Tools for SEO (alternatives to those you know)

The truth is that technology has never advanced as much as in recent months. Practically daily, we see how new tools emerge and, above all, new forms of interaction between users and brands.

SEO, of course, also keeps mutating and updating, especially since Artificial Intelligences have been consolidating. That is why, more than ever, it is important to know which SEO tools have been able to adapt to the new realities of search engines.

We have compiled some alternative SEO software to those you surely know and have tried. The idea is that you can experiment with new solutions, but that you can be calm, knowing that your investment makes sense and, above all, that it is effective in terms of showing your store in the results.

Get ready, but first let´s make an important observation.

Those of us who have been in this for years have been seeing how they “kill” poor SEO again and again. But the truth is that it still has validity.

Keep in mind that Artificial Intelligence has not replaced classic search engines, it has actually served to complement and boost them. Google has been seeking a conversational, natural language interaction with the user for years (do you remember BERT?), so it was already adapted to the new way of searching.

But I can give you more quick arguments:

So, answering the question that opened this section, we can say openly and clearly that SEO still makes sense, of course.

The options you will find here are a bit outside the norm. It is not that classic tools like Semrush, Sistrix, Ahrefs or Screaming Frog no longer work, they work wonderfully, but we have already talked about them and we want to give you other interesting alternatives to complete your SEO toolbox. 

They are less common resources, but they can give you an extra in areas such as link building, technical auditing and, of course, content creation, which is where technology in general (and AI in particular) is having the most impact.

Let’s start with link building. Building links is delicate and, although it is not difficult, it can be tedious.

That is why a tool like Pitchbox can make your life much easier. Imagine that you are looking for relevant sites for your niche; you just have to type your keyword in the search engine and, in seconds, you will have a list of websites and blogs that fit your strategy.

But it goes much further, because it allows you to see the evolution of the strategy, the status of each request or the response rate of the actions. You can even use Pitchbox to create email templates you will send to different contacts requesting links. You can automate a large part of the process.

If several people on your team are working on link building, this tool offers the possibility of managing tasks jointly.

Wondering if it uses AI? Indeed: it uses AI as an assistant, for example, to create campaigns, create email templates and personalize all communication.

Where: https://pitchbox.com

How much: $165 per month.

It is always important to have control of how our website is doing. To carry out site audits, the best is to use a tool that allows you to know at all times how SEO parameters, ranking factors and potential unintentional bad practices that could imply a potential penalty are.

Sitebulb is designed to perform a comprehensive technical audit of your eCommerce, so that you can download a detailed (but accessible) report with aspects such as internal links that do not respond, indexing problems, poorly resolved redirects… everything that hinders crawling.

At the eCommerce level, it has some highly recommended functions, such as, for example, duplicate content analysis, which is quite frequent due to the very typology of online store websites.

Finally, it is worth highlighting the usability of the tool itself, which has a really easy learning curve and reports that can be interpreted without being overly technical. The hint-based approach ends up making it very easy and actionable to apply improvements.

Where: https://sitebulb.com

How much: $180 per month.

Ranking and keyword research, or what is the same, where my site appears in search engines, and for what search intents it does. This has been the basis of SEO for almost two decades, and it continues to be relevant because it gives us an idea of how the strategy is working and inform whether we are reaching our audience with the right products, or not.

Well, Serpstat gives you all that and a few more really useful things. Obviously it monitors the positions of our keywords in different search engines, but it also allows us to analyze our competitors, so that we will know what their strategy is to neutralize or surpass them.

Additionally, Serpstat has proven to be a great keyword research tool. It has a complete module in that sense, which offers us lists of relevant words for specific search intents (head tail, long tail and even questions and answers, which are especially useful in such a conversational environment as modern SEO is becoming).

Where: https://serpstat.com

How much: $44 per month.

And of course, if content is still king, a good content planner is a guarantee of success. Both “conventional” SEO and positioning for Artificial Intelligences (which is beginning to be known as GEO), need it to be well created and optimized to offer the best possible answers to searches/queries.

With Market Muse you have a really powerful tool both to analyze your content already created with its advanced content audit (pages with low performance, duplicate content, low quality...), and to generate an editorial calendar based on relevant and potential topics. For the latter, it has an IA-based topic modeling system that is exclusively proprietary.

Another thing I like a lot is that, in a topic that is apparently quite subjective, they have created customized metrics that help evaluate the authority of each topic and, more importantly, the difficulty of ranking that content, based on our own website parameters.

Where: https://www.marketmuse.com

How much: $149 per month.

And we close with a suite, an all-in-one program, that can serve as a general solution for SEO on-site optimization, keywords, content…

It does not have the specific analysis depth of other SEO tools we have analyzed, but it has the advantage of integrating everything into a single solution.

The best thing about Surfer SEO is that it solves almost all optimization needs with great reliability. It is especially worthwhile at the content optimization level, where they have integrated natural language very well into their analyses and recommendations.

I would also highlight the competitor analysis, which is a source of ideas to optimize or create content where our rivals are not reaching or, on the contrary, where they are strong and we are not competing.

Surfer SEO is, above all, an easy-to-use tool. It is not necessary to have excessive training or be an SEO consultant, anyone with notions and a little time quickly gets the hang of the tool.

Where: https://surferseo.com

How much: $79 per month.