SEO tools I used to grow my sites to 20k+ visitors/month

SEO & analytics help grow site traffic

Whether you're working on your own blog, a news site, building a product, you absolutely must care about your site's SEO. If your site is not optimized for search engines, it is harder to find, leading to fewer visitors and potential customers. SEO tools can help you improve the usability of your site, making it easier for users to find the information they are looking for.

These are the tools that I use to monitor and enhance my sites' performance. The can help you build a site that is easier to find and use, too.

ahrefs webmaster tools

"You only need to spend a few moments researching SEO online before ahrefs pops up somewhere in your results. In addition to their incredible on how search works on the web, they provide a fantastic suite of free tools for monitoring and improving the SEO on your sites. Similarly,

There's always room to improve SEO, and ahrefs webmaster tools makes it easy to digest

I have found come from what I learned taking Monica Lent's for its privacy-first features).

Best of all, it's free! Just register and follow instructions to add a DNS record, or upload a file to a specific place to verify that you own the site you're interested in monitoring. You should make sure to have a sitemap on your site - they're easy to generate, and worth the time to get right. This is what Google's crawlers primarily use to index your articles for search results.

I use the Search Console to make decisions about things to write about next, and track the progress of my site over time. At the moment, Google will keeps 16 months of your site's traffic history around for you to analyze, but that history starts once you've registered you site with the Search Console. So, the sooner you get set up, the better!

Fathom Analytics

, , , and - you'll need to configure and host it yourself, but it should give you an idea of what Fathom's premiums service is like.

If you're interested in trying out Fathom's paid service, use my to manage the DNS records for all of my sites. In addition to having a really straightforward UI for DNS management, they offer a host of other features to keep your sites running well. This includes automated protection for DDoS attacks, maintenance mode, and performance enhancements such as origin server optimization and caching.

Cloudflare provides a , which you can use to add interactivity to your site.

F5Bot

is simple - as they say, it is a service that will help you to "Get an email when you're mentioned online!".

It's completely free, and takes just moments to set up - you just need to create an account, and set up keywords for the service to track. When your keywords are mentioned on , or

This is what typical notification from f5bot looks like.

Notifications come very quickly - in my experience, I see them within minutes of my sites being mentioned online. This is hugely helpful because it allows you to respond quickly, strike up a conversation, and make a connection with the people who are sharing your work. Those connections are the backbone of building a great personal brand online.

You can set up any search keyword you want, so if there's a competitor or topic that you're hoping to keep an eye on, it's great for that, too.

Overall, I highly recommend