The Shark Tank

The internet is an invaluable tool for businesses and customers alike. A credible online presence is essential for showing potential clients and customers what your business has to offer. Utilizing certain tools can make the process of establishing your digital footprint easier and help you monitor the growth of your online authority.

Our favorite platforms keep track of what’s working well and what may not be, so it is easier to pinpoint ways to improve your overall digital marketing strategy. Below, we have compiled the three helpful tools we use to keep our SEO strong.

BrightLocal – Citation Building and Reputation Management

BrightLocal is a tool that can help grow a business’ local SEO presence. This multidimensional tool can be used to prospect sites for possible citations and deliver numerous reports on how your business is doing locally. One of the most significant benefits is that this tool allows you to find new local citations and push your listing out to those for a credible listing.

BrightLocal gives us the ability to check the status of the links we build for our clients as well as check for any duplicate listings. It has a plethora of features, but we primarily use this tool to monitor and build the citations we have for clients. This tool is also useful for tracking where you rank for local keywords. Whether we are checking for incorrect citations, or just making sure our links are indexed after a period of time, BrightLocal compiles useful information into a single hub.

One advantage of BrightLocal is its ability to manage the local citations and links your business receives. It will alert you when positive reviews come across some of the biggest review sites as well as help you manage any negative feedback you receive. This tool does have a price tag attached, but in the long term, it can be money well spent.

Ahrefs – SEO Tools to Grow Your Traffic

One of the things a business needs to have for a credible online profile is content, links, a technical foundation, and citations across a multitude of sites. Ahrefs can give you backlink reports that identify what links you have gained and lost. With such an extensive network of known indexed links, the tool also allows you to check for spam attacks, or spammy links that competitors build to your site.

Ahrefs helps you monitor your backlinks and learn what you need to do to outrank competitors from an off-page perspective. This tool allows you to see what links your competitors are building, as well as the density and what pages your backlinks are going to.

For us, Ahrefs wears many hats. It has capabilities for competitive analysis, general site authority statistics, and link profile view. It allows you to monitor the status of your links, as well as the status of links for your competition. Ahrefs is a valuable tool in understanding your competition in local niches.

Proofreading and Plagiarism Checking Software

Although this category can be quite broad, we believe that one of the most critical components of an authoritative online presence is polished, precise, and properly-researched writing. There are hundreds of plug-ins, websites, and revision software options available to ensure that the content you publish is easy to read, grammatically correct, and free of errors.

Grammarly is a tool we like to use to offer clarity, variety, and vocabulary checks for the content we create for ourselves and our clients. However, another important component to Grammarly is its plagiarism check. Google’s algorithm is advanced enough to recognize plagiarized content, and copied information will hurt your rankings. Utilizing a tool like Grammarly to check for duplicate data, or to suggest edits for original content, can creating quality content that much easier.

The Importance of SEO Tools

Although there are thousands of SEO tools that you could use to build your business, we believe that these three are a great place to start in your mission to create a strong digital marketing strategy. As your business grows, you will find what works for you and the tools that best help you optimize your online profiles. We recognize that building and maintaining a domain can be challenging, but utilizing these three tools can make it easier.