SEO & PPC Tools
Our team uses several tools to help us successfully develop and execute our SEO and PPC strategies. We’ve tried numerous tools throughout the years, but the ones below are our tried and trues. Our SEO tools help us with things like topic research and keyword tracking, whereas our PPC tools help us create and manage our pay-per-click campaigns. With the help of these SEO and PPC tools, we get a comprehensive look at the markets we’re working with and accurate data that helps us drive success for our clients.
SEO Tools
ahrefs
Keyword and backlink research
- One of the largest databases for backlinks and keyword research.
- We favor AHREFs for backlinks and SEMRush for keywords – but AHREFs is absolutely no slouch on the keyword side.
inlinks
Semantic optimization
- Builds internal links and schema markup at scale.
- Helpful with content research and helping figure out how to best outline your copy around a given topic.
oncrawl
Technical auditing and tracking
- Incredible depth of technical auditing for large websites.
- Lots of great visualizations on where your internal rank is flowing and which errors you need to prioritize.
- The tool’s ability to pull virtually any data you want about your pages or links is maybe the best part. We use this all the time to find technical improvement opportunities or to dig into a widespread problem.
screaming frog
Technical auditing and tracking
- A tool we are continuously learning new uses for.
- Our go-to for on-demand technical auditing.
- Lots of great use cases for collecting data to inform on-page optimization.
semrush
Keyword and competitor research
- One of the largest databases of keyword research data available.
- Probably the most used tool we have.
seomonitor
Rank tracking
- Provides daily rank tracking for lots of keywords – a basic thing that all SEO agencies need.
- Incorporates Google Search Console and Analytics reports to show impact of rankings. This allows you to see ranking, clicks and revenue at the keyword level.
- The projection tool is really nice for trying to show the potential value of an SEO initiative.
PPC Tools
optmyzr
PPC insights and script management
- Great for helping simplify repetitive tasks like building shopping campaigns or A/B testing ads.
- It doesn’t try to be everything for everyone. You’re not expected to use it as the single point of management for all campaigns or have it replace your bidding algorithms within platforms.
- There’s lots of flexibility with alerts to help catch problems before they explode.
- It has some very cool reporting for helping determine the root cause of a performance change, e.g. pinpointing a specific audience that had an impression share drop or something at that level.
Go Data Feed
Product Feed Management
- Can connect to a number of ecommerce sites without much/any customization
- Lots of options for filtering and editing the data coming from your catalog before it hits the ad networks
- Product data is always in sync
shape
PPC budget optimization
- It manages your budgets and that’s that. We love tools that are amazing at one thing rather than pretty good at several things.
- While we prefer to handle the detailed planning of budgets and how we allocate across campaigns. The main reason we use Shape is to keep us on track with day to day small adjustments.
- This also helps replace spreadsheets by automatically rolling over/under spend each month and allowing you to set seasonal budget changes.
Unbounce
Landing page testing
- We don’t always have ideal places to send traffic and Instapage is as good a tool as any for easily creating landing pages to drive form submissions or get people to move deeper within a website.
SEO & PPC Reporting Tools
We use several tools, provided by Google, to analyze user behavior and build custom reports that meet the needs of our individual clients.
- Google Analytics – Reporting and data analysis
- Google Data Studio – Reporting
- Google Search Console – Reporting and data analysis
Want to learn how Transistor can help?
Talk to Jay.

Jay Ratkowski | Founder
President – Head of Paid Media