Top Tools Businesses Can't Live Without for 2021
The business world is constantly changing. Every year, new tools and methods are introduced that can help make businesses more efficient, or provide a competitive edge over other companies in the industry.
In this blog post we will explore some of these tools for 2021 and discuss why they are so important to successful businesses.
Let’s see which tools do these businessmen find useful.
Contributions are posted in no particular order.
Alba SEO Services
Twitter @SeoAlba
The tool that we can't live without is AHREFS. We use it for tracking our clients on SERPS and also running weekly site audits.
Mikemike
Twitter @hit_ruga
The tool I would hardly survive without in business is INTERNET ....Almost 80% of my work depends on internet
Anil Agarwal
Here are the three SEO tools I can’t live without.
1. Semrush: I’ve been using Semrush for 6+ years now and had amazing results with it so far. We use it for everything including keyword research, competitor analysis, site audits, keyword tracking, and so on.
It gives you access to over 45 amazing SEO tools under one roof. If you’re looking for an all in one SEO toolkit, Semrush is probably the BEST choice. Although Semrush pricing plans start at $119.95/mo but it’s worth every single penny.
2. Rank Math: Rank Math is the most powerful SEO plugin that helps you properly optimize your content for your target keywords. We used the Yoast SEO premium version in the past but Rank Math has even more powerful features.
You’ll get access to amazing features like schema generator, tracking keywords, automating image captions, detecting orphan pages, and many more. The good thing about Rank Math is its free version is also incredible!
3. SEOquake: SEOquake is another powerful SEO tool that helps me conduct on-page SEO audits on the go. It’s completely free to use and helps you easily analyze all the internal and external links of a website.
It also offers incredible features like estimating keyword difficulty, comparing URLs, determining a keyword’s density and getting an in-depth analysis of SERPs. It’s an essential free browser plugin that’s useful for anyone who runs a website.
Apart from the above SEO tools, I regularly use Google Search Console (GSC) as it helps me monitor pretty much everything. It not only helps you discover the performance of your organic search traffic but you’ll also be able to find various website issues easily.
Sam Gooch
BeFound
Advice or Tip: Out of all of the SEO tools I use, ScreamingFrog is hands down the best and comes at a fraction of the cost of most other good SEO tools. This SEO crawler doesn't promise to automate your SEO for you, or give you "estimated" search volumes and "difficulty scores" for keywords.
ScreamingFrog presents actual data that you can use to quickly spot issues and help build on your SEO strategy. You can completely configure your crawl using countless filters and settings, allowing you to get a quick snapshot of a few hundred pages, or a full-on audit of any site.
The guys behind the tool are also well known and loved in the SEO space and always help the community. Even John Mueller (Search Advocate at Google) uses it!
Avi Ilinsky
tDCS Devices
Advice or Tip: I love using Sitebulb for on-page and technical SEO audits! A wonderful tool that provides very insightful tips on what needs fixing and how it should be done. It's also very visually pleasing, the layout is a lot more user-friendly than SF, IMHO (although SF has its advantages, no doubt - another power tool to keep under your belt).
For off-page tasks, Buzzstream is my go-to autopilot tool for scraping contacts and reaching out to niche-specific websites. Very handy if you don't have the time to go over endless lists of sites coming from your link brokers.
Heroine Fred
Advice or Tip: As an Entrepreneur one of my tools/strategy this year is adding prize/gift to almost every delivery made to my customers. This makes them want to buy more.
Dale Powell
Advice or Tip: If you manage hundreds of Google Ads accounts accounts then I highly recommend Opteo. Based on each account's performance, looking at conversion data and performance target, Opteo proposes improvements to take the campaigns to the next level.
If you're like me who likes to have maximum control over campaigns then Opteo is like having a second pair of eyes on the account. It's brilliant.
Sean Daniels
WebsiteOnWheels
Advice or Tip:
Advanced Custom Fields - This makes it easy for clients to customize their site without needing to reach out to me as a developer. It is scalable and can give clients power of their website design without all the drawbacks and limitations of software such as Wix and Squarespace.
VS Code - This tool took the code editor world by storm, and for a good cause. Seamless, helpful, and full of well-built extensions. Whether using it for local WordPress development, or a custom VueJS application, this is the only editor for me!
Kimberly Coleman
Advice or Tip: Since I'm a professional content creator, SEO is really important.
MOZ is an excellent resource. In addition to their SEO software, their blog and email updates are so helpful. The free MozBar Chrome Extension is also a "must-have".
Ubersuggest also has an excellent keyword tool. The owner, Neil Patel, is an experienced marketer so definitely look at the Ubersuggest blog for informative updates.
Adam Smartschan
Advice or Tip: Zapier is absolutely indispensable to our B2B marketing agency. I can't begin to tell you how many hours a week we save on repetitive tasks. Simply copying and pasting leads from email to our CRM would waste at least an hour a day.
Zapier does it automatically. Likewise, we need job applicants to automatically populate a spreadsheet for review. Again, automatically.
Advice or Tip: I use Photoshop every day with my photos to create my art!!
Gibrón Williams
Advice or Tip: Why do you need a Website?
There's been a rather bizarre notion that all you need is social media and not a website for your small business. As a marketing consultant, I can assure you that building a website will be one of your single most important business investments. So, before you go and build your brand on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter, consider the fact that you don't have autonomy on those what I call marketing islands.
If one of the social media platforms I just mentioned decides to change its look, existence, or rules, you'll have to bend and adjust accordingly. I highly recommend that you build your brand on your own island (website) first, before venturing off to a social media platform. Like Google, one of the strengths of your brand is content aggregation.
Your business website will be like having your own library, history, and enables business owners with the ability to grow in a safe, controlled environment.
Remember MySpace?
Advice or Tip:
Ahrefs.com - I mentioned this tool as the first one, because I can't imagine work without it. It useful for various tasks: semantic core collection, competitors research, website technical issues analysis, SEO strategy development, content ideas research, link building opportunities discovery etc. List of applications so long, no other tools (even Google's) can't compare with it.
Google Search Console - indispensable tool which will tell you about any technical issues or manual actions on your website.
Rich results tool - another useful tool from Google for structured data code verification. Google uses microdata for various types of "fast answers" and extended descriptions in SERP, so every website owner should use as much Schema types as it possible for his/her website.
Screaming Frog - number 1 tool for website analysis when i prepare SEO audit. It will tell you about any technical issues and more detailed than GSC. Recent updates also allow to compare changes on competitors' websites. So now you can see how have changed competitors' pages/content/menu etc and optimize your website the same way your competitors do.
SpeedLinks - the most effective way to index any links you built for your website. It is especially effective, when some website is linking to yours from the page which is unlikely will be indexed organically (there are no internal links to this page). So with the help of this tool such links will be indexed within 1 day.
Name: Davide Puzzo
Advice or Tip: Serpstats because gives you a perfect audit, gives you the status of backlinks and gives you something that other tolls don't do it, it gives you the "missing keywords"
Name: Luiz Eduardo Bastos
Advice or Tip: Here at Seo Partner we are not without a keyword research tool. There are a wide variety of tools of this type, ranging from free to paid. As the free tools limit the amount of data for searching and importing data, we use Mangools for several projects. Simple, fast and affordable, Mangools meets our needs with reliable data.
Another tool that we use in our daily lives is the Lighthouse, available through the Chrome browser. It is through it that we guide the necessary improvements in performance, accessibility and good practices. The choice for the tool is due to the fact that it was developed by Google itself and is in line with its guidelines.
Linda Blue
Advice or Tip: I would say that 17 Hats is an awesome tool for any business! Everything I do from invoicing, emailing, contracts, quotes, questionnaires, etc... is all right in one place. I love it and it keeps me organized!
Jamil Ali Ahmed
Advice or Tip: The marketing industry is highly competitive with thousands of tools available online and it's a tough challenge to find the best tools that are affordable and worthy to me and my team here @Cloudways.
Being passionate for marketing, I test lot of tools. Talk about research, analysis or audit, all the tools I used, here are the ones which I use daily and find them the best:
Google Analytics: The best analytical tool in the industry for analyzing the website traffic.
Ahrefs: Most popular SEO tool that provides in-depth data of your website backlinks, referring domains, keywords, anchor texts, content gap and much more.
Mangools: This is an interesting set of SEO tools like KWFinder for keywords research, SERPChecker for SERP Analysis and SERPWatcher for keyword rank tracking.
Trần Thành
Advice or Tip: Suffer is one of my best friends on Youtube SEO content. I don't need to do it like a headless chicken anymore but easily figure out which word or tag suit perfectly with my content. Love it since 2020!
Tiago Dias
Advice or Tip: First of all, SEO and how to do it, because it's very tricky. This is the first part because without good SEO, most people wont see your business in Google or in another search engine. Good SEO might bring you to the top of them and you'll make more sales.
Secondly a good product, it does not mean that it's a physical product, but a product that the people need, or are make to believe that they need.
In terms of tools, you can say a website, since it's kind of a tool for your corporation, for you to communicate with your customers and sell your products.
One other tool might be considered your team, since without a team it's very hard to make a business as a solo entrepreneur.
Advice or Tip: All-in-one WP Migration is a WordPress plugin that allows full site backup with minimal effort.
For WordPress website development, you can quickly export your fully developed WordPress website from your staging/testing server, and import to the production/live server.
For backup, you can download your entire WordPress website as a single file (including databases). Should anything has happened to your live site, you can re-uploaded the backup file to your web server, and have your website fully restored.
Robert van Glabbeek
Advice or Tip:
Screaming Frog - this absolute brilliant SEO-tool helps to find technical and architectural flaws and errors within a website. The completeness and flexibility of this tool is amazing. Also, the price is very reasonable.
The ability to connect with several API's and the large amount of metrics it checks, make this tool a must-have for every beginning and advanced SEO specialist.
Chrome dev tools - this chrome integrated tool set provides a large set of helpful tools for every SEO! From checking HTML/CSS/JavaScript to running performance checks it does it all. This tool if integrated within the Chrome browser and free to use. Great tool to use.
Advice or Tip:
As an SEO, couldn't live without ScreamingFrog & Ahrefs. They're my bread and butter to get anything meaningful done the right way.
Advice or Tip:
SCREAMING FROG, SEMRUSH, SEOLYZER and AHREF. They perfectly meet the needs I have and the price seems fair to me
Robb Fahrion
Advice or Tip: Slack is my go-to productivity and communication optimization tool for our firm. I can run my business from the palm of my hand with connection to Slack.
The other beauty is that Slack now allows companies to integrate directly onto your platform with their own account. This makes for an incredible way to collaborate cross-functionally or outside the organization.
Slack also helps to create a culture during the remote day and age we live in. Our team has channels that we pass memes and GIFs back and forth on and it has really brought our firm closer together. Go get your company on Slack right now!
Advice or Tip: I like to separate my SEO workflow with certain tools that are great for specific aspects of SEO. Generally speaking, I'll split these up into on-page, off-page and technical SEO tools.
For on-page, I love using Semrush to perform keyword research, identify keyword gaps and track my SERP positions for my targeted keywords.
For off-page, Ahrefs is my go-to for auditing the backlink profile of my websites and to prospect any potential collaborations where I can obtain links.
Finally, I use Screaming Frog to run technical SEO audits by crawling websites and getting right to the raw data of each URL.
I also like to tinker with other tools as well from time to time, as the industry is filled with them!
