Knowing where to look when it comes to SEO and Social Media advice can be a battle, but here, Richard O'flynn, Director of digital marketing agency, 201 Digital, offers his top professional tools and tricks to stay ahead...

Professional tools for SEO and social media Searching Google for ‘SEO tools’ offers almost 40 million hits, and looking for ‘social media tools’ gives you ‘approximately’ 677 million. If even Google can only be bothered to approximate, then that makes searching for the right SEO and social media tools for your business something of a tricky ask, right? Add to that the plethora of social networks that are around and it can be difficult to handle the social networks you choose that are best for your niche.

Fortunately, we’re here to help – here’s a list of some fantastic, essential tools that can really help boost the social media and SEO side of your business.

1. Staying contented

Of course, making good use of social media should – if done right – mean that your SEO is boosted as a consequence. So a couple of good apps to help you keep track of and schedule your content are a must. Buffer allows you to schedule posts at any time of day or night to all your myriad of social media accounts, as does Hootsuite.

Twitonomy, however, is fast becoming the go-to site for those looking for some really in-depth social media analysis, offering the chance to look at everything from your most influential followers to who’s retweeted what across which date range.

Other great ways to analyse your social impact include Mention, which tracks all the, well, mentions of your company or subjects of interest across both social media and the net in general, with excellent controls to make sure you’re only receiving the information you want. Tagboard is similar, letting your monitor keywords across Twitter, Vine, Facebook, Instagram and Google Plus – a fantastic way to check brand reputation and curate content on specific topics.

2. Data analysis

Komfo is a good alternative to Facebook Insights, offering you data in a rather more digestible way, showing your posts’ popularity with your fans, viral amplification, spam score and more. Source Metrics (previously known as Swix), meanwhile, allows you to create a ‘scoreboard’ displaying all your social media metric data, displaying YouTube video views, blog traffic, Twitter followers and so on.

Then there’s Flowtown. This allows you to take a list of email addresses – those you send marketing mails to, for instance – and from these Flowtown can determine on which social network these people are most active. A terrific tool for targeted marketing, allowing you to clearly establish which of your fans would be best receptive to marketing on which media. And if you’re not convinced, here’s a quick look at exactly why you really do need to do some social media analysis, if you don’t already.

3. Search me

As we said, good use of the above – along with the creation of quality content, of course – should do your SEO no end of good. However, that’s not to say that a few useful tools wouldn’t be handy too, of course. And we’ll start with Google’s range of tools, which you really shouldn’t be without.

Google Analytics, as you probably know, allows you to really drill down where your traffic is coming from, which posts and web pages are most popular, and so on – helping determine which content really pulls people in.

Google’s Keyword Planner and Adwords go hand in hand with it, letting you see which keywords your competitors are employing, and offer suggestions that you maybe hadn’t thought of. Wordtracker performs a similar function, giving you ten alternatives to the keyword you suggest to it.

And sticking with keywords, Scribe analyses documents, as well as web pages, for keywords that might be of use to you. Spyfu meanwhile will tell you your competitors’ most profitable keywords and the clicks per month they receive. Cause and effect But now you’ve got your keywords, it might be worth taking a closer look to see just how effective your site’s performance is. Screaming Frog will scour through your site to tell you about your page speeds and files, while Open Site Explorer will take a look at your links and give you scores for page and domain authority.

And one final useful tool for Wordpress users is the All in One SEO pack, a plugin that automatically optimises your blog for SEO with XML sitemap support, a built-in API and plenty more besides.

Not familiar with SEO? Unsure why you need to carry it out in order for your site to rank well, take a look at here for an overview.

4. Keeping a look out

That’s some suggestions from us – these really should provide the social and SEO sides of your business with a nice boost, if used wisely. But remember that the internet moves fast and new tools appear all the time – so keep an eye out for what’s new and, if something looks useful, give it a shot. You never know what the future of marketing might turn out.