As more and more consumers are carrying out their purchases online, company’s need to optimize their web presence in an effort to be visible to their potential customers. Often they will solicit the service of an SEO (Search Engine Optimization), either through an agency or through freelancing job boards, such as Fiverr, BloggingPro, or ProBlogger.

The competition on these job boards is rude. There are, however, a few tools that can help you produce high-quality work and help you stand out from your competitors.

Freelancing comes with its own challenges and pitfalls. If the prospect of being your own boss and succeeding in self-employment appeals to you, make sure to get any competitive edge that is available to you, starting with these 3 simple, yet highly effective, tools.

Surfer

By running an analysis of high-ranking competitor sites, Surfer produces a list of keywords and their frequency as well as the number of headings and the word count you should aim for when drafting content that is likely to rank high with search engines.

The content you draft is given a score based on its likely appeal to search engines.

By using this online tool, you are able to show to your clients, in a quantitative way, just how well optimized your content is for search engines. After all, that’s what they’re paying you to do. And if you can show them, objectively, how well optimized your content is, they won’t need to wait weeks and months to see the results of your efforts to know that they’ve made the right choice in hiring you.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs (pronounced H-refs) is a comprehensive all-in-one SEO toolkit, including learning materials and access to a large knowledgable and supportive community.

Ideal for conducting a complete SEO audit, Ahrefs enables you to:

• Get an exhaustive analysis of a website – Ahrefs gives you an overall SEO health score, allows you to visualize the data with graphs and flags possible SEO issues while providing suggestions on how to fix them
• Analyze your competitors – Ahref checks your competitor’s site for organic traffic, keywords that rank, and backlinks. It also checks to see if your competitors are using any paid traffic research.
• Research keywords – See the search data for relevant keywords and find ones that will help you rank quickly
• Research web pages – Find the most popular content on any given topic and see what kind of content drives traffic.
• Track your progress – Simply input a list of keywords, filter by country(s) and Ahrefs will track the data and send you regular updates.

Answer the Public

Get a clear idea of what common queries are associated with given keywords.

Great for getting relevant content ideas, Answer the Public lets you see what questions the “the public” is asking.

This tool is especially helpful in generating relevant headings that will not only make your content engaging to the reader but will also rank high in search engine results.

Conclusion

Whether it’s to help you generate ideas, optimize your content for search engines or simply to show your clients the due diligence you’ve carried out with respect to their order, using these 3 tools will go a long way toward satisfying your clients and helping you stand out in the crowded field of SEO.