My Lean SEO Technology Stack
In this edition of #MarketingOnMondays, I'll be taking you through my entire SEO technology stack and explaining why I'm a big fan of lean tech stacks, no matter the size of the business.
£338.14…
That’s how much it costs to run my entire SEO technology stack.
It’s comprised of a few simple tools:
Ahrefs
Instantly
SEOTesting
Surfer
ScreamingFrog
Add in Google Search Console and Google Analytics, you’ve got my entire technology stack.
Disclaimer: I also use Keyword Insights, but this has not been included here as I use the tool on a PAYG basis. Will update once this becomes a monthly subscription at some point in 2023. Love keyword Insights.
Why am I advocating for a leaner technology stack?
Cost
The first, and main, benefit of operating with a lean technology stack is cost. Like I said above, it costs just over £300.00 per calendar month to run my entire SEO operation.
This is more important now than ever, too. We know we’re about to head into a recession and it’s often costs within the marketing department that are the first to be reviewed. Especially as trigger-happy CFOs get involved. If you can save your company money by slimming your tech stack down, you will be looked upon as the hero of the day.
I’m certainly not saying that businesses will be saved from having to lay staff off if they are cutting martech costs, but it will certainly help.
Efficiency
This is a simple point, so I am going to keep the writing simple too.
Less tools in your stack, generally, means work can be shipped quicker. Whether it’s new content on your site, a test that’s going live, some internal links being updated. It doesn’t matter.
Less tools to use during the process of shipping, you can ship more, and achieve more as a result.
Laziness
This is, probably, more of a selfish point here… Have you ever had the heartachingly boring task of creating SOPs? No? Lucky you.
It sucks.
It’s a ball-ache, it’s monotonous and even once you have created them all you still need to update them at regular intervals.
Needless to say, more tools in your stack, more SOPs to create.
This will also help new starters within your business, too. If there is a lower number of tools within your stack, there’s a lot less to learn initially and your new hires can hit the ground running straight away.
My Technology Stack
I showed you all the tools above, but now it’s time for me to actually explain how each of them help me on a day-to-day basis.
All-Rounder - Ahrefs
Rank Tracking
Backlink Tracking
Keyword Research
Ahrefs is, arguably, my favourite SEO tool at the moment and it is absolutely the tool I use the most. I’ll use it to track where our website is currently ranking, what backlinks have gone live recently and I use it for all of my keyword research needs too.
Considering I pay approximately £150pcm for this tool, it’s a great deal.
Email Outreach - Instantly
Yes, yes… I work in SEO, which means a key part of my job is building backlinks.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that I am not a fan of tools like Pitchbox that scrape the web based on keyword entries and pulls through email addresses. This feels too impersonal. I’d hate to receive an email that’s impersonal and not addressed to the right department. I’d hope you do too.
Instantly adds more work in the initial stages, like actually having to find contacts, but once these emails have been loaded into the system, using it is a breeze.
Testing - SEOTesting
Testing is a huge part of my role at Land of Rugs. I’m making changes to our website regularly to improve our position within Google’s SERPs.
SEOTesting makes this easy.
Because we only have one website, we absolutely see positive ROI on the $40 monthly cost for a one website subscription to SEOTesting.
The process is incredibly easy. I will make the change I wish to our website, add this as a test in SEOTesting and SEOTesting links directly with GSC to track click, impression and ranking data based on the test.
One of my favourite SEO tools.
Content Optimisation - Surfer
Like testing, content also forms a large part of my role (and the role of my apprentice) here at Land of Rugs. Whether it’s writing new content or optimising existing content.
Surfer helps us massively with our content workflow. With it, we can:
Create content briefs.
Write new content in-app.
Optimise existing content.
We can also audit pages on our website (like category and product pages) in order to see the changes that we could (perhaps, should) make to the pages to see them rank higher. Often, doing this is what forms my SEO tests which are then measured with SEOTesting.
Auditing - ScreamingFrog
I do not really need to say a whole lot here. If you do not have a web auditing tool as an SEO, I am not 100% sure you can be classed as an SEO.
That’s my hot-take for this week’s #MarketingOnMondays edition.
What crawler you choose is completely up to you and the needs of your website, but I will always advocate for ScreamingFrog. It’s very reasonably priced and able to handle all that I ask of it.
I can optimise internal linking, see how Google is crawling my website and so on, and so on!
This Week’s Mental Model - Zone of Genius
After reading a lot of emails from Sahil Bloom, I started reading into the Zone of Genius model, championed by Warren Buffet.
I am an incredible content-based SEO. It sounds big-headed to say, I know. But I believe it’s true.
Give me a business, allow me time to plan and execute a content strategy and I know I could take that business to great heights.
However… Ask me to do a complete technical SEO audit of a large SaaS website, I am not sure I am the best person to do this job. Mainly because I am not necessarily an amazing technical SEO specialist, but also because I haven’t worked in SaaS a whole lot before.
This is where I believe I can make my Zone of Genius work for me.
I have a lot of amazing connections in the SEO and wider digital marketing space. If anything comes up that needs specialist help, I am confident I can find someone to do the job (and do the job better than me).
This is where the biggest wins can be made.
Allow me to do my work on the content-side of a business, and let me hire external professionals who are better than me to do other bits and pieces. Whether that’s a technical SEO job or a digital PR campaign.
This is also why I am passionate about helping other SEOs! There is enough room in the industry for ALL OF US! We shouldn’t be competing against each other, we should be helping everyone out when they need us.