Tools to Use in SEO Projects

Discover essential tools that accelerate your workflow and streamline data analysis in SEO projects.

Speakers: Yiğit Konur

Content author

20 Jun 2017

Video Transcript

⏱ 14 min read• 2,463 words

Read the full speech or switch languages

Hey everyone, Zeo followers. I'm Deniz Yiğit Konur. Today I'll walk you through some tools you can use in your SEO process. As you know, SEO gets more technical every day. To weigh all those technical details together, we end up digging into big data. And honestly, that bleeds into every category of SEO. Today's topic will follow a few specific categories too. At Zeo, we basically approach SEO across 4 areas. First is technical SEO. Second is content. Third is link building. And fourth, we put real weight on measurement.

Each of these has its own sub-branches. They shift based on what the project needs. The consultant has to sniff out where the project is heading and steer those sub-branches. Today I'll introduce you to some of them. And I'll cover tools you can use to dig into each one. You can use all of these tools. Or just pick a few with a free plan or a free trial. Many of them eat serious system resources. So naturally, most show up as paid tools.

Let's start with crawling, the must-have of technical SEO. SEO jargon pushes us into English terms sometimes. But on this show I'll try to say the Turkish versions too. Crawling is honestly one of the most important parts of SEO. Googlebot crawls our website. The errors it finds can push things in a good or bad direction. To catch those errors before Googlebot shows up, we need crawlers. At the most basic level, a crawler enters your site just like a Google spider. It walks every page. Then it hands you the insights it gathered as detailed, large-scale data.

The best-known tool in the Turkish market is definitely DeepCrawl. Plenty of agencies run DeepCrawl as their main tool. Plenty of brands do the same. DeepCrawl shipped a new release recently. Version 2 is much faster. It lets you run crawls at the scale of millions of pages. Botify is similar. It's a solid French tool that gives us good data here. Onpage, out of Germany, is another one with strong insights. Pricing is monthly and depends on your site's URL count. I'd say it runs from $29 a month up past $1,000. Different tools, different tiers, based on how many URLs you have.

On the second side, one thing we care about a lot is data collection. Data collection tends to shine in specific cases. Let's take an example from one group of errors. Say you work on a big e-commerce site. Certain errors cluster in certain areas. But you're struggling to figure out which categories they belong to. All you have is a URL list. The slug tells you nothing. The URL structure carries no category info at all. So what do you do here? You need to match those URLs with categories. This isn't just a technical SEO thing. It's useful in a lot of areas. So where do you pull the category info for those matched URLs? Usually from the site's breadcrumb area. That's the part that shows navigation.

To match that area with your URL data, you've got two options. Either you go copy and paste each URL's breadcrumb one by one. Or you use a tool like Screaming Frog. You give it specific CSS paths. You tell it "this area is the breadcrumb, pull the data inside it for me." Screaming Frog is a desktop system. It supports Linux, Mac, and Windows if I'm not mistaken. But it doesn't run in the cloud. Sometimes it eats up a ton of your system resources. So my advice is to use Amazon's AWS service. There are machines you can rent for up to 200-250 dollars an hour. These can be legendary big machines with 256 GB of RAM and like 64 cores.

You can run a crawl analysis on these. You can use them for crawling too. Collecting data gets really enjoyable for technical SEOs. On the other side, there's the log analysis piece. That's another thing you absolutely need in your SEO toolkit. Let's walk through another case. Imagine you're another big e-commerce site. You made a big change to your page structure. When you took that project on as a consultant, the change was already done. But you want to know what the old URLs were.

That's when you walk into the sysadmin's room. You ask: "Can you get me the log analysis?" From those logs. You can spot exactly which pages Googlebot crawled. You can pull out the exact URLs, no guesswork. Same goes for site problems and 404 errors. Log analysis shows you everything Googlebot runs into. Small sites may not need this. But for large-scale e-commerce SEO projects, log analysis is a must. Those are the tools I'd recommend on the technical SEO side. I tried to walk through each one in detail. To do technical SEO well, you absolutely need helper software. Now let me move to the content side.

The content side is a bit more subjective. Inside that subjectivity, you can add your own value while using these tools. But you'll still need them at plenty of points. Here too, we split things into 3 different categories. First one is market data. When you're producing content, what's the biggest help you can get? What's happening in the market? Where can we draw inspiration from? That's where market data comes in. First, I'll talk about Bassumo and Impactana. These two tools crawl the entire web. They pull together the articles we need. What could those be? Say I'm making content about lighting systems. I want to see what's been written worldwide about lighting in photography.

I go into Buzzsumo. I just type in the related keywords. It gathers every piece written on the topic. It tells me: "Yiğit, look, these got shared this way. And here are the share counts." So I learn exactly what my audience is searching for. Better yet, I see what content reaches them and what they share. Impactana is another tool in that same kit. There's also an SEO angle to this. Searchmetrics' content module is incredibly good. SEMrush's Pages section is very strong. You can plug in a competitor and see which articles actually drive their traffic. Their SEO traffic, specifically.

You can dig into those. That's why reading the market correctly matters so much. On the other hand, you already have your own data. You don't need to pay for any tool. The Search Analytics section inside Google's Search Console is one of the best sources here. This is Google's own data, so you can absolutely trust it. It's rock solid. Go into Search Console, open the Search Analytics section. And ask: "Which pages get me the most traffic? Which keywords bring the most traffic?" Or "Which keywords drive traffic to a given page?" You can track all of that.

Or let's walk through an example. You wrote a post about link building. Then you looked at that page in Search Analytics. You're trying to see which keywords drove traffic. Right there you can spot the keyword groups where you're genuinely weak. Then you build optimization strategies around them. So I think Search Analytics data gets overlooked a lot. It really deserves attention. Google Analytics has data you can pull real value from too. Which pages did users bounce on? Which page groups did SEO traffic land on, and how many visits did that create? From there you can understand the relationship between the search and the site. Then you can build your own content optimization plan in-house.

Same goes for tools like Hotjar. There are tons of alternatives. You can use SumoMe too. These tools give you data about your content. Say we created this piece and shared it. How far down did people scroll? Scroll depth is one of the best ways to see how much of a piece actually gets read. Along the same lines, you can use Wistia. Wistia shows you how far into the video people watched. It shows where they dropped off, too. That's another important piece on the content side. At the end you might need some scraping again.

Say you're running an e-commerce site again. You're curious how long your content actually is. Specifically the content you built at the category level. You probably don't want to paste each one into Word. Checking word counts one by one is a pain. Want to export it all at once? Just feed the right CSS paths into Screaming Frog. You can find those paths with small add-ons. Search for something like "Chrome CSS path extension." Add them to Screaming Frog. Then you pull all the data out at once and build an optimization plan from it.

Same goes for your blog content. Screaming Frog lets you export all of it in one shot. The permissions are that broad. Content-side optimizations are endless, of course. But I wanted to walk you through the tool types we use most. Third area: link building. Link building is still one of SEO's core pillars. It's also one of the highest-impact parts of the job. I can point to three different tool types here. First one is big data analysis. You can see your own backlinks in your Search Console. But where are your competitors pulling links from? What about other sites in your industry? The best way to figure that out is these backlink tools that crunch big data.

Majestic and Ahrefs are both very strong here. On raw data volume, I find Majestic a bit better. It's a nerdier, geekier solution. But Ahrefs does really nice work on the visualization side. On the other hand, say you want deeper analysis. Maybe you're digging into negative SEO and poking at opportunities there. Link Research Tools is one of the best. A little pricey, but you'll definitely want it in your toolkit. Kerbo is another solid option you can use the same way. It also offers different services. These tools let you handle everything in one place.

Last piece of link building is outreach. Basically, external communication. You produce a great piece of content. Just letting it sit there won't earn it great links. You need to promote it to the blogger community proactively. You need to actually put that content in front of people. That's what outreach tools are for. Definitely check out Pitchbox, and maybe Ninja Outreach. Both are very capable in their own right. On the link building side. You might be hoping to hear about buying links or managing that process. But between Google's policies and modern SEO, there's a better way. Analyze the data. Track your competitors. Apply the techniques that work directly to your own site. That's one of the most important points, in my opinion.

Last stage is measurement. No matter how much work you do, you can't improve what you don't measure. I absolutely believe in that philosophy. So one of our biggest focuses in SEO is measuring at every stage. Both our own data and our competitors'. On this side, Web Analytics tools are a must. Google Analytics is now one of the key sources for almost every site. Don't want to share data with Google? There's an open source option. Piwik, if I remember right. You can take advantage of Piwik too.

It's not as detailed as Google Analytics. But it gives you solid support for free. That's the Web Analytics side. At the enterprise level, you can also use tools like Omniture or WebTrack. Search Intelligence means something specific. What insights can search data give you? What can you infer from it? Some tools don't just hand you raw position tracking data. They don't stop at "Yigit. Here's where you rank." One of them is SEO Monitor. And it's a favorite of mine. It shows the monthly search volume for your uploaded keywords. It puts your positions right next to that. So how big a slice of that volume are you getting?

How will those monthly search volumes shift over the next 12 months? How much traffic do your competitors get? How much do you get? What kind of forecasting can you run? It answers all of that. Really strong tool. I definitely recommend it. On the other hand, Searchmetrics is more of an enterprise solution. It has its own visibility score for measurement. If you need historical data, that's the key. When you need a look back in time, use Searchmetrics and Semrush. Another option runs a bit pricey. Autoritas is a UK-based company. They do something similar to SEO Monitor's Search Intelligence work. On the left side, you've got dashboards. We manage huge amounts of data these days. Knowing what to focus on gets really hard.

Dashboards are surface-level tools. They pull data together and show it in one place. One of the most important ones is Clipfolio. In Clipfolio you can hook up your own APIs. You can also connect Google Analytics, Search Console. And Searchmetrics right out of the box through their APIs. The results are incredible. In SEO we run different dashboards to track our own content. We also build separate ones for our clients. That way clients see the overall big picture. And they track their performance way more effectively.

GeckoBoard is a similar option, just cheaper. Using all these tools together really matters here. Of course, that comes down to budget. Each one shows up as a separate line on your credit card statement. I'm sure many of you know how those small tool payments pile up into a mountain. For a lot of brands this is a serious investment. But an agency needs most of the tools here. At minimum, one tool per category. And to make them all talk to each other inside your enterprise system. You need to talk APIs.

An API is one of the key ways applications talk to each other. If a tool supports it, you're set. Say DeepCrawl has an API. Then I can pipe the data coming out of DeepCrawl straight into my own central system. I can pull Searchmetrics data into my own central system. Once I collect data from every tool through APIs into one service. I can do amazing things. That's how you see the big picture. I can multiply this data, divide it, and run all kinds of operations on it.

You need to work with a developer for this. Tools like Clipfolio help sometimes. But there's no end to this work. There are nice solutions where you can plug in Google Sheets too. Like I said, the toolset on this side is huge. Understand your own needs. Then build the right solutions around them. That's all I have for this week. See you in the next video. Thanks.

This transcript was generated using AI speech recognition and verified against subtitle style rules.

Yiğit Konur

Content author

Yiğit Konur

both

Contact us

How we handle your data

Open as a full page