Yesterday, a massive 2,500+ SEO/Digital folks popped down to Brighton for what is probably the UK’s largest SEO Conference – BrightonSEO.

It’s a staggering amount of attendees, which makes me realise just how big the UK search industry is now – and it’s really just the tip of the iceberg, I imagine most SEO teams only could bring down 10-20% of their staff.

I enjoy Brighton SEO for one a simple reason – I always walk away with a ton of geeky new SEO tips, tricks and tools that simply help me do my job better. Plus, you get a free beer at the end.

If you couldn’t make it, then I’ve rounded up all the BEST SEO & Content Marketing tools I stumbled upon at the event, that I’m sure will make you even more awesome at SEO.

SocialMention
http://www.socialmention.com 

Social Mention scrapes data from 30+ social media platforms, letting you quickly discover mentions of content, URLs or a brand-name. Export the data in .CSV or setup a email alert. I previously advocated Topsy for doing this task, but the feature-set and data seems better here.

LinkRisk
http://www.linkrisk.com/

Unnatural Link Warnings are hard work, LinkRisk is a brand-new tool in BETA will ease the typically painful, murder-inducing process.
Setup your domain, answer a few questions and it’ll help automatically identify the toxic links in your backlink profile.

It works by taking backlink data from multiple sources (Majestic SEO, Webmaster Tools etc.) and filters it by a number of metrics i.e. dodgy domain extension, no Google PR, link no longer indexed. Last year, me and a team of 3 people manually audited in excess of 400k backlinks to resolve a manual penalty. It took us 3 months, 4 reconsideration requests and a well-timed tweet to remove it. I think that alone says why this tool is valuable.

Trendsmap
http://www.trendsmap.com/ 

One successful tactic for grabbing attention with your content is to talk about seasonal or trending events. TrendsMap visualises the most talked about trends on Twitter in specific locations. You could use this data to help you generate content ideas whether it be on a local news story or national events. No prizes for guessing about the most talked about thing in Brighton yesterday.

ImageRaider
http://www.imageraider.com/

How many times has your infographic on ‘the history of painting and decorating’ been copy & pasted? Probably none, but anyway..
ImageRaider is a super-charged version of Google Image’s reverse search feature, add a list of URL(s) and you’ll get a nice little report on everywhere it’s been published (or politely stolen).

PowerMapper
http://www.powermapper.com/ 

There are lots of good tools out there to generate sitemaps (XML-Sitemaps.com being one), but this tool creates 2D & 3D visual sitemaps for you – which is really powerful when trying to understand how crawlers navigate your site, or explain to a client the architectural issues a site maybe facing.

GrepTheWeb
http://blekko.com/webgrep 

So, how many people use rel=author on their site? Or, is Lady Gaga more popular online than Beyonce? Blekko let’s you find out the statistical answer using GrepTheWeb. Enter in a text string and Blekko will grep the entire web and find out how many domains & backlinks mention the query.

With an infinite source of data, you’ll never struggle to find statistics for your content on air conditioning ever again (please don’t write about that, oh dear..).

Robotto
http://www.robotto.org/

If you manage multiple large websites like me, a recurring #SEOFacepalm is when a client makes a change on the site without telling you. Let Robotto do the job for you, it monitors website changes and will notify you on anything that has changed. Whether it be a line added a Robot.txt file or a header response issue.

Content Idea Generator
http://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker/

Stuck for a whitty content idea about boring subject? My challenging client’s have included Boilers, SSL Certificates and Business Insurance so trust me, I know all about it. Portent’s awesome Content Idea Generator tool comes up with all types of whacky ideas to inspire content generation. Here’s a few that I came up:

“How [Boilers] will stop North Korea”
“6 Facts About [Baked Beans] That’ll Keep You Up at Night”
“Why [Business Insurance] is Cuter Than a Kitten”

That’s your lot!

Enjoyed the post? I’d love to hear about any more SEO or content marketing tools you recently discovered.

Credits

For more great SEO nerdyness (the folks who inspired this posted) – follow @Rich_falconer, @LexiMills, @PaulDavidMadden & @Hannah_Bo_Banna on Twitter.

On a completely different note, I recently lost to @DigiMatt in a ‘SEO Pool Competition’ despite my pro-skills and as a result, I owe him a follow link, so here you go sir ‘Matt Evans – SEO & Viagra Pills Specialist‘