The best international SEO tools to support your global SEO strategy

By Acclaro

You know a successful international SEO strategy will help you capture global market share and increase your reach. But where do you start? There are so many tools out there, how do you decide which ones best meet your needs?

Whether you’re just starting to define your international SEO process or looking for tips to improve an existing one, we can help. This short guide to international SEO tools helps you evaluate the tech landscape and choose tools that best help you optimize your global SEO campaigns.

Tools to help with SEO research

Before you jump into the wild world of SEO, you should first establish a solid foundation for your global strategy. It’s a smart idea to spend time starting out by conducting keyword research, examining trends, selecting the right local dialects and finding localized images.

There are countless options for tools you can use for SEO research, including many that are free or have trials that allow you to try before you buy. The following list covers the most popular platforms, so you can ensure you use the right one to kick off your international SEO efforts.

Semrush is one of the most popular tools for SEO/SEM on the market, providing access to more than 20 billion keywords in 130 countries. The keyword magic tool uncovers relevant keywords for any topic. In addition, you can track keywords in your target language or see historical rankings in your target market.
AnswerThePublic is an aggregator that uses consumer insight to give you questions and keywords related to your content. Available in multiple languages and regions, this tool ensures you’re covering topics in depth.
Ahrefs bills itself as an all-in-one toolkit, providing the ability to conduct site audits and competitor and keyword research. Where Ahrefs excels is in the backlink analysis, which can be used to discover where your website is attracting backlinks. On top of that, you can even find backlinks your competitors have that you don’t have.
Moz is one of the oldest and most recognized brands in SEO. In addition to providing a comprehensive SEO toolkit, it’s great for understanding the competitive landscape of search results. Many internet marketers use these as a benchmark to determine how competitive it will be to rank for a certain keyword.
Google Trends provides data on what people are searching and can give you insight about related topics. By following trending topics and incorporating them quickly into your content, you can capture organic traffic before your competition.
Google Search Console is the source for the best data there is: The data straight from Google. This tool shows you how you’re ranking for keywords and the number of impressions and clicks you’re receiving. You can filter the data to see how your data is performing by region and which keywords you should be optimizing.

Tools to help execute your SEO strategy

Once you’ve chosen the tools to help research the appropriate strategy, it’s time to begin executing it. An important component of that execution is setting up your hreflang tags or sitemap correctly, especially when you have pages in multiple languages. Doing so allows Google to deliver the correct version of your website to users based on their language or region.

Unfortunately, these are the most common errors we find in technical strategies, so it’s wise to explore tools to help validate your hreflang tags or sitemap. Below, we cover the most popular tools and which ones are best based on your needs:

Erudite Hreflang Map Generator is an easy-to-use tool that lets you upload an excel file of URLs to create XML sitemaps with correct hreflang markup.
Aleyda Solis Hreflang Generator helps develop the correct hreflang tags either inline or via XML sitemap.
Hreflang Checker provides a quick and easy way to see if your hreflang tags are implemented correctly. Pass this one on to your developers so they can use it to QA their work as well.
Merkle hreflang Tags Testing Tool allows you to test individual URLs or XML sitemaps for accuracy. Use this to run quality checks on sitemaps.
Chrome DevTools are a set of tools built into the Google Chrome browser. The audit panel, now called Lighthouse, checks your metrics to find areas for improvement. With the Core Web Vitals update, it’s important to prioritize mobile experience. This post from Search Engine Journal goes into more depth on how to use Lighthouse and use it to improve your site performance.
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps improve SEO by checking a host of technical SEO elements, including hreflang tags, sitemaps, broken links, errors and more. For any SEO or content marketer, Screaming Frog is a powerful tool for performing daily operations.
Botify supports enterprise-level SEO strategy by providing quick access to detailed data by merging crawl logs, analytics and onsite data.
Deepcrawl, a technical SEO platform, crawls and analyzes large websites to assess SEO and improve website performance. Tools like this one have become increasingly important as tech stacks get more complicated and the SEO landscape more competitive.

Tools to track your SEO results

You can’t measure what you don’t track. How will you know if your SEO strategy is successful? Use one of the following websites to analyze keyword ranking and traffic. You’ll notice some repeats from earlier in this post, but these multi-functional tools cover a lot of ground:

Semrush makes the list again, because aside from the great features mentioned above, it allows you to set up campaigns to track specific keywords and monitor both your site and those of your competitors.
Moz is another repeat for its utility in defining campaigns, adding keywords and tracking performance.
AWR Cloud, while less well-known, packs in a host of user-friendly features and excels when you need to track thousands of keywords across multiple search engines.
Google Analytics is hands-down the most widely used tool for tracking website performance. However, setting it up for international sites can quickly become complicated, so it’s important to have a plan in place from the start.
Adobe Analytics is a powerful platform that easily integrates within the Adobe tech stack and provides more data and greater flexibility than Google Analytics.
Batch Speed quickly checks page speed in bulk to identify slow pages, helping you improve page performance.

Other resources

Why International SEO is Key to Reaching New Markets: It can be daunting trying to figure out where to begin your international campaign. This helpful blog outlines the steps you should take to ensure you’re set up for success.
How to Choose Multilingual CMS: Not all CMS’s are created equal. Our checklist helps you evaluate different platforms for their multilingual capabilities.

Making sense of international SEO

With SEO seemingly changing from one minute to the next, it can be daunting figuring out how and where to begin. And when you do wade into it, you can quickly get overwhelmed by the multitude of tools out there.

But, we’re here to help! We created this comprehensive guide to SEO tools as a starting point as you look at executing your global SEO strategy. For additional help with your international SEO, contact us today to learn how our expert team can help you successfully execute your international SEO strategy.