TOP 5 tools for an SEO specialist

SEO promotion is a complex and time-consuming set of tasks for internal and external website optimization in order to raise the site's position in search engine results, as well as increase organic traffic. And in order to effectively promote a website, there is a need to use a number of tools that allow you to quickly analyze key parameters, as well as detect and prevent errors found at the initial stages. After all, as we know from practice, the sooner an error is detected, the cheaper it will cost. But don't rely on the fact that you will find one tool that can fully cover the need to analyze all indicators.

Each SEO specialist selects a number of effective tools and uses them in combination. This will help you achieve the desired result. On average, each specialist uses more than 5 tools for analytics, collecting a semantic core, tracking the indexing of site pages, and other parameters. In this article, I will list the TOP 5 tools that I use in my work every day. Here are my TOP 5 tools for an SEO specialist:
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- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Serpstat Topvisor
- Ahrefs

What opportunities do SEO tools offer?

Let's start with something simple. When promoting a website, we, as SEO specialists, need to monitor traffic and compare organic results over different periods to see the dynamics of traffic growth or decline. Google Analytics does this best. As part of the tool's functionality, it is also possible to monitor the effectiveness of contextual advertising. If you use website promotion through social networks, you can generate a report in Google Analytics that will show which social networks visitors come to your site from. To see the number of visitors for any period, go to Traffic Sources → All Traffic → Channels. We set the desired period or choose to compare the indicators with the previous period and get a report on user traffic on the site.

SEO: Costs, Benefits, and Disadvantages

Paying for ads is like renting an apartment, and creating content is like creating a machine that won't stop building buildings over time. Content never sleeps, doesn't get sick, and it's always working. The articles you write, the videos you edit, and the audio you record will be the best employees in your business. Why is that? Because they'll work as advertisers, public relations specialists, and sellers for your brand. You'll no longer have to tell stories about why your products are the best or why your services meet the needs of your customers. The content will do the job for you. And even if the road is a little longer (you won't make it to the front page of Google in a week), the return on investment is much higher.

Many customers want to know what actions a user takes on the site. Google Analytics allows you to set goals that can be further monitored and analyzed. For an SEO specialist, this makes it possible to track the entire chain of successive user actions before the goal is achieved and to identify at which stage the user left the site. To create a goal, go to Administrator → Presentation → Goals → +Goal

Then we name the goal, select its type, value, and create a goal. Note that you can set up a maximum of 20 goals per view. We figured out how to track site traffic and actions on the site, now let's move on to the number of pages in the index and which utility can be used to track this? One of the parameters that a specialist monitors when promoting a site is the number of pages in the index. The more pages that are crawled and indexed, the better. Google Search Console allows you to track the dynamics of pages entering the index. This data is available under Coverage.

Google Search Console allows you to not only check your site's indexing status, but also:

- track possible mistakes and penalties
- track external links to your resource
- track internal links
- see the availability of Sitemap files
- et al

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are free and mandatory. As part of the site, these two tools are linked to each other so that performance metrics are transferred from Google Search Console to Google Analytics.

Are paid promotion tools a necessity or a fad?

There are many tools for optimizing a website. But all free tools are limited in functionality and will not be able to solve a number of website optimization tasks. Therefore, in order to effectively promote the site, you will definitely have to use paid programs with the necessary functionality. At the first stages, when the project is first launched, you need to conduct a full audit of the site. After all, it is very important to check for 404 errors, incorrect redirects, and maybe 500 server errors. It is also important to analyze your site's competitors. Serpstat does an excellent job with all these tasks.

In general, this program has great functionality and is not limited to the points described above. With Serpstat, you can collect the semantic core and its advantage over ADS is the “Similar Phrases” section, which helps you collect the maximum number of requests and not miss out on synonyms. The program allows you to monitor positions, cluster requests, and much more. Another program that I use when optimizing a site is Topvisor. It can be used to measure the frequency and generate reports on checking the site's positions. Very simple and intuitive interface, it is possible to upload graphs in the desired format, and you can also create a guest link to the report that the client can open in the form in which it is presented in the program.

And the last tool on the list is Ahrefs. This powerful tool includes a number of features:

link promotion analysis
position analysis
backlink analysis
content analysis
competitor analysis

For myself, I single out this tool for analyzing link promotion. It is very convenient to watch the growth dynamics of referring domains and links, as well as the site's domain rating.