As a digital marketeer, having the right set of tools can make all the difference when managing SEO, advertising, and website health. Whether I’m optimizing landing pages or tracking keyword performance, I rely on several key tools every day to stay ahead of the competition. Today, I want to share five essential tools I use daily, which streamline my workflow and improve my campaigns.
1. NordVPN: Checking Google Ads in Different Countries
One of the trickiest parts of running Google Ads campaigns is ensuring they perform well across different regions and countries. Sometimes, your ad’s performance can vary due to location-specific factors, like cultural differences or local regulations. This is where NordVPN becomes indispensable.
With NordVPN, I can connect to different servers across the globe and view Google Ads as if I were in that specific country. This allows me to spot-check ad placements, keyword targeting, and overall visibility. It’s also great for evaluating competitors’ ads in real-time and making strategic adjustments accordingly. Without a reliable VPN, I’d be stuck with a skewed perspective, limited to just my home country’s Google results.
2. Ahrefs: Tracking Keyword Rankings, Off-Page SEO, and Opportunities
When it comes to SEO, Ahrefs is my daily go-to tool. It provides a comprehensive suite of features to help me monitor keyword rankings, analyze off-page SEO efforts, and uncover new opportunities for growth.
On a daily basis, I rely on Ahrefs to:
- Track keyword rankings: By monitoring keyword performance, I can make data-driven adjustments to my SEO strategy, ensuring my site climbs the SERPs.
- Check backlink profiles: Building a strong backlink profile is essential for off-page SEO, and Ahrefs provides detailed insights into who’s linking to my site and how valuable those links are.
- Identify content gaps: Ahrefs’ content gap analysis helps me spot untapped keyword opportunities and refine content to capture more organic traffic.
Having Ahrefs in my toolbox gives me a solid understanding of both my own SEO progress and what my competitors are doing, making it an invaluable tool for long-term success.
3. Redirect Path: Ensuring Clean Landing Page Redirects
Whenever I’m working on new landing pages, one of my main concerns is whether there are any unnecessary redirects that could slow down page speed, strip my UTM tags which messes with my GA4 tracking or confuse search engines. This is where the Redirect Path tool comes in handy.
Redirect Path is a simple yet powerful Chrome extension that checks if your landing pages have any 301, 302, or other types of redirects in place. It highlights any potential issues, allowing me to quickly resolve them before they negatively affect the user experience or SEO. By using this tool daily, I ensure that every landing page is free from unnecessary redirects, which helps maintain fast load times and a seamless user experience.
4. Check My Links: Identifying Broken Links Quickly
Broken links are a major issue when it comes to SEO and user experience. A single broken link can lead to frustrated users, lost conversions, and lower search rankings. That’s why I use the Check My Links Chrome plugin every day when optimizing landing pages.
Check My Links scans through all the links on a webpage and highlights any broken or problematic ones in red, making it easy to fix them before the page goes live. This tool saves me from the tedious process of manually checking each link, ensuring that all paths lead to where they should and that my landing pages are error-free.
5. Screaming Frog: Comprehensive SEO Audits
No SEO toolkit is complete without Screaming Frog. This powerful crawler tool allows me to perform in-depth audits of websites, ensuring every technical aspect of SEO is covered. It checks everything from metadata and canonical tags to duplicate content and broken images.
On a daily basis, I use Screaming Frog to:
- Identify site errors: Issues like 404s, server errors, or missing metadata can hurt both user experience and SEO. Screaming Frog highlights these problems for me so I can fix them quickly.
- Check crawlability and indexing: I make sure that all important pages are being indexed correctly by search engines, while any unnecessary ones are blocked by robots.txt or noindex tags.
- Analyze site architecture: Understanding the structure of a website helps me ensure a smooth flow of link equity, while also improving user navigation.
The detailed reports Screaming Frog generates are invaluable for keeping my website optimized and search-engine friendly.