Did you know that mastering SEO Tools doesn’t have to be complex?

To show you, we’ve interviewed three SEO Tools experts to give you their opinion and viewpoint on how to be successful with SEO Tools.

From scaling to fine tuning, we hope you enjoy this deep dive.

Subscribe to BoostSauce to learn even more marketing and sales knowledge, faster…

When it comes to SEO Tools, there are only a few people we turn to for amazing advice that works across the board for different goals.

Whether you’re in SaaS, eCommerce, or lead gen, you’ll be excited to learn that the recipes these experts will share will all help you hit your goals faster.

 

   

Including The Following Guests:

 

Dan Shure: Owner @ Evolving SEO

SEO consultant for companies (past and present) like WGBH (Boston’s NPR), PBS FRONTLINE, Harvard Business Review, ButcherBox, Zappos, Primal Kitchen, Sumo and more. Podcast Host and Producer of ‘Experts on the Wire’ (now over half a million downloads!), Musician, occasional Speaker (Social Media Marketing World, Content Marketing World, SMX, ContentJam, Agents of Change). My content has appeared on sites like Drift.com, Moz, The Next Web, Entrepreneurs on Fire and more!

Nuggets Dropped x63

“Many businesses and clients try to rank the wrong page for the wrong thing.”

Brian Dean: Founder @ Backlinko

Brian Dean has been called an “SEO genius” by Entrepreneur.com and a “brilliant entrepreneur” by Inc Magazine. Brian’s award-winning blog, Backlinko.com, was listed by Forbes as a top “blog to follow” in 2017. He is an SEO expert and the founder of the Backlinko blog and YouTube channel. Success Magazine has referred to Brian as “the world’s foremost expert on search engine optimization” due to the influence of his blog, which reaches over 2.5 million people every year.

Nuggets Dropped x40

“I can say with confidence that I’ve tried more SEO tools than anyone else out there.”

Rob Bucci: VP Research & Development @ Moz

Rob is the founder and CEO of STAT Search Analytics. He’s been a developer and entrepreneur in the SEO space since 2005, and he especially loves tackling big-data challenges in data mining and analytics. When he isn’t doing that, you can usually find him falling down a ski hill, splashing in the ocean, or taking cookies out of the oven.

Nuggets Dropped x42

“We want clients to see what their customers see to give them the right data to base their strategies on”

SEO Tools With Dan Shure

Johnathan: All right Dan, can you hear us okay?

Dan: Yes I can.

Johnathan: Awesome.

Sean: Hi there.

Johnathan: Perfect, well you are here in the studio with Sean and I. We’re super excited to talk to you. For the people listening, this is Dan Shure from Evolving SEO.

You and I, Dan, we’ve done some stuff together in the past. And one thing that I was really, really curious about is how you go about research and what you basically do. So tell us about it. Where do you even wanna start?

Dan: Yeah, first I wanna paint the picture as to why this is so important. I think when we’re all doing SEO we want traffic. I’ve seen the Topic choice be like the deal breaker in people getting traffic or not.

You’ve heard it all the time. There’s people out there blogging and they’re going, we’re blogging, we’ve been posting, we have 100 posts, we’ve been doing it for two years, but we’re not getting any traffic or results.

And then you look at their content and maybe the content’s even good, but they’re not talking about topics that people are interested in, or they’re overshooting what they can actually rank for. And so the way that I help all my clients grow their traffic is by identifying the right topics for them to begin with. 

And because of years and years of doing this, thousands of topics later, I’ve developed a way to categorize content types that align with keyword types in a way that I haven’t heard many other people talk about before. And I use this to help brainstorm and help inform my research when it comes to researching topics for clients.

That’s kind of the backstory about why this is so important and how I’ve found it to be so powerful.

So let me give you an example. There’s this specific type of content that I’m sure you’ve seen all the time that I call an object or a thing list.That might be something like piano apps, or business podcasts, or marketing books.

There’s a noun in that keyword that is a thing that people are looking for a sort of, call it a listicle if you want, but it’s a ranked list of things that is the best of this thing.

It might be the best bagels in New York. Whatever that topic is that is a content type that you can begin your key research and think, okay, there’s these common things that exist.

Books, podcasts, conferences, posts, like whatever it is, and you can say okay, I’m gonna take my topic and just mash it together with all of these noun lists. And then I’m gonna start there.

Because I guarantee you, in almost any industry right now, there’s an opportunity probably to publish that podcast list. And even more specifically, the one I always see opportunity around is an Android app list.

We take any topic and do an Android app list and there’s probably opportunity there because, guess what, a lot of people are just creating app lists, for all app for all platforms, iTunes, Android, but not as many people are writing stuff for Android specifically. And they’ve still got good volume.

So it’s just less competition there. So when I go into new clients and I know that there’s these common types of content I can use that to inform my research and I’m usually gonna stumble upon something that has some kind of opportunity to it.

That’s one example, and we can go into a lot more. But that’s kind of the first picture I wanted to paint with a clear example of a content type.

Johnathan: Right, so for me being very, very juvenile in my SEO and content understanding is, I tell Sean, Sean I want more listicles and I want these Keywords to go rank, for example. And then Sean magically makes it happen. But you’re saying there’s another way to go about that, especially if things are very, very competitive in that world that you’re trying to compete in.

Dan: Yeah, I mean, with all types of content if you can find a specific topic that no one has really answered a question around or written an article around and you can be the most relevant specific result, in many cases you’re gonna outrank something that might be higher authority, but less specific. 

For example, today I was just doing research and I just tweeted about it. I found a very, kind of old piece of content on not a great website ranking for “string height Stratocaster.” That’s a guitar for anybody that isn’t familiar.

Johnathan: Oh, I was like, what?

Dan: Yeah, and this is a pretty decent volume search query. There’s other sites ranking that are super high demand authority. They’re even competing with Stratocaster, themselves.

Yet, this lower authority site ranks because just not many people have talked about that specific question. So relevance is a big thing that anybody can leverage, no matter what type of  content it is.

The reason why I categorize content by the different content types is because it’s really important in SEO to match your document, or your content, with the intent of the keyword. I’ve seen many, many, many businesses and clients, I hear the chicken noise, thanks for that.

But many, many businesses and clients trying to rank the wrong page for the wrong thing. I think a real concrete example is, let’s say I wanna rank for shoes. I’m not gonna use an article to rank for a search like that because the search intent is likely to purchase shoes. So I’m gonna want a category or something with an e-commerce result. But that applies to content, as well.

Let’s take another type of content category, which might just be, what I call, a topic subject or concept. This is a broad word where there’s no intent specified.

So it might be something, like marketing, where it might be a topic I researched lately called privileged access management, or audiogram, this is all just a topic with no context behind the search query.

And the mistake many people make with those is they take something like marketing and they  try to write something super specific, like business marketing strategies 2019, or whatever, and  it’s way too specific and it totally misses the mark for satisfying a broad search query intent.

And so this entire approach is really important because if you start thinking about these different types of topics, you can match the right content when you execute against that topic.

I actually, the one I just talked about, the type that is just a subject or a concept like marketing, I often recommend my clients to avoid those types of keywords. Or if they go after them, to be much more strategic than just creating a simple blog post.

‘Cause when you’re dealing with something like privileged access management, it takes a lot more time and effort and nuance to figure out how should you structure that content to satisfy that search query. Because that’s a very vague intent.

We have no idea if the person’s looking for a definition, or they want some sort of process, or they want a how-to, or a history, or what they’re looking for. So I often recommend clients to approach those types of topics with care and with caution. 

Johnathan: How do you figure that out, what the intent, then is of the examples that you just gave?

Dan: Yeah, so there’s some rules of thumb with the type of piece content like that so 9 times out of 10, you’re gonna start your content with a definition. 

You’re gonna go, what is marketing? And answer that. That’s 99% of the time what’s gonna happen. Because most commonly, if you look at related searches, people are searching, what is marketing or marketing definition.

Then what you do is you use Google’s results to help inform your topics. So what you wanna do is look at the other sub-topics that is showing up in the other number one ranked pieces of content, and you also wanna look at Google’s suggested terms, either in Auto Suggest or down below the results.

And you can also use tools, like Keywords Everywhere. It’s a super popular free tool that is gonna give you keyword data in Google as you’re searching for stuff. And that tool is amazing. It’s really been the biggest game changing tool, for me, in the last two years doing SEO.

Sean: Yeah, we use it ourselves.

Johnathan: We’ll put that in the notes, too.

Dan: Yeah, it’s a really, really crazy, awesome tool. So you use SERP analysis, search engine result page analysis, and a combination of that and some tools. And then again, when you do this a lot, you start to see common threads.

Like if something might begin with a definition, then it might talk about why is it important, then it might talk about that topic versus another topic, then it might give a little bit of a how-to, so you start to see these common things.

But that’s what I like to do is use search analysis to help inform that, and I will say that a broad search, like this, could be a candidate to what I might call a hub or wiki section, and that is a bigger collection of pages to address a big topic.

So for example, a while ago, I worked with a company that dealt with hearing aids. And for three years, they ranked number one for hearing aids in Google at 201,000 searches a month, huge keywords, drove a lot of traffic, but that’s ’cause we built a 10 page section about the broad topic of hearing aids with sub-pages below that.

So when you have a big term like this, that’s why it’s really important to approach this with care, because you can’t just throw up some random page around hear aids or jot down 1,000 words and expect to make something happen with that. It’s another good reason to just be knowledgeable about these different topic types ’cause then you can strategically choose which ones to do.

Johnathan: So for the, quick question on that, so for the bigger, wide-rage of what the intent could be from the words or the topics that you wanna rank for, you mentioned the hub and spoke model, too. So you guys were creating the hub and then you had 10 sub-sections, the spokes of the hearing aids–

Dan: Yeah, and I should clarify, I’m actually not a huge advocate of the hub and spoke model or the topic cluster model through Hub Spot because they are hammers looking for nails. They are a templatized, blue printed, pre-planned out strategy. I like to let the keywords and the opportunity dictate what actually gets executed.

Johnathan: You sound like an artist. You sound like an SEO artist.

Sean: The keywords find me.

Dan: Yeah. No, I mean I like to look at the keyword’s landscape for what it is, it’s kind of like, be the keyword. Don’t judge it or come with some pre-decided plans.

So what we did with the hearing aids thing is literally, we went to Google, typed hearing aids and then all the suggest terms that came off of that, a lot of those ended up being sub-pages.

So hearing aid bluetooth, hearing aid costs, hearing aid Medicare, hearing aid equipment, all that stuff. If we followed the topic cluster model, we would have ended up with something very different that I think would not have worked in that case.

Johnathan: And can you tell what the topic cluster model is? Is that the same as hub and spoke?

Sean: That’s the hub and spoke, yeah.

Dan: Yeah, so topic cluster is a little bit more loosely based on, oh we’re gonna talk about hearing aids. Let’s just link to other pages that have to do with hearing aids. I know it’s a little bit more sophisticated than that, but the reason that doesn’t quite work, in many cases, is because it’s not looking at the keyword and the keyword information architecture.

So the way I planned this thing out with the hearing aids, and with other clients, is when you use the seed-term, hearing aids, then that becomes the sub-folder URL, /hearing aids. And then all the sub-topics become, /hearing aids/bluetooth.

 And so the entire architecture of the whole section from the URLs to the internal linking to the navigation is all dictated by the keywords.

And so it’s a much more tightly connected group of content, rather than just, oh let’s have a main page about marketing. And then we’ll link to Instagram. That’s a bit more loose. That doesn’t always work.

Johnathan: So you’re saying, even though you might not be a believer in the hub and spoke, or the topic cluster model, it’s still a good, it’s a better option than just writing one blog post on marketing or one blog post on hearing aids, is that correct?

Dan: Yeah, yeah. One of the big beef I have with the Hub Spot article was it came out with the sub-text saying, Google now uses topics, not keywords. And they said this in 2015 or 16. And it’s like, they’ve always been using topics.

I don’t understand why this is a new thing, all of a sudden. And so, they came at it saying this whole topic thing is a new ranking factor, but it’s really just good site architecture. So yes, to answer your question, you’re better off thinking about good site architecture and good information architecture. 

Johnathan: Love it, awesome.

Dan: So I should probably go through some other topic types, too.

Johnathan: Yeah, yeah go for it.

Dan: So we talked about a thing list, like piano apps, we talked about a broad topic like marketing, there’s also, what I call information or concept list. That might be like Facebook Ad Tips, or cyber security best practices, or preschool curriculum ideas, so you get the picture with that.

These are all more like, it’s not a concrete thing, but if somebody’s looking for, they’ve specified the intent of what they’re looking for. I love going after these terms because you know exactly what the user’s looking for. When they say, Facebook Ad Tips, you better give them Facebook ad tips.

Johnathan: Oh boy, we know.

Dan: Yeah, you know quite a lot about Facebook Ad tips. It’s what you do at KlientBoost. This type of topic is super easy to go, then, execute because then, literally, we’re talking about the content that is, the 12 best Facebook Ad tips of 2019.

And again, I can make it sound like a cheap listicle, but when executed well, these are very high quality valuable pieces of content, especially if you are in an industry where there’s a little less competition.

I mean, Facebook Ad tips posts are a dime a dozen, right now, but if you’re in a lesser competitive industry like preschool curriculum ideas, that was a topic I found for a client. And it’s super less covered than Facebook ad tips. So you can definitely add a lot of value, depending upon your industry that you’re in.

So I love that type of content because it can arrive at keywords easily ’cause you know you’re just gonna take topic and add strategies, or tips, or process, or ideas, any of these things that represent something specific.

And then you’re just gonna execute on that common structure of that content. There’s some others that are common that I’m sure people see all the time but you might not think about.

So, versus, so maybe like, silver bars versus coins, versus palio, VPN versus proxy, lists can go on and on.

But you could take any starting topic and go to Google or go to another tool I’m gonna mention, which is keywordkeg.com, this is made by the people that also make Keywords Everywhere and you can throw in VPN versus and it’ll spit back to you all of the other searches that have VPN versus proxy, versus etc.

Johnathan: Keyword Keg, like a beer keg?

Dan: Yeah, keywordkeg.com.

Sean: That sounds funny.

Johnathan: We like it.

Dan: You can also do keywordtool.io for pre-stuff. There’s a lot of these tools. Ubersuggests is one that Neil Patel bought. He bought it and ruined it so I wouldn’t use Ubersuggests anymore.

Johnathan: No cluck.

Dan: Yeah, no cluck on that one. But yeah, there’s all kinds of ways you can get this, but that’s another common content type is to look for versus stuff.

Another one that a lot of people don’t think about ’cause on the surface level, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything to do here. But it’s a yes, no question.

So is FaceTime safe? Or is butter dairy? Or is piano hard to learn? These are all things I could answer with a yes/no question, in theory, but if you then think about following that up by expanding it on asking why.

So is FaceTime safe, yes. Okay, why, and then there’s your post ’cause then you’re gonna go and be answering the nuances to that question, the follow-up question of why. And I think a lot of people overlook this type of content because you just think it’s gonna be simple.

It’s yes/no, why do I need the whole piece content about that? You can, again, go to answer the public, go to Google with your Keywords Everywhere plugin, or Keyword Keg, or whatever, and you can put your topic and then put the cursor in front of the topic and type the word, is. And then you can find all of the long-tail off of that.

So is butter dairy, is one example I’m sure you could find. Is butter healthy, or whatever. So that’s a common content type that I often find there’s a lot of opportunity around, as well.

Johnathan: And do you do that when you go for the versus or the question type of content? Is that when things are very, very, let’s say, competitive, and nobody’s, the competitors that you’re trying to rank against them, that have a higher domain authority, are not taking advantage of the versus or the question topics? Or is it just, how do you prioritize that? Which one’s arrived first?

Dan: So competition is going to differ based on your verticals. So again, if we’re in marketing, it’s all gonna be competitive. If we’re in the one industry I reached with precious metals, it’s gonna be a little less competitive.

Johnathan:  We need to get into precious metals.

Dan: So you have to know your industry. So for versus, there isn’t a stock answer. [static]

Johnathan: No, sorry.

Dan: Sorry, I missed you guys. What’d you say?

Johnathan: I didn’t say anything, I was just nodding and agreeing.

Dan: Oh, got it, okay. So yeah, I think for competition, what I look for is, is my connection still good?

Johnathan: Yes. Loud and clear.

Dan: Okay, what I look for for competition, no matter the vertical, is three basic things, which I’ll cover very quickly. Relevance, quality, and authority. 

I wanna look to see, are there relevant results? If there’s little to no other relevant results answering that specific search query or question, then I know there’s an opportunity no matter the other two things, authority and quality.

The other thing that you do, very quickly, is just turn on your friendly MOZ bar overlay plugin in the Google search results, and look at the domain authorities the other site’s ranking.

I should caveat, ’cause there’s been discussion in the SEO world, lately, about how Google doesn’t use domain authority, which is true. They don’t have anything like domain authority. But I still find domain authority valuable to quickly gauge what’s the overall ranking power of this site that’s showing up. It’s still a useful metric.

So you can quickly scan the domain authorities. And if you find, what I call, the domain authority gap in the search results, you might be able to rank. So if your site is a DA50, but everything on page one for your term is DA40 and below, you could probably rank there, given other factors, of course. But that’s a really good opportunity showing up in terms of domain authority.

The other thing that takes a little more analysis and figuring out is quality. But even if you lower domain authority, and there’s other relevant results, maybe they’re old or maybe not written by an expert. Maybe they’re low quality, maybe the images are broken.

Low quality, in any sort of way, you could still do something better, bigger, newer, etc, and possibly outrank those other results. Even if there’s some higher authorities and relevant results, as well, on page one. So that’s how I assess competition, but there’s a lot more nuances. That’s kind of a quick minute crash-course.

Johnathan: Yeah, no it’s the fundamentals.

Dan: Yeah, one thing I’ll say is, I typically ignore keyword difficulty tools when doing this granular level of asking can I rank for something, where I will use a keyword difficulty score, like in SEMrush or MOZ, it’s just broadly.

If I wanna look at a set of keywords and just filter out everything that I know is gonna be too hard to rank for, in SEMrush, I’ll filter out everything that’s like 80 and above. I just wanna get rid of the stuff that’s gonna be super hard and then that way, I can dig into the lower stuff.

So I use it in a broad way. But I see some people obsess over, well this is a 65 and that’s a 70. The 65s easier to rank for. That is totally not true, it doesn’t work like that but it can be used as a broad way to analyze stuff.

Sean: Do you also, I mean you’ve talked a lot about the search intent and everything, I’ve just got one question. How do you balance certain keywords that you’re targeting, or topics that you’re targeting if you think they have a nice strong intent, in terms of lining up with the keyword and what you’re writing, but they have a low search volume?

Dan: Yeah, then you’re gonna get low traffic or you’ll find stuff with higher volume. There’s always a balance there, right. I think depending on your niche, some companies or websites have to be comfortable going top of funnel with their traffic acquisition.

I was just working with somebody who is going to be selling courses on how to repair guitars, or how to be your own guitar technician. There’s 90 searches a month for that. So he’s gonna write about stuff that is way more top of funnel, capture people on email, get them in a system, and then sell that way. It kind of is what it is.

You can’t make up volume for stuff that’s not there, so then you have to write about something that people are searching for. That’s how I deal with it, and then I try to educate clients on the value of that top of funnel content, which doesn’t always go super well, but the ones that are receptive, it definitely works.

Johnathan: Super cool.

Sean: Awesome

Dan: The last content type I’ll mention that is super common is how to, or process, and I think it’s valuable to just mention this discreetly here, because the biggest mistake I make is that I see people taking something like marketing strategies, and then they write a how-to. And that’s not how to rank for marketing strategies because you’re not aligning the content with the intent.

Johnathan: So would that be a listicle? Like X amount of marketing strategies?

Dan: Yeah, that’s back to your list. Your topic list, your information list. But when you encounter something like, how to jump a car, or how to cook on the grill, or maybe even how to set up Facebook ads, then you’re structure of your content becomes a outline of steps.

Think wikiHow. Every single piece of content on wikiHow falls into a how-to or process. So it’s just good to know that because then you can go, you can also back-step into the keywords.

So sometimes I work with clients and they’ll go, well we don’t wanna do any how-to’s, or any teaching type of stuff. And then in my research, I’ll just take everything that would have been how-to off the table.

So sometimes it’s good to know the types of content you wanna do and then reverse that back into the keywords that MOZ line up with.

Johnathan: Do they change their minds sometimes when you take away the how-to and they’re like, oh, we can’t rank for all that now.

Dan: Yeah, sometimes, yeah it can be a little rude awakening to see what the opportunity actually is.

Johnathan: Cool, well Dan, this has been so amazing.

In regards to the different types of, not getting too technical either, ’cause I’m really, really liking with what you said, anybody listening to this can actually follow along and understand, and of course, the tools that you mentioned, we’re gonna obviously have in the notes, too, so people can use them.

Is there any last things that we need to keep in mind before we wrap up?

Dan: That’s a loaded question.

Johnathan: You can talk about anything, brownie recipes, doesn’t matter.

Dan: No, I would say, one thing I’ve been huge on, lately is your opening sentence, your opening paragraph on content. 

I know it’s like I’m going super specific, here, but I see a lot of mindlessly written openings, and in the world of SEO and just good marketing, getting people to click is one thing, but getting them to stay on your content is really, and you deal with this all the time with KlientBoost, a lot of wasted clicks and traffic out there for content where people spend very little time on their first sentence or their opening.

So that could be a whole separate topic. I’ll give a quick little plug here. My next podcast episode coming out, Experts on the Wire, is gonna be with somebody that is a writer who is just incredible at this stuff, and we go into super deep on how to write a good opening sentence. So anybody interested could check that out.

Johnathan: Yeah, we’ll add that in.

Dan: Cool, yeah I’ll give you the link if you wanna add that.

Johnathan: We totally will. Well Dan, really appreciate your time. We will most likely have you on another type of SEO or content episode in the future, too, so thanks for spending time with us.

Dan: Cool, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Sean: All right, thanks a lot Dan.

Johnathan: All right, bye.

SEO Tools With Brian Dean

Brian: Hello?

Johnathan: Hey Brian, Jonathan and Sean over here from BoostSauce.

Sean: Hey hey.

Brian: Hey guys.

Johnathan: So thankful to have you here. For the people listening, we’re talking with Brian Dean from Backlinko, today’s topic is gonna be on SEO tools.

So Brian, where do you wanna start with this? You probably have a fair share of experience and knowledge of what you’ve done and what you still use.

Brian: Man, I am kind of a tool addict. I actually, what I’m told, I have used over 200 tools.

Johnathan: Oh my goodness.

Brian: In about a month. It was insane, it was just non-stop, had to have someone on my team create all the accounts.

But ultimately, I tried, personally, 200 tools for the first edition, since then, I’ve tried another probably 60 or 70. Only about 190 made the cut for this giant list that I have, but I can say with confidence that I’ve tried more SEO tools than anyone else out there.

Johnathan: We believe you. That’s amazing, so there’s different tools for different things, if you wanted to take somebody through the must-haves and then the nice-to-haves, where would you rank and categorize the must-haves?

Brian: Well, I mean obviously, the must-have right now is Ahrefs because even just for link building, they are a must-have. Because they’ve totally, that won’t throw me off, don’t worry.

They were a link-building tool and they’ve fully expanded their feature set. And every feature that they’ve put out is one of the best out there. They released their keyword research tool a couple years ago that has since been refined.

And it’s slowly become my go-to for keyword research, in addition to all the other stuff they have.

Now they have some other features that probably aren’t as good as some others and things like that, but in terms of must-have, that’s the one that I find myself logging into most often. Which to me, indicates how much value it brings to the table ’cause I can’t do a workday without that tool.

That shows me that it’s a must-have.

Johnathan: Okay, awesome. What other tools?

Brian: The other would be SEMrush.

Johnathan: Okay, and what do you use SEMrush for?

Brian: I use it mostly for reverse engineering competing sites and what keywords they rank for. Like Ahrefs, they have a billion features from content stuff to even their own link database.

But when I think SEMrush, I think keyword research and it’s still a really good tool for that even though Ahrefs can also reverse engineer, MOZ can now reverse engineer, a competitors ranking can show you exactly what keywords they’re ranking for.

I find the SEMrush is good for that, but it’s also good for just coming up with keyword ideas. So you pop in your keyword and get a bunch of keyword ideas. And to me, the results you get from SEMrush are still a little bit better than most because they’re not just variations on what you type in.

So a lot of times, if you type in SEO tools into a keyword research tool, it’ll give you variations like, best SEO tools, free SEO tools, stuff that you could have thought of on your own, but SEMrush comes up with some unique keywords that a lot of other tools don’t have.

The only other one that’s similar in that way that I would put on my almost a must-have list, not necessarily must-have, but it’s really good to have and it’s a little bit above nice-to-have, would be MOZ pro. 

Their keyword research tool is also really good at coming up with those lateral keyword ideas that just are tough to come up with on your own, but using their own sophisticated algorithm, they know how topics are linked together and they suggest some cool keywords that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own.

Johnathan: That’s amazing.

Sean: Well I was gonna say, I know that being limited on the non-pro subscription to MOZ and I get, I think, 10 keyword searches a month, that’s a bit difficult.

Johnathan: We don’t have a budget here at KlientBoost. So are those three your must-have, you can’t live without those?

Brian: I would say Ahrefs, SEMrush, and then if you consider Google Analytics a tool or Google search console a tool. I mean those might even be above. Without that stuff, you’re really flying blind.

Johnathan: That’s true, that’s true.

Brian: It depends if you consider them a tool or not. I do, but they’re not paid, they’re not really like a third-party thing, but you kinda need them to do SEO and to rank. You need Google Analytics and all the stuff you can break down and the Google search console is like a dashboard. I would put those in the must-have category, but most people don’t because they’re not really tools.

Johnathan: I mean I disagree. I think I’m on board with what you’re saying. They’re definitely tools because they’re free.

But yeah, that’s awesome. Now, since you’ve reviewed so many tools, too, in regards to the nice-to-have, which ones pleasantly surprised you when you were going through your review?

Brian: One tool that I really like, and I don’t hear a lot of people talk about, is called seedkeywords.com. It’s kind of a strange tool, but it’s brilliant in its own way.

So the problem I have with keyword research, a lot of time, is that it’s based on what you type into it. It’s like that old computer science, garbage in, garbage out and a lot of times, I’m giving it garbage.

I will just type in keywords that come to my mind, like link building, and it’ll just spit out variations of that. And I don’t even think of how people are actually searching for this stuff.

So what Seed Keywords is, you create a question for a task for Google. So you say, okay, how would you find an SEO tool in Google, and basically, it creates a link and you send this question out to anyone that you can. You can share it on Twitter, with colleagues, with friends, with clients, with your own agency, and then they tell you how they would search for this stuff.

And then a lot of times, the keywords they would use in Google are completely different than you would think. So it brings up these awesome seed keywords, hence the name, that then you can type into the Google keyword planner or whatever, to see how many people actually search for this stuff, or whether that one person was just a weirdo and they searched for it in a weird way.

Or maybe they’re onto something and you’re the weirdo and the way they typed in is how most people search for but you didn’t think of it. It’s really good for industries or niches or topics that you’re in and you can’t see it from an outside perspective. 

Johnathan: Okay, I like that. Any other ones in regards to, I guess Ahrefs and SEMrush can do this too, but competitive monitoring. If there’s anything new that they’re doing? I don’t know if that’s something that made the list or anything that’s nice to have?

Sean: Or what about Answer The Public, I mean doing something like what you just described. Do you ever use Answer The Public for that?

Brian: Yeah, but they’re not really necessarily keywords, they’re more looking at communities for questions. And obviously, there’s a lot of cross-over, don’t get me wrong, Answer The Public‘s great. I use it a lot, and faster than the seedkeywords.com tool, which is free, by the way.

I use them both, actually. Seed Keywords is good if you’re, say you’re an agency and you just get a new client that sells organic gardening stuff. And you know nothing about this topic. It’s a good way to get some keywords that you couldn’t think of.

Or the opposite, if you’re in it and you wanna see an outside perspective. Answer The Public’s good, but it has that same problem that if you type in gardening equipment, it’s gonna give you the same set of questions based on that, versus Seed Keywords will give you these laterally, things you wouldn’t even think of, like organic tomato kits.

Then you type that in and you get all the questions people ask about that online. They actually compliment each other really well.

Johnathan: Cool, what other ones surprised you when they made the list for you?

Brian: Another good one that I like, I would actually put more in the must-have that I forgot to mention is BuzzSumo, which I think most content marketers, SEO people are very familiar with it.

A couple things I use it for that are a little outside the box, I don’t think get enough love, one is searching for content on a competitor’s domain. So a lot of people only use it, they type in a keyword and see what content is done well, this is how it was designed to be used.