Search engine optimization marketing has evolved over the years. When first starting in this business, there were no tools or SEO software available. You made decisions with your gut. When it came to backlink, buying the quality of the link was based on a little green bar called Page Rank. This subject might come off a bit boring to some, but I want to provide you with some background history and how the industry has changed for the better or worse.
Over the years, the SEO industry has seen exponential growth and can be divided into three segments. You have technical on-page SEO, backlink building, and content marketing. All these segments are needed to ensure a successful marketing campaign. Also, these clearly defined channels are what created the boom software boom within this industry.
Development of SEO Software
As SEO grew, more businesses took notice, especially software developers. They saw the potential to make some money buy servicing niche aspects of the industry. Now fast-forward to today, hundreds of software platforms are available, from backlink checkers, site audit reports, SERP rankings checkers, and more.
The software creators focused on filling a niche and helping the end-users grow their businesses or boost their client’s rankings by providing useful insights and data. This data, in return, allows for better decision making throughout an SEO campaign
Now that you have a basic understanding of what created the boom for search engine optimization software, let us discuss some of the more popular products on the market and what they are designed to do.
SEO Audit Software
My top three favorites software tools to use while performing an SEO audit is Screaming Frog, SurferSEO, and Siteliner.
- Screaming Frog is a spider tool that reviews all the pages on your website and comes not only gives you web page status codes but helps you find header and meta tags, broken links and duplicate content issues.
- SuferSEO is newer to the industry and provides some functions that Screaming Frog does, but what they do well is point out content issues. The issues can revolve around the over and underuse of your keywords, Content length, and more.
- Siteliner is an online tool that doesn’t get a lot of credit. It’s completely free and helps run quick audits for broken links to duplicate content. You don’t have to download or even log in to anything. Just input the URL, and you want to get an audit report for, and you are good to go.
Backlink Checkers
Now that we have covered onsite technical software lets change our focus to backlinks. Backlinks, as you know, are essential to helping building authority to your site but also for ranking specific web pages. The three biggest backlink checkers are Aherfs, Majestic, and Moz.
- Ahrefs is my personal favorite out of all the SEO tools I have used. They are also the most expensive, but the amount of data the site provides is invaluable. It will help you make better backlink building decisions and give a score on how hard it will be to rank for a particular keyword.
- Majestic is an older backlink database software program. That was popular but has lost some of its lusters since Ahrefs has taken over the market. However, their software is less expensive and efficient at providing backlink data to help you make decisions on the quality of a link.
- Moz has many tools and is one of the original software companies that saw a way to fulfill a need in this market. Once Google stopped publishing the Pagerank links, buyers and honestly sellers needed a way to verify the quality of a backlink. So Moz had the brilliant idea of creating software that would score the overall authority of a site and the individual page. It’s what you hear called in the industry as Domain and Page authority. Not only did they offer these metrics, but they also provide a spam score. It is easier for you to determine the quality of your site and backlink opportunities from other sites.
The Downside of SEO Software
The downside is becoming too reliant upon software to do the work for you and the costs. I use SEO software to provide me with data and help aid in my decision-making process. I don’t follow the software suggestions to a T. The reason for this is two-fold, one I trust my gut more than some software program telling what to do.
Secondly, due to costs, most of these programs are not updated frequently, often given you data that was relevant months ago.
My suggestion to you if you plan on getting into SEO marketing and are looking for ways to be more productive then test the software through free or paid trials. This way, you can see if the software fits your needs is worth the cost and helps you achieve the goal of boosting your website or client’s website rankings. After all, we are all doing SEO to make money.