Note: Originally posted in 2011 but updated for 2020!
We all have our own little way of doing things to make our professional lives easier or better or clearer. Sometimes these are tools that we have stumbled across, other times recommendations from friends or colleagues and other websites or blogs similar to this one. One thing that Dinkum does at the foundation of all of our Internet Marketing campaigns is Search Marketing and, for the longest time, so much of what we did was very manual. Over the years we have adopted tools that makes us more efficient and improves what we do for our clients. These are the business tools (seo things) that I personally use on a daily basis to make sure that we stay on top of our game.
Google Analytics – whether you have one websites or you’re managing several, I feel like I spend a lot of time in GA where you can see general numbers like users and where those users are coming from as well as more specific info like Revenue and Goal Completions. We manage a lot of clients so checking this on a daily basis is essential. Also the ability to compare to specific dates whether previous period or previous year offers critical perspective on performance….a lot of good stuff that can often be viewed at a glance. If we spot any issues, we’ll head down that rabbit hole to investigate and adjust if needed.
Raven – there’s a lot to like about Raven, they’ve provided a great deal of value under one roof. All of our clients go straight into this tool including target keywords, Google Analytics not to mention the keyword research tools that they provide. For us though it’s the reporting capabilities that we love, taking what was once a very manual process and automating many parts of it.
BrandMentions and Google Alerts – a big part of what we do is listening on behalf of our clients. What’s going on? Is there buzz? Are customers complaining? Are there opportunities we can leverage? For this, Google Alerts has traditionally been our tool of choice but increasingly we have been in need of something a little more comprehensive which is where www.socialmention.com comes in. Pop your keyword in (or URL) and create an email alert and keep an eye on online activity.
Moz Pro – from the folks at Moz (which provides a weath of information and resources) provides great information about your website including technical issues, rankings and competitors. It shows the number of links, anchor text distribution and linking pages and includes their own rating scale.
Tweetdeck – This has become my tool of choice for updating my Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Foursquare accounts as well as a very useful realtime listening option. Best of all its free….for now (it was recently bought by Twitter, so we will wait to see what happens next).
Google Search Console – we’ve had a bit of a love/hate thing going on with GSC (formerly Google Webmasters) over the years but they continue to improve and provide key data about your website. Links, keywords, technical issues and overall performance can all be gleaned from their info.
Screaming Frog – we use this a lot mostly for checking out technical issues but also to get an overall picture of a website including meta data, broken links, redirect chains and so much more. It’s especially good for the deeper dives and analysis.
SEMRush – we check this every day particularly for keyword performance but there are other features that are highly valuable to us. Their dashboards give a greater overview of performance especially when you integrate Google Analytics and Google Search Console. On Page issues, backlinks, keywords, competitors, technical issues are all readily available.
What tools are in your daily toolkit? Share with us in the comments.
Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/604255
