There are a number of tools we use here to Crucial to help us with our SEO. They save us a huge amount of time, and are invaluable to helping with your SEO. If you’ve been working on SEO on your site for any period of time, you will most likely have come across and used one of the tools below to make your life easier.

Ahrefs:
Ahrefs is by the far the best tool I’ve ever used to check backlinks to a site. It shows the most backlinks of any tool I’ve used, and gives you a day by day view as links are added and removed everyday. The day by day view is extremely useful to see how your link building efforts are going.

Up until recently they had an amazing Keyword Analysis tool which provided where you ranked on Google for a large selection of keywords. This tool used to show your changes on a day by day basis, unfortunately the tool was removed a month ago and is no longer available.

SEOmoz:
We’ve been using SEOmoz for quite some time now, they have a good variety of tools to help with SEO.

Keyword Ranking Tool:
The keyword ranking tool allows you to enter up to 300 keywords, and receive weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports on the rankings of the keywords across Google, Bing, Yahoo, and how much traffic they received (linked via Google Analytics).

Crawl Diagnostics:
Crawl diagnostics provides info on errors, warning, and notices. This includes 404 errors, duplicate page or title content, etc.

Competitive Analysis:
Want to compare how you are ranking with your competitors? This is the tool to use! It takes into a number of factors, including SEOmoz’ own MozRank and MozTrust scores.

Open Site Explorer:
Open Site Explorer is a free backlink analysis tool, with a more advanced version available when you have an SEOmoz paid subscription. While less powerful than Ahrefs, it is still a useful tool and I’m a fan of their Domain Authority, MozRank, and MozTrust rankings.

SEMrush:
Ever since the Ahrefs tool stopped offering the Keyword Analysis tool I was on the lookout for a new tool. I was recommended to check out SEMrush. It appears to have more keywords ranked than Ahrefs did, however it doesn’t seem as though it’s updating them as often.

MajesticSEO:
The main reason we started using this tool was due to the Link profile graph which shows the Trust flow vs. Citation flow of your site. This is a great way to see the quality of the links you to your site, and how trusted they are.

MajesticSEO also has a bunch of tools to check Backlinks, Anchor Text, etc as well.

Hit Tail:
Hit Tail is a tool which tracks what keywords are used on search engines to get to your site. It’s a great way to identify long tail keywords and write content using those keywords to attract more traffic.

Link Detective:
This tool is slightly more advanced, it allows you to see how your competitors are ranked and classifies the types of links they are using (i.e. Blogroll, Comment, Advertisement, Directory, etc).

Google Analytics:
This is a must have for any website that receives traffic, the information Google Analytics is invaluable to understanding your visitors, how they got to your site, and what actions they are taking!

Google Webmaster Tools:
This is information straight from the horses mouth about your site, find out where there are errors, who links to you, and a whole bunch of other useful information. This tool is free, and if you haven’t set it up already then you are missing out on free information.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool:
Another Google tool which can help significantly in understanding your market, and what will be the most effective SEO strategy. Using the Adwords Keyword Tool you can find out search volumes for specific keywords, and also recommendations of similar keywords. Google also provides an indication on how competitive the keyword is, which can help in choosing the right keywords to target on your site!