Which SEO Tool is Suitable for Your Company?

The most important tool for SEOs is the head. Then comes the browser (with the Dev-Tools). Then there is a long gap. And then other tools come along that are capable of shaping the SEO measures and tactics of the SEO strategy determined with a clever approach and ensuring their implementation.

But: Not every SEO in every company considers the same SEO tools to be of equal importance. As an SEO consultant, Johan von Hülsen works with many different tools and wants to help you include the right SEO tools in your selection.

The basis: The free SEO tools (from Google, Bing and others)

Basically, there is no way around the Google Search Console (and the Bing Webmaster Tools). Here you get data that no one else has. They are free. So it's a no-brainer.

There are also other extremely good free SEO tools, that can make your life easier: PageSpeed Insights for example, the Rich Results Testing Tool or a whole battery of SEO browser plugins for various purposes, or a software like Quaro.

What types of SEO tools are there?

The tools you need for your company can be divided into three groups:

• Crawlers: You need to regularly crawl your own and other sites to:
  • capture the structure of the site
  • identify technical problems
  • check whether all content is accessible
• SERP scrapers: A tool that retrieves Keywords and gives you information which domain ranks for which terms, is extremely helpful to
  • monitor competitors and market development
  • trace changes in search results over time
  • Help you with Keyword Research.
• Special tools: Whether your focus is on content, tech-SEO, news-SEO, international SEO or Offpage: There are specialized tools for each of these groups.

How does your SEO strategy influence your tool selection?

You probably need at least one tool from each group. At least? Yes. Depending on the level of your activities, you will need special functions of individual providers. And your SEO strategy and domain size influence your tool selection:

Focus on content

If your focus is clearly on content, you not only need excellent support in identifying the right keywords (the right keywords do not necessarily have particularly high search volume, but a high business value and excellent conversion data), but also support in writing content or creating content briefings for colleagues or service providers.

Focus on internationalization

If internationalization is relevant for you, you should not only make sure that your crawler can validate HREFLANG attributes. In the selection of your SERP scraping tools and your content tools, you must ensure that they not only have good keyword coverage in different languages, but also support besides Google the other search engines relevant in your target markets (Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Seznam, …).

Focus on technology and structure

If technical excellence and outstanding information architecture are essential pillars of your SEO strategy, you will need to give serious thought to your crawler selection. There are very different configuration and export functions. But above all there are crawlers that try to structure and prioritize problems. If you are technically oriented, you will probably be happier with a tool that focuses as much as possible on raw data and leaves the analysis and interpretation to you.

Focus on Backlinks

If your focus is on backlinks, then your first task is again to use the most important tool of an SEO and to consider how sustainable your strategy approach will be. Secondly, you will need to think about how you can best distribute the incoming link power. The quality of your website crawling tools' internal linking reports is particularly important for this.

Of course, there are also tools from the Link Building area. But I can't tell you anything about them, because we rarely work with them at Wingmen.

How does your domain / company size affect your SEO tool selection?

If you have a larger website in front of you, then a crawler becomes more important. You can no longer know every content and a technical error becomes much more dangerous because it affects your entire website.

Tips on SEO tool selection when your website is really large

If you are managing a website with a few thousand or hundred thousand URLs, then all crawlers can handle it well. When it comes to millions of URLs, different crawling solutions start to falter. These order of magnitudes are quickly reached, however. Do you not only need to check internal resources, but also external pages that you link to, for example? Do you need to regularly check the images? This can be supported by a software like Quaro.

Another important aspect: The segmentation of pages. You can't always read everything from the URL that you want to know about the URL: Is it about certain topics? Does the URL contain a video? A certain integration? Who wrote the content? What is the cost of the product? How many products are on the category page?

The larger the page, the more important it becomes that the crawler does not simply crawl, but also helps you to better understand the page structure. Audisto has certainly the edge in this area, but you can also teach other crawlers the right tricks with custom extractions or custom snippets.

For monitoring performance, I find the Search Console segments of Ryte very helpful on larger sites. Here you can see at a glance whether your product pages or certain keyword groups have won or lost.

But with Lumar we have also already been able to crawl really large pages without major problems.

Tips on SEO tool selection when your website is going to grow

If the website is (still) smaller, then the focus will be less on a crawler. Perhaps a monitor from ContentKing will alert you when errors occur, but otherwise the focus is on content.

If you work in the German market, there is no way around Termlabs.io. Internationally, the tools are then rather thin.

Also essential: A tool for market observation, which supports you in the research of new keywords and helps you to reconstruct the change in your most important SERPs. Semrush for example, offers you monthly screenshots of the SERPs of a keyword. Sistrix on the other hand shows you the structure of the search results on a weekly basis and allows you to very accurately recognize changes in the composition of the results. Both SEO tools help you a lot to get to the bottom of changes in ranking or CTR.

What SEO tools are available on the market?

Who are (exemplary) players for the respective categories and what distinguishes them (in our opinion)?

SEO tools for SERP scraping

Germany is the country of SERP scrapers. Since SISTRIX developed the Visibility Index, much has happened:

• Sistrix: The industry standard in Germany. Developed in Bonn and the oldest German SEO tool of this category. You will find many SEOs who have worked with SISTRIX. Data and tool are constantly evolving. And even after years of use, you always discover new features. SISTRIX is modular and you can add individual modules (for example the link module) as needed. Each module has cost 100€ per month for a long time.

As soon as you enter a keyword in Sistrix, you will receive a dashboard under Overview.

• Searchmetrics: The second major German visibility tool. A bit like a counter draft to Sistrix. From the beginning, Searchmetrics was more focused on growth and internationalization. In recent years, Searchmetrics has tried to speed up the briefing process with the Content Experience Platform. Searchmetrics mainly targets enterprise customers (also in terms of pricing).
• Also from Germany comes XOVI. Xovi positions itself primarily as a cheap beginner's variant.
• Metrics.Tools is also relatively cheap, but above all focuses on as much configuration and customization options as possible. The metrics.tools focus most strongly on the functional core and try to do it really well.

The international SEO tools: Especially Semrush and Ahrefs have also many followers in Germany. ahrefs is especially known for a large backlink index. SEMrush, on the other hand, tries particularly to highlight operationalization insights and support you in local SEO.

Honorable Mentions: BrightEdge, Cognitive SEO, Moz Pro, Mangools

SEO tools for crawling

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the industry standard. The team from the UK has set up a fantastic desktop tool for your own computer with an unbeatable price. The innovative power of Screaming Frog is enormous. A feature that I miss with all other crawlers is the link classification. What is also very nice: You can watch the Frog at work. You see when the crawler gets lost in areas, can react and „just do a crawl“ is nowhere as relaxed as with the Screaming Frog. And you probably don't get as close to the raw data with any other crawler. But: As a desktop tool, the crawling performance depends on your computer and your internet connection. And even when the crawl is finished, the exports are sometimes slow. The advantage and disadvantage at the same time: The Screaming Frog does not do any evaluation and prioritization of errors. It just collects data and you evaluate it. What beginners find demanding, experts appreciate: The tool leaves me in the driver's seat. Also used and liked quite often: The functions for custom extraction of site components. Prices of competitors? Number of reviews of certain products? Distribution of the manufacturers in a shop's product range: All no problem with the Frog at your side.
• Ryte is as a crawler more on the other side in many places. Captain OnPage takes you by the hand and shows you where the problems are. The problems are explained and Ryte helps you prioritize and make the tickets for the IT understandable. Many evaluations you can put together in the tool and don't have to export the data. What I also appreciate very much: Ryte is not a pure SEO crawler. The evaluation of third-party scripts and reference to GDPR compliance can be worth a lot of money.

A comparison of the keyword segments in Ryte.

• Audisto is the extremely helpful nerd that you never wanted to have by your side. Audisto doesn't forgive you a single technical error and puts his finger in the wound until the bug is fixed. Through the focus on internet standards and the professional knowledge that meets you, Audisto is the perfect companion to get your IT in order and to stimulate the play instinct in developers. Having no errors in Audisto is more difficult than achieving a 100 Score in Google's PageSpeed Insights. But Audisto is also enormously strong in discovering suggestions for improvement in your site architecture and internal linking. If you have more than 100,000 URLs, you should definitely have tested Audisto. Downside: The Audisto perfectionism seems to still be in the way of JavaScript crawling. While all others can do JavaScript crawling, Audisto is still in development to bring it as close to the Google bot as possible. As soon as this is added, the moment has come to invite the nerd for a visit again.
• Sitebulb is catching up. Sitebulb meets one more and more in the last years. Sitebulb has some great features and brings a lot of life into the booth. Sitebulb wants to take you by the hand and is probably the most colorful crawler. So far, I haven't warmed up to the tips yet, but then again I generally don't like being told how to prioritize my SEO tickets!
• The 3 Template Clones Lumar, Botify and OnCrawl. Okay. That's not really fair. But the three look completely the same to me. That doesn't mean they have the same features, though. Lumar has a fairly large fan base and I have always enjoyed working with the tool. For SEOs, for whom Audisto is too nerdy and Ryte or Sitebulb are too overconfident with prioritization, the three may be an alternative as hosted crawlers.

SEO tools for briefings and content specialists

As an SEO from the tech and strategy corner, the content tools are naturally not as close to me as the crawlers and visibility tools. But especially if you work with German content, there are two candidates you should definitely take a look at:

• Termlabs.io is the German content nerd. Without training you won't get far, but once you've worked your way in, Termlabs has the potential to become your content all-in-one weapon. Termlabs has its own corpus, based on which language analyses of your content are carried out: Which terms / tonalities should you use more often? Is the content cleanly structured and are facets missing that the competition mentions in the content? Main problem: If you work internationally, then you lack the power of the tool when switching to other languages / markets.
• Textanalyse Premium by Wortliga is the little German teacher while writing. Here the sentence becomes too long, there too complicated. Here is a passive and above all: Grammar? Typos? Of course, automated recommendations are always just a suggestion for the editorial staff, but the word league text analysis is doing a great job there.

Similar approaches as by Termlabs or Wordleague you can find but in different depth in almost all SEO tools. If you just want to check a content once, then the tools from Sistrix, Ryte and Co. might already be enough to write better SEO texts.

A special mention deserves Searchmetrics at this point. For large sites that want to produce a large volume of content, the Searchmetrics Content Experience is worth a look. The content suite aims to accompany the lifecycle of a content from briefing to go-live. You have a keyword research tool and an editor at hand. But above all a possibility to map the process: This briefing is created and goes to Rita Editorial. Rita wrote the text and gave it to review, etc.

Spontaneously Scompler comes to my mind, which offers this in a similar form, but with even more focus on the process and the entire online marketing - less related to the SEO briefing.

In the english market the world looks different again. Here the NLP/Machine-Learning approaches reign, which are not yet really ready for the market in German and help with the content creation. Thruuu and Frase you should look at. If you look for an alternative to Wortliga for English, then hemingwayapp.com is a nice free solution.

If it goes with you about more than English and German, then there is almost hardly an alternative to the classical SEO tools (Sistrix, Searchmetrics, Moz, etc.).

SEO tools for monitoring

SEOs can never do enough monitoring. And yet it happens too rarely. And just the new error which costs 10% performance, has somehow sneaked past the testing. But that's no reason to leave it completely, because you still discover surprisingly many errors.

An SEO monitoring tool is still useful even if the tech team already has clean unit tests. So let's take a look at which SEO monitoring tools we have:

• ContentKing is not so well known in Germany, but a very relaxed life insurance: Configure domain, link with GSC, disable a few error messages that are not errors and already the monitoring is running and reports if something is broken. ContentKingApp is less flexible than the other solutions, but that doesn't have to be. Better a less configurable monitoring that discovers many errors than no monitoring at all because you don't have time to configure the tool. ContentKingApp selects based on the performance data which URLs should be monitored especially intensively.
• Testomato is the classic from Czech Republic. You define the URLs and the Checks completely yourself. Should the URL have an H1? How should it read? How does it look on the next URL? With every error Testomato informs you. The problem: If you have adjusted the H1, then you also have to adjust the Check. But you can test every possible error in the HTML.
• Leankoala is not built for SEOs and I took a very long time to synchronize my thinking with the tool. But then Leankoala is fantastic: It combines parts of the automation of ContentKingApp with the customizability of Testomato. Leankoala can not only render the page, but also test interactions of users. If the checkout in your shop has gone broken once, then Leankoala is the tool you want to use.
• Little Warden App is a small special case. Also here you can define many checks yourself. The sweet spot of Little Warden is the team with the many domains. Little Warden has his strengths there and helps you to renew the SSL in time. Also changes of Titles and Descriptions are covered.
• Other monitoring solutions: Various tools have recognized the problems of lacking monitoring. Searchmetrics for example monitors the availability and indexability of the URLs with the highest visibility. Audisto has a monitoring module that continuously monitors your site for errors.

Conclusion: Which SEO tools are the right ones for you?

You see: There is a very wide range of SEO tools and depending on your individual needs and priorities, the decision looks different. The first important thing is not for which tool you decide, but which tool group can best support your SEO strategy. And the definition of the strategy can't be taken away from you by any tool. This is mental work. So we arrive at the most important tool of an SEO: the head.

Once you have found the right tool class, then you need to test. Personal preference is important, collaboration options/sub-accounts as well. Above all, you should already be able to derive valuable recommendations for action during the test. The rule of thumb applies: Every hour in the tool should at least lead to three hours of work on your site. And with this rule of thumb, the cost point quickly becomes less relevant, because you know that you generate actions from this tool that justify the price. A tool that does not generate any actions, you should not have in your tool chain.

My tip, therefore: Take a closer look at the 2-3 favored SEO tools for each area as you see fit. Often there are test accounts or even webinars in which the tool and its features are introduced in more detail. Don't hesitate to bombard the providers with questions you have at this stage - because that already shows how they will handle it later when you contact them as a customer with problems and desires. Write down what you liked and what bothered you and then make a decision after 1-2 weeks of intensive testing.