What are the Best Tools to Help Master Google SEO?
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Google is the most popular search engine in the world. It also happens to be a website that many digital marketers are trying to rank on, and it’s not easy! The best tools for mastering Google SEO can help make this task easier for you.
In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of the top tools out there that will help you master your Google SEO strategy and get ahead of your competition. Let’s dive right in!
Table of Contents
Why Use SEO Tools?
Managing to rank content without using search engine optimization (SEO) tools can be done, but there’s a lot of work and a bit of luck involved with it. But if you use the best SEO tools, you can reduce the workload and make things more organised.
Another benefit of using SEO tools is that they will help you get more traffic. Many tools out there are geared towards improving your rankings so that better tools will generate more opportunities for visitors and potential customers.
The third benefit is measuring data, which can be very helpful if you want an accurate idea of what works best in content creation and promotion. No more guesswork is needed!
Keyword research tools
Perhaps the most important part of the toolkit for digital marketers and bloggers is the keyword research tool to uncover the best long-tail keywords. There are some big variations out there in terms of what they offer and what they charge, so you can find something that works. Here are a few that I’ve tried.
Keysearch
Keysearch is my go-to keyword research tool. It is very affordable and has a good range of keyword ideas and information, including monthly search volume and a difficulty score to help you decide if the keyword is worth going after.
There are also some features to help assess your site’s SEO, including what keywords you rank for. There is a content auditor, but I’ve found I prefer using Frase for that (more below on that one).
AHrefs
AHrefs is considered one of the gold standards of keyword research tools, and the price reflects that. Their basic tier is around $99 a month, but they do have a few basic tools you can use for free.
I tend to use this once or twice a year for a month to do some intensive keyword research and also follow the competitor analysis system that I learned from Mike in Stupid Simple SEO. You can also do a 7-day, $7 trial that gets you all the features for a week.
You can also use powerful backlink analysis tools to see how your backlink profile is looking. This is a big factor for domain authority rankings as it looks at external links leading to your website.
MOZ
Many bloggers will know MOZ for their DA (domain authority) score system and their free MOZBAR, but they also offer a comprehensive package of tools that include keyword research.
I’ve only used the free tools with MOZ, but I know it is similar to AHrefs both in terms of the comprehensive level of data and cost. Again, maybe one to use periodically unless you are doing lots of keyword research for clients.
Ubersuggest
If you want a free tool that helps with a list of keyword information, then Ubersuggest is a good one. Created by Neil Patel, it offers a limited number of searches each day for free. Some people say the data is a little off, but if you want to decide whether a keyword is worth it, then the exact stats aren’t always a bit issue; the overall difficulty is better.
Content planning tools
I’m not 100% what you would call these tools as they do a range of jobs, so I’ve grouped them under the primary thing I use them for, content planning and research.
Frase
I’m a fairly recent convert to Frase, but it has quickly become one of my essential tools. Frase lets you plan your content, organise what you want to write about, and provides you with all of those tricky LSI keywords that are important to include in posts to improve search rankings.
I plan content first in Frase, looking at top competition, what they are talking about, what headers they are using, and how I can outdo them. Then I create the content and bring it back to Frase to make tweaks for those organic keywords. These are the terms that Google expects to see in a post and can help improve your ranking by making the content more comprehensible.
Frase also has an advanced plan that includes SEO tools for keyword research, but I decided not to use it at this time.
Surfer SEO
Surfer SEO is very similar to Frase, but there’s one feature they have that I really like that’s a little different – their content planner. Here you can add a keyword and see a huge list of topics that you should cover to create a silo or topic cluster for the term.
This is great to help ensure you cover a topic comprehensively and includes keywords each article should use. It also covers SERP results checks, keyword research, and content auditing.
It has a great integration with another favorite tool, Conversaion.ai, but I prefer Frase.
Thruu
Thruu is fairly new to me, so I haven’t fully integrated it into my workflow, but it is interesting. It describes itself as a SERP result scraper and can help you get data about a search term from the search results themselves. This is handy to help with content planning and also seeing who is ranking for what on a term.
On Page optimisation helpers
Again, this is my term for these tools, and there are probably other ways they describe themselves! These are tools that help to get all those little on-page elements in place.
Conversion.ai
This is another of my go-to tools and is super powerful. But here, I’m focusing on a few features you can use to help finish your blog post that are available on the lower-priced plan.
Jarvis is the name for the AI that runs inside this tool, and he can help you create some of those tricky, awkward elements every post needs. For example, I use it to create:
- Meta descriptions
- Blog post intro
- Summary paragraphs
- Pinterest descriptions
- Social media posts
The AI is hugely powerful and can do so much more, but not everyone wants to pay the higher tier plan. As someone with multiple blogs, it is well worth it!
Link Whisper
Ever realise you forget to internally link to other content when you just published a post? Well, if you did, then Link Whisper is what you need. This is a clever tool that allows you to create internal links across your whole site easily and has a ton of settings.
You can add links from a post to other posts. Then you can look for inbound links from other posts to the one you are creating. You can even create automatic links between posts with a specific keyword.
There’s a free plan, but it is well worth upgrading for the extra features.
Yoast SEO
I’ve tried a couple of SEO plugins and always come back to Yoast. Do I stress about getting the green light? No! But it is a good way to prompt you to do a few key jobs and to put things like the meta description in. Plus, their Blocks for things like FAQs are useful as they are formatted for Schema.
Studying what works
The final part of mastering SEO is to understand what works and what doesn’t, and there are no better tools for this than Google’s own free ones.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the base point for studying your stats; all websites should have it connected. You can see your traffic, where it comes from, where it goes on your website, and many more advanced features.
Google Search Console
The partner app is Search Console which focuses on organic traffic from Google and gives you more information about it. You can see what pages you rank for, what queries bring people to them, and things like conversion rates. If there are technical SEO issues with your site, this is where you can find out and solve them.
Getting the right tools for the job
With so many different tools out there, it can be difficult to know which ones are the best for your particular SEO needs. That’s why I decided to put together this list of my favourite Google SEO tools that I use on a regular basis. Maybe one or two will strike you as useful too!
Let me know if you have any other favourites and would like them added in next time round – we’re always looking for new ways to make our lives easier 😉
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