Amsive

PUBLISHED: Oct 29, 2020 6 min read

What We’re Loving Lately: Our 4 Favorite SEO Tools This Month

Bambi Frazier

Bambi Frazier

Sr. Manager, Local SEO & Content

Our support system here at Amsive Digital comes by way of some SEO tools that we’re very selective about choosing.  

Just like digital marketing, we use tools that help us stay on top of the latest developments in our field, using only the most highly respected, cutting-edge technology.  These tools must make our jobs easier by way of efficiency—or no dice.  

How Tools Factor into Our SEO Process 

We have a strong sense of collaboration at AmsiveDigital rooted in our daily 10am SEO meetings and we chat with one another throughout the day for guidance, support and advice.  In short, our award-winning SEO team is immersed in the ever-evolving digital landscape of SEO.  

Our tools help us build specific SEO strategies to boost our client’s website traffic. And even when a Google core algorithm update takes the SEO world (and thousands of websites) by storm and surprise, our tools help us navigate our way through it all one step at a time.  

So, what are these tools I speak of?  Well, there are many.   

Some are oldies but goodies, withstanding the test of time. Some are new—proving they have all the good stuff to meet our daily demands, and some offer just one or two perks but are game-changers when it comes to specific tasks.  I spoke with our AmsiveDigital SEO team to get their take on which tools they’re loving most lately and why.  

Screaming Frog 

A hands-down favorite across our SEO team.   

Screaming Frog is mostly utilized for site audits and uses what the company has dubbed its ‘SEO Spider.’ This unique crawler helps to “improve onsite SEO, by extracting data & auditing for common SEO issues.”   

Associate SEO Strategist, Alec Cole, loves that it offers a “custom extract for keyword list building.” Adding to that, SEO Strategist Joe Woll calls it “the quickest and ‘dirtiest’ way to pull valuable technical wins from a domain.” Fellow Strategist, Joshua Squires, got even more candid, saying, “I effin’ love Screaming Frog. Especially with the PSI plugin.” 

Joshua explains, “I can crawl a site and get all the data I need for each page in a single crawl. By combining PSI with your standard Screaming Frog data, I can tell if a page has a bunch of images, or an un-optimized banner, or a bunch of excess JavaScript.  And because I can export that data into something that data visualization tools can connect to, I can rapidly identify problem pages and their issues with a handy graph instead of combing through lines in excel or individually testing pages.” 

Screaming Frog User Interface
Screaming Frog Analysis Window

Ahrefs Broken Backlinks Tab 

Paul VanHevel and Cullen Smith are a dynamic SEO duo for a handful of AmsiveDigital clients. So, when they responded separately about their favorite SEO tool, currently, it’s no surprise that they were aligned in their thinking. 

Paul, who recently took home TWO awards for his quarterly performance for his outstanding work at AmsiveDigital, named the Ahrefs ‘Broken Backlinks Tab” as his current favorite, and Cullen agreed. Why do these two experts love it so much? 

Paul says, “It’s just a super-easy way to restore any lost SEO value when onboarding a new client— typically, there’s a ton of big wins in there.”  

He continues, “You can quickly identify domains and specific URLs that are linking to your content and whether or not those links are resulting in a 404, canonicalization error, or some other problem. You can easily export broken links, sort by most authoritative and then map redirects or fix other errors to instantly restore any lost SEO value. It’s much easier to re-claim existing backlinks than it is to earn new ones. Oftentimes, there are hundreds or even thousands of authoritative backlinks that can be restored via a simple 301 redirect.” 

In short, if you’re looking for quick wins that make a tangible difference, Paul and Cullen advise to start with Ahrefs and its broken backlink tab.  

Now… what would a AmsiveDigital blog about SEO tools be without feedback from our SEO Director, Lily Ray?  Lily—fresh off two virtual SEO speaking engagements in the same week, took a moment to share her favorite tool she’s using daily, at least, for now.    

Sistrix 

Our SEO Director, Lily Ray, relies on Sistrix for a variety of reasons. According to its website, Sistrix is all about Unique Data Tracking and Digital Market Movements.  The company created what it calls a ‘visibility index,” which helps “make Google rankings transparent and easy to understand.” For Lily, it’s all about looking at what’s happening with a multitude of sites, not just AmsiveDigital’s clients’ websites. 

“It allows me to track SEO visibility of websites we don’t manage at scale and see how they were impacted by various google updates dating back ten years,” Lily says. “Those results make for great business development discussions and a better understanding of the SEO landscape in a given category.” 

Finally, there’s the current favorite of yours truly:  

Sparktoro 

Sparktoro is my current favorite for a variety of reasons—primarily because it can be used for SEO and many other applications.  It’s all about helping you better understand your target audience by offering a zoomed in view of their online activities.  No… not THOSE activities!  But rather, “what your audience reads, watches, listens to and follows” collectively.  

When you get to Sparktoro’s homepage, you’ll have a few options on how you want to get started with your search, using the “My Audience” bar.  So, for example, if I want to learn more about an audience that frequently talks about chocolate chip cookies, I’ll drop that into the search bar and click “Discover Now.”   

Sparktoro then fetches a plethora of results about my chocolate chip cookie loving audience, including websites they visit, hashtags they frequently use, social media accounts they follow and more.  Plus, I’m also told which percentage of my chosen audience does all the above.   

The coolest perk is the ‘hidden gem’ which shows platforms with less overall reach, but “high relative engagement among this audience.”  The findings have not only been insightful for me, but also for my colleagues and our AmsiveDigital clients as well.  

The Round Up  

So there you have it, our SEOs favorite tools: 

  • Screaming Frog 
  • the Ahrefs Broken Backlinks Tab 
  • Sistrix 
  • Sparktoro

All tools we’re loving lately that make our SEO work here at Amsive Digital even better. Looking for SEO experts to deploy some of these tools for your site? Let’s talk.  

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