Best SEO Tools 2021

 

 Best SEO Tools 2021

 Ever wondered, which SEO tool is best.Well in this blog, I'm gonna share some of the free SEO tools that we use here at AARC Marketing and also do a bit of a shootout to see which of these SEO tools has the best data..SEO tools are really useful whilst no SEO tool is ever going to do your work for you.

There are some really important tools to have in your toolbox as a digital marketer,which can help you get more data that you might not otherwise see,and also do a lot of competitor snooping things like identifying which pages on your website are broken but also having a look at what your competitors are doing, how they're building links,what sorts of content is performing best for them.

So whether you're unloading your own website to see what sorts of errors might be holding your ranking back or whether you're doing a little bit of competitive snooping and identifying what that link strategy is, or how they're using content to generate traffic, some of the tools that we're gonna be looking at today can give you immense input, and show you a whole bunch of stuff that would take years to dig out otherwise.So first up, let's look at some of the free SEO tools

That pretty much every SEO or digital marketer needs in their toolbox.

First up, Screaming Frog, and that Screaming Frog is great for analyzing your website and finding technical SEO tweaks to make to improve your ranking.We've got other more detailed blogs on that
so I'm not gonna go too much into exactly.

How to use Screaming Frog, or in fact,any of these other tools in this blog,
but we primarily use Screaming Frog to perform site audits to tell us the sort of pages that might have issues with meta or pages being indexed that shouldn't be.The next free SEO tool is Moz Domain Analysis.

Now this is a great way to get a free, fast overview of any particular websites or authority.Moz Domain Authority or DA is pretty much industry standard recognition of a site or authority now that Google has removed its page rank number from the toolbar and whilst it's imperfect most DA is a very useful shortcut to understand how authoritative a siteis in relation to other sites,whilst the data that the Moz Domain Analysis tool gives you is much more limited than some of the other toolsthat we're gonna be looking at.

If you just need a quick overview of how authoritative your site is or a competitor site, or you want to analyses how authoritative a publication might be, Moz DA is a pretty good place to start.Next tool which is an absolute must have for every website owner is a Google Search Console.

Now Google Search Console or GSC has become way more useful for SEO over the last few years and it has one massive advantage over the other tools in this blog and that massive advantage is that the data Google Search Console gives you,is measure data that comes directly from Google,i.e. this is that first party data.That's great because you know, that it's accurate.

Whereas some of the other tools that we're looking at today, they're projections they're based on a small sample size or crawling or scraping or taking data from looking at how people are using websites, you know that when you go into search console, that data is gonna be as closeas Google will give you to being completely accurate.

So you can pretty much rely on things like impressions and the number of clicks your site's getting, as being accurate.Or you can use Google Search Console, see all sortsof useful things like how many times your site is showing up in search, how many clicks it's getting and also the keywords that are driving clicks too And you've got the really useful kind of basic stuff such as, how is Google able to crawl your site.
How's Google processing any schema on your site? and also are there any mobile issues? and of course, if you really wanna sleep well at nightyou can use Google Search Console to find out if Google thinks, your website has been hacked or not. It's just laugh a minute inside search console, so these tools are great as the basics,and they're really useful if you wanna analyse your own site in depth or analyze your competitors, but a very surface level.But what about 

if you wanna take things up a notch,if you wanna find new opportunities, analyze different types of keywords, or most importantly, spy on your competitors,so you can steal their best ideasi mean.Adapt, adapt their best ideas.Okay, that was L page from the competition commission, adapt their best ideas. 

Well then it might be time to take a look at one of the SEO super, super, super tool.The SEO super tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, WebCEO, Serp stat,claim to do all sorts of things, awesome things.Showing you how much traffic each of those pages is getting and from which keyword, tracking that and your ranking

From particular devices from different locations over time.Now, a lot of people understandably get really obsessed about finding out how much traffic their competitor sites are getting, which leads us onto this topic of data.One of my personal bug bears inside the world of SEO is how people treat data as all the same.
Broadly speaking, we actually have two types of data,we have measured data and we have what I call,Projection data, so measure data is the stuffthat is reported, by the organization or by the toolthat it is measured from.

Now as we've seen Google search console is a great SEO toolif you want to use measure data.But the trouble is if you're basing all of your SEO work on only Google search console, your competitors, probably aren't gonna give you access,to their Google search console, so that you can seewhich pages are performing the best,so you can build a content strategy around it to crush them into the ground.

So if you really wanna do some snooping you're gonna have to use one of the above mentioned SEO super tools, super tools which obviously leads to the question how accurate is the data inside these super tools?In my experience they are pretty accurate All the SEO specialist i know have and worked with not only use these super tools but recommend it as well.

Still if you wanted to find out which of these super tools has the most accurate data, I have devised a little test to for you to find out. So this is what we did we decided to have each tool,tell us how much traffic they thought five different websites were getting from organic search.Now, these five websites are either my websites or our clients. So we've got access to  analytics and search console.

So we know exactly how much dtraffic they are getting from organic search, so we're basically putting up these super tools against the measure data to see which one is closest.Now we chose these five sites based on a couple of different factors.Firstly, we wanted to choose a mixture of UK and US and IND sites.And then secondly we wanted to choose sites with different amounts of traffic.

Some of the sites that we're gonna be looking at are much newer, so they have lower traffic volume,
but some of them are more establishedand have larger traffic volume.ow all of these fit into the smaller,
medium sized business category.We're not looking at sites like Facebook here because most of the people who are reading thisblog and considering these tools are gonna bein that smaller, medium sized business category.

So whilst it's much easier to have accurate estimate datafor huge massive sites with millions and millionsof visits each month, we wanted to focus this teston smaller sites that were getting four, five or six figures of monthly organic traffic.

Now because these are either clients of Aarc marketing  I'm not gonna share the website URL with you,
but I will share that data.Now before I do so I just wanted to talk about how these tools are getting to this data,now answering a question like how much organic traffic,a particular website gets, might seem really straightforward but actually it's really not,because in order to make an projection of how much organic traffic a website is going to get.

The first thing these tools need to do,if they're gonna guess how much organic traffic a website gets,is they need to measure the search results for a huge number of different keywords.'Cause they need to know where each of these websites is ranking, for a whole range of different keywords.

Then the tools need to estimate how many times each of these keywords is being searched per month
in each of the locations, then they need to estimate what percentage of those searches are clicking on that website, based on its ranking for those keywords.

So in order to give accurate data these tools need to measure a huge number of keywords,they need to track the positions accurately for the ranking of each of these keywords.They need to know Approximately how many people are searching for each of these terms every month.And then they need to be able to work out how much of that search traffic each of these sites is getting based on its position.

So we've really got these four metrics which are then multiplied together and give us this output which is how much organic traffic a site is gonna be getting.
So whilst on the surface, it might seem like a really basic simple question for one of these tools to answer.
It's a great test because actually multiplies so many of these different projections  together.which by the way is exactly what we got

.Okay, so remember each of these tools has projection how much organic traffic each of these sites gets.The first slope we measured actually got 3,422 monthly organic visits.

SEMrush estimated 5,100, Ahrefs estimated 2,700,09:31
Serpstat measured 31,600. AND  Web CEO estimated 3900.

The next site, the real organic traffic Was about 223,000 a month.
Here are the projection data
SEMrush estimated 259,000 

Ahrefs estimated 136,000,
Serpstat estimated 1.4 million and WebCEO estimated 225,000.

Third site in our test got around 7,000 monthly visits
from organic search,SEMrush estimated about 12,000,

Ahrefs estimated about 5,000 Serpstat again,

way off with 136,000 andWeb CEO estimated was 6,500.

The fourth site in the test was around 13,700,

SEMrush estimated27,000, Ahrefs estimated 27,700.
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Serpstat estimated at 218,000,

and Web CEO estimated15,500
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The final site and our list had around 5,000 monthlies,

SEMrush estimated 2,908, Ahrefs estimated 1,500,

Serpstat 33,000 and Web CEO estimated 5.500

So in order to score these results and announce our overall winner to our little test.
Are you ready for the results?

In First  place came  Web CEO with the highest accuracy.
And the Last  place,  Serpstat
In The Third Placegoes to Ahrefs the data seemed to be broadly pretty good.
And the second t place, (drums rolling) goes to  SEMrush

This is kind of why we use Web CEO as our primary SEO tool here inside AARC Marketing.Not only has it performed best in our little test here we also find the functionality and features are awesome.And it also tends to blow everything outside of the water,with search volumes, for trending keywords.

So things that see a large spike in keyword search volume,this can be useful for seasonality, for promotional stuff,or if you're trying to piggyback on a trend like Trump's ban of TikTok for example,
so much tends to give the best data for those sorts of keywords.So we award Web CEO the overall best data in this very simple, quick and dirty little test.The other thing I would say is that on the whole the lesson from this,is to take projection data, always with a pinch of salt.

We use and love so much because it gives us loads of different tools from helping us find blog posts0
and content that's ranking best for competitors to finding related keywords and spying on competitors paid ad traffic.Even though we love it, and the data is pretty good,we should be careful of the data and cross check it with other tools because at the end of the day,all of this data from these super tools is projection data.

It's not measured data that comes directly from the source.It's all susceptible to things like seasonal changes,growth, or drops over time.And basically extrapolating from lots of low volume searches, what traffic might be.It's really difficult to project the organic traffic to a site that only getting 3000 visits a month,that's a really, really tough thing to do.

Now of course, most of these tools performed betterfor high traffic, high volume keywords,but many of the businesses using them are not huge corporations,they are smaller medium sized businesses like you and me.That wanna make strategic decisions basedon the data inside them.So we've got other blogs on how to use so much,it is our preferred SEO tool of choice,and we've actually managed to negotiate a free 14day trial
for readers of the AARC Marketing blogs here on blog spot.

Link mentioned above you can actually get a free trial of so muchit isn't advertised We managed to negotiate it with them, because not only we we love it but we extensivelyd we use it, so you can get stuck in you can trackyour competitors, you can see what sorts of things they're ranking for, that you might wanna adapt.and don't forget, we've got other blogs here, about all things Internet marketing

I hope you've enjoyed this,and I hope you found it useful.And dare I say, do you know what?I'm just gonna say, I hope you found it fun,I hope that looking at SEO, super tool data was fun for you.

If we can make that fun, we can do anything.Don't forget to follow and share  if you enjoyed this blog
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hit follow optio in the bio if you want to just be constantly bombarded with new stuff like this, don't forget to check out the other blogs and leave a comment it makes a massive difference to our egos, which are really really extremely fragile. And don't forget if you want helpwith your websites digital marketing,then you can drop me a message here and i will get back to you.
15:38
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This is awesome, this is a super tool,
I should have said this at the start,
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then you do have the option to.
Right, that's enough for this,

this is deteriorating let's end it,
16:25
from your number one digital marketing Agency,
16:28

Before i signout here is the list of Best SEO Tools 2021that we discussed

Best SEO Tools 2021

Basic Need to have

• Screaming Frog
• Moz Domain Authority or DA
• Google Search Console.

Superstar list

• SEMrush,
• Ahrefs,
• Web CEO
• Serp stat,

Thats it from me

Over and out