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It can be difficult to keep your ecommerce site running smoothly. We don’t mean your Magento platform – our developers make sure everything is top-notch with our support program. We’re talking about your marketing and SEO processes. Gauging success and finding the right data can be daunting. There are so many SEO and marketing tools out there – how do you know which ones are worth your time or money?

We’ll let you in on the tools we use day-to-day to improve our own SEO and marketing efforts. Most of these tools have a free option that supports just enough metrics for monitoring one site. Many of these tools also have a paid option that is definitely worth the price if you’re interested in custom dashboards and long-term tracking. Let’s take a look at some really great resources that can make your KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) that much easier to find.

Site Crawls With Screaming Frog

If you’re a reader of our blog, you know we’ve mentioned the site crawler, Screaming Frog, quite a few times. That’s because we love this tool! Their SEO spider tool crawls your site (or a competitor’s site) for internal and external links, response codes, URI parameters, page elements, H-tags, and more.

The SEO spider is the perfect tool for performing a technical site crawl. Here, you can catch things that may not be so obvious on the front end of your site. Things like hidden 404 response codes (page not found) and stubborn 302 codes (temporary redirect) that you may have forgotten about are brought to the forefront again. You also have the power to explore your page elements by length, either under or over industry recommended lengths.

At ParadoxLabs, we use the free version. The free download is really robust enough to give us the information we’re looking for. Screaming Frog does offer a paid license – this does not have the 500 URI limit and allows you to look into the source code of any website. If you’re looking for an even more powerful crawler, buying a license would be a worthwhile investment.

Link Data With Moz

At ParadoxLabs, we love Moz. This SEO company has become a leader in the industry – providing practices and tools that are at the top of the market. Moz offers many, many tools to improve your SEO efforts. We love their Open Site Explorer tool in particular – this offers an in-depth look into a site’s link metrics. It pulls everything from authority indicators, domain metrics, and social metrics to internal and external links that can be grouped by domain to make audits that much easier.

Moz’s powerful tools don’t end with Open Site Explorer. They also have tools for web mentions, link opportunities, rank trackers, on-page graders, crawl testers, and a local listing platform. The diversity and power of these tools make a Moz subscription a priceless investment.

These start at $99 per month – the price is dependent on how many campaigns you’re looking to track. For one site, and maybe a few of your competitors, the $99 package does the job. The monthly cost really pays for itself – you’ll receive a custom dashboard just for your site. Moz will then send weekly emails with crawl updates, recommendations, rankings, and outstanding issues to bring to your attention.

Keyword Research With SEMrush

SEMrush is our favorite tool for lots of great keyword data. They use their own spiders to scrape millions of search results for keyword rankings. This is so useful after Google’s crackdown on providing keyword data. “Not provided” has taken away over 80% of our keyword data reported by Google. So, SEMrush built their own spider to gather this useful information.

With this tool, you’ll be able to get an idea of how many of your keywords rank within the top 20 of Google. Remember, keyword rankings are no longer the most important metric, but it is useful to get an estimation of where your most valuable keywords land. In addition to your own rankings, you’ll be able to dive into competitors. You’ll be able to see other sites compared to yours, based on your root domain, or even a keyword. Here, you’ll also be able to research the CPC (cost per click) and SV (search volume) of keywords for writing content, optimizing pages, and more.

We use a paid version of SEMrush at ParadoxLabs. This is not to say that the free option of this tool isn’t useful. Though you are limited to the depth of results and certain metrics, it does give you a good idea of keywords and competitors. If you do a lot of keyword research, or would like to discover new competitors, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.

Social Management with Hootsuite

Since we explored a lot of technical tools, we thought we’d include our favorite social marketing tool. Hootsuite is a social manager and scheduler. This awesome tool allows you to add your social profiles into a seamlessly integrated dashboard. You’ll be able to schedule posts to all or some of your social networks on your dashboard – choosing the perfect day and time for each to be posted. This is a huge time saver if you’re committed to posting on your social accounts regularly.

Hootsuite is such a helpful tool if you struggle to find time to curate and accurately post on your social platforms. We find their free tool is great for personal or small business use – you can add up to 3 social profiles. You’ll have basic options in the free version, but this is all you really need if you’re just starting out.

They also have a Pro package for only $9.99 per month. With this program, you can add many more profiles. You’ll also have access to more analytics and insights that can help with ideal posting times and insights about your most engaging posts. We love this program at ParadoxLabs. It allows us to keep all of our social profiles in one place and saves us a ton of time!

We hope letting you peek inside our toolbox was helpful! At ParadoxLabs, we understand it can be difficult to juggle your SEO and marketing tasks. That’s why we offer SEO services so you can make the most out of your site.