SEO Resources

Web Analytics Tools

Overview: These free and paid tools allow you to track what keywords are sending you traffic, what keywords are profitable, and what keywords lose money. As soon as you start tracking results your campaigns get more efficient because you start focusing on the results.

Tracking where you already rank does not alert you to potential areas of opportunity that you have not yet focused on, but if you track conversions you know what those keywords are worth, and it is easier to rank for keywords related to words you already rank well for than it is to rank for a whole new basket of keywords.

At the bottom of this page is a free video about using web analytics tools.

Free Analytics Tools

These tend to be limited in feature set and give themselves sitewide links on your site, or require you to trust giving a major search engine like Google virtually all your marketing data.

• Google Analytics – powerful full featured analytics tool. Even allows you to track your ROI by keyword for each AdWords ad position. Google AdWords also has internal split testing and conversion tracking software.
• Google Website Optimizer – allows you to A/B split test landing pages and track how well Google AdWords traffic converts.
• Microsoft adCenter Analytics – not publicly launched yet, but accepting invite requests.
• Piwik – open source web analytics program
• Site Meter – starts off as free, but charges for advanced features
• Stat Counter – starts off as free, but charges for advanced features and bandwith usage.
• Webalizer – default log analyzer on many servers.
• Analog – default log analyzer on many servers.
• Awstats – another popular default log analyzer on many servers.

Cheap Paid Analytics Tools

• Clicky – cheap web based tool similar to Google Analytics. A few less features, but you are not giving all your data to Google either. Also offers a cheap white label analytics package convenient for SEO firms looking to add another revenue stream to their businesses.
• Mint – affordable downloadable analytics program that you set up on your own server. Unlike most other paid analytics programs in Mint does not track conversions.

Affordable Business Analytics Tools

• ClickTracks – Downloadable software and hosted options. Starting at $99 a month.
• Indextools – Starts at $50 a month.
• Weblog Expert – Downloadable log analyzer. Starts at $75.

Expensive / Premium Tools

• Omniture
• VisualSciences / WebSideStory
• WebTrends

Keyword Research & Suggestion Tools

Overview: These are free and paid tools which will help you find which keywords to target and how competitive they are. Here is a video offering an introduction to keyword research

At the bottom of this page are a link to a free keyword research PDF and a few more free background videos about understanding keyword research and using keyword research tools.

Traditional Keyword Suggestion Tools

• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – tool shows top keyword phrases from Wordtracker.
• Wordtracker Free Keywords – free keyword suggestions from Wordtracker. Wordtracker also has a more advanced paid version, and sells top keyword reports.
• Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool – recommends keywords based on a keyword you enter or a URL you have the tool analyze
• Google Suggest Tool – shows frequently search for phrases starting with the words and letters in your query. grab the source code
• Keyword Discovery – free keyword tool from Trellian. Trellian also has a more advanced paid version of Keyword Discovery.
• Microsoft Keyword Forecast – shows predicted Microsoft search impression count and historical trends.
• Wordze – nice for generating decently large keyword lists quickly and inserting them into paid search campaigns.
• Yahoo! Search Marketing – Yahoo! has a keyword research tool inside their platform. It is really bad marketing of them to only have the new tool accessible inside their platform, while neglecting their old keyword tool.

Keyword Valuation Tools

• Google Traffic Estimator – shows the estimated bids prices and ad clicks for the top ranked AdWords ad. Allows you to check for [exact match], “phrase match”, or broad match.

Free Internet Marketing & Search Engine Marketing Competitive Research Tools

Overview: These are free and paid tools which will help you determine how large a competitor’s traffic stream is, and which search terms are sending them the most traffic. Watch this video for a brief introduction to using the following tools.

Competitive research tools can help you find a baseline for what to do, but some companies that focus on the competition too much instead of adding value to their offerings actually end up destroying their own profit margins.

SEO for Firefox

SEO for Firefox – Import useful marketing data (like link details, site age, site size) right into Google and Yahoo search results.

General Competitive Research Tools

• Alexa – shows traffic trends for competing websites. Alexa has a heavy webmaster bias that is nowhere near as noticeable at Compete or Quantcast.
• Compete.com – shows you traffic trends for competing websites. Allows you to compare sites head to head. Also offers a paid search analytics tool which is both exceptionally useful and affordably priced.
• Quantcast – shows site traffic and demographic trends and details. Also allows you to download a list of their top 1,000,000 websites.
• Google Trends for Websites – free tool from Google showing traffic estimates, visitor country location, top 10 related websites, and top 10 related keywords. Only returns data for fairly high traffic websites though.
• Google Search Insights – shows keyword trends, hot keywords by cateogry, and top geographic regions for a keyword.
• Archive.org – see how old a website is and what it looked like in the past
• DomainTools – see Whois data and how many times a domain has changed hands
• SearchStatus – highlights nofollow links, shows PageRank, shows Alexa rank, and provides links to some backlink information
• Xinu – lists some SEO related data plus more general web related data points like Alexa ranking and Del.icio.us bookmarks.

Paid Competitive Research Tools

• Compete.com Search Analytics – low cost competitive tool showing keywords that send competing sites the most traffic.
• HitWise – similar to Compete.com Search Analytics, but costs about $10,000 and up.
• KeyCompete – shows keywords that competitors are buying
• KeywordSpy – similar to KeyCompete, but with more data – including cached ad copy and affiliate data
• SEMPhonic – tracks keyword rankings and provides competitive reporting
• SpyFu – shows terms that competitors are buying or ranking for in the organic search results.
• Trellian Competitive Intelligence – shows keywords that competitors rank for and keywords that send them significant traffic.

SEO Related General Competitive Research Tools

• IndexRank – scores how well your site is getting indexed in Google compared with related sites.
• SearchRascal – shows the top 10 rankings in Google and other major search engines, and tracks how the rankings have changed over the past day, week, or month. RankPulse offers a similar service, but for a smaller set of keywords.
• SEODigger – free tool which shows you keywords that a site ranks for out of a database of 44,000,000 keywords
• SEOMoz Page Strength Tool – estimates how strong a page is based on inbound links, age, PageRank, etc. Grabs some of the similar datapoints that SEO for Firefox grabs.
• Top 10 analysis tool – shows how your site’s age and backlinks compare to the top 10 ranked sites
• URLTrends – shows a sample of keywords that a site ranks for using a database somewhat smaller than SEODigger

Research the Competition’s Keyword Strategy

View our keyword research tools section, or use some of the following free tools to get a view of their keyword strategy.

• Keyword Density Analysis Tool – finds common words and phrases on your site, or competing websites.
• Page Comparison Tool – tool compares the page titles, meta information, and most common two and three word phrases between different pages. grab the source code