3 SEO Resources from Beginner to Pro

Last time on the blog we sat down with Creative Strategist and Design Queen Indre to talk about design, inspiration, and resources to help the process along. Today we’re following that up with a rundown of some of our favorite SEO resources! This time we’re going to sit down with… well… just me! I’m sure some other writers will pop in their additions when they get their grubby mitts on this blog!

1. Moz

Who Is It For: Beginners Just Diving Into SEO

I feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Moz. Moz began back in 2004 as SEOmoz, a blog and community for OG SEOs to share research, ideas, and best practices. Since then they’ve branched out from just education to creating toolbars, SEO audits, and more. While I might not turn to it much these days, Moz was a great resource a few years ago when I was just getting started in the SEO game. While I can’t testify to the quality of their tools, they have some of the best beginner content to help orient you in the world of SEO, understanding the importance of keyword research to grokking ‘authority.’ For that, they’ll always have a soft spot in my cold, dead heart.

2. AHREFS

Who Is It For: Advanced SEOs

Ahrefs is that new hotness for SEO resources. First, we started using them for their robust keyword researching tools, then their SEO audits, then we started using their YouTube channel to build out whole new departments in our office (what up link building!) Ahrefs launched its backlinks index back in 2010. Over the past 10 years, they’ve rolled out new tools and features to completely change the landscape of SEO processes like backlink analysis. Now their tools are crawling 8 billion pages a day. While that’s about a third of what Googlebot is crawling, it’s still more than just about anyone else, and it provides incredible in-depth, actionable data.Ahrefs’ motto is "First do it, then do it right, then do it better." That speaks to us here at Helix. As a bunch of creative perfectionists, we all have a habit of trying to fine-tune and tweak something to perfection before releasing it into the world. In the world of marketing, you just can’t do that! We always talk about getting things to the 90-yard line and then coming back and iterating to optimize the performance of our campaign. We hold ourselves to an incredibly high standard so our 90% is still a great effort, but rather than delay a launch for weeks trying to polish that diamond to 100%, it’s more important to get it into the market so we can fine-tune and optimize with real, hard data.The point is, in Ahrefs we find kindred spirits.Alright, let’s take a look at something a bit higher level...

3. Google Search Liaison on Twitter

Who Is It For: Experts (Who Can’t Clock Out)

Twitter might be a bit of a wasteland these days, with marauding bands of bots, Brands trading barbed blows, or increasingly terrible news - but! Despite all that, there are still some really great follows out there! For us, that means @SearchLiasion.@searchliaison is a great follow if you’re in the SEO biz because it helps you understand the intentions and inner workings of Google search. When algorithms get updated, when things seem to go sideways, you can usually find a tweet from Google’s public liaison of search Danny Sullivan illuminating the why of something, even if he can’t quite get into the how.Here’s an example from just last week!

This thread continues for several more tweets but the point is clear: something strange happened, and @searchliaison made note of it early and updated as it was being addressed.As SEOs, we’re concerned when the tried and true methods of building up sites don't work or when, as happened last week, previously indexed pages start disappearing. Heading to Twitter and seeing if @searchliaison is talking about it helps us identify if it is a general system-wide error or change, or if there’s a more local problem on our side. This is what we mean when say high level! It’s not a tool where you click three buttons and get an answer, it requires some serious engagement and critical thinking to use it well. It’s macro information on the world of SEO, it’s up to you to make it actionable. Moz and Ahrefs give you the tools to take action.As you might have expected, Google, whether their Twitter liaison or their blog is a top resource for everything we do here at Helix so staying abreast of all the new info and changes is critical to making sure our work is as crazy impactful as it is.Now, this is far from the be-all, end-all definitive list of SEO resources. These are just the ones we rely on in our day-to-day here at Helix. If you’re just getting started in SEO you can learn a lot from the free resources available from Moz and Ahrefs, and following experts on Twitter is a great way to understand Google algorithm updates.If you are a business owner you can save yourself thousands of hours of homework and instead leverage SEO professionals like us here at Helix House. We put in the work so you don’t have to! Give us a call and get an SEO audit to grow your business today!