17 ESSENTIAL PR SEO TOOLS

With so many tools to help you in your SEO efforts, which ones are relevant to PR and communications professionals? As a PR agency, we use lots. Here we list some of the PR SEO tools that we have found most useful in building PR campaigns for our clients and increasing brand awareness on search engines:

PR SEO tools for onsite performance

Start by getting a decent understanding of your website’s performance, backlinks and rankings before planning an SEO and PR strategy. A website needs to be fully operational and optimised as this is how Google finds you and ranks you. The better your performance and content, the more likely third party websites will link to our site, the higher you will rank in search engine results and the better the referral traffic to your site:

Google Analytics: your best friend when it comes to monitoring your website stats – if you haven’t got Google Analytics plugged into your website, you should. Look at traffic, referrals, conversion rates, bounce rates and then delve into audience demographics and conversions. You can even create customised reports and dashboards.

Majestic: “The planet’s largest Link Index database” – Majestic allows you to look at your website’s backlink data (i.e. who is linking to you and where), as well as monitor competitor data.

Moz: as well as its handy Mozbar, which allows you to see every website’s DA in your search results, Moz offers other useful SEO tools. The Keyword Explorer helps you research the best keywords for your website and the link explorer helps you find link-building opportunities. Plus, local businesses can check their My Business Listing directory and research categories for local listings. Run a free 30-day trial to see if these are tools you would like to continue to use and pay for.

Brand coverage and sentiment

These tools will help you track who is talking about your brand and, crucially for PR and SEO efforts, the sentiment behind what they’re saying. Your quality content should resonate with your target audience and help secure your brand backlinks, and these tools provide insight into what conversations are taking place around your brand mentions:

Google Alerts: get alerts of news coverage, delivered to your inbox, on any key phrase or topic. Useful to pick up coverage about your company or client and give you content or campaign ideas.

Brandwatch: a useful tool for tracking a brand’s sentiment online and analysing demographics.

Keywords and search terms

When you’re planning a new campaign or strategy, it pays to research the keywords and phrases you want to target. Keyword research is part of any quality content development and should be part of all PR SEO strategies:

Google Ad Keyword Planner: your first port-of-call when researching keywords, Google’s free keyword tool helps you lay the groundwork for a successful campaign.

Yoast: if you’re looking for related keywords or more long-tail keywords, Yoast is a simple tool that allows you to type in a word or phrase (for example ‘care homes’ or ‘teen’) and get a list of expanded keywords.

SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool: a simple-to-use keyword tool – just type in a keyword for suggestions of niche or semantically-related keywords, and then use the filters to organise them.

Trends

These tools let you delve a bit deeper into the trends and questions relating to your search terms. Increase your brand’s online visibility by creating great content that your audience wants to engage with. One of the best ways is to produce content or launch creative campaigns that align with key trends:

Answer The Public: type a topic and see the most popular search queries presented in a handy format to show the queries starting with ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘can’ and more.

Google Trends: keep abreast of what people are searching for with this nifty tool. It shows you which search terms are trending right now in different countries, and lets you search your own keywords. Each search is presented with useful graphs to see its interest over time, related topics and queries.

On This Day: find out what the BBC was reporting on a certain date in history – a fun way to run ‘remember when?’ style stories.

Target audience research

YouGov Profiles: a handy media planning tool for agencies and brands to profile their target audiences. Type in any brand, person or thing and get a useful persona based on over 230,000 data points, collected from 280,000 GB YouGov members.

Surveys and polls

Need content ideas or stats to add weight to a press release, infographic or piece of content? Creating unique content is a great way to ensure your brand mention is positive across social media and in online coverage, and to help build quality backlinks. Check these out…

Statista: looking for statistics to add to a press release, infographic or report? Statista gives you immediate access to over one million stats and facts.

Office for National Statistics: trends and latest research – look at headline news, figures and publications or search keywords of interest to your brand.

OnePoll: if you’re looking to run a survey, OnePoll can help – and they’ll advise you on how to turn the data into something beautiful too.

Social media influencers

If you’re spending time working with influencers it’s important to find the right ones for your client or brand. These tools can help…

BuzzSumo: find influencers that are the most engaged on social media for a certain topic.

Followerwonk: a quick way to find influencers on Twitter by topic and location.

 In case you missed them, it’s also worth us mentioning earlier blogs in our SEO and PR series where we covered domain authority, SEO and how PR and SEO can work together:

Domain authority, SEO and PR – the basics 

How PR and SEO can work together 

Are your favourite SEO tools listed here – or have we missed any that you think are important? Tell us which ones your rate in the comments below, or tweet us @Ambitiouspr.