Jeff Millett — January 24, 2017 Follow @jefftheseowhiz— January 24, 2017
As a long time SEO consultant I am always on the lookout for new tools that help me do my job better.
I have recently found a few tools that are worth writing about that have made a real difference in my business.
Who These Tools Are Meant For:
1. Marketers who understand how to do SEO
2. SEO Consultants
3. Digital Marketing Agencies
If you fall into one of those three categories, these tools can really help you.
SEOJet
SEOJet is perfect for you if:
1. You have a good knowledge base of how SEO works.
2. You actively build links for your or your clients websites.
Using a data driven algorithm, the software makes it super easy to build a #1 ranked link profile for any page.
It guides you through things like what anchor text to get for every link, which page you need to link to next, and which links you should stack (link to a link).
The software is based on hundreds of hours of research into thousands of links pointing to a large group of #1 ranked web pages.
Instead of guessing what to do next to climb the rankings, SEOJet simply tells you what to do next and all you have to do is follow their advice.
It is link building with a plan, and the plan is to build a #1 ranked link profile with every page you care about.
Again, I can’t reiterate this enough, this is NOT for beginners.
You need to understand what a link profile is and what anchor text is.
Also this is not software that gets links for you. You have to do that on your own.
What SEOJet does is put your link building on steroids.
It automatically guides you to build organic #1 ranked link profiles and rank much quicker than if you just built links the old fashioned way.
I personally have been using this software for a little while now and have seen some amazing results.
I don’t do link building without it anymore.
My SEO clients benefit from it because I can get them top rankings with less links.
I benefit from it because it costs me less out of pocket to get the same top results.
This means that every client is more profitable for me.
The price is reasonable considering how much it saves me on link building costs since I can get awesome rankings with a fraction of the links.
This is definitely my favorite new tool and quite frankly is a game changer for me and my SEO business. (No, they’re not paying me)
NightWatch
Nightwatch was built by the creators of Ranktrackr.
Ranktrackr has been the ranking report software I have used for a couple of years now and it has served me well and provided accurate results.
Well the same guys have been working on a more feature rich ranking report software and they have recently launched beta.
Nightwatch is different from Ranktrackr in that it is much more customizable in how you can view your rankings.
It allows you to get a much more in depth view of every key phrase you are targeting and it helps you stay focused on the phrases that are going to drive targeted traffic to your site.
When you drill down to a specific key phrase it shows you things like your position, local and global search volume, average cost per click for adwords, monthly impressions, monthly clicks and click through rate.
It is able to pull this data because of its biggest new feature, which is it integrates with Google analytics to give you access to much more useful data then just where you rank in Google.
This way I know which phrases are actually driving traffic to my client’s site.
As far as cost goes if you were a legacy Ranktrackr user you automatically got upgraded to the new Nightwatch software.
Otherwise I’m not sure on the cost because they are still in beta.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a tool I have been using for a lot of 2016 so technically it isn’t brand new but it is relatively unknown.
Hotjar is more of a user experience software than it is SEO software.
Having said that I truly believe that user experience is becoming more and more important to Google and how they rank websites.
This is what is so great about Hotjar. They have two main features that I use all of the time.
First is the click recording where they will show you exactly where users are clicking on a certain page. I like this feature because it will tell me at a quick glance if visitors to my or my client’s site are doing what we want them to do.
I realize Crazyegg has this exact same functionality but Hotjar has a free plan and Crazyegg doesn’t.
The second feature I love is the visitor recordings. The software will actually record the visitors to the site so you can watch all of the mouse movements, watch where they click and watch where they get stuck.
You can use this data to make changes to your pages and create a better user experience which will keep your users on the site longer. This again is a signal to Google that your site is relevant.
As I said before the cost for Hotjar is reasonable and they have a free (albeit limited) plan so anyone can use it.
Conclusion
There you have it, the 3 SEO tools I highly recommend for 2017. I have tested and used all three and they have made a real difference in my SEO business. If you have a tight marketing budget, personally I have gotten the best return on my investment with SEOJet.
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