If you are doing SEO work on a website in exchange for money, I would highly recommend using the following tools as a foundation of analysis for performance benchmarking and for auditing competitor sites for new ideas in the marketing space.
I have also included some benchmarking platforms for data collection which I think are no-brainers, but which can also have significant impact on website performance. I would highly recommend having some form of data collection on your website.
I say essential, but these are really just suggestions for tools which can be helpful during audits or investigations, particularly when you’re investigating significant breakage of CSS or of links.
Crawls websites and pulls every piece of information you could possibly need from the front-end of a website. If this tool can’t do it (especially with a license), then more than likely you’ll need some custom dev work. Frankly, you may need some custom dev work even if Screaming Frog does find the issue – but at least you’ll find the issue.
This is the most useful “digging” tool – built into Chrome (Mozilla has a similar tool), this allows you to mess around with a rendered page – you can test CSS, HTML, and even JS loops in the console to test out solutions live, and much, much more. This is worth a master class, tbh.
Tells you what a website is using for their tech stack – good for snagging new tactics from industry leaders!
Lets you audit your informational structure, as well as your Page Title and Meta Description for the given page, allowing you to double check your calls to action and keyword inclusion on the fly!
Does what it sounds like – it will give you the status code of the last link you clicked on, which can be helpful for tracking down broken and redirected links.
Screenshots – great for design audits and CRO, as well as general flow and informational hierarchy.
Design – pulls the color off of a webpage. Imagine being in a live page builder and realizing you don’t have your color hex codes – well now you can!
Auditing the effectiveness of your data collection tags – can be helpful for any tracking issues, despite being designed for older implementations of the GA snippets.
The following platforms are intended to provide comprehensive data collection and analysis, which can help you to make better and more effective decisions about running your digital marketing.
Covers all of your basics, and has the capacity for some really heavy integrations – worth every penny (oh, and it’s free).
Gives your SEO data for search engine results pages. Sampling, but still the most accurate window into user behavior prior to arriving (or not) at your site.
Allows you to place code snippets for tracking and analytics configurations without having to get a dev (other than setting up the container in Tag Manager).
Allows you to handle citations in one location, rather than handling each individual citation on their own. Saves a lot of time for larger, multi location businesses and enterprise level clients. Also useful for single location, but somewhat expensive.
Provides information about keyword rankings, backlinks, internal links, issues, core web vitals, and more. Also provides some warning about algorithm updates.
Similar to SEMrush, with a slightly different billing model, and different data sources. If you are thinking about running either SEMrush OR AHREFs, I would recommend the latter.
On the one hand, some major brands use YEXT to help manage their online presence. On the other hand, none of those “major” companies are doing particularly well online (particularly Subway, though for unrelated reasons). I’ve heard their Review aggregation is quite good.
A platform used to aggregate reviews across platforms – super useful for businesses that rely more heavily on social proof – think experience based businesses. E.g. Restaurants, Entertainment, etc.
I suppose masochism becomes us all, friend. The button below will take you to the Introduction to Technical SEO page, and hopefully that will sate and/or quench your seemingly insatiable hunger for knowledge and unquenchable thirst for growth.
You do you.
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