49 Experts Rank Best SEO Software For Agencies (LEADERBOARD Inside)

Brendan Hufford

Semrush provides great visuals that we can use to pass along information quickly to clients.

Ahrefs is what we use for most of our competitive analysis and content strategy. A good bit of our work focuses on this, including data for reporting. If Ahrefs had better design for clients (aggregate numbers per month) we would use it exclusively and drop Semrush.

Pitchbox allows us to scale outreach in a way that we couldn’t when we were only using G-Suite (email & sheets).

Data Studio buildouts have been helpful internally, but also allow us to provide real-time reporting for clients.

Screaming Frog has been invaluable for crawling existing sites. We do a heavy amount of website redesign and being able to crawl massive sites, save/store data, etc. saves us any time we need to take a look back at something or make informed decisions going forward. It’s also, on a very granular level, helped us write better pitches and build better client relationships as we can more accurately assess the size of a website prior to an engagement.

Slack is how we communicate within and across teams and move much more quickly than we previously could with only email.

Brogan Renshaw

Ahrefs – Our primary tool for keyword research, developing content strategy and competitive analysis. The amount of data you can pull for almost any facet of SEO is fantastic. Probably the only SEO tool our team uses every single day.

Asana – We use Asana for project management. The automation and rules based features are a massive time saver. I can see what every team member is (or should) be working on and where it is up to. We are also able to give access to clients to ensure they can see what we are working on and what is planned. Massive improvement on previous project management software were have tried in the past.

Data Studio – Google data studio is a fantastic free tool for building out client reports and dashboards. Though it can be a slight learning curve to get the most out of it, it can be hugely powerful to show important data easily.

Supermetrics – We use Supermetrics to link multiple data sources into Google Sheets – then link some of these into data studio for reporting. Being able to auto pull data into sheets and combine with out sources eg Google Ads Keyword Data & Search Console Data allows us to see more opportunities and insights for clients.

John Doherty

Semrush is our tool of choice as their site crawl is top notch, their visibility data maps well to what we see in the real world, and they are constantly adding new tools that meet user needs.

Our secondary most recommended tool is Ahrefs, especially for keyword and topic research, as well as competitor SERP analysis at scale.

Emma White

Ahrefs – This software covers a lot of bases. I use it to assess backlink profiles, track keyword rankings, for competitor analysis, finding guest post opportunities, and coming up with ideas for content. I also use it to assess whether a website will be a good fit to link to our clients.

The alerts feature allows me to outreach to potential link opportunities the day after something was published. As a whole, this tool is really powerful and allows me to perform lots of different tasks all in one place. I’ve usually got at least 1 Ahrefs tab open when I’m working.

G Suite/Google Drive – We do a lot of tracking in Google Docs and Google Sheets, and Google Drive is used to store files. It makes collaboration between team members incredibly easy, as well as sharing files with clients. With all of the information we need in one place, it means team members can work seamlessly if someone is away and if remote working is required. I always have a Google Drive tab pinned in my browser for quick access.

BuzzSteam – This is the hub for our outreach. The fact that you can divide contacts into different projects for different clients makes organizing conversations a lot easier, rather than trying to keep track of everything in one inbox. This is especially the case when conversations with the same people can cross over into multiple clients, or multiple people within one client. When you do a lot of outreach it pays to be able to keep things organised else you can miss opportunities for your clients.

Traffic Think Tank – Not necessarily a tool, but this community still allows me and my team to get results for our clients. Opportunities that have come up among the members are ones that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to secure, and have shown great results in ranking movements.

Also, the ability to bring a question to the community and get lots of different perspectives allows us to tackle project issues in ways we might not have thought of. Being a part of this community has provided results for both our clients and agency.

Jason Berkowitz

Ahrefs continues to be our agency’s go-to tool for analysis on our clients and their competitors.

Our favorite (okay, two favorites) features of Ahrefs is the Site Explorer, which has a plethora of value tools in itself. We use this feature to gain a deep understanding of the behind the scenes SEO metrics like links, traffic, top pages, and more.

Our second favorite feature of Ahrefs is Keyword Explorer. In conjunction with our regular keyword research, Keyword Explorer comes in handy for finding unique target opportunities we likely wouldn’t have been able to locate through traditional methods.

Christina Blake

Power BI has been a big game-changer at Seer.

We’ve been able to look at more data than would be practical (or even possible) in Excel and we’re able to connect different data sources (including sources across channels) to find more insights.

Data visualization also offers the ability to look at data in different ways – you can identify outliers more easily in a visual chart like a treemap or a scatter plot, which allows you to find major opportunities, then drill down into the specifics.

You can learn more about how we’re using data visualization at Seer in our Guide to Power BI for Digital Marketers.

Andy Crestodina

Semrush – Before the company has even signed a contract with us, I can tell them what’s working in search. In seconds, I can find all the striking distance keyphrases. I can add value starting within minutes of the first phone call.

Eric Siu

1. Clickflow

Clickflow is our platform of choice for SEO A/B split testing. The tool suggest pages with untapped SEO potential — a high-impression count but low click-through rate (CTR) — which can be improved to increase clicks and traffic.

Clickflow lets us choose a target CTR increase and serves up pages, along with a keyword report that lists what your page is ranking for and which keywords will help you get more traffic.

You can then make changes to title, meta description, title tag and body content, inside the app; changes are automatically reflected on the site. Clickflow then runs an experiment comparing the optimized page to the original.

We love it because it isolate the variables that contribute to success — or failure — giving us actionable insights, while also allowing us to make optimizations in real-time. (Disclaimer: I’m a Founder of Clickflow but we use it all the time.)

2. Ahrefs and Semrush
Ahrefs and Semrush are both super comprehensive tools that we use all the time. We use them to track keyword rankings, monitor our site’s inbound links, perform competitor analysis, and more. Their content and keyword explorer features drive our content ideation, while the detailed SERP analysis shows us how we can optimize existing content — e.g. potential to add new backlinks.

3. Google Search Console
Google Search Console helps you to monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site’s presence in the Google search results. You can easily identify and fix problems related to indexing and crawling, you can submit sitemaps to Google to improve crawling, and you also receive direct alerts from Google in case it finds any issues with your site.

4. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is more than a keyword research tool: It displays domain-level metrics like number of backlinks, top content pages, number of referring domains, organic traffic value and many other important metrics. And it’s free to use! What’s not to love.

Sam McRoberts

We specialize in audits and strategies, and as such use a pretty large tool stack, but the ones we consider most important are:

Semrush – Because it has the largest and most useful keyword database, across multiple countries, and makes not just keyword research, but competitive analysis and numerous other tasks super easy.

Moz – While we’ve used all the key players (Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz), we just feel that Moz has the cleanest index and matches up the closest with Google. We use them primarily for link profile analysis and competitive research.

Screaming Frog – There are a ton of crawlers on the market now, but Screaming Frog is still the best as far as we’re concerned. Super configurable, capable of crawling huge sites, exports data in an easy to use format, constantly being updated…what’s not to like?

BuzzSumo – The best content/social share database that we know of. For analyzing which content is being created and performing best for competitors, and understanding what content performs well for various keywords and sites, there’s nothing better than BuzzSumo.

GTmetrix – Arguably the best page speed analysis tool out there (though Pingdom and Google’s various tools have their merits). GTmetrix though provides the most granularity into the elements that cause your page load speed.

Google Search Console – What’s better than data directly from the horse’s mouth on how your site is performing? Not much (though it’s got plenty of issues). You can extract a ton of good data from here, particularly re: crawl errors and average ranking/CTR data.We use a ton of other tools, but these form the backbone of what we use.

Chris Castillo

1. Google Analytics
We do our best to identify the triggers and events that indicate interest and engagement from visitors and log and track everything. Using advanced features of Google Analytics like segmentation in combination with these logs can really give you a ton of insight and shed light to opportunities for quick wins.

2. Ahrefs
There’s simply no better content and link building tool out there that’s better than Ahrefs. You can really get into a rabbit hole of research that can lead to amazing link and content opportunities. It’s also a core tool in our audit toolbox.

3. Screaming Frog
We use Screaming frog as a core tool for performing technical and content audits. With on-page SEO being so important, there’s often a ton of opportunities you can uncover using just Screaming Frog alone.

4. Airtable
Project management and tracking pending actions is super important and we’ve built a project management system using Airtable to keep us organized and on-track. Our content creation calendar and outreach are all managed through Airtable.

Ilan Shabad

Ahrefs – We use it for keyword research, rank tracking & link analysis.
Screaming Frog – Our go to tool for any technical SEO analysis tasks
Asana – when it comes to SEO Project Managment, this tool is key! A fantastic tool that helps us manage resources, tasks and client deadlines.

Noah Learner

Ahrefs, Google Sheets, Teamwork, Supermetrics, Google Data Studio, Apis, webhooks, Zapier, and Integromat are the tools that we lean on in our SEO agency to provide a holistic digital marketing solution for North American bike shops with average online revenue growth of over 60% YoY the last two years running.

Jordan Choo

Google Sheets + API/Zapier — By leveraging App Scripts on top of Google Sheets we’re able to tap into multiple different tools and APIs to streamline our SEO process. We’ve saved hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars thanks to it.

Here are a few examples:

We use DeepCrawl (DC) for our technical SEO audit. As a result, we created a custom connector that pulls in DC data into Google Sheets, formats them into the appropriate tabs, columns along with generating initial recommendations that our technical SEO leads can review in an easier manner.

Another example is our backlink analysis tool, all we need to do is export the raw CSV data that Ahrefs provides and paste the raw data into a Google Sheet. From there all of the raw data is crunch, analyzed and formatted into a custom actionable report.

A more complex example, is we’ve tapped into a client’s SalesForce account and connected it with Google Sheets which is then synced with Pitchbox (our link outreach tool) in order to build links from sites that the client partners or works with.

One last example is due to the types of clients we deal with (i.e. multi-location & franchise), creating, scheduling and managing Google My Business Posts across all of their locations is a HUGE pain in the butt. We’ve tapped into GMB’s post API and created a Buffer-like Google Sheet that allows us to schedule and publish GMB Posts across all of a client’s locations in an easy way. In fact, we are working on an Algorithmia integration that auto summarizes articles that will then be queued to a GMB profile.

Kevin Gibbons

Google Data Studio – this has become a key tool for us to centralize client reporting by pulling in data from Google Analytics / Search Console, plus pulling in with reports from a number of other 3rd party SEO tools to provide actionable insights for the team.

Jesus Meca

Supermetrics: We pull data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console into Google Sheets to do some of our magic and this tool is a must for us to be able to save a lot of hours per week.

Screaming Frog and CORA SEO: We use Screaming Frog for scraping websites and doing a lot of technical analysis as well as the beginning of on-site seo changes and internal linking strategies.

Ahrefs: For competitive analysis, mostly in the link building department.

We also use Semrush, Google Analytics, Search Console, Google sheets with lots of Vlookups and filter functions.

Suganthan Mohanadasan

Ahrefs – I use Ahrefs daily just like many other SEOs. The primary purposes are to check backlink opportunities, domain metrics, keyword analysis, SERP preview (Search intent change over time) and their powerful API.

Mangools suite – I use the Mangools suite (mainly KWFinder and SERPChecker) for keyword research and SERP analysis. Especially the KW Finder, which helps find new keywords, related questions and autocomplete keywords. It’s fast and works great. I also use SERPChecker to quickly get a feel for the SERP positions and difficulty scores.

AccuRanker – I use Accuranker to track keywords and keep a tab on the competitors. It’s cloud-based and works excellent.

SEO PowerSuite – I mainly use Rank tracker when dealing with a large number of keywords (Over 5000 keywords) as the tool runs locally it’s smoother to Install and use. All data is synced to the cloud so I can easily switch between devices.

MarketMuse and Clearscope – For doing topic modelling and semantic analysis.

Sanitycheck – I use Sanitycheck to look for running SEO split tests and especially testing multiple titles.

Sitebulb, URL Profiler & Screaming Frog – I use them for doing technical SEO audits.

Felipe Bazon

Semrush: due to its databases that are really good to work in various different countries like UK, Brazil, Portugal and Spain. All countries that we operate in. For instance, keyword research, organic visibility and ranking monitoring in different countries and areas of Brazil.

Screaming Frog: our universal crawler. It helps us quickly uncover a wide array of issues from website of all sizes. From really small local SEO clients to enterprise clients with over 50.000 URLs.

Ahrefs: our go to source for link building. Also very good databases that help us monitor link profiles in different countries (mentioned above). The Content Explorer feature is also really good to uncover link opportunities and it works very well in UK, BR and Europe.

Basically, we are always on the lookout for tools that enable us to work at the same level as we do in English-speaking countries in other countries, specially Brasil. Many tools tend to have all their focus on English-speaking countries and the above really stand out for us as an international SEO agency

Adam Chronister

#1 – Semrush is a great tool as it offers an easy to use reporting dashboard. It’s perfect for the daily account review and helps us keep track of account changes like rankings and traffic with very little time investment. We can pop in and pop out, make sure everything looks good and get on with the rest of our tasks.

Their site auditing features are also great, and while they may not cover everything we would need in a more enterprise-level audit, it covers about 80% of what you need. It is an exceptional resource for keeping on top of your technical SEO.

#2 – Ahrefs is a close second. As of late, it’s our go-to tool of choice for keyword research. We also love Ahrefs for its link reporting functionalities. Not only does it do a great job monitoring our client’s link profiles, but it also is great for reporting what links the completion is receiving.

#3 – Screaming Frog is a must for more in-depth website audits. We might leverage some audit data from the likes of Semrush and Ahrefs etc, but what makes Screaming Frog great for in-depth website audits is its minimalist data output. There is nothing like a simple spreadsheet of data to get a good sense of where to start your technical SEO efforts.

#4 – Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are of course on the list. We use these both natively and in our custom Google Data Studio Reports to keep track of everything from traffic trends to website index issues.

Stav Sarandiev

WooRank, Ahrefs, RavenTools, SERPBook

Ann Smarty

Google Analytics and Google Search Console: I think it’s self-explanatory. The first thing to analyze is always traffic history, rankings history, backlinks and any messages Google itself sent to the client. Both tools provide this data.
SpyFu: Huge index of rankings history across lots of niches. It is best for US companies though.
Majestic: Huge backlink index, plus new backlink alerts,
Ahrefs: The most usable tool of all. We just love their intreface and data freshness. We go for competitive and SERP analysis. The only think they miss is historical data.

Brian Wray

For on-page, our team uses Page Optimizer Pro, CORA, and Website Auditor. Page Optimizer Pro and CORA are used to help us tune our on-page elements according to factors based on our page one competitors. Website Auditor has a great TF/IDF feature that helps us add in the right keyword variations. For off-page, keyword research, etc. we use Ahrefs.

Miles Anthony Smith

Semrush is the best tool for keyword research since it allows you to identify keywords and sort them by authority, search volume, and ranking difficulty very quickly.

Ahrefs & Mailshake for influencer outreach; the former allows you to create a hyper-targeted influencer list and the latter allows you to scale and mass-personalize that email outreach.

Screaming Frog for larger technical site audits due its many features and data integrations with other tool’s APIs.

James Norquay

The tools we use a lot –

1. Ahrefs – For link analysis, keyword research and prospecting.
2. Semrush – Keyword analysis and project management.
3. Google Sheets & Google Data Studio – Management of projects, reports, and data analysis.
4. Mailshake – Email outreach tool we use in the office to secure high quality placements.
5. Hunter.io – Tool we use for finding prospect emails.
6. Scrapebox – Great tool for prospecting and scraping data.
7. Sitebulb – Website crawling tool we use at scale. One of the best on the market.
8. Screaming Frog – another crawler we use for audits.
9. Trello – Good tool we use for project management.
10. Hubstaff – Tool we use for time tracking and project management.

Kyle Goodchild

Screaming Frog – One of my favorite crawling tools allowing quick opportunity finds and analysis. Being able to crawl and highlight all on-page attributes quickly is key to deploying strategies and capturing quick wins.

Semrush – Great tool to track and gauge performance / improvements. The reports and audit functionalities allow for transparent reporting on updates and changes.

George Zlatin

When it comes to building our SEO client’s backlink profiles two tools are key for our outreach efforts: BuzzSumo and Muck Rack.

Any combination of these tools allows you to find highly relevant publications and writers quickly and on a large scale.

We rely on BuzzSumo to not only keep tabs on our clients’ backlink profiles, but also to identify key websites, publications and writers who are talking about similar content and subjects. BuzzSumo’s “Backlinks” search pulls quick and easy reports on who shares URLs, their domain authority, and social media engagements.

From an outreach and link building perspective, these reports provide insights into who is amenable to writing about our clients’ work. We’re able to build media lists of relevant and authoritative contacts who can help us strengthen our client’s own authority.

Muck Rack operates as a “little black book” of seemingly everyone in the media. When trying to build media lists to share our client’s content, Muck Rack allows us to search for, categorize, and organize the types of writers and publications we want to work with. The database’s keyword search capabilities and detailed writer profiles help us avoid pitching the wrong people and instead allow us to hone in on the journalists who are the most relevant to our client.

When we are able to target relevant and authoritative publications from the onset of our outreach efforts, we see more powerful results from an SEO perspective.

Time is money, and tools like Muck Ruck and BuzzSumo help take out the guesswork of blanket pitches and allow our outreach efforts to hit the right people and publications that can benefit our overall SEO efforts.

Natalie Athanasiadis

Semrush: Our agency uses this software for competitor research as it makes gathering those key insights efficient. The data contributes incredible value to the construction of a high performing SEO campaign.

Google Search Console: This is a tool we wouldn’t want to live without. We use it to review average query ranking positions, website health and also to push pages to be indexed/re-indexed.

Screaming Frog: This platform is one of the best SEO tools available. It’s a time saving tool that allows for efficient analysis and auditing of a website. So it’s also great for competitor research!

Chris Dreyer

Aside from your standard Google toolkit (Google Analytics, Search Console, Keyword Planner, and Trends), here are some tools I feel are essential for SEO agency success.

AceIDE – This file editor allows us to make code changes more efficiently and directly from the WordPress dashboard.

Agency Analytics – Agency Analytics is one of our go-to tools for measuring success. It has integrations directly to Google Analytics and Search Console, as well as CallRail. One of the things on which we pride ourselves is radical transparency, so we provide our clients with user and mobile access to these dashboards.

It keeps them informed on a proactive basis and at their convenience: they have control over when they receive data on their campaign.

Ahrefs – An essential tool for competitor backlink analysis, Ahrefs has very comprehensive crawling capabilities. My team finds it intuitive and easy to use.

Our primary use for Ahrefs is backlink analysis; however, we do perform keyword research (using the Content Explorer tool), which details search volume and keyword difficulty, as well as providing keyword ideas.

Screaming Frog – We use Screaming Frog to crawl an entire website in a relatively short period of time. It allows us to take a more granular look at metadata, permalink structure, word count, and just the overall architecture of the site.

This allows us to spot SEO opportunities more easily, since the entire structure is available and sortable as a .csv file.

Smush Image Compression & Optimization – The title of this WordPress SEO plugin is fairly self-explanatory, but we use it to reduce the size of images, and thus improve overall website speed and performance.

Aaron Agius

Ahrefs: For link profile analysis, keyword research, competitive analysis, content idea generation and much more.
Semrush: for competitive analysis.
BuzzSumo: For content idea generation and data gathering for influencer outreach.
Pitchbox: For outreach management.

Anthony Lavall

Sitebulb, Botify, STAT, Semrush, Ahrefs,

Dario Zadro

There’s such a wide array of tools to use, and it entirely depends on the client’s current needs. Since we developed an in-house SEO Auditor tool, we always start there to get a high-level feel of the client’s existing authority and fundamental on-page factors.

When engaging a new client, performing a complete SEO audit is necessary. The top tool for this is Screaming Frog, with Excel going hand-in-hand to provide the reporting of results. We’ve even used Screaming Frog’s xpath extraction for a site migration to match up key data. SEO is practically impossible to do correctly without it.

To deliver ongoing results, tracking links is critical. We use Ahrefs primarily for that purpose, and it always makes alerting easy when the content strategy obtains new links. However, GSC is also a great place to see links and much more, especially errors.

For keyword research, Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz are all great. But, keyword rankings are not something we typically report on. For reporting, Agency Analytics is a great high-level tool, and nothing beats customized reports from Google Analytics. I feel results are best measured on conversions and ROI.

Ryan Mendenhall

Search Console: One of the most powerful SEO practices I know of is looking at terms that people are using to find your content and then optimizing for those topics that aren’t specifically or deeply addressed presently on those pages. This keeps your site fresh and continually relevant. We look for pages and terms that are already getting lots of impressions and some traffic that are in positions 6-20. When optimizing these pages, we often see fairly quick (when comparing to new content) improvements in ranking, traffic and conversions. You could also take this a step further and begin by looking at your top converting pages, even a small increase in traffic to those pages can work wonders!

Ahrefs: We will often use Ahrefs to look at a competitor’s top pages (depending on the situation- top by links, top by traffic or top by value). This gives us insights into key content topics we may be missing. If we already have similar content, it gives us insight into any topics we may have missed talking about in that content. It also helps us identify backlinks to those pages that we may wish to investigate for our own content.

Personally, I also find great value in seeing what keywords a client is ranking for that are showing featured snippets, video results, etc. This helps me give recommendations on content types that a client could use to be more competitive in their space.

Screaming Frog: This tool, once understood and combined with a good audit process is a life saver! We use it extensively for our initial site audits. While many audit tools will give you information on duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, etc., Screaming Frog gives you much, much more.

We use it to identify redirect chains, 404s (when connected to Ahrefs you can sort these by 404s with backlinks to establish a priority on fixes), canonical issues and more. We’ll often uncover issues that a site owner had no idea existed. This very in-depth audit process with Screaming Frog gives our clients an edge in their respective industries.

Google: While there are many tools an SEO agency could use, a simple Google search should be among the top. When investigating a topic to rank for, it’s essential to look at what Google already thinks is the most relevant for it. Googling a keyword phrase can tell you the type of content you need to create (If the results are exclusively showing product pages, you may be hard pressed to rank your blog post for that keyword).

Additionally, you can gain some amazing insights by paying attention to Google’s questions People Also Ask, and the Searches related to items at the bottom of a search page. These are great related topics to bring up in your content. The guys at Income School even suggest that the autosuggest feature has been more reliable tool to show what gets searches than all those that provide search volume. Testing this out.

Clint Butler

Ahrefs, Semrush, Page Optimizer Pro and CORA.

Trey Copeland

Semrush for simple and easy keyword research.
Ahrefs for even faster keyword research, competitor link analysis and organic research.
Speedmonitor.io for automated Lighthouse page speed testing.

Leslie Gilmour

Ahrefs is by far our single most used tool. We use it in two different areas of the business. The daily use is finding and qualifying targets for link and content outreach. It is easy to pull the backlinks from competitors and niche relevant websites and drop into a sheet. (We still have a Majestic account, but only for Trust Flow). Better quality links normally results in better client rankings.

I love the broken links feature for finding broken pages on client’s website that have inbound links. Redirecting these is a real quick win the client. We use content gap, site explorer, and content explorer to find content ideas for blog posts.

Buzzstream is second on the favorite list – though if they upped their game with more integrations it would be first. Using BuzzStream we can work through a list of target websites for outreach very quickly. BuzzStream helps us keep in touch with every website we have ever written for, it pulls RSS feeds, lets us make notes with reminders, and confirm that all the links are live each week.

Buzzstream will help us move into more traditional PR as we build our lists. SEO will eat PR if we are smart.

This year has seen us focus more with on-site SEO. Using tools like Clearscope to write and optimize current content. Screaming Frog and Sitebulb to crawl sites and keep them in good health. URL Profiler to run speed test in bulk.

Currently our agency is spending around two thousand dollars per month on SEO software. Clients reap the benefits of faster workflows and in-depth research.

Daniel Brooks

Big Metrics.io – Big Metrics allows us to analyse our clients Google Search Console data, not only at scale but with easy to use reports. Keyword cannibalization is something that is always an issue for large sites. Big Metrics allows us to download an easy to use CSV file and make recommendations based on real data.

Conrad O’Connell

Ahrefs, Optmyzr, Buzzstream & default Google products (Google Analytics/ Search Console).

Ahrefs is our most important third-party tool. It runs our keyword rank tracking, link research, new topic & keyword research. For SEO we’d be not nearly as productive without it.

On the paid search side, Optmyzr has been a more recent addition but one that’s proven to help us with managing bids, A/B testing new ads, reviewing budget pacing and other important paid search activity.

Buzzstream has been an important tool to manage all of our outreach and record link placements in a single dashboard.

Scott Polk

We use a lot of different tools as finding a single tool that does it all is impossible.

Crawling – We use a few tools for this type of data collection. Crawlers are able to easily identify technical issues with a site without much effort. We also monitor sites monthly with crawls in order to reduce the length of time any technical issues may impact the site. We use DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog and URL Profiler.

ADA Compliance is a big topic for a lot of website managers. WCAG and SEO go hand-in-hand most of the time. As more lawsuits are filed for ADA compliance, we highly recommend testing for WCAG to become as compliant as possible. We use PowerMapper to assist with WCAG compliance.

For competitive research we use Semrush – it is simply the best tool out there for data of this nature. We use this tool to benchmark our client vs competitors, resarch the competition and assist with content marketing.

Local SEO – yes, you do need a tool that is specific for Local SEO, we use BrightLocal to monitor local rankings, local citations, Google My Business, reviews. We give our clients access to their external reporting tools as well.

Amanda Schack

At Wpromote many of us rely on BrightEdge to drive results. Brightedge provides us visibility into our tracked keywords and also a visual of what the SERPs look like for that selected keyword. This allows us to understand quickly if the landscape and user intent have changed saving us time to focus on strategy.

We also rely on Google Tag Manager as a way to monitor certain initiatives. By using specific tags, we can give our clients true transparency on the impact of our organic efforts.

Screaming Frog is another great tool that allows us to get a view of the technical well-being of the site in a relatively quick manner. We run our clients URL through this at least monthly, if not bi-weekly in order to ensure the site is sound.

Alan Silvestri

We rely HEAVILY on Ahrefs. It’s getting better and better every day, I love the support, community and the Ahrefs blog is one of our go-to learning resources.

We use Ahrefs for basically everything from link prospecting and analysis to keyword, content research and competitor analysis. I also use it a ton for sales and consulting calls. It’s probably the only tool I open up at least once every single day.

Other than Ahrefs, the only tool I’ve been using recently is PageOptimizer Pro. It’s great for on page insights and I love the fact that it’s based on actual research data done by Kyle Roof. We use it mostly to further optimize content that already has links, but is still not ranking as it should.

Devin Schumacher

Rankpro.io – this helps me manage multiple campaigns, track rankings, track actions on a site, monitor changes, assign targets, and handle 40+ client SEO campaigns without needing spreadsheets.

Greg Mischio

We use Semrush to analyze keywords a company is ranking for, as well as their competitors. It helps us break down the percentage of traffic each keyword is responsible for, which can be a real eye-opener to a company. We also like its ability to show how a company stacks up against competitors.

Gary Simpson

Zendesk: Managing link building outreach, content approval, and customer tickets all in one.
Ahrefs: Keyword research and backlink analysis. We use this tool religiously.
Screaming Frog: Provides critical insights into immediate technical issues. We also use this for lead gen – doing initial crawls and sending to prospects as a foot-in-the-door.
Google Sheets: We use custom internal sheets that update clients in real-time on live links & new content.
SearchEye: Our proprietary software we built to manage client campaigns start to finish: automated reporting, citation management via API, Google Maps management, keyword tracking, competitor tracking, link building schedules, and more.

Russell Jensen

Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Google Analytics and Google Data Studio

I use Ahrefs mainly because of the visibility report coupled with the competitor tracking. The best way to get buy in from your clients is to show them where they stand in relation to their top competitors. And I’ve found the tool’s traffic estimates are fairly accurate.

Google Search console is a staple of the SEO tool set and Google has been investing time into making it better.

Google analytics is by the best tracking platform because of it simplicity, and its free.

Google Data Studio is great because I can bring many reports from different platforms into one clean report.

Nick Garner

Ahrefs
Why? It’s very good at intersecting different perspectives on data. For example I can
– see share of search for a particular set of key phrases,
– historic data from any given domain showing all of their substantial key phrase searches of movement over time
– their keyword reports are excellent
– the link analysis information is also superb and it gives data on search traffic going to given websites. That’s an important metric for me, because if Google trust the website enough to rank it, then probably a good place for a donor link.
– Overall the data exports are very consistent and quick, which means I can run metrics through Excel spreadsheets have created the give me information you can’t get on Ahrefs

Digimetr
A bulk analysis tool which gives you metrics such as:
– historic traffic volumes,
– proportion of search traffic,
– other sources of traffic,
– meta data
– page views
– time on-site
Along with numerous other metrics.1,000 queries cost about one US dollar. I find it’s very useful for understanding overall characteristics of groups of sites. For example, I’ve got a press release distribution list and I refresh that list through this tool every month or two, so I can identify sites with highest engagement. It is also very useful for analyzing sites for prospective link placement. It’s the only bulk analysis site I’ve ever come across which gives me the kind of data you have to pay for via a pro-Alexa account or similar web.

Hypestat.com
Similar to Digimetr , this gives you some detailed metrics on websites. For example if you are looking for links, this is a good supplemental tool for checking out traffic and other site metrics that are useful for judging quality. Main bonus: it’s free to use!

Excel/Google Sheets
When we sort out a client website, it’s because we’ve gone through a gap analysis process where we’ve looked at competitor pages that out rank our client pages and from there were able to come up with a change list they can use to improve user satisfaction.
Google Sheets is great for low level spreadsheet work, where you’ve got collaboration. But Excel is still king when it comes to spreadsheet processing power in my opinion. I hate to say that, because I’m not Microsoft fan 🙁 Fact is: it’s hard to beat the malleability of Excel . And when you mix that in with the quality of data you get from ahrefs… You’ve got something very useful.

Invision
It’s a wire framing tool that allows designers to come up with very realistic mockups of websites. It’s probably the most powerful of its kind that I’ve ever seen and clients love it, because sketches are very accessible and easy to change. Coders love it because it automatically creates specifications for front-end development.

HubspotCRM
It’s free and very powerful. It integrates with Gmail and so we use this as our outreach CRM tool. The reporting is excellent and in many ways it’s far better than any of the paid systems we’ve used in the past.

Mike van der Heijden

At Local Visibility, we specialize in website development and digital marketing for small businesses, therefore we use the following tools:

Semrush – Keeps us on track to see movements in organic visibility over time, we also use Semrush for basic keyword research and rank tracking.

Ahrefs – Mostly for link analysis, but have been using it more and more to determine popular pages and content on competitor websites.

KWFinder (Mangools) – these guys have a great suite of tools for quick and dirty on the fly checks, things like SerpWatch to get snapshots of SERPs at any given time, and can set it to take daily snapshots of the SERPs you want to track.

Sitebulb – Pretty obvious why we use this..

Agency Analytics – We use Agency Analytics for reporting, as it has everything we need for smaller accounts.

Ivan Kokuti

Majestic SEO – this tool uses a metric for trust flow and topic. It’s the best tool to qualify sites for relevance when looking for backlink opportunities.

Borislav Ivanov

We usually start with tools that give us specific information directly from the source about the overall SEO state of the project. These tools are Google Search Console and Google Analytics. We need current information about the project, so need to be crawled. For this purpose, we use Screaming Frog SEO Spider. For analyzing backlinks, we often also use Ahrefs.

Khushal

SEO Monitor – provide all the elements to ensure our content marketing campaigns are at par against competition which we can analyse with the competition in detail with the likes of Sistrix/Searchmetrics.

The key is not only to track what we optimize but also keep an eye out for opportunities and growth of direct/indirect competition which can be measured in depth using the tools mentioned.

Winston Burton

Acronym is a tool agnostic search and performance based advertising agency with many technology partners and platforms to research markets, implement and optimize advertising and promotional campaigns for maximum return on advertising spend.

For local search initiatives we partner with Rio and Yext, two of the largest local search platforms in the industry. We implement these tools for expert management of local listings for Clients in the hospitality and education sectors. Our local search team optimizes landing pages and ensures the N.A.P data is accurate, that sites generate and maintain accurate citations, and also manage reviews and feedback.

Acronym’s own propriety search and business intelligence platform called Keyword Objects™ has been designed to offer to our enterprise level Clients deeper insights and clear, uncluttered reporting and analysis.

Keyword Objects™ includes the patented Keyword Provided Algorithm (KPA) which provides a solution to the secure search encrypted keywords problem and brings back keyword data with 90+ percent accuracy. Also featured in this one-of-a-kind platform is the Synergy Module which provides Clients with a side-by-side analysis of SEO and PPC data giving a keyword dollar-for-dollar comparison chart.

From an SEO platform perspective, we partner with a number of industry players such as Search Metrics, BrightEdge, Conductor, SEO Clarity and others. Acting as agency of record for our we both recommend to, and work with, existing technology partners chosen by our Clients. The Acronym team is certified by all major platforms and expertly drive organic performance, find new opportunities (answer box, content gaps) as well as analyzing and reporting market share.

For competitive analysis and backlink insight and tracking we partner with Semrush, Majestic and Ahrefs. These tools enable us to discover new linking opportunities, analyze sources where competitors are inducing and attracting links from and perform routine analysis for link reclamation and internal linking structure.

For site crawling and audits, we partner with DeepCrawl, Botify and Screaming Frog and Google Search Console. These tools enable us to create check indexing status, technical errors, content quality and optimize online visibility for all of our Clients.