The SEO Tools We Use Every Day as an SEO Agency: Driving Results and ROI

We wanted to give you an insight in to the SEO tools we use every day in view of enabling our readers to get better SEO results.

In the ever-evolving field of search engine optimisation (SEO), having the right tools at your disposal can make all the difference in achieving success for your agency and your clients. At CTO Digital, a leading SEO agency based in the north east of England, we understand the importance of utilising a comprehensive toolkit to drive results and deliver a fantastic return on investment (ROI) for our clients. In this blog post, we will delve into the tools we rely on, namely SE Ranking, Ahrefs, Surfer SEO, Moz, Answer The Public, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Canva, Elementor and Google My Business. Here our design and SEO team have put their heads together to give you an insight in to the tools that we use every day to deliver the best results for our clients.

SE Ranking: Empowering SEO Strategy and Tracking Success

SE Ranking is a versatile SEO tool that provides invaluable insights and features for our agency. With SE Ranking, we can conduct comprehensive keyword research, track keyword rankings, analyse competitor performance, perform website audits, monitor backlinks, and generate detailed reports for our clients. This tool empowers us to identify the most valuable keywords for optimisation, monitor our clients’ progress in search engine rankings, and fine-tune our SEO strategies to stay ahead of the competition.

• Keyword Research: SE Ranking’s keyword research feature allows us to discover relevant keywords, assess their search volumes, and identify keyword difficulty to optimise our clients’ content accordingly. This data helps us target the most valuable keywords and optimise our clients’ websites for maximum visibility.
• Rank Tracking: We utilise SE Ranking’s rank tracking capabilities to monitor our clients’ keyword rankings across search engines. By tracking their positions over time, we can measure the effectiveness of our SEO efforts and make data-driven decisions to improve rankings.
• Competitor Analysis: SE Ranking enables us to analyse competitor performance and identify opportunities to outperform them in search results. We can track their rankings, evaluate their backlink profiles, and uncover insights to refine our strategies and gain a competitive edge.
• Website Audits: SE Ranking’s website audit feature allows us to analyse our clients’ websites for SEO issues and identify areas for improvement. We can identify on-page and technical SEO issues, such as broken links, duplicate content, page speed, and mobile-friendliness, and implement necessary optimisations to enhance website performance.
• Backlink Monitoring: By monitoring backlinks using SE Ranking, we gain insights into our clients’ link profiles, including new backlinks, lost backlinks, and toxic links. This information helps us refine our link-building strategies and ensure a healthy backlink profile.

Ahrefs: Unleashing the Power of Backlink Analysis and Competitive Research

Ahrefs is a powerhouse when it comes to backlink analysis and competitive research. By utilising Ahrefs, we gain a comprehensive understanding of our clients’ backlink profiles, identify opportunities for high-quality link acquisition, and track the effectiveness of our link-building campaigns. Ahrefs also offers valuable keyword research capabilities, content analysis, and site auditing features, allowing us to optimise our clients’ websites holistically.

• Backlink Analysis: Ahrefs provides in-depth insights into our clients’ backlink profiles, including the number of backlinks, referring domains, anchor text distribution, and domain authority. We can identify high-quality backlinks, analyse competitor backlink profiles, and uncover link-building opportunities to boost our clients’ website authority and search rankings.
• Competitive Research: Ahrefs enables us to gain a competitive edge by analysing our clients’ competitors’ SEO strategies. We can evaluate their top-performing content, identify their backlink sources, and discover content gaps to create more targeted and effective SEO campaigns.
• Keyword Research: Ahrefs offers a robust keyword research feature that helps us identify relevant keywords, assess their search volumes, and analyse keyword difficulty. By understanding the keywords that drive organic traffic to our clients’ competitors, we can optimise our clients’ content and target high-potential keywords.
• Content Analysis: With Ahrefs, we can analyse the content performance of our clients’ websites and identify areas for improvement. We can evaluate the top-performing content in terms of social shares, backlinks, and organic traffic, gaining insights into the content formats and topics that resonate with their target audience.
• Site Audits: Ahrefs’ site audit feature allows us to identify on-page and technical SEO issues that may impact our clients’ search rankings. We can uncover issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and crawl errors, and take corrective measures to improve website health and performance.

Surfer SEO: Precision On-Page Optimisation for Maximum Impact

Surfer SEO is an innovative tool that helps us optimise on-page elements with precision. By analysing top-performing pages for specific keywords, Surfer SEO provides actionable recommendations for optimising our clients’ content. We can leverage Surfer SEO’s insights to improve keyword density, page structure, meta tags, and other critical on-page factors, ensuring our clients’ websites are well-optimised and primed for higher search rankings.

• Content Optimisation: Surfer SEO analyses top-performing pages for specific keywords and provides recommendations to optimise our clients’ content. We can optimise keyword usage, improve the structure of the content, and align it with the top-ranking pages to enhance relevance and search visibility.
• Content-Length Recommendations: Surfer SEO helps us determine the ideal content length for specific keywords based on the top-ranking pages. This insight allows us to create comprehensive and valuable content that aligns with user expectations and search engine requirements.
• Competitor Analysis: Surfer SEO’s competitor analysis feature enables us to evaluate our clients’ competitors’ on-page optimisation strategies. We can gain insights into their content structure, keyword usage, and other optimisation techniques to identify opportunities for improvement and surpass their performance.
• Real-time Content Editor: Surfer SEO provides a real-time content editor that allows us to optimise our clients’ content directly within the tool. We can make on-page optimisations, analyse changes, and ensure our content meets the recommended guidelines for higher search visibility.

Moz: A Comprehensive SEO Toolkit for In-Depth Analysis and Optimisation

Moz is a widely recognised SEO toolset that encompasses a range of features catering to different aspects of search engine optimisation. With Moz, we can conduct in-depth keyword research, track keyword rankings, perform site audits, and monitor backlinks. Additionally, Moz’s Local SEO tools are particularly beneficial for our clients, enabling us to optimise their presence on various online directories and enhance their visibility in local search results.

• Keyword Research: Moz provides a comprehensive keyword research tool that helps us identify relevant keywords, assess their search volumes, and evaluate keyword difficulty. We can discover new keyword opportunities and optimise our clients’ content to target high-value keywords.
• Rank Tracking: Moz allows us to monitor our clients’ keyword rankings across search engines and track their progress over time. We can gain insights into the effectiveness of our SEO efforts, measure the impact of optimisations, and identify areas for improvement.
• Site Audits: Moz’s site audit feature enables us to analyse our clients’ websites for technical SEO issues. We can uncover issues such as crawl errors, broken links, duplicate content, and missing meta tags, and implement necessary optimisations to improve website health and performance.
• Backlink Analysis: Moz’s backlink analysis tool provides insights into our clients’ backlink profiles. We can identify valuable backlinks, evaluate their domain authority, and monitor the quality of the links pointing to our clients’ websites. This information helps us refine our link-building strategies and improve our clients’ website authority.
• Local SEO Optimisation: Moz’s Local SEO tools allow us to manage and optimise our clients’ presence on various online directories, including Google My Business, Yelp, and Bing Places. We can ensure accurate and consistent business information across platforms, respond to customer reviews, and improve our clients’ visibility in local search results.

Answer The Public: Uncovering User Intent and Tailoring SEO Strategies

Answer The Public is a unique tool that helps us uncover valuable insights into our clients’ target audience’s search behaviour. By generating visualisations of search queries and related keywords in the form of a “search cloud,” Answer The Public allows us to identify content gaps, create targeted content strategies, and provide relevant answers to the questions our clients’ potential customers are asking. This tool helps us tailor our SEO efforts to align with user intent and boost organic traffic.

• Content Ideation: Answer The Public provides a wealth of content ideas by presenting search queries and related keywords in a visual format. We can identify popular questions, topics, and trends related to our clients’ industries and use this information to create valuable and engaging content that addresses users’ needs.
• Long-Tail Keyword Research: By analysing the search cloud generated by Answer The Public, we can uncover long-tail keywords and phrases that are relevant to our clients’ target audience. Long-tail keywords often have lower competition and higher intent, allowing us to optimise our clients’ content for more specific user queries.
• User Intent Analysis: Answer The Public helps us understand the intent behind users’ search queries. By identifying the informational, navigational, and transactional intent of the search terms, we can optimise our clients’ content to align with user expectations and provide the most relevant answers.
• Content Gap Analysis: Answer The Public allows us to identify content gaps by comparing our clients’ existing content with the search queries generated by the tool. We can uncover areas where our clients’ content is lacking, develop strategies to fill those gaps, and provide comprehensive resources that satisfy users’ search intent.

Google Search Console: Leveraging Google’s Insights for Enhanced Performance

As an SEO agency, our collaboration with Google Search Console is vital. This tool provides essential data and reports directly from Google, offering deep insights into how our clients’ websites are performing in search results. We can monitor crawl errors, track keyword rankings, analyse click-through rates, and identify indexing issues, ensuring our clients’ websites are optimised for search engine visibility.

• Performance Tracking: Google Search Console provides valuable performance data, including impressions, clicks, click-through rates (CTRs), and average position, for our clients’ websites. We can analyse this data to understand how our SEO efforts are driving traffic and visibility, and identify areas for improvement.
• Keyword Analysis: Google Search Console allows us to see the keywords for which our clients’ websites are appearing in search results. We can evaluate the rankings, impressions, and CTRs for these keywords, gaining insights into the effectiveness of our optimisation strategies and identifying opportunities for further optimisation.
• Indexing and Crawl Monitoring: Google Search Console alerts us to any indexing issues, crawl errors, or security issues that may affect our clients’ websites’ visibility. We can quickly address these issues to ensure that search engines can crawl and index our clients’ web pages effectively.
• Sitemap Submission: With Google Search Console, we can submit XML sitemaps for our clients’ websites, ensuring that search engines can discover and index their web pages efficiently. This improves the visibility and crawlability of our clients’ websites.

Google Analytics: Measuring Performance and User Behaviour

Google Analytics is a cornerstone tool for measuring website performance and user behaviour. By integrating Google Analytics into our SEO strategies, we can track organic traffic, monitor user engagement, identify conversion funnels, and gain valuable insights into user demographics and interests. This data enables us to refine our strategies, optimise user experience, and drive meaningful results for our clients.

• Traffic Analysis: Google Analytics provides comprehensive data on organic traffic, allowing us to understand how users find and navigate our clients’ websites. We can track the number of organic sessions, bounce rates, average session duration, and pages per session to assess the effectiveness of our SEO efforts and identify areas for improvement.
• User Behaviour Analysis: By analysing user behaviour metrics such as page views, time on page, and exit rates, we gain insights into how users interact with our clients’ websites. We can identify popular content, optimise conversion funnels, and improve user experience to encourage longer engagement and higher conversion rates.
• Conversion Tracking: Google Analytics allows us to set up conversion tracking, enabling us to measure and analyse the effectiveness of our SEO campaigns in driving desired actions, such as form submissions, purchases, or newsletter sign-ups. We can attribute conversions to specific SEO efforts, evaluate conversion rates, and optimise our strategies accordingly.
• Audience Insights: Google Analytics provides demographic and interest data about our clients’ website visitors. We can understand the characteristics of our clients’ target audience, such as age, gender, location, and interests, and use this information to refine our SEO strategies and tailor content to their preferences.

Google My Business: Enhancing Local Search Visibility

For local businesses, optimising their presence on Google My Business is crucial. This tool allows us to manage and optimise our clients’ business listings, including contact information, opening hours, customer reviews, and photos. By optimising Google My Business profiles, we enhance our clients’ visibility in local search results and improve their chances of appearing in Google’s Local Pack, driving more traffic and leads to their businesses.

• Business Information Management: Google My Business enables us to ensure accurate and up-to-date business information, such as business name, address, phone number, and website, across Google Search and Maps. This consistency improves our clients’ local search visibility and helps potential customers find their businesses easily.
• Reviews and Ratings: We can monitor and respond to customer reviews and ratings through Google My Business. Engaging with customer feedback enhances our clients’ online reputation and builds trust with potential customers.
• Photos and Visual Content: Google My Business allows us to showcase our clients’ businesses through photos and videos. By uploading high-quality visuals, we can provide potential customers with a glimpse into our clients’ offerings, attracting more engagement and interest.
• Local Insights: Google My Business provides valuable insights into how customers find and interact with our clients’ business listings. We can assess the number of views, clicks, and calls generated through the listings, gaining insights into customer preferences and behaviour.

Canva: Designing Engaging Visual Content

Canva is a versatile design tool that enables us to create visually appealing and engaging content. From social media graphics to infographics and presentations, Canva provides a wide range of templates, images, fonts, and design elements that allow us to create stunning visuals that complement our clients’ SEO strategies. With Canva, we can design eye-catching featured images for blog posts, compelling social media graphics to accompany content promotion, and visually appealing presentations for client pitches. We also find Canva great for reporting to our clients. It is simple to use and allows us to give our clients clear and easy to understand SEO reporting.

Elementor: Building Dynamic and Optimised Web Pages

Elementor is a powerful WordPress page builder that empowers us to create dynamic and optimised web pages for our clients. With its drag-and-drop interface and extensive widget library, Elementor allows us to design visually stunning and user-friendly websites that align with our SEO objectives. We can optimise page layouts, add interactive elements, and ensure that our clients’ websites are responsive, fast-loading, and optimised for search engine visibility.

The importance of investing in the best SEO tools:

At CTO Digital, we pride ourselves on using a comprehensive suite of SEO tools to deliver outstanding results and ROI for our clients. We work with clients in almost every industry using the above mentioned SEO tools, from accountants to locksmiths, plumbers to estate agents and everything in between, they enable us to deliver great results in any niche. By leveraging the power of SE Ranking, Ahrefs, Surfer SEO, Moz, Answer The Public, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Google My Business, we are equipped to conduct thorough research, track performance, optimise websites, analyse data, and drive targeted organic traffic. These tools enable us to stay ahead of the curve, adapt our strategies, and consistently deliver exceptional SEO outcomes for our clients. Contact us today to experience the power of these tools firsthand and propel your online presence to new heights.