There are a few things all SEO agency owners and managers will agree on. First of all, they will agree that running an SEO agency and meeting the demands of their clients is a difficult job. They will also agree that SEO is an ever-changing industry and that snoozing for a day or two is enough to make the agency start lagging behind others. Finally, they will agree that running an SEO agency is impossible without a couple of tools that make their jobs easier and, what is even more important, more successful.
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Google’s Quadruple-Pack
Sure, many SEO agencies will also be providing Bing- or DuckDuckGo-related services for their clients, but for the most part, everything will revolve around Google. And since it is Google we are all concerned with, not using their own tools would be pure madness.
The quadruple-pack from Google will include:
- Google Analytics which will provide you with an incredible amount of insight into who your audience is, what they are doing on your clients’ websites and how they are converting;
- Google PageSpeed Insights which, as its name would suggest, helps you take care of your clients’ websites’ speed and user experience;
- Google Search Console that will provide you with info on links coming to your clients’ sites, internal links, search analytics and much, much more, and;
- Google Keyword Planner which gives you a great starting point on what keywords will best work for your clients
Ahrefs
There is no SEO without backlinks and competitor analysis. Everyone knows this. You want to know what your competitors are doing, where they are getting their backlinks and how you can compete with them on this front.
There is a whole range of tools designed specifically for this purpose such as Majestic or Moz. However, while these are perfectly fine tools that do certain things fantastically well, the tool you need to do a proper backlink and competitor analysis is Ahrefs.
Simply put, Ahrefs’s got the numbers. Their index is the largest and their crawlers are the fastest and the busiest. As a result of this, the backlink analysis that you do with Ahrefs will be far more thorough and result-abundant than anything you can achieve with any other tool.
That being said, it is always best to do double or even triple analysis and that is where the two aforementioned tools can be of great help.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
When you run an SEO agency, you are dealing with a number of clients’ websites and you simply need to know what’s going on there and how Google is seeing those websites. You can do this manually and spend thousands of man-hours on this. Or, you can use Screaming Frog SEO Spider and get the majority of data you need in a very short time.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one of the more versatile SEO tools on the market, providing you with the ability to do basic website crawling, check internal links and even site content. You can also check to find any problems with the website and do an audit of meta data and directives. It even provides some link building features.
While the majority of features that you will find in this tool are more than decent, it is the website crawling that takes home the gold. This is the primary function of the SF SEO Spider and it really provides you with invaluable and very practicable data.
BuzzSumo
A big part of SEO has become creating high-quality content and for an agency with a large number of clients and link builders, there is always room for improvement. This is where BuzzSumo comes in with their content research and social media engagement analysis.
In essence, BuzzSumo will help your SEO Agency produce content that will not only be interesting to read, but which will also be shared on social media which has become an essential part of a good SEO practice.
Besides letting you know what kind of content flies, it can also provide you with great insights into keywords to target and it can even help you identify influencers in the industry that you can then reach out to for social media or content partnerships.
Active Collab
While Active Collab is not strictly-speaking an SEO tool, there is good chance that it is actually the best ally an SEO agency can have.
Anyone who has ever worked at, let alone ran, an SEO agency understands how chaotic things can get. SEO is a superbly rapidly moving field and projects get changed on the fly a couple of time in a single day. With a number of teams working on a number of such fluid projects, keeping track of everything can be near impossible. Factor in calculating the value of services provided and billing your clients appropriately and you get a task of Herculean proportions on your hands.
Now, Active Collab is by no means the only project management tool on the market, but it is obvious that it’s the most agency-friendly SEO project management tool out there. It might actually be possible that some of the folks who worked on this tool worked in SEO before, but that is just a feeling you get when you fire it up.
Closing Word
These are not the only tools an SEO agency would benefit from, but used in combination, they can be the ultimate combo to make your life easier and your clients more successful.
Of course, being a savvy SEO agency manager means always keeping your eyes open for more tools and opportunities.