When it comes to building your own eCommerce site, you need to find the right tools to make it happen. You have to make sure that your apps are the best for your software, like if you’re using shopify then you have to make sure you have the best shopify affiliate software. It’s important to get a tool that will only work well with your business. Sure you can open things up a bit and expand your mind frame, but that doesn’t mean compromising your essence. This is especially the case in regards to your SEO. What relates to your business? How is a certain keyword or phrase relevant to your cause? This is what you need to tap into before you start making other moves for your business. Here are five key tools that will really help out your SEO: Ahrefs, SEMRush, Majestic, Moz, and SpyFu. Take a look at four different methods you should really consider for your ecommerce site.

1.  Taking the Steps to Spy on Your Rivals

Spying on your competition is a great way to exploit their weaknesses. Find out the things they do and the things they don’t do. This way you can carve your own niche in their market. You’ll know the level you stand on and if there’s anything you can do to improve on the situation. It’s much more easier to make strides when you know the advantages and disadvantages of your competition. Let’s take a look at what some of these eCommerce tools have to offer.

SEMRush

This is a premier program that allows you to really get a leg up on your competitors. The great thing about this service is you can just take a quick peek at the overview page where you get the following information: organic and paid search, traffic costs and even keywords for your research. The top anchors are separated into lists. Additionally, you can look at referring domains. If you are looking to promote or advertise, this is a great way to close in the competition and find those weak spots. Exploit them to your advantage and make their weaknesses your strengths.

SpyFu

The strength is in the dashboard. You have great data to go through in terms of knowing how your competitors move in a campaign. Some may view a few of the tactics a bit old school but it does give you sound information like what ads have been profitable for your competitors in a specific quarter. You can gauge SEO performance and any other changes in that industry as well. This helps you keep with the current trends in the market. Additionally, you can take the data and see what could be seasonal or all year round.

Moz

Sometimes keeping it simple works the best. You don’t need some crazy magic SEO. Moz tells you things for what it’s worth. Generate multiple campaigns for your business and others while keeping an eye on domain authority, keyword ranking, and even crawl issues. The latter is important because you never if you have any broken links you need to fix. People hate going to pages to find absolutely nothing. The search engine sees this as a spam-filled or in authoritative page. This could cause you to lose tremendous traffic. It’s a detriment to your business; a big help to others.

Majestic

There are some pros and cons to using this service. A few cons include it’s not very user friendly, the interface needs to be updated, and it just seems quite stark. On the plus side, the tools are nice, reveals backlinks, IP addresses, different subnets, and more.  It’s nothing special but the few pros do give the program a bit of shine.

II. It’s Important to Take Time to Plan Your Content

Another key aspect of doing well in SEO is knowing how to plan and write your content. This is a good way to bring in organic traffic as well as really maximize it by posting it at the right time. Having a plan of attack can be great to schedule things ahead of time. Also, it gives you flexibility in case you do need to make some serious changes. Here’s what everyone has to offer:

SpyFu

SpyFu is in another league when it comes to content. You can plan your content by setting goals with each of your keywords. As time goes by, these terms only rank stronger on the search engine. You’ll find what keywords do well and also if they have a certain longevity. Let’s say you are trying to test things from the outside looking in. This is perfect because you’ll know how different keywords can affect the traffic of your site. Additionally, this may a gift to see how you can incorporate this in your content. As a result, the traffic can lead to more stable sales. Long term this poses an advantage to your business.

Majestic

It’s not as strong as Ahrefs but it can still prove very useful. Of course, you can forecast stuff with your data but a lot of the work comes from you.

Ahrefs

The main strength here is content exploration. You can go off and do a search for the most relevant content and how many shares it gets on sites like Twitter and Pinterest. Look at the organic traffic and backlinks from the last week to year.

Moz

This is where Moz falls short. It offers typical things like tools to analyze your website and optimizing for the search engine. However, many free services offer the same thing. In a sense, it’s just not worth it for your content planning.

III.  Putting Your Good Backlinks and Keyword Research Together

This is extremely important because you want to know where different sites link. It’s a good way of telling how your competition does by referring to reputable sites. There’s always something to exploit in this territory. You can typically do this with quality keyword research. Here’s an idea of what each tool has to offer regarding your backlink and keyword research:

SpyFu

While it may not be the strongest tool as far as backlink and keyword graphs, it does provide good keyword analysis. The themes that continue to show up in your graphs can be narrowed down into groups. This gives you a chance to analysis them, export them, and find what ways you can modify them to fit your brand. Not every keyword is created equal, so it’s important to weed through the ones that serve no purpose for your site.

SEMRush

SEMRush shines in this category strictly because of their graphs. On one end, you can note the backlinks your competitors receive. This gives you good indication of their primary focus. Also, it can give you an idea of what you can do in order to find an untapped resource they’ve yet to use. You can see from the top anchors how the referring sites piece their content, and the other domains can be clicked on and evaluated. This is the kind of thorough process that really gives you deep data needed to go after your top competitors.

Ahrefs

There are a few major gems using this service. One, you can look at the site explorer for backlink analysis. The keyword explorer is separate list that allows you to piece out each keyword. This helps you experiment and get good ideas as far as best options for your online store. However, the main reason you want to use Ahrefs is to see the keyword difficulty score. When you find something is difficult to rank, this means you shouldn’t invest in it. It’ll cost you a lot of advertising dollars.

Majestic

It gives a good diagnostic of things like backlinks with trust scores, link types and what backlinks actually help your site. They present more of trending topic feel but this could be the edge you need to keep your competitors at bay. Any kind of advantage or ground you can gain is useful to all aspects of your business.

Moz

Moz shows no frills by giving you a spam score, link anchor text, and the URL backlink. The graph is pretty reasonable and shows enough detail with the type of ground you have to cover if you decide to compete with specific rivals. This will honestly give you accurate detail on what things you should be doing, and whether or not you should carve your own lane.

IV. What Kind of Pricing is Available for All Options?

SEMRush

If you sign up for an account with your email address, you can get 10 free searches here. If you plan to use it on a daily basis, the costs will start to come up. Here’s a brief example of what’s offered:

From Pro, Guru, and Business you have different things offered like search results, projects, keyword track, spider crawling specific pages, social media profiles, daily reports, and more. The price ranges from $69.95, $149.95, $549.95.

SpyFu

While it doesn’t provide a free trial, it does provide 30-day money back guarantee. It’s also more on the affordable side for the smaller business.

The programs range from Basic, Professional, and Pro-Monthly. There are great options in regards to unlimited search results, data exports, overviews for your domains, keyword rankings per week, top results, leads, and even contacts.

The pricing is well within your budget; this makes things perfect for the small business owner. If you are unsure of how to go about SEO, use this as a springboard until you become aware of the more advanced tactics. Keep this in mind before you go ahead and start choosing other plans. Pick your plan from $49 to $74.

Moz

You have a choice between Moz Local and Moz SEO. Moz has a 30-day free trial before you decide on a plan. Here are the details:

You have a standard, medium, large, and premium setting for different initiatives like campaigns, keyword reports, branded reports, keyword ranking, and even support for your lists and crawling. Depending on your budget, you can choose the $99, $149, $249, or $599 plan. It’s not a bad selection to choose for your SEO purposes.

Majestic

It does a great job of sitting right in the mid-range while providing great value. There’s a lot of good downloadable links, storage on cloud, decent support (1-15 users, and more. The price ranges on a Silver, Gold, and Platinum scale. Go from $78.99, $169.99, and $399.99.

Ahrefs

It does have a 7-day trial run but you have to pay $7. Ahrefs is naturally the most complete yet expensive tool for SEO out of the 5.

The lite, standard, advanced, and agency  version each have their advantages. Depending on the service, you can get tracked keywords, weekly updates, specific domain amounts, content reports, keyword reports, and more. Choose from $99, $179, $399, or $999. It’s important to really make a commitment and understand what these different facts mean. This could take your business out of the park.

The five tools serve a great purpose but the two key tools that give the best value include Ahrefs and SpyFu.

If you’re a small company with a modest budget, SpyFu is that right service for your niche. You’ll great service that works well for your small niche under $80. This is certainly the best buy because it helps you keep your feet wet in a dominant industry. It may not have advanced features and data streams like the other ones but it’s perfect for a good start. You need to build a foundation so that you learn from each and every lead and sale before tapping into the big leagues.

Ahrefs is good for a business already established as it just catches the big fish in the sea. This will make you a top notch player. When you are really starting to be a force to be reckoned with in your niche, you need to take it up another notch. Ahrefs has all the tools needed to really stake your claim in a particular market. If you have the money, Ahrefs can help take you to the next stage. These Apps really work wonders and that is why they are growing more and more popular everyday.