Which Digital tools should you invest in for your digital toolkit is always a quandary. I have been in Digital for over 17 years and during that time I have seen many tools and technology stacks coming to the forefront as the next "vital" thing in assisting with your Digital strategy and effective analytics and it is an ever evolving and confusing landscape.

Over the years I have complied a bit of a checklist summary on which Digital Tools and platforms I have found helpful and what they can offer.

This is by no means an extensive list but hopefully gives an overview of those I am familiar with and where they could help you depending on your Digital needs.

Moz

www.moz.org

Moz is a staple for SEO and Digital Marketing and provides a full research and analysis suite for on-page and off-page analysis.

Open Site Explorer/Link Explorer: Research and compare backlinks with competitors for intelligent and targeted link building. Identify top pages, view social activity data, and analyse anchor text.

Keyword Difficulty & SERP Analysis: Keyword opportunity tool that helps assess how challenging it is to rank for a keyword including competitor analysis.

Rank Tracker: A tool to check, track, and monitor where SERP rankings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

On-page Analysis : Graded on-page keyword targeting. Report on how well pages are optimised for target keywords and gain insight to improve websites for best performance. SEO Web Crawler : Reporting tool assessing how accessible a site is to search engines and identify common on page SEO problems.

Majestic

www.majestic.com

Another staple for SEO professionals is Majestic; Majestic is a suite of tools in aid in onsite and offsite analysis. Keyword Checker : Searches Majestic’s index for a Keyword or Phrase and reports on how many times it appears, as well as reporting the Search Volume for each keyword. Link Profile Fight : Compares the backlink profiles of two sites graphically with our enhanced link profile "fight" tool. Backlink History : A reporting tool that determines the number of backlinks detected for given domains, subdomains or URLs.

Bulk Backlink Checker : Reports on backlink counts for many domains.

Clique Hunter : A tool that can find all of the 'cliques' that link to a list of domains. Majestic Million : The top one Million Domains* on the internet - listed by TLD and updated frequently. *as rated by Majestic SEO metrics. Comparator : Compares headline stats for up to 5 different domains.

Screaming Frog

www.screaming-frog.co.uk

Screaming Frog is a spider simulator that allows you to quickly analyse, audit and review websites. Super useful when building out your SEO audit.

Xenu

https://xenus-link-sleuth.en.softonic.com/

Xenu is an assessment and reporting tool that identifies broken links on websites.

AWR – Advanced Web Ranking www.advancedwebranking.com AWR is a ranking monitoring tool that allows reporting on keyword positions in multiple search engines in multiple countries.

Raven SEO Tools www.raventools.com Raven Tools is an online platform that allows users to monitor, research and report on urls. Research Central: An online reporting suite of SEO intelligence data from SEMRush, Majestic SEO and SEOmoz. Link manager: A CRM and link management and database tool to aid link building activities. SERP Tracker: Monitor and report on keyword rankings within specified search engines. Research Assistant: A tool that integrates third-party data from SEMRush, SEOmoz, Google AdWords and OpenCalais. Produce reports for organic and paid keywords, including rank, traffic, costs and volume.

Backlink Explorer: A back link research tool. Site Finder: Link discovery/prospecting tool. Keyword Manager: Monitor and manage the keywords for a campaign and their search volume.

Competition Manager: Competitor analysis tool reporting on Domain Authority and number of indexed pages.

Website Directory: Reporting tool for link building and quality information of prospects and built links. Quality Analyser: Assessment tool for backlinks.

LaunchRock http://launchrock.com/ LaunchRock is a landing page creation tool with social integration. Followerwonk http://followerwonk.com/ Follwerwonk is a Twitter analytics tool with features such as follower segmentation, social graph tracking and bio searching.

Crazy Egg www.crazyegg.com Founded in 2005 by Neil Patel Crazy Egg is a reporting tool that helps with landing page optimisation through features such as heat maps to gain insights into user on page engagement.

Clicktale www.clicktale.com Clicktale is a reporting tool to help optimise landing pages and increase conversions. Acquired by ContentSquare and offers Experience Analytics to enhance the UX and Digital Experience.

AHRefs

ahrefs.com Ahrefs is a toolset to check your site backlinks, keyword rankings and competition.

Outbrain

www.outbrain.com/

Outbrain is an amplification tool for content via a network of top publisher websites.

Zemanta

www.zemanta.com

A native content distribution platform now part of Outbrain, Zamanta helps maximise the reach of content to audiences.

Google Search Console/Google Search Central

https://developers.google.com/search

Google Search Central, formerly Google Webmaster Tools is a free web service by Google for webmasters that allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimise visibility of their websites.

Google Analytics

analytics.google.com

Google Analytics is one of the most popular digital analytics software. It is a web analytics platform that lets you measure your sites performance, web traffic, advertising ROI and social networking sites and applications.