It is difficult to know which SEO tools may or may not be useful for your business. We have extensive experience with many tools sold in the SEO market and the degree to which they are helpful. Here we will give you an overview and assessment of each of the tools available.
Backlink Measurement SEO Tools
One great piece of software for competitive intelligence is offered from MajesticSEO. These guys are doing the industry a great service, our collective hat is off to them and we are giving them a link because they deserve it (and they provide a lot of free data):
Majestic is really helpful in understanding how big the hill you have to climb is – or how much of a lead you have on your competitors. This is the best back-linking measurement tool around.
We also like to verify their data by using Yahoo data – Majestic recognizes this and has conveniently included a link to yahoo’s measure of the data in their results page – check it out, you’ll love it – we use it all the time.
Useful FireFox Based SEO Tools – Competitive Intelligence
SEOBook makes a great competitive intelligence tool for FireFox called appropriately, SEO for FireFox. This tool is free great, thus they have earned a link.
SEOBook also offers another tool that can be used to check keyword ranks, the problem with this tool is that it takes measurements by 100 results at a time – meaning that the results are going to be skewed somewhat. So, it’s a good tool for a general sense of things but it doesn’t give you precisely accurate results relative to the typical searcher.
Comprehensive SEO Tools & Keyword Rank Checking
We’ve tried lots of the top level Comprehensive SEO Tools around – and for the most part they are pointless. There are only 2 things that this software does that you can’t easily do yourself and those 2 things are: Check Your Keyword Rankings & Compare Your Sites Content Optimization to Competitor Sites
Checking your keyword rankings is where the software is really useful, this is an annoying and time consuming task – not to mention the search engines don’t like it. All of the below do an ok job. Raven is a good choice in this regard as they run the searches off their own servers. From a cost perspective, WebCEO is the most affordable with a pretty functional free edition (though it will only run 5 keywords per report run, so it’s a bit cumbersome). Higher functioning versions of WebCEO are a flat cost of ~$200-$400. Web Position and Raven both use a monthly pricing schemes with $19/mo as the entry level pricing for each.
- Raven SEO Tools
- WebCEO
- Web Position
The other task that software can be used for is comparing your site to your competitor’s sites. Unfortunately none of the available software, including from the above mentioned software are good at this. They give you trite and superficial analyses of other sites. We don’t generally find them very useful, but if you have the software anyway to run keyword reports, why not check it out.