When developing your brand’s website, one of the most vital components to ensure success is a thoughtful plan to engage your target audience. If you want to accomplish this, and stay competitive, you need to consider SEO. Whether you choose to work with an agency or develop a plan with your in-house team, SEO tools can serve as a boon to sales and help you triumph in your industry. 

We’ll walk you through some of the best online SEO tools to utilize when implementing changes and optimizing the content on your website, including:

  • SEMrush
  • BrightEdge
  • Google Search Console
  • Screaming Frog SEO Spider
  • Moz Pro

1. SEMrush

First up, SEMrush is an online SEO tool that can help you conduct marketing research with an advanced selection of tools, including:

  • Competitive research
  • Keyword research
  • Link building
  • On-page SEO
  • Technical SEO

Aside from these primary SEO tools, SEMrush also provides access to services, such as:

  • Local SEO
  • Advertising
  • Social media
  • Content marketing
  • Agency solutions 

This platform is mostly used by small to mid-sized businesses to build out or optimize any portion of their website, whether it be one page or a collection of pages. You can perform site audits and find organic traffic insights to strategize future actions. 

Competitive analysis metrics are one of SEMrush’s most unique tool sets. They provide various options that allow you to increase your performance and ultimately outrank competitors. 

SEMrush offers a variety of subscription services, including Pro ($119.95 per month), Guru ($229.95 per month), and Business ($449.95 per month). You can select a plan based on your brand’s needs and business goals.

2. BrightEdge

BrightEdge is known as a leading SEO solution and content performance marketing platform that assists businesses in gaining organic traffic. BrightEdge has the capability to transfer your data into actionable recommendations that strengthen your website and draw more users in. 

BrightEdge offers a variety of analysis tools, including:

  • Data cube content research
  • Instant (real-time research)
  • Share of voice competitive analysis
  • Backlink analysis
  • Site audits & reporting
  • Keyword tracking & reporting
  • Site audit (crawl analysis)

BrightEdge not only allows you to perform keyword research, but Instant’s “YouTube Rankings” implementation provides real-time rankings and recommendations for optimizing your brand’s YouTube channel/videos. This gives you the opportunity to progressively improve organic rankings beyond typical website content (top landing pages, blog posts, etc.).

BrightEdge is also a paid service, but pricing for the platform varies depending on the services you desire.

3. Google Search Console (Free)

Next, Google Search Console (GSC) is a great tool for new site owners or beginners who want to get started with SEO, offering reports that:

  • Identify website audiences and gaps
  • Gather performance data
  • See what drives users to their site organically

Search Console is especially helpful for building your blog. No matter how advanced your own SEO knowledge is or how far along you are in ensuring your site is “SEO friendly,” GSC guides you through viewing your site’s indexing and webpage performance easily in a dashboard. Google Search Console provides a multitude of free tools, such as:

  • Search performance 
  • Page indexing
  • Sitemap indexing
  • Core web vitals
  • Page experience
  • Mobile usability
  • URL inspection

Google Search Console is free to all users with a Google Account, which is all the more reason to make sure you keep it in your SEO toolkit for your online digital marketing needs.

4. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an advanced technical SEO tool that specializes in analyzing your website and crawling its pages. Screaming Frog prides itself on its user-friendliness, as it is relatively easy to use and generates detailed analyses. 

One of Screaming Frog’s best capabilities is crawling the pages on your site to identify:

  • Broken pages
  • Missing title tags
  • Title tags that are too long/too short
  • Duplicate meta descriptions
  • Amount of links (internal and external) on each page

There is a limited free version available for Screaming Frog, which includes access to more of the basic features; for example, it will crawl redirects but places a 500 URL limit. The more advanced version of Screaming Frog, which tends to be better for bigger sites, requires a subscription of about $180 per year. 

5. Moz Pro 

Moz Pro is an SEO software service that also offers website-building solutions, specifically by running campaigns for you to understand the overall user experience for your site and strategize next steps needed to reach your goals. 

Moz Pro offers specialized analysis metrics across their campaign options, including:

  • Keyword research
  • Link building
  • Domain analysis
  • Competitive research
  • Rank tracking
  • Local SEO management tools

The cost associated with Moz Pro also depends on the aspirations you have for your site. There are 4 plans to choose from, which are Standard ($99 per month), Medium ($179 per month), Large ($299 per month), and Premium ($599 per month).

Conclusion

Looking to build your brand and grow your site in 2023? Utilize the online search engine optimization platforms discussed in this article to do so. These tools will allow you to improve the performance of your website both individually (landing pages, blog pages, etc.) and as a whole (total organic visits, click-through rates, time spent on a page, funnel attribution, etc.).

Depending on the size of your website, these tools can be used simultaneously or you can work intimately with whichever one best suits your business goals. Whether you are just getting started building your site or you want to begin optimizing existing content, there is a tool for you.

For more information or help to improve your website’s SEO strategy, contact us.