Hello! My name is Humberto Valle, I'm a 10 year vet in the marketing and strategy world. I am the current CEO of www.Unthink.me, evangelist for a 100 Software Engineer community called BetaBulls and work with startups and large corporations from many countries.

I have been involved with SEO one way or another for many years now, and as you may already know there are a lot of tools available - some free some carrying a high price - but ultimately what things come down to is your value for each of these tools. For example, we use Hubspot and SpyFu primarily for content and SEO driven growth - works wonders for us. One of the key factors to our success is that I created a strategy to follow for our SEO efforts more so than just saying" we want more traffic, lets find the keywords in our industry and match them - No, what we did was pair the right keywords for a very small niche (small innovative business owners who run service based businesses) and the content we create, the places where we promote (paid traffic influences SEO as well), me being here responding, was all intentional to position a real person around a team - to this day we get hire because someone reads an article I wrote years ago, or a response I wrote here years ago... They email me or my team, schedule a call and hire us because of my first exposure to them as a person --> they found it with the help o SEO.

There is a new tool http://www.maaxmarket.com/ that offers low-cost SEO help - but it's NEW. So beware.
When it comes to content driven growth, what you need to focus on is the value you are providing to your target audience through your content and then lastly making it available to them through a well thought out delivery plan - such as social media channels, scheduling, headlines, cycles, imagery, calls to action, etc. etc.

Content is always good right, but also consider that sometimes in order to achieve growth in an already crowded market place you may have to recur to non-traditional marketing efforts to stand out. Depending on what your startup offers, you may be better off not focusing initially on SEO and instead achieve high exposure some other creative way. SEO in itself takes time to build, so good content and creative ways to deliver a message are way more important factors than SEO.

Thank you for reading, I hope I've provided some clarity and guidance. If you need further help, please don't hesitate to contact me directly.
Humberto Valle
www.unthink.me
humberto@unthink.me
www.linkedin.com/in/humbertovalle

I've been doing SEO for nearly 20 years now (about as long as that's possible), built 3 of my own successful businesses from it, and run a 12-member agency in Chicago these days.

Here's my take.

You mentioned a lot of great tools there, but keep two things in mind.

- These tools tend to overlap like crazy, but they're all mediocre at just about all but one thing. That's if you're lucky.
- Having a system to use a tool is infinitely more valuable than the tool itself. Tools alone are worthless.

This said, here's a basic SEO tech stack that I'd consider:

- Ahrefs: they have the largest backlink database and a great web interface. Though, they also have the worst API by a lot (Majestic wins that).
- SEMrush: they have the best scrape database of Google search results.
- Screaming Frog: the best tool that I've seen to crawl your own site (by far). Somewhat of a learning curve, but pays dividends once you get good with it.
- Moz: Mostly just for their keyword explorer, which is quite good. Tracking MozCast is nice too, though that's free.
- BuzzStream: The most impressive outreach CRM that I've encountered.
- Linkdex: for really intense per-keyword proposals.

That's a strong core and how to use it.

Best of luck.

I'm an SEO consultant for startups, and my company, CanIRank, has been featured on Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Search Engine Roundtable, and CNET. My team and I have helped startups go from 141 to over 150,000 monthly organic search visitors in six months and have helped dozens of startups get to page one in Google within months.

As a startup with a limited budget and even less time, it’s essential to research and select the right SEO content software tools. Fortunately for startups, creativity, strategy, and brainpower matter more than a marketing budget (or lack thereof)! There are a number of free/affordable tools out there to optimize your content and rankings.

SEMRush, Moz,and Ahrefs are all great tools, but keep in mind that they require a lot of data mining and analysis. If you’re not a seasoned SEO pro, all of the heavy data work might be overwhelming for SEO newbies and busy startups.

For startup teams that have less SEO experience and are short on time but want to hop on the SEO train, Yoast SEO, CanIRank, BuzzSumo, and WooRank are solid options.

If you use Wordpress, Yoast SEO is a must-have plug-in. Yoast SEO’s most useful features are free and include a built-in content analysis tool, meta and description management, keyword manager, social tools, and a lot more. The content analysis tool analyzes your site in real-time and checks for readability and the presence of your primary keyword.

My company’s tool, CanIRank (https://www.canirank.com/ ), is especially helpful for startups who are hurting for time and resources. CanIRank is a comprehensive SEO intelligence tool that pulls data from well-known SEO services, such as Moz and SEMRush, and then delivers personalized insights, recommendations, and opportunities in a dashboard. Our software does the heavy lifting (collecting and analyzing data) for you, so you’re not spending hours trying to make sense of the numbers.

CanIRank focuses on delivering actionable opportunities over raw data, so you can achieve tangible results sooner than later. Each content optimization opportunity comes with DIY instructions for straightforward execution. And if you’re really short on time, our team of SEO experts are always there to jump in and execute those opportunities for you, freeing you up even more.

BuzzSumo is great for identifying content that’s performing well in a specific niche and generating content ideas for your own site.

WooRank is a helpful SEO audit tool that lets you enter your site url and then generates a personalized report (that you can download as a branded pdf), indicating potential issues and areas of improvement.

Regardless of which software tools are used, it’s essential for startups to not only produce significant value through content but to develop a repeatable content amplification process to get all of that content out there! Strategically researching where to send your content – whether it’s to social media influencers, forums, Q&A sites, aggregator sites in your niche – and then sending it out there has some serious SEO benefits. Here’s a blog post (http://www.canirank.com/blog/define-content-amplification-process/ ) on content amplification that you might find helpful and want to keep in your arsenal.

This will be an answer and not a pitch for my services as everyone above did ;)

Semrush
SEO meta in 1 click for Chrome (love this plugin and it's free)
Moz (a bit expensive, I prefer SEMrush honestly but Moz has a great keyword tool)
All in 1 SEO plugin for Wordpress (not a Yoast fan)
BrightLocal
Whitespark
Screaming Frog (free version is fine)

I would recommend having these three tools and you will be able to do a lot.

1. Screaming Frog to Crawl your site. Alternatively, Sitebeam site crawler works for free.
2. SEMRush or Ahrefs to look at backlinks. SEMRush is cheaper so I will recommend it, although I prefer Ahrefs. These tools also provide audits and rank tracking.
3.If you are a local business, check out Yext or Brightlocal for citations and NAP consistency.
4. If you are heavily focused on content, you could benefit from Content King or Buzzsumo.

If I had to choose the most barebones, I would say: SEMRush/Ahrefs + Screaming Frog. Master one tool instead of have a lot of others.