Success is measured in many ways. For online commerce, it is best measured relative to your peers. Whether the metric of interest is number of backlinks, organic rankings, or unique visitors, it is important to know where you stand in the peer group in which you operate. But finding this data can be time consuming and confusing. So we are going to share some of our favorite research tools below to help you get started. Each of these tools offers something of value, and in our opinion none of them are perfect as a stand alone tool. Fortunately, they all offer free versions (lite versions) that provide plenty of data without any cost.

AHREFS: AHREFS is a great tool for visually tracking your data. This company has written their own algro to compile data into their proprietary metrics. How useful this site is depends on your needs. If you are building links or running a PR campaign, this can show you where you are getting traction and if/when links are appearing or disappearing. AHREFS recently launched their own global site ranker where you can measure your standing in the global website population.

MAJESTIC: Majestic SEO is a very popular tool for webmasters and SEO workers. They create a metric that is very attuned to how Google looks at your site. Trust Flow is the measure that seems to work well in creating the measure of how your site is performing from a search engine perspective. As with AHREFS, Majestic is a good tool to use for tracking purposes.

SEMRush: One of our favorite tools for providing a lot of data at your fingertips, SEMRush comes in handy time and again for seeing where you stand across a wide range of metrics. We have found SEMRush to be broadly useful and fairly accurate, so this is a good tool to keep handy.

Google Webmaster: Finally, perhaps the best tool for seeing how your site is performing is one that is provided free of charge from Google. A site’s webmaster account provides tons of data straight from Google. While there are certainly limitations – Google does not show you all of your backlinks – there is enough in the data set to work with. More importantly are the diagnostic tools they provide you with to ensure you are not tripping over your own feet.

We will be providing a lot of reviews on DIY SEO and marketing tools coming up. But this is a good place to start and get a handle on your site performance. Let us know below what your favorite site monitoring tool is if it is not on this list.