Tools I love

There are so many tools out there, how can you keep track of what’s good and worth experimenting with? Because they do all take so much time, don’t they? To investigate and have a go with. So here’s my (growing) list of what I use on a daily – or at least frequent – basis. Any time I add something exciting, I’ll mention it in my weekly emails, so make sure you’re signed up to my newsletter.

Website technical help

The tools in this section help with monitoring or creating technical things that would be complicated to create yourself. (This doesn’t include tools that actually create websites, they’re in their own section.)

AiProfiles

Our own inhouse tool, of my devising, so of course I love it – a super easy way for non-coders to have a page of structured data about their business, complete with LLMS.txt file. You simply fill in a form, which asks the best questions that ChatGPT wants to know the answers to, and it generates you a page of structured data in schema.org mark up. Let the robots know everything you want them to know, for SEO and GEO (AI).
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SiteVitals

So this one hasn’t officially launched to the public yet, it’s a tool we’ve built and use inhouse to monitor our client’s sites – it tells us when things go down, or their performance slows, or they have a SEO blip, or a security issue crops up. If you’d like to be on the free tier when we make it open to the public, please leave your name on our waiting list.
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GA4

You need to be careful that you get your site visitors to opt in to you tracking their actions, but if you want statistics on who’s visiting your website, then GA4 (Google Analytics 4) is your tool. Some people will scoff that this is on the list, but if you’re new to all things website, you genuinely might not have heard of it – and you need to.
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Google Search Console

Run by Google (as the name suggests) this gives you insight into what Google thinks of your site, if anything is going wrong, and lets you dig into what’s working from a search engine optimisation point of view. Take what it says with a pinch of salt – you probably don’t need to pay a developer to make everything perfect as some of the things it raises aren’t really important, but it’s still a valuable tool.
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Matomo

Very thorough analytics / reporting which we use when we need to crunch and analyse a lot of data (beyond what you can do for free on GA4). Matomo though is also great because you can install it locally on your own server so you’re not sharing data with another company / dropping 3rd party cookies – so if privacy is a concern, Matomo trumps GA4.
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FFmpeg

If we need to convert or condense video files, this is what we use. We often also set it up on a server so a website can manage large files or carry out conversions and compressions programmatically. Not super super relevant to this section, and a little too technical, but I probably won’t have anywhere else to put it. And as a great free tool, it deserves a shout out.
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SEO and content tools

Arguably, the ones above are in part SEO tools, but these are a few more. I’ve linked content and SEO together, because the reason I use these content tools is for SEO.
A reminder of the ones above: AiProfiles, SiteVitals, GA4, GSC

AlsoAsked

This brilliant website tells you what people also searched for when they searched for your topic. So if you are writing an article about a topic, you enter your keyword/phrase into AlsoAsked, and it returns a host of related phrases that people have really truly searched Google for, in connection to your topic. It’s free for a few goes a day.
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Headline Studio

This tool (which has a free tier) analyses the words in your headline to help you make it punchier or more emotive – or whatever it deems it needs to be to get a better CTR (click through rate). It helps you craft title tags that people will want to click on when they see them in Google.
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Ahrefs

A massive piece of SEO software (that has a free tier) that helps you dive deep into everything to do with your website, with a new set of AI tools for tracking your visibility in AI too. There’s too much to say about Ahrefs so have a read through their features. I particularly like the tools that help you analyse your competitors approach.
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SEMRush

SEMRush is in the same camp as Ahrefs (somewhere I’ve written some notes comparing the 2 so I’ll dig those out for a future newsletter). But something I’ve used of theirs recently is their free toxic backlink report so as to help a client detect and eliminate back links which were damaging their SEO.
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Reddit really isn’t a SEO tool, but I’m putting it here because I won’t have another place to put it, and I use it so as to build credibility and citations so as to get myself and our work mentioned by ChatGPT. Read my article about it here.
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Iszy

Another inhouse tool of ours, Iszy is designed to help you collect content from a dispersed team – maybe a workforce “on the ground” or a team of volunteers. It was originally devised (by me!) to help a Ski School who wanted to create more blog posts of stories about the day to day adventures of their ski instructors who were also busy out on the slopes.
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Websites that put you in touch with journalists

I’m on mailing lists for all of these sites – and yes, it’s a full time job replying, but if you get chance, it can give you some great coverage.

Editorielle – from £10pm. I’ve used this for a few months now and whilst it has lots of interesting requests every day, lots are around beauty and fashion, so not really my remit. I might cancel my subscription as my inbox is BURSTING with all of these press emails at the moment so I’ll stick with the free ones. But if you’re a UK based PR or lifestyle/beauty brand, this is a nice service with lots of opportunities.

HARO (Help A Reporter Out) – this closed down for a while but is back in business, after it was taken over by Featured. It’s free and is a great resource. You get daily emails with details of stories journalists are currently working on so that you can email back your “pitch”.

Featured – has a free tier, and a great interface for seeing what’s been accepted. You can then pay monthly or just top up with credits if there’s something else you want to pitch on. Again, you get emails with stories that you might be interested in contributing to (because you tell Featured about your niche).

Qwoted – Extremely comprehensive with the ability to follow journalists and search for things of interest, as well as setting up email alerts. It’s targeted at showing people you’’’re an expert – rather than some others can just be looking for “person on the street” kind of opinions. It allows you to build a profile and keep in touch with journalists.

SourceBottle – Australian – again, free to build a profile, say what you’re an expert in, and receive email alerts.

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