I am often asked about what tools I use for SEO. It’s been just over a year since I last posted this, and there have been some changes and updates. This is my SEO tech stack heading into 2023.
There are a lot and some of them are situation based, but this is a quick list of the tools I use frequently on basically every project.
Semrush – This is one of only two tools that I log into every single day. I use this for assisting with site audits, competitor organic and paid research, keyword research, and content generation/marketing. I’ve shown many examples of how I use Semrush. Here are a few:
- Using Semrush to Uncover New Niches
- Using Semrush to Quickly Find Featured Snippet Opportunities
- 2 Quick Ways to Boost Traffic With Semrush
- Semrush’s Topic Research Tool
I cannot say enough about how valuable this tool is to me.
Then there are the Google Tools:
Google Analytics
Google Search Console
Google Tag Manager
Google Optimize – If you are not familiar with this one, I use it primarily for A/B conversion testing.
Google Looker Studio (Formerly Google Data Studio)- I just want to mention that this is one I think is underutilized and under appreciated. With Looker Studio you can pull data from Analytics, Search Console, and Google Ads and combine and present it how you want. You can also much more easily segment the data. If you are working with clients, you can make all that data more appealing to the eye and emphasize what you want them to focus on as well (like leads, sales, etc.).
I’ve also shared a few Looker Studio Dashboards I created, but this one might be the most popular:
Auditing / Monitoring Tools:
Screaming Frog – I know a lot of people like SiteBulb instead. They do pretty much the same thing, but Screaming Frog does it faster and is less resource intensive.
ContentKing App – It has great monitoring features, but also lets me easily dig through and segment pages. It’s kind of like Screaming Frog, but it is online and crawls the site every day. It will notify you of major changes to the site, like if a title tag or heading changed on a page. I recently shared how I use ContentKing to find internal link opportunities.
Keyword.com – I try to avoid sending clients keyword ranking reports or getting too hung up on specific rankings, but this is a great rank tracker that does what it is supposed to do. It makes tagging keywords into clusters and viewing those clusters easy.
Optimization / Content Generation Tools
Frase – Love this for generating content briefs for writers and picking apart data, headings, questions, etc. used in top ranking sites for queries. Great tool for writing content. Very similar to Surfer SEO, but I like it better.
You can watch my video here about how I build content briefs in Frase.
I probably spend almost as much time in this tool as any other right now. I love using it for optimizing existing content and doing entity gap analyses versus top ranking competitors. It’s been one of my secret weapons the past few years and has resulted in huge gains for clients.
They currently are offering a trial for $1. If you have never tried Frase, this is a great opportunity.
Keyword Cupid – Have you ever generated a list of 400, 500, 1,000+ keywords and then had no idea what the heck to do with them? Feed them to Keyword Cupid. Keyword Cupid “uses state-of-the-art neural network models to reverse engineer Google’s knowledge graph, in real time!”
In other words, it takes that collection of keywords you generated and organizes them into silos or topic clusters for you. It saves a ton of time, and honestly might be one of the best values on the market. It is very inexpensive for what it does.
Jasper – There are plenty of AI writing tools out there and it seems like new ones popping up each day now. I prefer this one. I use it to boost our content generation. I do not create content in Jarvis and post it straight to websites. Everything gets edited first, but it really speeds things up versus writing from scratch.
I mostly use it to help in generating ad copy and headlines. I use it to help generate title tags and H tags in articles. I rarely use something it generates for these directly, but I will have it write 20-25 variations of a title tag, and use those to create something myself. I’m constantly finding new ways to use this.
SEOPress – I’m not a fan of Yoast and anyone using it is doing so at their own peril, or the peril of their clients. Yoast has a long history of releasing updates with bugs in it, sometimes site and SEO crippling ones.
SEOPress basically does everything Yoast does, but is less bloated and has never F’d up one of my sites.
Productivity / Knowledge Management Tools
Monday.com – Although not directly an SEO tool, this is the other tool I log into every single day. I often get asked how I keep on top of everything and manage clients without anything falling through the cracks. This is how. There are plenty of similar tools out there, and even if you are working solo, I would recommend using one.
I cannot imagine working without this one. If you sign up for Monday and want to chat about ways I am using it and some general strategies for using it, feel free to reach out.
Taskade and Asana would be my next choices. I would actively avoid Trello, ClickUp, and Notion.
Taskade- This is a newcomer to my list this year. I started using this in early 2022, and have it running all the time. You have to start using it to see its true potential.
Taskade is the app I use for my knowledge management system. What is a knowledge management system?
It’s where I organize all my notes, things I want to read later, things I want to be able to recall easily, etc. Something comes across my screen that I think would make a good note for The SEO Pub later, I store it in Mem. If an idea pops in my head that I want to share with a client on our call next week, I store it in Mem. Canned answers for commonly asked questions? All in Mem.
What is cool about Mem is its feature they call Mem Spotlight. By hitting CMD+Shift+Spacebar, I can instantly bring up a search bar, search for something in my Mem account, and paste it straight into whatever I’m working on.
As an example, a common use case I have for this is the URL I share with people who want to book a consult. Just a couple of keys, I hit enter, and it pastes right into the email I’m composing rather than me having to go find it or type it out each time I need it.
I highly recommend anyone in this business have something where you can organize all your notes, thoughts, ideas, etc. If not Mem, try Taskade. That would be my second choice. The best way I can describe Taskade is it is like Notion if Notion was good.
Things 3 – This one is a Mac exclusive. It is a simple to-do list manager. There is only one reason I use this. It has a feature where at any time I can hit CTRL+Spacebar and it brings up a box for me to add a new task. I’m sure there is something equivalent out there for Windows.
This may seem highly simplistic, but it is a great feature when I’m on client calls and action items come up. It is more efficient than adding them to something like Monday. I can quickly create a list of tasks from our calls and then decide which ones need to go into Monday as an actual task to track and which need to get done, but don’t necessarily belong inside of our Monday project.
