The Top 3 SEO Tools Every Marketing Department Needs to Use

By Clinton Courier | December 14, 2022 |

Regardless of what sector of activity your business is active in, you need to build brand recognition, engage with your existing customers or clients, and appeal to new ones. To a large extent, your company’s online presence will determine how effective you are at achieving those key goals. And SEO (search engine optimization) is all about boosting your online presence – so, a must for any marketing department.

While more traditional, non-online advertising is making a slight resurgence – meet the NYC start-up bringing online advertising technology to the offline world – there is no doubt that online marketing is what’s making the biggest impact today and most likely in the future as well.

From data security and AI to software development and virtual design, what makes technology a good career path is its tremendous growth rate, continuous opportunities for advancement, and chances to work on new and exciting projects. And SEO will be the marketing pillar for all of those ventures.

In this short article, we’ll take a look at the 3 top industry-leading SEO tools every marketing department should be using – or at least take for a test run.

1 – Surfer

We’ll start at the top with what is arguably the most often cited tool among industry experts, Surfer.

Surfer is both a comprehensive website analytics tool as well as a content creation tool.

Features

Evaluate keywords – their popularity, their different iterations, the difficulty level to rank for them, keyword strings, etc. – backlink requirements, costs, and difficulty to create a competitive, comprehensive marketing content strategy with the aptly named Content Planner.

Get a huge head start on your content with the AI-powered Outline Builder, which crafts content for your targeted keywords – SEO optimized and with headers!

Surfer also brings a certain level of gamification to the content creation process with its feature Content Score. From the content creation page you can see:

The targeted word count
All the keywords your article should have (color-coded according to the frequency with which they should appear and the number of which you have already used)
The exact number of times each keyword should appear in your content
The number of headers your content should have (as well as which keywords should figure in them and how often)
The number of images the content should have

While drafting your content, Surfer will give it a score (displayed on a color-coded wheel) according to how likely it is to rank on search engines – or, more precisely, how appealing it is likely to be to search engines. Create content that will help boost brand visibility all while making a game of it.

Pricing

You can choose from 3 different subscription packages:

Basic – limited to 1 team member and 20 website audits – $49 a month
Pro – limited to 3 team members and 60 website audits – $99 a month
Business – limited to 10 team members and 140 website audits – $199 a month

2 – Ahrefs

Royalty-free image taken from the Ahrefs Twitter page (pinned tweet)

To develop a comprehensive content marketing strategy, you could spend tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of dollars to hire the help of an SEO consultancy agency. Or, with Ahrfes – pronounced H-Refs – you can have the data and the tools to do it yourself.

You may not be like Aiden and have an AI-powered co-worker that behaves like a marketing analyst, but with Ahrefs, you have the next best thing.

Features

Analyze your competition as well as the backlink performance of your own website with Site Explorer. You can find out exactly why your competitor is out-performing you or why you have gone up or dipped in terms of search engine results. Ahrefs Site Explorer analyzes a website’s backlink performance as well as data related to the organic traffic a site brings.

Check the health of your backlinks – whether they are broken, lost, or other – with Ahrefs Backlink Profile. You can use Backlink Profile on your own website or on those of your competitors.

To know what keywords are drawing organic traffic to your site, Ahrefs has you covered with Organic Search. And in collaboration with their Keyword Explorer, you will be able to develop a well-informed, targeted, and precise marketing content strategy. And thanks to Ahrefs’ comprehensive analytics – for example with their Site Audit feature – you will be able to monitor the progress of your campaign and make the necessary adjustments in a timely manner.

Even though Ahrefs is designed to make you self-reliant in terms of marketing content campaigns, you don’t have to go it alone. Ahrefs offers Community and Support with resources – blog posts from industry experts, master classes, and video tutorials – as well as access to Ahrefs Insider, a community Facebook page where users bounce ideas and questions off like-minded SEO enthusiasts.

Pricing

You can choose from 4 monthly payment options:

Lite – 1 user with up to 500 reports: $99 a month

Standard – 1 user with up to 500 reports, plus expanded data history and expanded site explorer: $199

Advanced – 1 user with up to 500 reports, plus expanded data history, expanded site explorer, and integration with Google Data Studio

Enterprise – everything in advanced plus unlimited history access (backlink data from 2013 and keyword ranking data from 2015), directory listing, and more

3. Answer The Public

Unlike the other two platforms on our list, Answer The Public is completely free to use – you don’t even need to create an account.

“Get instant, raw search insights direct from the minds of your customers”

Select a region and a language. Then, simply, type in a brand, product, or service and see what internauts have been searching in regard to these topics. What better way to get an idea of what keywords your company should be targetting than by getting specific answers about what the online public is asking about.

The results of your search are presented in a circle with auxiliaries such as when, who, why, where, can, etc. stretching out and splintering into sub-questions.

Know what internet users are asking for so you can then be prepared to address these concerns.

In a Nutshell

Whether you are a freelancer – digital marketer, content creator, or copywriter – you work for a marketing department, or you own your own business/start-up and you want a greater online presence, SEO is going to play a huge role in how successful or not you are in reaching that goal. The tools in this article are among the most widely used by industry professionals. If you haven’t done so already, you should consider giving them a test run.