3 essential SEO tools you need to get started with organic search

In our latest webinar, our CEO and Founder John Readman was joined by Modo25’s Head of SEO, Pete Boucher to discuss whether you still need an SEO agency, or whether it’s a team effort between an agency and inhouse.

John quizzed our inhouse expert Pete on essential tools you need to get started with organic search. Here’s what he recommends.

This great free service from Google. All you need to do to access your data is to connect your domain. If you already have a Google Analytics account, this automatically authorises your account.

If you don’t have this setup, it’s important to verify your account and domain for Google Search Console to work effectively. You will need a developer to input code on your website to allow Google to crawl your website.

In Search Console, the Crawl Stats report shows you statistics about Google’s crawling history on your website. For instance, how many requests were made and when and if there are any issues. 

More importantly, Search Console feeds you site insights based on search queries and phrases. A key feature in this platform is understanding how many people a month are seeing your website in search results and clicking through. Ultimately, you can optimise your website based on those phrases.

Screaming Frog is a popular tool used in digital marketing. It’s essentially a website crawler that allows for analysing and auditing technical and on-page SEO.

Through Screaming Frog, you can simulate how Google is crawling your site. You can optimise key pages to make sure they are found on a search and identify areas on your website that require work.

Within Screaming Frog, you can connect other SEO tools to the platform, integrations including PageSpeed Insights, Google Analytics and SEO Spider.

Ahrefs’ tools help you to improve your overall SEO performance on your website. Ahrefs provides valuable keyword research data, which will show the top 100 keywords ideas when a user inputs any seed keyword or phrase from Ahrefs’ database – which includes 10 billion keywords and phrases taken from across over 170 countries.

Ahrefs’ SERP Checker includes vital SEO metrics including referring domains, number of backlinks, and the estimated traffic search.

The Ahrefs dashboard shows the top 100 backlinks to any webpage or website. As well as this, it also includes the five most linked pages, the most common anchor texts, the total amount of backlinks, and Domain Ratings (DR) and URL Rating (UR) scores.

You can also connect Google Search Console to Ahrefs, and you can see your Google data within their dashboard for free.

If you would like a free SEO audit, get in touch with our team by sending us an email at team@modo25.com. We don’t just do the work for you. Our ongoing SEO training gives your team the chance to pick our SEO specialists’ brains and learn from our experience.

Our next panel discussion will be around Google’s new platform, GA4 – is your data and tracking ready? Join our CEO and Lead Data Scientist Michael Thompson to discuss the imminent changes and how to use GA4 effectively. Sign up here.