How to Make the Most of SEO Monitoring Software - Visualping
By Emily Fenton
Updated March 6, 2023
The 5 Best SEO Monitoring Software Platforms for 2023
Search engines like Google constantly update their algorithms, changing how websites are ranked in search engine results pages (SERPs). So if you want your site to consistently land on the top of search results, you’ll need SEO monitoring software to monitor your progress and let you know when to make an adjustment.
Whether you’re managing a single site or multiple sites, it’s important to be continuously vigilant about everything happening on your sites. SEO monitoring software tools like Visualping will allow you to do just that. If something goes wrong with your SEO, you can make immediate fixes to keep your rankings as high as possible.
Beyond that, SEO monitoring tools also offer additional capabilities that you’ll want to take advantage of. Here, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the best SEO monitoring software platforms available today.
Why SEO Software Is a Must-Have for Success in the SERPs
As the internet has adapted, SEO has evolved out of necessity. Because of this, effective strategies have become more complicated, and ranking high in the SERPs is an ever-changing challenge.
Many factors determine your ranking in the SERPs, including:
- Keywords
- Intent
- Quality of content
- Snippets
- Backlinks
SEO and SERP monitoring tools allow you to stay on top of these elements, allowing you to maintain and even improve your site’s performance in rankings.
Additional ways that monitoring SEO helps with SERP performance include:
- Improving site performance
- Gaining a leg up on the competition
- Keeping your site from being penalized by Google
- Tracking your SEO progress
However, monitoring SEO is a constant process you’ll need to continuously audit. But the good news is that you don’t have to do it alone. In fact, you can find several powerful SEO monitoring tools that make the job much easier and more effective.
Here are the top five:
Visualping
Visualping is a tool used to track anything on the internet that’s important to you. As a result, it’s easily adaptable for functions such as competitive monitoring and SERP tracking.
All you need to do is enter the URL for a web page and provide your email address, and Visualping will send you website change notifications every time a change is made on that page. When you receive an alert email, simply visit the Visualping dashboard to dig deeper into what has changed and why.
Using this tool, you’ll always know exactly what your competition is doing. And you can easily apply that knowledge to see improved SERP results.
Semrush
Semrush is a popular and widely used platform with plenty of visibility tools, including social media tracking, brand monitoring, traffic analysis, SEO reputation management, and SERP position tracking. It monitors over 800 million domains, making it one of the most comprehensive options. In addition, it gives you actionable insights within dashboards that are easy to navigate and understand.
Some of the additional key features offered by Semrush include the following:
- Market explorer
- Keyword gap tool
- Keyword research tool
- Backlink audit tool
- Advertising research tool
- Competitor monitoring
- On-page and off-page SEO analytics
As an extra benefit, Semrush also comes with content marketing features that can help you create exceptional blog posts and website copy.
Finally, Semrush can be easily leveraged for social media marketing thanks to its built-in toolkit, allowing you to manage your Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google Business Profile accounts. It also has built-in integrations with Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another all-in-one SEO platform that features a comprehensive index of backlinks and extensive SEO monitoring tools.
This tool contains six featured modules:
- Projects Dashboard
- Site Explorer
- Site Audit
- Keywords Explorer
- Content Explorer
- Rank Tracker
Another important function this software serves is measuring the performance of your content. This is done by monitoring organic traffic, social sharers, traffic value, domain rating, and referring domains. Beyond that, its Content Explorer helps you uncover topics with low competition and partnership opportunities.
Finally, the developers offer a free API that allows it to integrate with nearly any third-party software platform. And international marketers will be happy to know that the tool supports a wide variety of search engines worldwide, not just the most popular options.
BrightEdge
BrightEdge offers extensive digital marketing capabilities, including dedicated modules for content, search, local, mobile, and social. Beyond that, it comes with a wide array of products you can put to work, including page reporting, StoryBuilder, intent signaling, and opportunity forecasting — the latter being one of its most robust features that outshines the competition. As one of the top tools for SEO monitoring, it’s used by agencies and marketing teams alike.
Some additional features you’ll find in BrightEdge include:
- Hyperlocal SEO
- Keyword research
- Content marketing analysis.
But one of its best tools comes in the form of ContentIQ, BrightEdge’s solution for SEO and content audits. It’s one of the most comprehensive site audit solutions on the market, allowing you to spot errors and fix them quickly, propelling you to outperform your competitors on the SERPs.
One unique aspect of the BrightEdge solution is that it’s tailored to the needs of each user. Because of this, it’s only available for deployment via personalized plans that they’ll need to quote for your specific use case.
SurferSEO
SurferSEO is a tool that focuses more on content optimization. It leverages AI and natural language processing to help you adjust your pages and blogs to make them more friendly to Google and optimized for high rankings. To do this, the platform analyzes more than 500 SERP factors, compares your site’s content to your competitors' content, then gives you a unique blueprint that will make your site rank higher.
Most SEO monitoring software will focus on user information, but SurferSEO utilizes modeling driven by data to help improve the ranking of your site’s pages. This allows you to focus more on what it will take to surpass your competition in the SERPs.
You can think of this platform as a personalized data scientist. It will analyze your competition’s performance metrics, then find the technical factors that impact search rankings. By using this data, you’ll be able to reverse engineer what your high-ranking competition is doing, allowing you to move to the top of the SERPs.
With all of the data SurferSEO gives you, you might initially feel overwhelmed. However, the platform makes it simple to identify the quickest ways to rank higher on Google.
Unlike some SEO tools used to monitor content, SurferSEO is simple to navigate. All its tools are at your fingertips, and the UX is very friendly to beginners.
The six tools you’ll be able to access are:
- SERP Analyzer
- Content Editor
- Content Planner
- Keyword Research
- Grow Flow
- Audit
Furthermore, there are also several tools you can add on as you become more familiar with what this solution can do for you.
Choose the Best SEO Monitoring Software Platforms
With so many solutions available, it’s important to use the tools to get you at the top of the SERPs. To achieve that goal, the first step is to start monitoring your competition with Visualping. Once you understand why they’re at the top of the SERPs, you’ll know how to get there yourself.
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Emily Fenton
Emily is the Product Marketing Manager at Visualping. She has a degree in English Literature and a Masters in Management. When she’s not researching and writing about all things Visualping, she loves exploring new restaurants, playing guitar and petting her cats