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45 SEO and Social Media Tools #SESLondon

Social SEO Tools

I really lucked out after moderating the morning session at SES London on Social Media Tools by joining the SEO Tools of the Trade session that followed. Both sessions had great speakers and I’ve decided to combine my notes for both into one post about social media automation tools and SEO tools.

The sources for the SEO tool recommendations include:  Richard Baxter of SEOGadget, Dave Naylor from Bronco, and Neil Walker from Just Search. The social media tool recommendations came from Andrew Girdwood from bigmouthmedia, Paul Madden from Automica and Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics.

Before I get into the list of tools, I feel compelled to share a quote that I’ve often used to give people context for tool use, since it’s so important to use them for scale, efficiency and to gain a competitive advantage:

“Tools are only as effective as the expertise of the person using them.”

I think that’s an important perspective, because some online marketers use a small handful of tools but their expertise is very deep. Therefore, they get a tremendous amount of productivity from them. Others use many, many tools without deep expertise in anyone area and as a result, effectiveness may be lacking. Once you find a handful of tools that work for you, get really, really good at using them. At the same time, always be open to trying new tools as they come along.

Ok, let’s start off with SEO Tools:

  1. RedFly GoogleGlobal Firefox & Chrome Extension – See SERPs in other countries
  2. Netcraft – Hosting, DNS, site uptime and many other features
  3. MajesticSEO – Link tracking, research and analysis. Export links by country code (TopRank uses MajesticSEO
  4. Copyscape – Find copies of your content elsewhere on the web to avoid duplicate content issues
  5. Google Webmaster Tools – How does Googlebot interact with your website. Check for crawl errors that could affect inclusion and ranking of your content
  6. Firebug – Firefox extension for reviewing code, look for hidden text issues that could affect search engine penalties
  7.  Google Page Speed – Check the load time of your web pages. Slow loading pages are not your friend and certainly nothing Google will reward you for
  8. Pingdom – Monitor uptime of your website. If your website is down neither customers or search engines can get to it.
  9. Xenu Linksleuth or Screaming Frog to spider your website
  10. Open Site Explorer – Download data and segment anchor text for identifying good/bad inbound links
  11. KISSinsights – Find sales objections and test them with a super short survey
  12. Fivesecondtest – Show an image and see what people think of it. Analyzes most prominent areas of your design
  13. Google Website Optimizer – A/B test your page designs
  14. Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Official keyword research tool from Google
  15. Spyfu – Perform competitive PPC and SEO keyword research
  16. Alexa – Wide range of traffic and keyword information about websites
  17. SEMRush – Get competitive SEO and PPC keyword information on websites found on Google.com and many other country domains
  18. KeywordSpy – Keyword research tool
  19. Wordtracker – Keyword research tool
  20. Wordstream – Keyword research tool
  21. Keyword Discovery – Keyword research tool
  22. Socialmention – Social search tool allows you to download to csv file of social keywords and influences that you can pivot to see what what kinds of mentions are you getting, on what kinds of social media sites and how it compares to the competition.
  23. Analytics SEO – page load time, pages indexed, ranking overview, reveal potential keywords, next opportunity keywords, reporting.
  24. Sistrix toolbox – Tracks PageRank over time, ranking, position, search volume, traffic index
  25. Searchmetrics Essentials – Suite of SEO and social media tracking tools
  26. GTmetrix – Compare multiple sites for their page download speed
  27. Link Research Tools – Link research and profiling tools
  28. Keyword Density – DaveN tool providing a wide variety of data points about a website according to a specific keyword phrases
  29. maxmind – Geographic ip detection down to the city level
  30. wipmania – Geographic ip location tool

Social Media Automation Tools (Some are a bit Grayhat SEO)

  1. Evri – Social content aggregator
  2. Trapit – Topical news aggregator that leans your preferences with AI
  3. Strawberryjam – Shows the links your social network shares the most
  4. ifttt – Rules based automation of actions through social channels/media sites
  5. Paper.li – Crawls links contained within RSS feeds, Twitter lists you supply and creates an online newspaper that auto-tweets the most popular twitter handles that share
  6. Pearltrees.com – Tool for aggregating content and sharing content with a rich visual interface
  7. Tweetguru Multi – DM up to 12 people on Twitter at the same time
  8. RSS Graffiti – Pull in RSS data feeds into a Facebook page automatically
  9. Tweetadder – Auto follows people on Twitter (um, kinda spammy no?)
  10. Socialoomph – Schedule social content and status updates (Twitter and Facebook)
  11. dlvr.it – Takes a RSS feed, filters content based on rules and publishes to Twitter, Facebook and other social channels
  12. Odesk – Not a tool but a resource to outsource redundant tasks. Use for research, writing small content, etc.
  13. Socialenhancer – In beta: Auto reply to tweets by keyword. Export followers for analysis
  14. Tweetdeck – Twitter management tool
  15. Hootsuite – Twitter, Facebook and other social channels management tool
SEO Tools

Richard Baxter, Dave Naylor, Neil Walker

There you go. I hope you find these tools useful. Some are quite old and some are new. Some are a bit iffy in terms of being more mechanical than meaningful for social engagement. Take care when checking them out. Tools can be a bit of a time suck so think about what your goals are, what tasks do you want to achieve. Look at these sites if you have time or ask other SEO and Social SEO professionals about them to decide what you want to try or test out.

What are some of your favorite SEO tools? What tools do you use to improve efficiency and automate redundant tasks when it comes to Social SEO actions? Would you like to see us do more reviews of tools?

About Lee Odden

@LeeOdden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing and editor of TopRank's B2B Marketing Blog. Cited for his expertise by The Economist, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, he's the author of the book Optimize and presents internationally on B2B marketing topics including content, search, social media and influencer marketing. When not at conferences, consulting, or working with his talented team, he's likely running, traveling or cooking up something new.

Comments

  1. Dhawal D says

    Awesome Compilation! I can mention a Few more, Buffer is a great tool, SEO for Chrome does a lot of the Rank and backlink monitoring tasks at once

  5. Sujoy says

    Great list….many of them I’ve used already and some are also there that I haven’t used yet. Thanks a lot for sharing!

  6. Flokant says

    I think I won’t do without this list from now on! I knew only some tools and I def will try all the other ones. Thanks so much for sharing!!

  8. leeodden says

    You’re right Bobby, 45 is completely arbitrary. Could you change the name field to your name instead of a keyword phrase? Otherwise, we’ll just delete it.

  12. Justin Deaville says

    Hi Lee

    Thanks for the mention.

    Wordtracker has always been known for its keyword research tool, but over the past year we’ve expanded our offering. 

    Last year, for instance, we launched Link Builder which helps you find and categorise thousands of potential link prospects quickly and easily. You can find out more at http://www.wordtracker.com/linkbuilder

    Proficient SEOs should also check out Strategizer, which helps cut out the grind of planning, measuring and monitoring SEO campaigns. http://www.strategizer.wordtracker.com

    I’ll definitely be checking out Strawberryjam, if only because of the name.

    I hope that’s useful.

    Justin

    PS. What had you done to Richard Baxter to make him look like that? 🙂
     

  13. Anonymous says

    Some good tools here. Another useful tool for SEO and Social Media is PageZephyr, which can search, edit, index, extract and export content for print or web publishing.

  15. Gautham says

    Great list. I wonder why Ahrefs tool was not reviewed. Ahrefs have pretty wide range of features similar to Majesticseo and Open site explorer.

    • leeodden says

      There were many, many tools not mentioned. Time was limited to 45 min in each session and the speakers shared a lot of tools in that time. Would you like to see more tools reviewed here?

  16. Anonymous says

    Juicy list!!! This list is a must for SEO providers but I’m not into Grayhat tools at all.
    Thanks for sharing

  17. Martz Hobert says

    Bookmarked! Sad to see that Yahoo Site Explorer is not available anymore since it can see lot of backlinks of competitor for free, unlike the free version open site explorer which shows few and not detailed links (thousands of detailed links will show if you pay seomoz subscription).

  18. Jack Coxill says

    Thanks for this awesome list! 

    I already knew some of the tools, but there are some real golden nuggets listed here. I totally agree with what the quote you put up, it’s so vital not to abuse these tools, but the use them in an effective manner, so that you can really get the most out of them. Otherwise, you can see the opposite effects take place sometimes, especially with software. 

    Thanks, 

    Jack Coxill

  23. Steve Chen says

    Still current and kick butt list of tools. I use about half of them and it’s true….tools are only as good as the folks that use them. Perhaps why my rankings suffer? LOL

  25. Saul Fleischman says

    May I suggest something radically different – a brand new social media tool, for brand monitoring, listening, topic smart-tagging, and content curation (with proper referencing of original content creators): RiteTag is a tool for finding the “rite” tags for many social networks based on your query. We also provide stats and examples of recent updates with each tag suggested, so people can learn about the types of content that tends to go with a tag.

    Some tools do tag illustration. Also, they do the job just with Twitter; http://www.RiteTag.com already has 10 social neworks (with topic-tagging) integrated, and will expand to more than 20 – which people can search on simultaneously. RiteTag – to find the rite tags, per network (they vary per network) and learn about tags as well. Its not about SEO, but SSO: social sharing optimization: optimizing social media updates to be seen by those not following you by name, but following and searching for your tagged topics. And absolutely nothing out there does what RiteTag.com does for this, not for one network, let alone the ten that we already have integrated.

    Also, we have a number of G+ RiteTag events coming up: workshops on using RiteTag, I invite you to serach those in G+ Events and join us and other RiteTaggers on what people can and have been doing with RiteTag.

    Thanks,

    Saul Fleischman
    RiteTag / Osaka, Japan
    http://www.ritetag.com