Running a SEO focused marketing department is pretty darn great – It’s what I do for the ol’ day job. What I really enjoy about digital marketing is finding the best strategies to connect people to our Drupal developers.

It’s always a lot of fun seeing what works and what doesn’t, with the goal of having more successes than failures. Crafting great articles, whitepapers, webinars and infographics and then getting them to rank… Yeah, that’s 100% my jam.

But there is a side to digital marketing that can be quite cumbersome – figuring out which SEO tools are the best fit and which SEO blogs are worth our time.

Last I checked, there are hundreds of tools that claim to be the best/greatest/game-changers. For proof, take a minute and check out Annie Cushing’s Must Have Tools. Yes, there are a lot.

On top of that, there are literally thousands of SEO blogs claiming to be the best/have the latest news/cover all the secrets to get you to the front page. And weeding through them is almost a fulltime job itself.

Despite trying lots of tools and reading hundreds of websites, I keep coming back to eight really great SEO tools and blogs. To me, these are the best of the best. So, with that, here are my top eight tools and blogs every SEO marketer should have and know.

TOOLS

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool

If you haven’t downloaded this tool yet, take a minute and do it right now. I’ll wait… Got it? Awesome. This tool is a must have – Not only to use internally, but also to look at competitors/potential customer’s websites. We’ve won a lot of clients using this tool to look at what their Drupal website is lacking from an SEO perspective. We’ve also used it to crawl our own site, optimizing as we go. The tool, “allows you to quickly crawl, analyze and audit a site from an onsite SEO perspective.” You’ll get errors, redirects, missing H1/H2/H3 and meta descriptions, image information, missing alt text reports – All for free. It’s my favorite tool. Get it. Use it. Love it.

Screaming_Frog

Pro Rank Tracker

This is my favorite SEO keyword ranking tool. What’s really great is that it’s free for the first 20 keywords. All you do is put in your URL, add your keywords and boom – You’ll get a detailed keyword report in your inbox every morning. It also has some really robust custom reports for you to use, generates keyword trends in 2 clicks and has a plugin for WordPress sites.

Ahrefs

Probably the best backlink analysis tool around, Ahrefs is great for seeing how your website’s content is doing in comparison to your competitors. With this tool, you’ll get all the backlinks and referring domains, be able to analyze the anchor text used to link to your site, see what content is doing the best and see which sites are sending referral traffic to that content… And really a whole lot more. It’s a really powerful tool, so it’ll take you a little bit too fully utilize it.

Open SEO Stats

Open SEO Stats quickly shows you the PageRank and Alexa Rank of a website. It also gives you some traffic stats, allowing you to see how many people visited that page. It’s a great tool to get a quick digital overview of a website’s worth. This is particularly important when you try to get a backlink/guest blogging. A good rule of thumb: If a site has a PageRank score of less than 3, then keep looking. Granted, even Gmail only has a PageRank of 8/10, so sometimes a page with a lower rank than 3 will be ok. Take away: Do your research.

Buzzsumo

If a site has a good PageRank and a lot of traffic, I then dump their URL into Buzzsumo. Buzzsumo shows which content/page on a website is shared the most in social media, which platform it was shared on and (most of the time) who shared that content. If a site has a lot of social media shares and a high PageRank, then I most definitely want to connect with them.

Another neat feature of Buzzsumo is Brand Monitoring. Buzzsumo lets you set up alerts for Brand/Competitor Mentions, keywords, backlinks, authors and more. These alerts are much more thorough than Google Alerts and other free tools in the market.

Buzzsumo

(Note: I’ve not included Bing Webmaster and Google Search Console as these are well-known and commonly used tools)

BLOGS

Having all the right tools is great, but you need to know how to use them. In order to be successful, you need to use all your SEO tools together in concert. And following the right SEO blogs will help you do just that. Here are the top picks to help you really focus in and be successful with these tools.

Inbound.org

This site isn’t a tool, but to our team, it’s just as useful. Inbound.org was started in 2012 by Rand Fishkin (Founder of Moz) and Dharmesh Shah (Founder of HubSpot) – Two powerhouses in the SEO and Content Marketing world. The articles and how-to guides on this site are 100% priceless (and free). Everyday there are tips, tricks and tutorials on how to be a better marketer, how to make sure your site is up-to-date with SEO standards and a whole lot more. Also, there’s a fantastic community of marketers there to answer questions, review landing pages and a lot more. We use this site every day and contribute as much as we can.

Inbound_dot_org

Backlinko

Brian Dean at Backlinko is awesome. Brian releases an article every 2 to 3 weeks, always focusing on actionable strategies for SEO and link building. His articles are extremely thorough and well-thought out. Brain definitely goes for quality vs quantity of articles. His articles will usually reference or incorporate one of the tools above, breaking down each step to using that tool. We’ve incorporated a lot of his ideas and techniques into our day-to-day SEO strategy. His ideas and strategies can be used by small shops to large news websites. We’re big fans.

Moz Blog

If Google changes its algorithm or there’s a new tactic/tool, then we immediately go to Moz Blog. The articles on this blog are 100% actionable and relevant and the individuals that guest post on the blog are the best of the best in the SEO world. What’s great, these articles will usually mention new ways to use the above tools. Further, this site is usually two steps ahead in trends/analysis, so you want to make sure you subscribe to their updates.

Moz_blog

Bonus!

I know there are only supposed to be eight tools/blogs, but I would be remiss if I didn’t include a shout out to Buffer Blog. Buffer does a fantastic job of bridging the gap between social media, content and SEO. Their articles heavily focused on data-driven metrics and tactics to get your content to be shared and thereby rank. There is 0% fluff in these articles, so make sure you take a minute to really digest them.

And there you go – Our 8 tools and blogs every SEO marketer should have and know. This list is by no means comprehensive, but using these tools and following these blogs will get you going on your way to a successful SEO strategy.

What are your favorite tools? What blogs do you like to follow? What did we miss out on? Let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear what other SEO teams use!

Jeffrey Wisard is the Digital Marketing Manager at Drupal Partners, an Open Source dev shop in Atlanta, GA. When he’s not writing, talking to customers or hosting webinars about Drupal, you can find him on his bike searching for a tasty IPA or run commuting to burn off said tasty IPA.