20 Awesome Tools That Dramatically Increased SEO Hacker’s Productivity

Every month we produce reports to show clients our efforts, and how they generated something beneficial.

Having many clients, one month is too short to do everything. In link building alone, the process is so tedious that we need more innovative people who will make this a non-boring feat that can be accomplished in less than a month. Same thing goes with other SEO Hacker departments.

And although we have the best people, which is something that I’m really proud of, I still can’t deny the fact that we’re only humans; we grow tired sometimes, things tend to become boring routines sometimes, and the quality and tremendous amount of work is not something that can be achieved by someone who’s only working 8 hours a day (which actually sounds enough, but no, it’s not).

Yet, we are able to meet our targets on time without losing the quality, in spite of our weekly 30-minute devotion, 1 to 2 hours training and our hour-long breaks when someone is celebrating their birthday.

How? Now, that’s the beauty of living in the era of tools, applications and software – you’ll get the chance to merge your own routines with technology to stay productive without losing all the energy and creative juices you have for the day.

In this article, I will enumerate the tools each of the SEO Hacker teams is using to make work a lot easier and exciting.

Link building Team

Our link building team uses Scrapebox to gather lists of blogs where they could post comments, or guest blog. This tool makes prospecting a lot easier, because you only need to type certain categories or niches, and it will supply you with lists of blogs, and their PageRank, which is needed to gauge the quality of a website.

Our team also uses Yesware, mainly for guest blogging. This tool helps them track whether the webmasters or editors have already checked their email or pitch or just ignored them. In that way, it’ll be easier to decide if they’re going to pursue guest posting to a certain website, or move on and search for other blogs.

Lastly, they use tools such as Moz toolbar and SEO Quake to check the quality of websites, because the goal is not just to do typical link building, but to build links and develop relationships with quality websites.

Blog Management Team

Writing is never easy (I know that!). It’s hard to write when it’s noisy, you’re not in the mood, or there are so many distractions in your browser, like Facebook. To avoid these dilemmas and meet daily goals, our writers use ZenWriter.

ZenWriter is a minimalistic text editor that helps writers be more productive – with relaxing wallpapers, background music, and a simple menu – you’ll have no reason not to concentrate on writing.

I personally love this tool, not only because it helps me focus intensely with writing, but also because it’s free. I love free tools.

For our Blog Managers, WordPress is a good editing instrument. Not only does it help them edit articles, but also makes searching for related articles and interlinking easier.

Social Media Team

I think all social media managers know how important Hootsuite is to their job. Our wonderful social media experts use this tool to manage and monitor multiple social networks in one. They even use it to shorten URL (because tweets are limited to just 140 characters), and track the performance of each post.

Hootsuite also enables them to schedule social posts, thus gives them more time to interact with customers/audience, and analyze whether their strategy is good or requires development.

Web Development Team

For our coders, tools like FileZilla, Notepad++, Firebug and Color Picker, and Adobe Photoshop make coding and web designing easier and more fun.

Programmers and designers usually don’t have the luxury to mingle with co-workers (lest they lose focus and start from the beginning… again), but because of these tools, they’re able to bond with us, in fact, our Creative Director sometimes blends coffee for us.

SEO Hacker School Team

One of our company’s prides is the SEO Hacker School. Our Presentation Specialist who invested so much time developing the School uses Canva to craft a more appealing and informative slide decks of SEO lessons.

Want to see what lessons I’m talking about? Visit SEO Hacker School now!

Piktochart is also a great help to this team, especially for times when they’re losing great design ideas in mind. So, instead of waiting for creative juices to arrive, they’ll just visit Piktochart and take inspirations.

Accounts Management Team

As part of management, I receive lots of emails every single day, and I’m also sending tons of emails, sometimes proposals, sometimes the reports and billing statements – all that stuff is important, and I need to monitor whether my recipients (which are usually our clients) have opened my emails, to at least help me measure if I should do a follow up, resend my email, or just inform them that it might have gone to the spam folder. Sidekick by Hubspot makes this email tracking possible for me.

Another tool that we use is Asana, mainly just to be reminded about our tasks, and to help us become more organized.

Marketing Team

Marketing is an exciting part of this business – and crucial too. Exciting because it’s dynamic, it requires you to do A/B testing, a lot of reading, and a lot of communicating. Crucial because as much as your marketing efforts can bring you to the top, it can also be the cause of your failure.

As a Marketing Specialist, what helped me focus more on the exciting part are the tools that guided me on how to develop our marketing strategies, what to offer to our audience and how to do it without losing too much of my precious time. Tools like Qeryz, a microsurvey tool that we use to understand more about our audience; Google Analytics that helps me analyze our website’s performance, and Bitly to shorten URL and track the number of people clicking on it.

But there’s one tool that we all love – Spotify! Spotify, because too much noise from co-workers is not healthy, and so is total silence.

Now it’s your turn!

What are the tools, or applications that you and your team are using to increase productivity? Share them here by commenting below.