I often get asked what Tools and Resources I use on a daily or weekly basis, both as a Digital Marketer and as a Blogger. So I thought it would be useful to create this resources page for all of your SEO and Digital Marketing needs. As I learn of more, I will update references on this page – I’d advise bookmarking this page for your reference and convenience. Have fun!
Disclosure: Please note that some of the below resources are affiliate links, these do not cost you a penny, I earn a small commission if you make a purchase through those links. It is important to note that to recommend a company below I will have used that company or website for months or years, I find them helpful and recommend them. The ONLY reason these are affiliate links are so that IF you decide to buy something to help you achieve your goal I get a small kickback, this helps keep SEOAndy running & free.
Recommended SEO Tools
As a reader of SEOAndy this is probably the bit you were looking for. I often find myself recommending these in conversation and email, I use them because they make my life easier – I am sure they will with yours too.
SEO Reporting Tools
Analytics SEO
This is a tool that has saved my bacon. Ultimately having used many of the tools below and as a lover of Big Data I needed more than the below could offer. Analytics SEO offers this data and in any form you could wish for, from CSV to PDF and PowerPoint presentations. If you’re an agency, you can white label it and clients won’t know it’s not your own system. It also comes with a handy task tracking system, which means that you can check billable time for your team and allows you to estimate times for projects – it makes you and your team more productive. If you work alone, it starts at only £19 a month and for all the data and help you get it’s amazing. Unsure what a task is, click it, it tells you how to deal with it. Ultimately I love Analytics SEO.
SumAll – It’s FREE!
A new kid to the block is SumAll. SumAll offers you multi-level detail across multiple platforms that you use. For instance you can connect your Google Analytics Data, Twitter and Facebook Data, MailChimp Data and Google Adsense info together in one place and one graph. This means you can see how your tweets affect visits, how many clicks your ads get after social media updates, whether visits increase as your update social media and how effective your emails really are. It can also do much more, there are more platforms added every month and as it’s free I highly recommend giving SumAll a try, it takes only a few minutes to set up.
Microsoft SEO Toolkit – It’s FREE!
The FREE Microsoft SEO Toolkit with its detailed analysis and search engine friendly suggestions helps improve the relevance of your website in search results right away. It of course requires you to have a windows PC to run from and can be slow if your internet isn’t speedy, but the results are fantastic and guidance it gives helpful. Give this SEO Toolkit a try.
Any More?
There are plenty more tools I could recommend, including: Moz (formerly SEOMoz), RavenTools, MajesticSEO and there are online “quick check tools” like QuickSprout, WooRank and Marketing Grader (hubspot grader) which are all worth a Google.
The Best SEO Blogs… and Marketing Blogs
These are my regular reads, I also have niche blogs I read so if you are looking in a certain industry give me a shout on twitter @andykinsey and I will point you in the right direction.
The Moz Blog (SEOMoz)
This is one of my very regular reads, its constantly updated – I should point out it is Very Technical at times, so if you just want the “grasp an idea” this isn’t the place to go. The level of insight from this blog is amazing, also check out the “youmoz” blog too, it written by members of the site and often easier to follow if you aren’t a data geek.
State of Digital
Offering a good mix of news and technique, SoD offers valuable insight for readers of all experience levels. Lots of industry experts write for State of Digital from many areas of the marketing world – great oversight.
Search Engine Land
If you are looking for the latest news from the SEO world then this is the place to go, its often first on a story and updates them where possible. Also check out the sister site marketing land, which does much the same but for marketing in general.
More of these great blogs…
Also checkout other great blogs: Distilled, SEOBook, Search Engine Roundtable & eConsultancy.
What Makes SEOAndy?
This is a common question and so I wanted to tell you who I use and recommend for various services that we use at SEOAndy, and on some client sites too.
WordPress CMS
I use a “self-hosted” versions of the popular open-source CMS WordPress. It’s Free to use for anyone with hosting and is what I would advise for the majority of blogs and very simple websites.
Web Hosting – SWBroadband
Over the past many years I’ve used lots of hosting providers, none have quite delivered the service they promised at sale – except one. SWBroadband, based in the UK, offer great hosting, great customer service and are without doubt the best hosting company I have ever dealt with. I run a custom virtual server (VPS) with SWB, running WHM cPanel. I’ve plenty of customisations with the needs of SEOAndy as it’s grows and SWB help with these a lot. Give SWB a shout on twitter @swbroadband you’ll see how amazing they are.
SEO Plugin – YoastSEO
I won’t go on about my love of the Yoast SEO Plugin for wordpress, but suffice to say I love it and so do my clients, it deliver amazing things with as much or as little effort as you want to put in.