We often get asked, "What apps do the SEOmoz team use?" To answer this question, we decided to put together a blog post with the Top 10 Web Apps We Love here at SEOmoz.
The SEOmoz team decided on the Top 10 apps below (in no particular order). However, we found we liked so many apps that we decided to include another 15 that are definitely worth mentioning. Take a look at our list and let us know your own favorite apps in the comments.
The Top Ten List (in no particular order)
Web Analytics
Google Analytics is an excellent free web analytics tool. Even if you have another analytics application, we think it's worthwhile to add Google Analytics to your site-- it's that good. We use Google Analytics to report on the performance of the SEOmoz website and our online marketing campaigns. Our only requests? Real-time reporting, a referral report with complete URLs and the option to pay for a service level agreement.
Also Recommended: Yahoo! Web Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, WebTrends
#2 KISSmetrics
Funnel Reporting
Does your website require users to go through multiple steps? If so, you need good funnel reporting; we like KISSmetrics. Simple to setup and configure, but with plenty of options for segmentation and customization, we use KISSmetrics to monitor and report on the key user experiences of our site. It even provides details on the conversion funnel performance of each of our organic keywords-- a big plus for SEOs.
Also Recommended: Adobe Discover,Google Analytics (limited funnel capability)
Conversion Rate Optimization
These days, Conversion Rate Optimization seems to be more popular than Harry Potter. Google Website Optimizer is a free way to do simple conversion rate optimization testing on your website. You can test varied landing pages using an A/B test or determine the ideal combination of elements using a multivariate test. Google's tool is free, and capable enough to get you well on your way with CRO.
Also Recommended: Unbounce, Visual Website Optimizer, Adobe Test&Target
#4 MailChimp
Email Campaign Manager
MailChimp, oh how we love thee. MailChimp is one of the most intuitive and simple email marketing packages around. And yet, it remains incredibly powerful with detailed analytics, great social media integration and an adorable chimp, Freddie. MailChimp offers both free and affordable plans that work well for low-volume and high-volume email campaigns. Stay awesome, MailChimp.
Also Recommended: ExactTarget
#5 HasOffers
Affiliate Program Management
SEOmoz re-launched our affiliate program this fall and we chose HasOffers as our new platform. Our marketing team has collectively used several other platforms in the past and none are as capable and intuitive as HasOffers. Based in the cloud, HasOffers has plenty of capabilities and is designed to enable you to self-manage your own affiliate program (or even your own affiliate network).
#6 Wistia
Video Hosting
Wistia is video hosting on steroids. Not only does this video hosting platform support HTML5, which makes your videos viewable on a slew of non-Flash enabled devices, but the platform is inherently designed for SEO. Try searching Google for "Top 10 Web Apps We Love" and you'll likely see the above Wistia-hosted video that's included with this blog post. Their tracking and analytics are also the best we've seen in video hosting. See a sample report here.
Also Recommended:Delve Networks, Vimeo (not recommended for commercial videos)
SEO Insight from Google
Google Webmaster Tools is SEO insight straight from the horse's mouth, and a must-have for any website. Get information on how Googlebot sees your site, view (some) links to your site and edit preferences for how your listing appears in the Google search results. While not as comprehensive as we'd like, it's still a welcome set of capabilities.
Also Recommended:Yahoo Site Explorer, Bing Webmaster Tools
#8 SEOmoz PRO
SEO Campaign Management
We may well deserve criticism for adding our own app to this list, but we really are proud parents. The SEOmoz website is large enough that the crawl diagnostics help us find issues we haven't fixed, the rankings report manages our large list of keywords, and Open Site Explorer provides invaluable data on backlinks. These features just scratch the surface of what you get with SEOmoz PRO. It's a toolset our marketing team uses everyday.
Take a 30-day free trial of SEOmoz PRO.
#9 CoTweet
Twitter Account Management
CoTweet provides an excellent interface for managing your Twitter account, especially if you need multiple people to manage it. Jen, who manages our community, approves of CoTweet-- and that means a lot! CoTweet makes it easy to access multiple Twitter accounts and keep an eye on your mentions. Even better, CoTweet integrates with our #10 App, Bit.ly Pro.
Also Recommended: HootSuite
#10 Bit.ly Pro
URL Sharing and Analytics
While most people only use a URL-shortening service for tweets, we like to use Bit.ly URLs wherever possible. Bit.ly Pro permits you to use a custom domain (we use seomz.me) and provides useful analytics for each URL you create. SEOmoz uses the data from Bit.ly Pro to determine which tweets generate the most clicks. Pro Tip: add a + to the end of any Bit.ly URL to see a detailed report, like so: https://seomz.me/hXrmAU+.
Other Apps We Love
Below are more of the apps we use and love. While they all can't be in our Top 10, they're definitely worth mentioning:
- Dropbox -- Awesome file syncing, backup and sharing.
- Google Apps & Google Docs -- Email, calendar and productivity apps.
- Feedburner -- RSS feed analytics.
- PostRank -- Analytics for your blog, guides and articles.
- ZenDesk -- Help desk software.
- SnapEngage -- Online chat software.
- Good Data -- Business intelligence and visualization.
- Geckoboard -- Business analytics dashboard.
- SurveyMonkey -- Online surveys.
- Box.net -- Online file sharing and collaboration.
- UserTesting.com -- Affordable usability testing.
- Silver Back App -- Usability testing software.
- Five Second Test -- Quick usability testing.
- Google Local Business Center -- Search management for small businesses.
- Pandora -- Keeping the marketing team sane!
What are your favorite apps?
Are we missing a must-have app for your website? Please let us know in the comments! We'd love to know what you're using to make your work easier, more productive and fun.
Update: Reader and PRO member shanedj created a Google form to collect your favorite web apps. He plans to write a YOUmoz post once he's got enough votes. Vote for your favorite apps here.
Happy New Year!
We're taking a few days off to celebrate the New Year, so things might be a little quieter around here than usual. We'll be back first thing next week to begin our most exciting year yet! From all of us at SEOmoz we hope you have a very Happy New Year!
Ah... not really CRO, but nice you put a link to a 30 days free Trial of SEOmoz Pro
You have just needed to put a disclaimer: Beware, this app is highly addictive. People should take breaks while using it to not risk overdose.
Other app that are really good are the RavenTools and, at least in this moment, I find it complementing the SEOmoz web app.
Kissmetric is really good and simple, I recommend it too.
On a "social" side, I tend to use Hootsuite, that is perfect if you have to deal with multiple Social Media presence, especially when you are (co)administering several Facebook pages.
Shh! I didn't think anyone would notice the free trial! ;) Glad to hear you think SEOmoz PRO is addictive!
With KISSmetrics, try segmenting your reports by keyword... it's very interesting!
Thumbs up on the hootsuite call out G. I use it too.
We use Hootsuite's assigment tool pretty much every hour of the work-day to route service incidents to the right technical specialists.
have not heard of Hootsuite, thanks for the mention!
I'm going to do a YouMoz post based on SEOmoz readers responses to this google form.
Would be really good to see what the community responses would be.
@Jamie would you be able to put a link in the "What are your favorite apps" section and i'll get a YouMoz post done when i have a good amount of data.
Done! Great idea!
These are some great tools that everybody love to use. However, I love tweetdeck to manage my twitter account, it is a great tool. Also, I love Invoicera.com to invoice my clients and mint.com to manage my expenses.
Invoicera looks great for consultants, and I'm a big fan of Mint for my personal finances as well!
I took a look at Invoicera and it looks pretty good, but what do you (freelancers, SEOs) use to accept credit card payments? I'm getting ready to put a credit card processing system in place - does anyone have any recommendations?
Hi there we use google checkout + freshbooks for our online CC processing/invoicing. It also exports our data into xero for accounting. Major benefit.
Thanks for the response! I'll check it out.
Man, Google Checkout takes out a huge chunk of money! Since I'd be processing less than $3,000 a month to start and $2.9 is a lot to be taken off the top. I'll keep looking at my options though, some companies look like they offer 2-2.2% per transaction so those would be a lot better if I could integrate it into my website.
Invoicera was just what I was looking for. Thanks
Adding a new comment as I can't edit mine anymore...
I don't see an App that it is my daily saver: BaseCamp.
It's the perfect tool for consultants like me that have to follow Web Marketing projects that see involved people from different places (Clients' SEO In House and/or Webmaster, Freelance Web Designers, On Topic specialists...).
Ah... as you put Quora and it is not available in Europe, I quote Spotify
Basecamp is really pretty cool but a bit too much for me. They did a simplified task list but that was too little so i built my own app
Might release it to public, not sure yet?
Our inhouse content team use clockingit.com though, they seem to love it
I've always liked 37Signals approach to products-- great suggestion with BaseCamp. Also, Spotify was supposed to launch in the US this year-- I suppose they have one more day! ;-)
Yep used basecamp recently on a collaborative project, really impressed.
thanks again, I will check this out also.
Yeah, it's really cool of you to place a link to a 30-day free trial of SEOmoz's Pro accounts. Will most definately give it a try some time soon.
Don't try it 'sometime soon'. Try it NOW! It's great!
I have just found hasoffers thanks to this list, I know someone who will benefit from it. Thanks!
After testing all of these products over the weekend, I had to just drop by and say thanks for all of the info. In addition to gathering some great info on my sites, I thought of a few more bits of data and tools that I wanted, which led to even more discovery. Thanks again.
So glad to hear it Keenan!
Love this list and love the comments... I also like 'Remember The Milk' as a great To Do app. :-)
Does hasoffers generate any SEO benefit from the links or do they get lost at the network?
Interested because I remember SEOMoz talking about creating their own in-house affiliate network so they could effectively control the link make-up to gather some SEO benefit from them.
Ben
Aggh I notice on the features page here it talks about SEO friendly links: https://www.hasoffers.com/compare-features on the PRO & Enterprise level packages. How are you finding that works?
HasOffers here :)
We do offer SEO friendly links! (thanks for stopping by the site)
There are a few boundaries when you enable SEO friendly links that limit redirects, etc, but those that are using them are having great results. We're working on some great case studies.
Thanks Perry - I'll drop you a message if thats ok.
I definitely want to try out some of those BI / dashboard ones (and hasoffers - I haven't played with that yet).
We use Vzaar for our video hosting and I can recommend them highly as well - great gadgets (Mailchimp integration!) and superb support.
PS speaking of which, do you have a beta invite for geckoboard?
GoodData is great, and we're just getting started with Geckoboard. We did receive a beta invitation and I'll see if we got any to share!
Oliver Stone invested in Vzaar? Whoa! How is Vzaar's reporting? Wistia's reports look like this: https://app.wistia.com/seomoz/250878
Yeah - analytics is an area where Wistia wins hands-down. The cool parts of Vzaar are all around the API / customisation.
Jamie,
Thanks for thinking of us (Wistia)!
Will,
We actually do have an API with more customization options than we used to. You can check out the API here: https://wistia.com/doc/data-api
I didn't see the video ranking at all clicking through on the serp link.
Also searching in videos shows the video but on a scraper site??
How can Open Site Explorer not grace at least the top 5 in your list much less not be on the list. OSE, GA and Adwords keyword tool would be top 3 on my list. Weird that 2 of them don't appear in your top 15.
Webmaster tools has made great strides this past year and it'll be fun to see where it is at in 6 or 12 months. The fact that they now show anchor text and incoming links is interesting if they really don't want webmaster manipulating (buying, trading, optimizing) links.
Good point-- we considered Open Site Explorer as part of SEOmoz PRO, as the full version is included with your PRO membership. Joanna uses and loves AdWords, but for now, she's the only one-- it would however be in my personal Top 10.
I know I'm massively in the minority and everyone will think I'm some sort of crazy loon, but I really don't like Google analytics. I just find it really tricky to use and I don't trust all the data I see in there. It's free-ness without trial period or data expiry is obviously appreciated but I'm just not on-board the GA waggon. Although I know 'everyone else in the whole wide world' can't be wrong so I keep perservering with it and maybe I'll come around one day.
Phew - getting that confession out of the way is a huge weight off my shoulders.
I agree there are some serious downsides, but for me I still feel like the pro's outweigh the con's. But I've often argued that a paid (but inexpensive) version of Google Analytics could potentially be a good thing if it included some piece of mind with performance, retention and uptime. I will say that having a free Google Analytics in the market does wonders to motivate the paid analytics software companies to make better apps.
While you need a budget for it, I've found that my best keyword insights come from running tests in my Adwords account. By setting all other variables equal, you can compare the exact number of exposures given keywords get. This beats Google's keyword tool that just gives you estimates (which are frequently off) You can also measure how compelling given keywords or phrases are by measuring and comparing click through rates. You also have the ability to measure these differences for specific geographic regions and times of day. Anyone who has an Adwords account and isn't running mini keyword experiments is missing one of the platform's great opportunities.
Great idea. I'm very curious: how close are Google's predicted impression levels using the AdWords tool vs. your own controlled testing?
I've found that Google's impression predicictions can be off as far as 50%. I do work in a relatively small niche where the most popular keywords are only getting about 5,000 impressions monthly. This being said, if you use the tool to the guage the popularity of a keyword vs. keyword it's generally an accurate guideline. For instance, If Google's Keyword Tool predicts that "blue widgets" will get 7,200 searches and "red widgets" will get 3,400 searches, those numbers might be considerably off, but it would be a safe bet that "blue widgets" will be more popular than "red widgets"
I've seen it off in both directions, both under and over estimated.
Great post some very good apps in the list, surprised SEO moz was not number one =)
haha! Well it's the list for the entire marketing team for which SEO is a part of. :)
I'm excited about mailchimp, I've been looking for an email marketing system. Thanks
The list of Web Apps from SEOmoz and everyone in the comments is great. They are all very useful!
How about Delicious? Incredible tool for organizing and accessing web content.
What do you recommended for back-link analysis? The free tools I'm using seem to be incomplete with respect to links or are operating on data that's a least a month old. I'd love some suggestions for real time complete tools. Is it time to start paying or am I just missing something?
Thanks for the Mail Chimp, I started using this last week and LOVE it!!
For Bit.ly, why use a separate domain instead of a subdomain? For more link juice????
Is anybody there? :-)
I agree that drop box is worth it's wait in gold as my laptop died on me last week, but thankfully most of the important stuff was backed up. Phew! Testimonial Monkey have recently made their Lite package free (it was £29 per month) which is well worth checking out:
www.testimonialmonkey.com
I like https://bootstraptoday.com .
BootStrapToday is an integrated and intelligent Application Life Cycle Management platform for Software development teams. This platform aims to automate process for software development teams with integrated tools as well help them intelligently collaborate to reduce productivity gap between the team members with early warning signs.
We have found that in terms of a business intelligence software - SiSense Prism is the ultimate solution. With the SiSense Elasticube technology, we are able to custom create reports to meet the individual needs of each of our clients. We can track everything from PPC to phone orders all in one place. It is fast and easy to use and a huge hit in our office.
Thanks for suggesting these wonderful tools. Few tools like Kissmetrics and cotweet are new to me. But i would like to include Google Insight along with Google analytics and Google webmaster tools.
We actually had Google Insights on our first draft of our list, and it's something we use, but not used as much as the other items in the Top 10.
Thanks for the resources. Although, I had kind of a problem to hear last part because of that music in the background. :)
well that was a good list that you provided. Those were really nice application. But my favourate is not in that list.
Thank you for great resource, It will help us add more tools to our arsenal..
Nice list, thanks for putting this together! I would suggest also adding WordPress, both for it's ease of use and it's SEO capabilities.
Well... isn't it something different than a web app?
Thank you for sharing your tools with us. I have not used some of these but will surely try now. I hope we won't be deprived of Rand's white board friday tomorrow. :-)
WhiteBeard Friday... surely it won't miss.
Rumour has it that Rand will be dressing up like old man father time complete with scythe and all.
Sadly, this will be the last post of the year as we're out of the office today enjoying a rare bit of Winter sunshine in Seattle. But, I promise we'll have a fun surprise with Whiteboard Friday's in January. Stay tuned!
Shame... I was tricked by what Rand was saying in the last WBF ("Let's see in one week for another edition of WBF")...
Nice list Jamie. I didn't know about KISS Metrics and I'll be checking them out shortly.
Also, I'd heard about Pandora before but never checked into it. Wow. I've been listening now for a few songs that it picked and I think I'm already addicted to it. What a cool service!
So glad to introduce you to those great apps. I'm very curious as to what musician you used as the seed on Pandora? My tastes are pretty fringe. This is a station I've been fine tuning for a year: https://bit.ly/gFLWOX
I think GNC might like this one better: https://www.pandora.com/#/stations/play/219024846664032580 ;)
ROTFL !!! You sooooo got me on that Jen! I feel like I've been Rick Rolled :)
Haha! You're such a hipster, Jamie!
Here's the station that I've been refining for over four years now. I use it when I'm writing at work or reading: https://bit.ly/fCqPwM
I checked your station out Jamie. What an awesome first song I heard Thievery Corporation's Lebanese Blonde from The Mirror Conspiracy album. Never heard them before but am totally entranced. I'm sitting here waiting for the song to end when I should already be up and eating supper.
For my station I used the group Iona as the seed and it made me a station that I am loving! Like I really needed yet another reason to stay glued to my computer!
IMO, I was really surprised not to see Statcounter.com make your list??? I couldn't survive without their real-time analytics for all my sites.....
Thank goodness for Pandora! I think we all have paid accounts there, we use it so much. ;)
Give Grooveshark a try!
Another thumbs up for grooveshark. I personally like it alot better than pandora!
Is that the service where you can share songs with other people, whether they have a Grooveshark account or not? I thought I had some friends that used it and shared songs with me.
What a great list. All of the above have been really awesome to work with, especially MailChimp. We have been moving all our clients who use email marketing to this platform and our designers really enjoy working with their system when compared to everything else. The only one I cannot agree with just because I've never used it is the Affilate platform
I use Constant Contact right now, just checked out Mail Chimp and see that they are priced competitively. You have any insight on the advantages of switching over?
MailChimp is popular with everyone over at SEOmoz, particularly our designers. I don't think enough can be said about making a web app that's pretty and fun to use, in addition to being functional. It makes any time you spend using it all the more enjoyable.
Analytics and HasOffers play a big part for us, definitely in our top 10!
I think Pingdom also deserves mentioning here, and of course there are so many other tools many of use frequently such as RSS Graffity on Facebook or Twitterfeed
That's a great addition. I wish I had known about Pingdom at my last company. I was always looking for a simple web-based uptime monitoring tool that didn't cost a fortune.
rather than real time reporting I think Google Analytics really needs first and intermediate clicks attribution Especially for e-commerce sites it's a critical missing feature
Well, luckily the Distilled band had thought about it and did their tweak. Use the search function above in right corner of this page and use "First touch attribution": two posts by Will Critchlow will pop up in the SERPs. Save those post in your favs.
yep, I've recently installed their tweak in the GA code for one of our client (https://code.google.com/p/attributiontrackingga/)
Not working as I hoped though, still trying to figure out why. Did you try it with success ?
Yes,
I made implement it in an eCommerce site on Magento, and it works.
At first we had problems, but mostly of interpretation of the informations, because that site was implementing the classic GA code before. That means that for several weeks there was the touch attribution doubt.
Great list.Though I wondered what you use for keyword study :-)
Free:
Adwords KWD Tools
Google Suggest
Wonder Wheel
Paid Tools:
Keyword difficulty tool > SEO Pro tool that you can try for free for 30 days (check the link in the post)
SEOGadget.co.uk Keyword Tool (fantastic).
Thanks for the list.
I haven't use those paid KW tools.But I do use Google Adwords KW tool.
For paid KW tools,I like Wordtracker and Wordstream a lot!
Gianluca has a great list of keyword research tools. Our Keyword Difficulty tool is one we use often, but I'd also recommend you check out SEOGadget's new tool. See a blog post discussing it here.
Thanks.And I wondered,why in your top 10 you did not mention any KW research tool.
Hey Jamie,That's a nice list of web apps. For efficient customer support, I invite you to try <a href="https://happyfox.com">HappyFox</a>. HappyFox is a simple customer support tool which helps you collate customer requests and manage them online easily. Powerful automation features and an intuitive user interface make HappyFox an ideal partner to work with. With affordable monthly pricing-plans, HappyFox is also light on your wallet.
Great blog post idea. I especially like the survey at the bottom. :) Can't wait to see the results.
Great List! There are a couple that I will have to check out.
I have to mention Xmarks (recently acquired by LastPass). I couldn't live without it. I bookmark a lot of sites so it's great to have my bookmarks automatically synced between my work pc and my home pc.
Talking about Bookmarks... what about Readitlater?
That's a good one too. I've tried it but wasn't crazy about it.
No mention of Evernote? www.evernote.com
Great for bookmarking pages, images etc. Plus it's free!
I'm a fan of Evernote, but it's not something we use as a team. Google Docs and Sites serves that purpose for us. (I definitely use Evernote on my own computer and iPhone, however).
I second MailChimp, I've used them since maybe July and have been very pleased with the interface, support, integration and pricing. Coming from Constant Contact, they're serious contenders in e-mail marketing.
Would also suggest Wolfram Alpha for factual research (I use it a lot lately to slice and dice data when I'm writing content for some of my Websites).
Animoto is great for making video presentations, its simple drag and drop interface is simply awesome. You can make 'em from your iPhone, too. (Don't think there's an Android app out yet.)
Not related to online marketing: Kayak for finding travel fares.
Wolfram Alpha is a great addition to this list. It's the most powerful calculator I've ever used, although I'm not sure it's fair to call it that. I've never used Animoto, but after reading about it would love to give it a shot. Thanks!
It's already on the list - but I'm a big fan of Visual Website Optimizer. It saves me so much time in setting up multivariate and A/B tests compared to Google's Website Optimizer. This is especially true for database driven websites. While it's hard to say no to free I've found the expense is well worth the effort saved.
I just started using it on a few personal projects but Raven Tools is also fast becoming indispensable. I love having all my seo tools in one place - rank tracking, link management, content management, social media, etc.
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Wow! Tahnk You for this data! will try some of these tools soon.
My favorite business intelligence software and dashboard analytics software is https://www.sisense.com/
Good to see dropbox on there. Personally this has been a bit of a life save in a handful of stuations. If your not using dropbox then Get it here.
Also props to the SEOmoz tool. Another mass time saving tool making site analysis (almost) a thing of the past.
Seconding DropBox. Integrates so smoothly with all of my devices.
Couldn't agree more about Dropbox. It's saved me more than a half dozen times where I accidentally deleted a file I shouldn't have or found myself somewhere where I didn't my documents with me.