You are a Blogger (or site owner, marketing specialist or SEO specialist) and you need traffic on your site. But how you can do it? Are there any tips and tricks? Can you use enterprise SEO services to boost your organic rankings and improve your business? Or maybe you should use tools, SEO tools, for getting tons of traffic?
Below I’ll describe you five SEO tools, which I use. Some of them are totally free, and some of them are really expensive. You must choose, what is best for you.
1. Alexa
Alexa is an online tool for basic website analytics. It’s based on huge database with relevant information and statistics about webpages.
Thanks to Alexa, you can very fast find out general traffic stats, what is an audience of the website (male/female, age, education, etc.), major sites, which are linking to your site.
The interesting thing is here a short overview, on top queries from search engines.
For example for Bloggers.com, most important three keywords are:
- Bloggers
- Top technology blogs in Nigeria
- Bloggers.com
Beside this, Alexa will show you Top 500 sites (worldwide, grouped by country or grouped by category).
Last interesting feature from Alexa is Alexa Toolbar, which can help you learn some statistics, related links and other things about browsed pages. It’s a plugin for your browser.
2. Google Keyword Tool
Google Keyword Tool is a totally free tool for finding keywords prepared by Google.
You can find keywords based on one or more words (or phrases). Important thing is to mark tick on Exact match, to find only specific keyword. Google Keyword tool doesn’t have a lot of options, but is simple – so I like it 🙂
Here you can read my article How to find best keywords for your blog or website using Google Keyword Tool or Market Samurai (the next tool, I’ll describe for you)
3. Market Samurai
Market Samurai is another tool, for finding best keywords for your site and analyze your competition
It let you:
- Find best keywords for your sites
- Analyze your competition on specific keywords (it analyzes most important factors for pages, which are in top #10 in SERPs, of course for your keyword(s))
- Find proper domain name for you
- Find content among Wikipedia, Ezine Articles, Google News, etc
- Help you find affiliates programs for you (Amazon, ClickBank, Commision Junction)
There is a lot more functions of this great tool, but personally I use it mainly for analyzing my competition, research keywords for me, and find appropriate domains (for example I find my domain nopassiveincome.com thanks to Market Samurai 🙂 ).
Market Samurai isn’t free tool. Paid version cost normally 149$ (it’s not cheap), but it is worth each cent I spent on it.
Here you can download free trial (12 days trial with some limitation). If you buy it during five days since downloading, you will get your Market Samurai only for 97$
4. SEMRush
SEMRush is a tool for analyzing organic keywords, competitors in organic search, AdWords keywords and a lot more. You can check it for ten Google databases (for instance for US, UK, DE, IT) and for Bing
For example, using free report for the website bloggers.com, we can get following results:
You can read (from the first table and first line), that most important keyword for organic search is bloggers. Bloggers.com is on 2nd position in SEPRs and this keyword generate 14,36% of organic traffic.
From second table (ads keywords) we find out, that bloggers.com doesn’t pay for ads.
And the last table (on the screen) show us, that major competitors for Bloggers.com are (in organic search):
Youtube.com (1718 common keywords)
Zimbio.com (1088 common keywords) and
Facebook.com (987 common keywords)
Of course SEMRush offers a lot of others helpful reports – information about potential ads/traffic buyers or sellers, estimated traffic to specified site or backlinks report.
Using free version, you can generate only five reports a day, what’s much to less, even for bloggers 😉
Paid version of SEMRush cost monthly from 69.95$ (Pro recurring version) to 499$ (Enterprise version)
5. Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is a last tool, I want to describe today.
It’s a tool mainly for analyzing your (and your competitor) backlinks, top pages, etc.
With this tool, you can also check backlink history and neighbourhood of your domain.
Three days ago Majestic SEO launched two new metrics related with link profile – trust flow and citation flow. I plan to test it in the future, but now I couldn’t tell you anything more about these features.
For getting some details about your site, you must login in to the website (so firstly you must sign up to it.
It’s free of charge, if you don’t need in-depth analysis and you need it only for your site. For professionals there are three paid plans: Silver, Gold and Platinum (49.99$, 149,99$ and 399,99$)
And how about you – do you use some SEO tools for making your life easier? Or maybe there are some other tools, which are valuable for mention?
Disclosure – please note, that some of the links above are affiliate links and I earn a commission, when you buy something via them.
Ben says
May 20, 2012 at 10:45 amI pretty much lived on the Google keywords tool for a week or so when developing my current site. I have heard that you should take the statistics it gives with a bit of salt but it seems to give a pretty good idea of the traffic driving potential of specific keywords.
With the exception of Alexa I can’t say I’ve heard of any of the other tools you mention, thanks for bringing them to my attention, I’ll make sure to check them out in the future!
Ben
Chris says
May 21, 2012 at 6:48 amHi Ben,
you should check them all, they are really helpful if you want to be “in front of” your competition.
BR, Chris
Trung Nguyen says
May 20, 2012 at 5:29 pmI know most of these SEO tools, Majestic SEO is new tool to me, so I’ll check how it works, BTW thanks for share your post to us, I’ve just retweeted your post, keep sharing.
Chris says
May 21, 2012 at 6:45 amThanks Trung. Majestic SEO is also very good tool, you should try it!
BR, Chris
Francis Inegbedion says
May 23, 2012 at 2:47 amThanks for posting these five seo tools. I think they are great way to get those extra traffic to your blog. I will investigate and learn how to use the tools I am not familiar with. Thanks!
Chris says
May 23, 2012 at 7:46 amThey are very easy to use, you should check them.
Thanks for commenting!
Matt Smith says
May 24, 2012 at 3:37 pmHI Chris,
Nice list of tools to help people drive more traffic. I hadn’t heard of ‘Majestic SEO’ before, but I’ll make sure that I check them out.
Of course, the biggest one that you missed though is ‘Google Analytics’. Similar to ‘Alexa’, but SO much better. I use it all the time to see what posts/pages are working on my site and which aren’t. Once you know which aspects of your site are working, you can utilize them better to drive even more traffic. For example, you could place more internal links to those pages, or link to them in guest posts, etc.
Chris says
May 24, 2012 at 8:11 pmHi Matt,
yes, I forgot about it 🙁 Probably I didn’t mention GA, because it’s only for your own sites (and during writing this post, I was analysing my local competition :)). And you must try Majestic SEO – it’s really good!
BR, Chris
Juan says
May 24, 2012 at 5:56 pmi like this post, thanks for sharing, currently i’m just using alexa, maybe later i will start using another seo tool that are suggest by u
Chris says
May 24, 2012 at 8:39 pmHi Juan, if you are analyzing your competition, you should try these tools.
BR, Chris
kapil singh says
May 28, 2012 at 6:29 amThank You
The given information is very effective
i will keep updated with the same
Chris says
May 28, 2012 at 8:29 amThanks kapil, welcome to my blog
John Ernest says
July 12, 2012 at 5:59 amTools are what make a success man. This is no different in blogging. You should have the right tools if you want to make a good insight. Through the relevant information that you receive from these sites, you will be able to make good decisions and strategies that will help improve your PR.
Company says
July 16, 2012 at 8:19 pmIt’s difficult to find knowledgeable people in this particular subject, however, you sound like you know what you’re talking about! Thanks
Taran says
August 28, 2012 at 3:56 amHi Chris,
You have shared such great SEO TOOLS.Its really a nice list of best tools.This post is so helpful for me.Thanks for the post.
Chris Madej says
August 28, 2012 at 6:18 amThanks Taran for your comment!
Hussain Saifi says
October 4, 2012 at 8:49 ama very nice list of great tools i am impressed
Sunil says
November 10, 2012 at 9:41 amGreat post admin.It tried your tips a month before and now i receive such good traffic from Google.And full credit goes to you.Again thanx admin.May your site live long
Tarun Gehani says
February 8, 2013 at 4:45 pmLive long & prosper! Some other great resources I use: SEO Book, SEOmoz, Raven Tools, Yoast SEO.
Dhruv says
April 6, 2013 at 4:34 amAlexa is not good actually..
It does not provide you with accurate stats!
Alexa ranks your site with the help of Alexa toolbar.
If your site is mostly visited by the people having Alexa toolbar installed in their browser, your site will have better Alexa rankings..!!
Even if some other site having 30,000 visits daily and about 3000 people among them have Alexa toolbar, then that particular site will be ranked less than those having 5000 people with Alexa toolbar among 15000 that are visiting daily.
So, don’t believe in Alexa rankings!!
Just make quick links on web 2.0 sites to improve your rankings 🙂
pargeet says
April 23, 2013 at 3:09 pmhey…nice post…i will definately apply this steps on my blog…i hope these are useful for me…
LOCANZO says
November 4, 2015 at 11:26 pmwonderfull but great resources I use: SEO Book, SEOmoz, Raven Tools, Yoast SEO.