Must Have SEO Software, Tools & Browser Extensions

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Welcome to episode 12 of the SEO show. I'm your host, Michael, and I'm joined as always by Arthur. How are you going?

ARTHUR: Good morning, Michael. I'm good. I'm good. Working away from home like everyone else.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah, the same. Yep. We're basically locked in our little home offices having to do the show from home, but it is what it is. It could be a lot worse. It could be exactly. It could be worse. You know, we could not be able to do SEO at all. Imagine if it was like that.

ARTHUR: What a nightmare.

MICHAEL: No internet or something like that, but we have it. We have the internet and we can keep doing this show and we can keep talking SEO. So that's what we're going to do. And this week we are talking about the must-have SEO software tools and browser extensions because if there's one thing SEO nerds like, it's software and stuff to get the job done, right?

ARTHUR: Apps, software, extensions, anything that can make our lives easier.

MICHAEL: Exactly. And there is quite a lot of stuff that we use. So we thought it'd be pretty cool just to run through it and cover off the different tools, the different browser plugins, different things we use to get the job done. Some of this stuff is free. Some of this stuff has a monthly subscription, you know, ranging from, as I said, $0 through to many hundreds of dollars a month. So it's not going to be applicable for everyone, but we figured having a chat about it all would be interesting and you can pick and choose what you think is going to help you get the job done. So. Getting into things. We thought we'd start with SEO tools first. And the big daddy of them all is.

ARTHUR: Ahrefs. Ahrefs as you like to call it sometimes.

MICHAEL: Ahrefs. Ahrefs. Yep. A-H-R-E-F for Fred, S for Sam. Ahrefs.

ARTHUR: Yeah. There's a lot of debate online how to pronounce it, but yeah, I think phonetically it's Ahrefs and that's how I say it. So.

MICHAEL: I think they say you can say whatever you like that or you can say whichever one you want. But anyway, no matter what you call it, it's a great tool. It is a great tool. It's a tool we use daily, even hourly, you know, at our agency. And it really makes a lot of different things in SEO much easier. So why do you love it so much?

ARTHUR: Um, look, I'd say it's probably the most universally used tool in SEO. Um, I'd say most SEOs would be using it, but the reason I love it, it's just because it's so feature packed. Um, it does everything. So, I mean, if you just look at logging into it now, I'm having a look at it. You've got a site audit. So basically you can do a whole tech audit on your site and Ahrefs will spit out recommendations on how to improve your onsite SEO. So it does all that technical things for you. It's got a site explorer, so it monitors all your backlinks. referring domain. So if you ever need to do a backlink audit or even if you want to keep an eye on the competition, you can using Ahrefs. It's got Keyword Explorer. Sorry.

MICHAEL: I was going to say the backlinks is really where it started, right? Like I remember years and years and years ago using it and it was just pretty much backlink focused. So that's where it built its name and reputation in the industry because it's basically like a crawler like Google itself. It goes out and tracks all the backlinks on the internet. in a big database and then you can search your site, your competitive site, you can see what links you have, what links they have, and then you can use that to go, you know, find new links or get rid of links that are bad. Like there's all sorts of use cases just with that link building and then they've added all these other features over time. So yeah, just thought I'd chime in on the link building side of things there.

ARTHUR: I could be making this set up, but are they not the second most active crawler on the internet behind Google? I'd say they'd be up there. Yeah. I remember hearing that maybe at a conference or something.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, actually there's a site on the, um, there's a page on the Ahrefs website where they talk about how big their database is and how, you know, the setup for their crawler and their servers and all that stuff. And it seems pretty momentous. So. Yeah.

ARTHUR: I think that's where I read it. Yeah. Yeah. Very active on the internet.

MICHAEL: They even spoke about creating their own search engine at one point, just cause they've got all of that, you know, they basically have all the infrastructure of a search engine there. Um, And I don't know what happened with that because the discussion, it was a couple of years ago, maybe a year ago or so.

ARTHUR: Imagine trying to go against Google.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I think their model was going to be like they pay websites in their data, like they pay people in it, publishers or something. I can't remember. But anyway, people won't use it. They'll use Google like they do for everything else.

ARTHUR: Whether they like it or hate it, yeah.

MICHAEL: But the thing is, SEOs definitely use Ahrefs to get the job done. So moving on, you know, like the links was a big thing, but yeah, I'll let you get back to listing the things you like about it.

ARTHUR: What else? I can't even remember now. Does Rank Tracking. It does Rank Tracking, yeah. We'll touch more on Rank Tracking later on, but it's pretty handy to kind of get a glimpse as to how competitors are doing, how your website's doing. It's got a Keyword Explorer, so really handy when you're doing keyword research.

MICHAEL: Yep, shows you the difficulty of them, like how hard they'd be to rank, how many links you'd need. Yeah, that's it. So that way you're not wasting your time going after keywords that are really competitive when you're not quite there with the strength of your site. The other thing I like and it's the content explorer where you can maybe you type in like a keyword idea and you can put all sorts of different filters on. So you might say, you know, show me our pages that have 10,000 visits a month. That's DR is less than 20. So, you know, a lot of traffic, but not that strong a domain. And you put in a seed keyword, so it might be SEO, for example, and then it's going to show you all the pages on the web that are generating a ton of traffic with a weak domain. Now, this is really good for content creation, I guess, ideating, because you can go out and create content around easy to rank for themes. So it's really good for that sort of stuff too.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I was doing that for 3D printing yesterday. Really, really handy.

MICHAEL: There you go. Exactly. So, if your website is not so strong, you can go for that low-hanging fruit, you know, the real long-tail traffic with that tool. So, look, it does a lot of stuff really, really well. It's a must-have tool in the arsenal of every SEO. I'd say even, you know, if businesses are doing SEO in-house, it's worth paying for it. It is, you know, you're looking at 99 bucks a month minimum, US. to get this tool, and then it goes up to as high as a thousand bucks a month, depending on the features you want.

ARTHUR: Is there a free version of it?

MICHAEL: No, you get a trial for like seven bucks, but there's no free version of it.

ARTHUR: I believe it's well worth the $99 price tag.

MICHAEL: Yeah, if you're serious about doing SEO, you probably want to spend, you probably want the more feature packed ones, like 180 bucks a month or so. But even still, if you are serious about SEO, even if you're just running one website and you're trying to really improve it, that is an investment over the year that should pay for itself in terms of saving time and you know, giving you insights and where to create content so that you can have some wins. And it's just a, you know, it's a good tool. So yes, check it out.

ARTHUR: And I guess I was going to say there is SEMrush as well, I guess an alternative, but that's geared more towards Google ads.

MICHAEL: SEMrush or SEMrush? SEMrush.

ARTHUR: Same, same debate. Yeah. It's funny how they have to be more clear in how they name the product.

MICHAEL: Maybe it's deliberate, you know, sort of a talking point. Possibly, yeah. But yeah, that's a, you know, SEMrush, S-E-M-rush. There is a free version of that. Probably. Yeah. We don't use SEMrush as much as Ahrefs, but it's a big, you know, it's a public company now. Did you know that? I did. Yeah. They're on the stock market and it's, it's bigger than Ahrefs in terms of the number of customers and stuff that they have, but we just find Ahrefs, traditionally, the data has been better. Although, you know, I would say of late things like traffic projections in Ahrefs are probably a little bit under reported, whereas SEMrush seems a bit more accurate in terms of traffic projections, but the link database in Ahrefs I feel is the best. Agreed. Yeah, cool. So look, either one of those tools are going to help you get the job done in a wide range of different aspects of SEO. So well worth the time and investment. All right, moving on though, let's look at, you know, auditing sites and crawling sites. What sort of tools do you like to use to get that side of things done?

ARTHUR: For web crawling, there's two that come to mind. So Screaming Frog and SiteBorb, both similar in the fact that they will crawl your website, crawl all the pages and all the files. But I think SiteBorb is probably the one we'll talk about today. just a bit more comprehensive. So, Siteboard basically, it's just a website crawler and auditing tool. So the way it works, it will crawl all the pages and files on your site and then analyze all the data from a SEO perspective. So not only does it provide you with a crawl of all the pages of your site, it will find any sort of crawl issues. So 404s, 500s, all the redirects, you can export all that and have a big list of all the pages, all the redirects. But I guess the most exciting part of this tool is that after the crawl, it provides you with a SEO score. So it basically, at the same time, does an audit of your website. Um, so what it does is it looks at all these different elements of SEO. So like your onsite, your metadata, word count, um, internal links, internal links, security, like it's comprehensive. Yeah. It's really, really good. So, um, and even, even better than that, it gives you a prioritized list of issues that you can go and action yourself to improve your website. So it's a really, really handy tool. It's, yeah, it's a game changer.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And that is where it sort of beats the other tool we spoke about, Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog, yeah. Like both of these tools will crawl a website and pull out all the data, but it's that prioritized list of fixes that SiteBowl gives that is really handy. It just saves so much time. Like we used to do this stuff manually. Now with this tool, it's super comprehensive and fast and spits out a prioritized list. So like, any really critical, obvious stuff you'll find right away with this tool. And then it's a matter of fixing it, you know, you either do it yourself or you just hand it to a developer and say, make all of these things better, please. And, you know, in doing so you're going to address a lot of the technical SEO requirements for your site. So that's it. Again, that is, I think that one has a free trial.

ARTHUR: That does have a 14 day free trial. And I think it's not that expensive.

MICHAEL: I'm just on their site now. It's $35 a month for one user.

ARTHUR: It's well worth it.

MICHAEL: Or actually, it depends how much you want to audit. If you really want to just go simple, 10,000 URL site, it will cost $13 a month. But that one actually gives you less less content in the reports and stuff. So, you know, like most of these things, the more fully featured tools are the way to go. Like anything in life, you get what you pay for. Exactly. So 35 US bucks a month, but like you could use it for one month, crawl your site, run the report, fix things, run the report again, then maybe turn it off. So it's not like you have to keep paying month on month.

ARTHUR: No. And Screaming Frog has, I think it's about $300 a year or something as well. So no, no crawl is going to be free.

MICHAEL: Yep. Yep. And so it's funny, like this thing is, it's software, it sits on your computer and it uses your computer's computing power to crawl these sites. Sometimes, you know, if you crawl a massive website, they can actually crash your computer, depending on how strong your computer is.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Yeah. It's happened in the past with Screaming Frog.

MICHAEL: Yep. They'll chew through all your RAM and just make your computer unusable.

ARTHUR: There were little hacks you could do to up the RAM that it uses. I remember back in the day, we were just sitting in BGMI to go in there and change the code. Yeah. But yeah, when you're crawling a massive e-commerce site, there were 70 times where it would just keep crawling and getting stuck in a crawl loop and your computer would be unusable and would sound like the computer's about to take off.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So there is a tool called DeepCrawler, which is a web-based crawler where you can use all of the sort of cloud resources for really big sites. But you know, most of the people listening to this, that's not going to be necessary. SiteBulb and Screaming Frog are the ones to check out. That's it. All right, moving on, let's talk about rank tracking. Now, so rank tracking, well, let's take a step back. SEO obviously is all about getting rankings in Google, ranking at the top, getting visibility so you can get traffic to your site and get leads and sales and all that good stuff. So how do you know that your SEO is having an impact? Well, you can track the rankings of keywords to see, you know, that your positions are increasing and that you're at the top of Google rather than deep on Google. So how do you do that? You use software. What software do you use? Well, that's what we're going to talk about next. What software do you like after when it comes to rank tracking?

ARTHUR: So the software that I or we use internally is a tool called Nightwatch. So it's a really, really cool tool. Like you said, it's a rank tracker. It tracks all the keywords that you want. Basically, the reason I like it so much is because it's very accurate. So I've used a bunch of different rank trackers in the past where, you know, The results haven't been that great. The accuracy hasn't been that great. And there's a lot of things that can skew the rankings. So, for example, the local pack or the snack pack or whatever you call it. Some rank trackers can't differentiate between a local listing and a regular organic listing. So it will basically throw all your rankings out of whack. People also ask questions as well that come up in the SERPs, that can throw it out of whack. So I found that after many years of using different rank trackers, Nightwatch has been by far the most accurate. It also uses various different data centers, Google data centers. rather than just sticking to the one. So you get a lot more accurate results depending on what area you're in. So you can actually set the location where you want to track the keywords from. So we can track keywords in different parts of the world. So if we're working in a client in New Zealand, we can track keywords from Wellington. If we're working with a client in Singapore, we can track keywords from there. So it gives you that kind of flexibility.

MICHAEL: And like with all of these tools, they basically, you load your keywords in and it will check at a different cadence. So, you know, daily, weekly, monthly or whatever to see how your rankings are. So, Nightwatch is good. It tracks daily. So, you'll see them refresh every day. Other tools maybe sometimes go weekly or, you know, Ahrefs, we touched on before. It has a rank tracker built in, but it's a bit, It could be monthly sometimes. Yeah, or you have to manually go and request certain keywords to update when you want it. It's not as robust as the Nightwatch. Yeah. Another one we've used in the past at another agency was stat, getstat.com. It's a bit more of an enterprise tool, you know. So it again, it was pretty accurate back in the day. I haven't used it in a while, but it was accurate, but it was a bit more expensive. So horses for courses, you know, there are tons of other tools out there as well. You know, like I kind of remember the names like Rank Ranger and Advanced Web Ranking or something like that. Like there's a lot of tools, but We just find Nightwatch really does a good job at a decent price. Most of these tools will charge you based on the number of keywords you're tracking as well. So the pricing scales as you track more keywords.

ARTHUR: Yeah, it can definitely creep up. Like all of those tools. Be careful.

MICHAEL: Yeah. All right. Well, look, there's no point dwelling on rank tracking too long. It is what it is. But another thing that we really do a lot of in the SEO world is on-site optimization. We, of course, have a couple of tools to help with that. You know, SiteBulb, before it, when it audits the site, gives recommendations around title tags and that sort of stuff where they're missing. But on-site optimization specific tools will give much more, I guess, comprehensive recommendations around what you can do to your website content to make it more similar to the competition. So the main tools in this space are Page Optimizer Pro and Surfer SEO. They both do the same thing, right? You know, they'll crawl your site, they'll crawl the competitors. Let me take a step back. You'll put your site in, you'll put the target keyword you want to rank for and this tool will crawl your site and it will crawl the main ranking sites in that space for that term. And it will tell you what they all have in common and what your site, you know, maybe is missing in terms of H1 tags, H2 tags, body copy, the keywords that need to be included, internal linking, bolding text, all that sort of stuff. And we find, you know, these tools are a bit hit and miss, you know, often you can make changes and results might go backwards, but other times they make a dramatic impact on your rankings.

ARTHUR: Yeah. They're a good starting point, especially if you don't have content on your site, you can audit the competitors. And I guess the theory is if a page is ranking first and obviously it's done something right. So replicating that or replicating at least the structure and the way that they've written the content is a good starting point.

MICHAEL: So it really is, yeah, it's just an average of all the top sites in terms of the recommendations essentially. But definitely worth using and testing just to see if you can get some, you know, decent results with it. Particularly in competitive spaces where, you know, sometimes you'll find just a little tweak to a title tag or, you know, the addition of a couple of keywords in your body copy, surprisingly can make a big difference to your rankings. So again, these tools, they have a monthly cost. You're looking at anywhere from 60 to a couple of hundred bucks US a month.

ARTHUR: It all adds up, doesn't it? Yeah.

MICHAEL: So, you know, at our agency, we're spending many, many, many, many thousands of dollars a month, US, across all these different tools. That's just the cost of doing business, you know, running an SEO agency. But if you want to do this yourself as a business owner or someone running a website, you do need to be prepared to put your hand in your pocket and pay for these tools. I think Pops a bit cheaper than Surfer. But, you know, it too has a monthly fee. On the on-site optimization side of things as well, it's probably a good chance to have a little chat about Natch, which is our own tool. Natch.ai, it's something we've developed in-house. It's not really available to the public. Now, or maybe ever, you know, time will tell, but it is a tool we're using. So maybe do you want to give a little bit of a background about what Natchez is and does? And we'll explain, I guess, the principles behind it so that people can maybe go away and look into that.

ARTHUR: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think we should get Rob in here one day. Do a deep dive. Yeah, why not? He created it from the ground up. It would make sense. But basically what Natch is, it's a tool that we created and basically what it does is it uses Google's natural language processing. So the API that we plug into the tool basically gives us a window into how Google interprets the copy that we input. So to give you an example, if we're working on a page on our website, we can copy and paste the text and we can see how Google interprets the copy on the page, all the different entities and keywords, and then it assigns scores. So sentiment and magnitude scores. And the idea is that you want to push up the entities of the keywords that you want to rank for. to the top. And the way you do that is by constantly auditing the content. So tweaking it, optimizing it, adding keywords here and there. And basically, it's just a long, long drawn out process of trial and error. But I guess we've seen really, really good results in the past by using this process. So previously, we were using Google's preview tool on the page, which is no longer there, if you've noticed. Which is great for us because now we're the only SEO agency that has access to it from what I know. But yeah, previously it was just a very manual process of us having to copy and paste bits of text, rerun it. It only gave you a certain amount of runs before you had to start using a VPN and it just became a pain to do. So we developed our own tool. And now we have a fancy Schmidt dashboard, which allows us to edit content on the fly. We can test run content and compare it to different test runs. So we can see how the changes we have made to the content has impacted and improved different entities, improved different scores. But yeah, I mean, without going in any deeper, that's basically it in a nutshell.

MICHAEL: And look, I guess with Surfer SEO and Page Optimizer Pro, they're looking at keywords, like just keywords on a page, basically. And Google's traditionally always used keywords to understand content. And so, keywords are still super important, but Google is more sophisticated these days and with the use of its, you know, natural language and machine learning and the like, it's much better at understanding things, you know, things in inverted commas and the relationship between those things. And the way it does that is through entities. So, you know, it will understand people, places, events. Organizations, everything. That's what our tool does. So, you know, we use Page Optimizer Pro, we use Surfer SEO, but we also use Natch and we combine the two and we just get a really good understanding of how Google interprets our content, but then also the top ranked websites content. So that's what that tool is for. It's pretty cool. It's something that we use internally. It's not available publicly, but that concept of entities and natural language, Google's natural language processing is a big part of SEO. We don't believe we know because we use it every day. So it's something to consider as well. Do some reading on articles around entities and natural language processing and the like. figure out a way to use it without having to build a tool would be cool. If not, maybe one day our tool will be available to the world. But yeah, let's move on from tools because I think they're the main ones we use, right, day to day.

ARTHUR: I think that, yeah, I can't think of any other tool that we use as frequently as those that we've talked about.

MICHAEL: Browser plugins though, that's another big part of getting the job done. You know, you live in your browser as an SEO, so you can add a lot more functionality to Chrome. You know, most people are using Chrome. You can add a lot more functionality through the use of plugins. So these plugins will basically add a bit of code to your Chrome setup so that you can do different things. So a few examples of browser plugins that we like to use day in day out as part of our SEO. The first one is a plugin called Redirect Path. So what is Redirect Path? Basically, it is a plugin that sits in Chrome and when you load a website, it will tell you if that page has been redirected to be loaded. So it might show you that there's a 302 redirect when you load that page, which is a temporary redirect. you want to see a 301, a permanent redirect. So in that case, you would need to fix the redirects. Or you might see that there's lots of redirects being chained together to load that page, which are just needless steps that you could maybe remove. So having that easy plugin in your window is very quick to tell, you know, if your redirects are the way they're meant to be, or if there's opportunity to improve them or any problems with them. So pretty simple. That's a pretty simple tool there.

ARTHUR: It can also show you JavaScript redirect, which is not ideal. It can also show you different errors. So there used to be, I've worked on sites where it would show a 404, but it would actually return a 300. So it's handy to pick up all the other kind of status codes as well.

MICHAEL: So another one we like is WordCamp plugin. Pretty simple.

ARTHUR: Pretty simple. Highlight the text and right-click on it and it tells you how many words.

MICHAEL: And this is good for, you know, creating content. Let's say you are looking at another competitor site and they have some FAQs and you just want to see how many words are in their FAQs. As Arthur said, highlight, right-click and this word count plugin will add in that right-click menu that pops up, it will now have the count of those words included. So pretty simple. Image size info, that's another one like that where, you know, image sizes is a really, if you put big images on your site, it's going to slow it down. If you have smaller images, it's going to be quicker. So it's a really easy way to have quick wins on the speed front. But the pain is that when you're looking at a website and it's got all images all over it, you don't know whether they're necessarily a massive file or a small. And traditionally what you've had to do is right click it, save the file to your computer and then go and look at that file properties and see how big the file size is. What this plugin does is allow you to right-click the image and see how big the file size is. And in a matter of four or five clicks on a page, you might find that a couple of them are two or three megs, and you can then go and compress those images in tinypng.com, re-upload them, and then you've just made your website, that page, much, much smaller and faster loading. So that's a really invaluable plugin right there. Another one that we like is Detailed Plugin. So the detail plugin is created by a guy called Glenn Alsop, who's been in the SEO industry for quite a while, blogging on different sites and the like, so he's got quite a good rep in the space. And he created this plugin that is basically, you know, you go visit a web page, you click the detail plugin, and it gives you a bit of information about that page. So you know, the title tag, the description tag, the canonical tag, what the robots tag is like, and the word count for the page, and your headings, and the… The links on the page, internal, external, all that sort of stuff, the schema data on the page. So really, you know, it's like doing a really quick SEO audit on whatever page you're looking at. And it's kind of similar to another one that we like to use, SEO Minion, right? That's one that you use a bit, that does much the same.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Much the same. Yeah. And it analyzes the on-page SEO. So just clicking through it now, it looks at things like you mentioned, the title, description, all the headings on the page, which is really handy. So it will scrape all the headings and you can sort it by type or you can have it not sorted. So that's really handy. Looks at open graph. What else? It looks at all the broken links, highlights all the links on the page, hreflang checker. So like the tool that you were speaking about, it's just like an all-in-one little plugin that you can utilize on the page and get all that information real quick. Cool.

MICHAEL: All right, well, another one that we use a little bit is user agent switcher. So basically, some websites will block certain user agents. So when I say user agent, that is Like when a bot goes to a website and crawls it, it has like a, I guess, a name or an identity. It's user agent. Some websites will block certain user agents. So a website might block the Ahrefs bot because it doesn't want its website being crawled and its resources being used by Ahrefs. So it will block that, but it will allow the Google bot through because every website wants a Google bot on it. So what the user agent switcher plugin does is it allows you to basically change your web browser's user agent to appear to be one of these other ones so that you can load pages in the way they are shown to different user agents or bots and maybe bypass blocks that they put up or see the site the way they show it to certain bots. So that can be really handy from an SEO point of view for all sorts of different reasons. That's another plugin that we like to use in the day-to-day. Of course, Ahrefs, Riffs, Ahrefs, they have a plugin that we use quite a lot. It's an overlay. With Ahrefs, you need to go to their website usually and log in and do all your work within that. But with the plugin, it's just an overlay that, yeah.

ARTHUR: Yeah. You need an account for it as well, which is worth mentioning.

MICHAEL: So you can't just use it. You need to be logged into your account to use it. But instead of having to go back to Ahrefs all the time, you can easily see on an overlay on every page you go to, you can see the DR, the links to the domain, the links to the page, the estimated organic traffic and the like that it has straight from the overlay. And then it also puts an overlay in the search results too, right?

ARTHUR: Yeah, it does. So you can compare search results. You can have a look at a glance and see all your competitors, DR, all the keywords, search traffic.

MICHAEL: Straight within the Google search results. So it's really easy to see, you know, like, let's say you search a keyword in your space. Let's say you're a carpenter Sydney. You can see, all right, well, the top ranked carpenters, they all have 400 links pointing to their domain. And what does my site has? Oh, it has five. Well, I probably should get closer to 400. Like it makes it really easy and quick to do that sort of analysis. Yeah. So what else do we like to use?

ARTHUR: I've been using the Core SERP Vitals plugin recently. So that's very much like the hrefs overlay. It's just an overlay that Google's created, which pulls in the different Core Web Vitals metrics. So LCP, FID, CLS. And now that they're focusing more on that, it's really handy to see where your competitors are, where the pages are. So like you mentioned with hrefs, you can kind of get an idea, all right, these competitors have an LCP of two, I've got an LCP of five or six, which is significantly worse. I'm going to need to improve that score in order to outrank them. So that's a really handy tool. Another one I've been using recently, or not recently, but one that we use all the time is Google Tag Manager, or sorry, Google Tag Assistant. So that's a great tool to kind of see all the Google scripts and tags that are on a page. So anything from GTM to Google Optimize, the GAs, really handy.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And I guess on that front built with as well, another one that we use quite a bit.

ARTHUR: Yeah, really handy to find out what CMS the site is using, all the different plugins, you can find out hosting information.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so this tool basically, it will crawl the website and figure out the CMS and the advertising software and like plugins, like JavaScript plugins that they're running on it and all sorts of stuff. So if you see a competitor that's got a really cool site or cool functionality on their site, you can run that tool through it and basically quickly identify what that is and then go investigate it and maybe use it on your own site.

ARTHUR: So yeah, I find scripts as well. Like I can see here, like call tracking metrics, GA, GTM, Facebook, Facebook pixels, lets you know what builder they're using if they're using WordPress. So if they're using Elementor, different plugins, what forms they're using. So super comprehensive. Really handy.

MICHAEL: Yeah, cool. Well, the other, I guess, stuff outside of browser plugins would just be, you know, I guess what we'd call miscellaneous tools or things that we use every day, which are as simple as Chrome browser and going incognito, right? Why do we do that?

ARTHUR: Just because it removes all the personalization, logs you out. So you're doing a more, I guess you're doing an incognito search, so you're not getting any personalization. Yeah.

MICHAEL: It's not keeping a log of the history and all that. It shows you a more clean version of the search as opposed to when you do it in your own browser that has all sorts of tracking and stuff going on. VPN as well, we use quite a bit. So VPN just allows you to basically connect to a different server in another location and then it makes your computer look like it's in that location. So this is really good for, you know, if you're working on an SEO campaign in another state or another country and you want to check rankings or see how Google is looking at your site, you would connect to a VPN server in that location. You'd then go to Chrome in incognito. do a search and then you would be able to see the search results and how you're really performing there.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, even with us being located in Weatherill Park, we get served different results than someone that would be in the CBD. So, we use that even here. So, just to search for clients to see where they're ranking closer to the CBD. Cool. What else do we use? PageSpeed. That's a bit more in-depth. So there are a bunch of different tools that we use, starting with GTmetrix. So basically what you do is you plug in the domain and it will crawl the site and tell you how quickly the site loads. And it will give you recommendations on what you can do to improve your page load speed. Because as we all know, page speed is a ranking factor and we want to get our sites as fast as possible.

MICHAEL: Yep, yep. And GTmetrix is just one. There's Pingdom, there's webpagetest.org, Google PageSpeed Insights. They all do the same thing, basically. Crawl your site. So don't hammer your site with all these tools at once during the day because it might slow your site down depending on the host that you're on. But it is a good way to get a benchmark for how your site's performing in terms of speed and then go fix things and then maybe test, you know, once you have done some changes, test and see what the improvements are.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I guess we could also, uh, I guess Google PageSpeed Insights would sit under that umbrella because it does the same thing. It doesn't give you like the actual time. I guess it does give you the time as well.

MICHAEL: So it's like, it's not as in depth as the other tools in terms of recommendations, but, um, You know, it's good to see what Google thinks of your site speed in any case, because obviously it's the one that ultimately ranks it in Google. So having a higher score in PageSpeed Insights just makes sense from, I guess, a logical point of view, right? You would think that Google would value sites that it thinks are fast.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I like to use a bunch of them. I use GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights together because sometimes they can contradict each other. for whatever reason. So you might get a really poor PageSpeed Insights score, but when you run it through GT metrics, you'll get, you know, that is annoying, which is because it is more often that way, right?

MICHAEL: Like the PageSpeed Insights gets things wrong compared to, you know, you using the site yourself, seeing it's fast and other tools, seeing it's fast and then PageSpeed Insights can be a bit off. It's, it's not always necessarily a hundred percent correlated with a fast loading site. Some of the stuff that PageSpeed Insights is saying. The other thing that we use a lot day-to-day every day is Search Console, Google Search Console. So it's a free tool from Google. You plug your site into it and then it gives you a lot of data and information about the site and it also allows you to interact with Google on behalf of your site, I guess, you know, like submitting pages that you want Google to come and crawl and the like. So yeah, what are you using Search Console for, you know?

ARTHUR: In Search Console, look, it does everything. It lets you know the keywords people are using to get to your site. You can see the clicks, the impressions, the click-through rates for different keywords. We use it a lot for crawl errors. So if there's any issues with your website, if you have any broken pages or you know, 500 areas or things like that, they'll all be listed within Search Console. We also use it to see and look at the page experience metrics. So like we touched on previously, Core Web Vitals, we can see if there are any pages which are failing or are giving users a poor experience. It does basically everything. It's a free tool. So the way you set it up is basically you log into your Google account, you go to googlesearchconsole.com or whatever the URL is, and you start setting up your domain. You put your domain in and then it'll ask you to verify it. And there are a bunch of ways you can verify it, but the most simple way is by adding a small snippet of code to your site, you add it to the head of your website. And once that's verified, it will start pulling in all that data. And basically it's just something you should be checking in on, you know, every day to every couple of days to make sure that your website health is up to scratch and that you're not missing anything that you might miss on face value. So yeah, super handy free tool that every website owner should be using.

MICHAEL: Yeah, nice one. Well, look, they're the main tools that we use. As we said at the start, in the SEO world, there is a ton of tools that you could use. If there's one thing SEO is like, it is their tools, but these are the ones that are going to get you really as far as you probably need to go in most use cases.

ARTHUR: I've got a question, though, before we go. If you were to pick one of these tools, If you were to recommend just one of these tools to someone that is interested in learning SEO and wants to improve their website, which one would you recommend? So out of the paid tools, I'd say, I'd say Ahrefs.

MICHAEL: Yeah, paid Ahrefs. And then I'd combine that with Google Search Console. And then, you know, some of those browser plugins are free, but yeah, if you have Ahrefs and Search Console set up, that's going to be enough to do a lot of good work with your SEO. Do you agree with that?

ARTHUR: I know a hundred percent agree because like we touched on, Ahrefs does a lot of the things these other tools do, maybe not as well or as comprehensively as a standalone tool, but it has a site audit. So it does, you know, similar things that Sitebob does in terms of giving you recommendations. It's got the Site Explorer. It monitors all your backlinks. It's got the keyword rank tracker. So, although it's not as accurate as some of the tools like Nightwatch, it's still there. So, if you were to choose one tool to get started with, I'd definitely recommend signing up to Ahrefs.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And that's not a sponsored recommendation there. Arthur's views are 100% his own. He cannot be bought or paid for.

ARTHUR: Well, if you remember correctly, I used to be a SCM Rush guy.

INTRO: Yeah. Not too long ago.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So, yeah. That's definitely changed.

MICHAEL: I used to be a Moz guy way back in the day, but like, yeah. Ain't on the same level as Ahrefs, that's for sure. Awesome.

ARTHUR: There goes any sponsorship from Moz down the track.

MICHAEL: Look, I don't think Mods are fooling over themselves to sponsor us. So it's all good. It's all good. But look, I think that wraps things up nicely for the tools episode. So thanks for listening in to another lockdown edition of the SEO show. We'll be back next week with another episode. So until then, happy SEOing. See you later. See you later.

‍