Top 10 SEO Tools For 2020 – How To Stay Ahead
If you’re looking for a terrifying fact about the pace of digital marketing in 2020, how about the fact that Google adjusts or updates its algorithms around 500 times a year or – to put it another way – twice every working day? That’s why it’s understandable if you work in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) sometimes feel frazzled. Plying your trade in one of the most business-critical and rapidly moving areas of all marketing requires constant research and commitment, to stay ahead of new developments and tactics. As Forbes recently observed: “SEO techniques from the previous decade will be wholly insufficient in the roaring ’20s ahead.”
In addition to the ever-changing algorithms, if you have an interest in SEO you will also know that your competitors are continuously looking for new ways to outfox you when it comes to search results, often trying to copy the very same tricks and techniques which have been successful for you. So you don’t just need to keep an eye on search engine developments but also have to stay vigilant about what your competitors are doing. Fortunately, there are some things to make your lives a little easier – an ever-expanding range of SEO tools.
Last year, software specialists Wordstream asked digital marketers what SEO tools they were using and received recommendations for about 70 different products, with more having entered the market since. It’s an increasingly crowded and noisy marketplace, and that’s why we want to help you cut through the noise and find only the tools that we think are most useful. Here’s our top 10.
Let’s start with the biggest name in the field, offering a product that has the added benefit of being free. Search Console by Google is available to anyone with a website and lets you monitor and report on your website’s presence on Google. It came second in Marketing Bitz’s recent ranking of the top 10 SEO tools of 2019. Search Console gives you access to the most essential information – how many visits your site is receiving, how visitors found you and which of your pages are most popular. These facts are crucial to knowing where to focus your energy, and Search Console has the added bonus that it help you find and fix site errors. Marcus Miller of UK agency Bowler Hat calls it “a treasure trove of information”. Another big advantage is that, being part of the Google mega-empire, it is well-resourced and frequently updated and expanded, with new features added often.
Another tool we can’t overlook is Ahrefs, perhaps the most recommended SEO tool online. You can use Ahrefs to analyse which links are driving traffic to your own pages, but the site really comes into its own when analysing competitors’ backlinks. If you are a new brand, you can use that information as a starting point for your own SEO strategy. If not, you can use it to refresh what you have in place already and make sure you haven’t fallen behind in the never-ending race for search supremacy. Ahrefs maintains 17 trillion links covering 170 million root domains, so it’s not surprising that Tech Radar calls them “one of the most powerful players out there” in their rundown of top SEO tools.
Another giant that makes all the top 10 lists, and for good reason, is SEMrush, which is currently flourishing thanks to a $40 million investment injection in 2018. While capable of a thorough analysis of your website, helping you establish the effectiveness of your Search Engine Marketing (SEM), content marketing, social media work and more, it’s the Domain v Domain analysis that makes this so beloved by its users. You can easily establish which websites are the top referring channels for your own site and those of your competitors, as well as snoop around such crucial information as average session duration and bounce rates. It’s enormously popular with its users, such as the Questionable Existence blog, which named it the best SEM tool on the market.
While Moz Pro isn’t as universally admired as the above, it has many passionate supporters who are in themselves a key asset. As Tech Radar notes, they have formed “a huge supporting community ready to offer help, advice, and guidance across the breadth of search marketing issues.” This is highly valuable, especially to SEO newcomers, but Moz Pro also has some very valuable tools in its arsenal. One of the best is the ability to audit your website with the Moz Pro spider, which highlights problems and gives practical advice, while also tracking site rankings over thousands of keywords per website. Keyword research tools and backlink analysis make this worth the price tag, which begins at $99 a month. There are also free tools available if you are currently being cautious about spending commitments.
All of the above offer suites of multiple services, but there are also more specialist tools that you should consider. While keywords might not be quite as all-important as they once were, one such tool is KWFinder. This is specifically designed to help you track down those long-tail keywords that have a lower level of competition and can allow you to outsmart your competitors in your SEO strategy. It can also be used to run analysis reports on backlinks and SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), and is valuable enough to earn its spot on the Marketing Bitz top 10.
Another specialist tool is Site Bulb, which allows you to drill deep down into the SEO-crucial details on your website, including meta information, duplicate content problems, anchor text, content readability, and more. It can then present all of this complicated information in an easily digestible visual format. The fact it can monitor several different websites makes it very popular with digital marketing agencies. Chris Hornyak is an SEO analyst at The Content Factory and says, simply, “I fell in love with Sitebulb”.
Good old-fashioned link-building remains a core part of most SEO strategies, and this is where a relatively older brand like BuzzStream – which was founded back in 2008 – can still provide superb value. It helps you to locate and contact the key influencers in whatever sector or niche you are targeting, and then reach out to them in a personalized and effective way to secure those ever-valuable links. SEOTools calls it “a very popular and effective tool”, and its reporting features are extremely user-friendly.
If you get stuck trying to find new topics to suggest to the influencers above, then many people find another older service – Answer The Public – a useful way to generate topic and even content ideas. As Website Planet points out in their review: “People ask Google questions that they aren’t going to ask anyone else – not their co-workers, their best friends, or sometimes even their doctors.” Answer The Public collects these questions and organises them so that you can quickly find out things about your customers that they wouldn’t tell you themselves, allowing you to create content that doesn’t just score highly with search engines but also grabs the attention of your customers.
As well as these more mature businesses, there are newer upstarts on the market that are quickly grabbing attention. Woorank is an SEO analysis tool that many marketers find useful, and which made the Marketing Bitz top 10. It handily offers free and paid options to track and report on marketing data, including the ability to find out which keywords your competitors are targeting so that you can decide whether to challenge them or find new ground on which to pitch your tent.
The even newer Serpstat has gained a following with similar rapidity thanks to its unique combination of features including rank distribution, historical data for rankings, and backlink analysis. It also offers that indispensable, foundational tool – keyword research. The Niche Pursuits blog argues “Serpstat is a viable alternative to tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs” and it is particularly worth checking out if you are looking for a tool that is, at the moment, less expensive than those bigger names.
Working in SEO isn’t ever likely to be the kind of job where you can just coast along. Staying on top of the latest developments and tools is both essential and endless, and is what makes the work ultimately exciting and fulfilling. If you are successful, you know you are outsmarting the best in the business. These tools can help you.
