16+ Best SEO Tools For Creating Winning SEO Strategies

Oct 21, 2022 by Simon Hilton

If you are looking for SEO tools to help you drive web traffic from search engines like Google, it's important to invest in the best SEO tools to give you a 360 view of the SEO landscape.

Whether you are optimizing your ecommerce store, driving leads as a SaaS company, or running a blog, the best SEO tools like Semrush and SE Ranking provide tools to enable keyword research, backlink analysis, on-page optimization, and site auditing.

Dedicated SEO tools like SurferSEO, Majestic, and Screaming Frog also offer specialized products for designing content for search, website crawling and analyzing backlinks at scale.

And with current estimates stating that 30% of total web traffic is generated by search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, there's never been a more important time to invest in SEO tools that can support you in driving more organic search traffic.

Best SEO Tools

We've tested all of the best SEO tools for keyword research, website ranking, page optimization, and backlink analysis.

Alongside paid tools, we have also tested the best free SEO tools that allow you to develop your search engine optimization strategy with a limited budget.

Semrush
AHREFs
SE Ranking
Google Search Console
SurferSEO
Screaming Frog
Majestic
Google PageSpeed Insights
Moz Pro
Advanced Web Rankings
SpyFu
Serpstat
Sitechecker
Google Trends
SEOquake
Linkminer
SEOptimer

Detailed analysis of the best SEO tools

Semrush

Our top pick for the best all-in-one SEO tool is Semrush.

Semrush is used by over 10 million marketing professionals worldwide and over 30% of the Forbes 500 - including big brands like Samsung, Tesla, and Walmart.

As an SEO tool, Semrush supports SEO experts with over 55+ separate tools for competitor analysis, keyword research, on-page SEO, link building, rank tracking, local SEO, site auditing, content marketing, and more.

In addition, digital marketers can use Semrush for additional monitoring and optimization by measuring PPC campaigns, analyzing markets, and increasing brand awareness across social media platforms using Semrush's wider toolkit.

Pricing starts at $119.95 per/mo for the PRO plan and allows you to track 500 keywords and 10,000 website results per report. It's also possible to upgrade to the Guru plan to access Semrush's content marketing features.

Semrush has been the leading authority for providing 3rd party domain rank for some time. If you are looking for an all-in-one SEO tool, you can't go far wrong with Semrush.

Key features

Keyword research - analyze keyword performance per keyword, access Semrush's keyword magic tool to discover new keywords, and complete keyword gap analysis with your competitors
On-page SEO - run detailed/scheduled site audits, receive on-page SEO optimization checklists, and analyze Semrush's log file analyzer
Rank tracking - track keyword rankings over time with position tracking, zone in on the keywords you really care about, and track your ranking performance over time
SEO writing assistant - access the Guru plan to use the Semrush Writing Assistant. Receive insights on how to create the best SEO content, and access Semrush's content marketing calendars and content audit tools
Local SEO - Semrush allows you to automatic list your website on authoritative directories, and provides you with an on-page SEO tracker

Pricing

Semrush offers 3 different pricing plans depending on your needs. If you would like to access the Semrush Writing Assistant then opt for the Guru plan.

Pro - $119.95 per/mo, optimize 5 projects, track 500 keywords, 10,000 results per report
Guru - $229.95 per/mo, optimize 15 projects, track 1,500 keywords, 30,000 results per report
Business - $119.95 per/mo, optimize 40 projects, track 5,000 keywords, 50,000 results per report

AHREFs

Alongside Semrush, AHREFs is another leading SEO tool, and Semrush's biggest competitor.

Like Semrush, AHREFs has world-class clients, including brands like Facebook, Netflix, and Uber, and offers an all-in-one SEO toolkit that takes care of your entire SEO strategy.

This includes site auditing, keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, and domain authority analysis.

What's impressive is that AHERFs website crawler is the second most active on the internet behind Google, even outperforming other search engines like Bing and Yahoo. AHREFs estimate that they crawl over 5 million web pages every minute.

Within the AHREFs database, there are over 10 billion pages, 19.2 billion keywords, 10 search engines, 243 countries, and 3.6 billion external backlinks.

AHREFs offers a Lite plan that is priced at $99 per/mo and allows you to access the AHREFs SEO dashboard, site explorer, keyword explorer, site audit tool, and rank tracker.

After that, you can upgrade to $199 per/mo to access historical data and AHREFs full suite of tools.

Key features

Site audit - AHREFs provide reporting on 100+ pre-defined SEO issues, including HTML tags, content grading, link analysis, and page speed
Keywords explorer - the keyword explorer allows you to access performance across 10 search engines and returns search volume, phrase/related/question queries, click metrics, parent keywords, SERP overview, and position history in over 171 countries. AHREFs also provide keyword difficulty scoring
Site explorer - it's easy to analyze competitors' organic traffic, site score, backlink profile, top keywords, and most valuable pages in one central space
Rank tracker - track how your ranking on your most important keywords over time, the Pro plan allows you to start by isolating 500 keywords that you can stay on top of with the AHREFs keyword tracker

Pricing

AHREFs offers 4 different pricing plans to suit businesses of all sizes.

Lite - $99 per/mo, optimize 5 projects, track 750 keywords, 100,00 crawl credit
Standard - $199 per/mo, optimize 20 projects, track 2,000 keywords, 500,00 crawl credit
Advanced - $399 per/mo, optimize 50 projects, track 5,000 keywords, 1,500,00 crawl credit
Enterprise - $999 per/mo, optimize 100 projects, track 10,000 keywords, 5,000,00 crawl credit

SE Ranking

If you are looking for a more affordable alternative to Semrush and AHREFs, then SE Ranking is a brilliant alternative.

Pricing plans start at just $23.40 per/mo and provide SEO experts with an all-in-one SEO tool for keyword research, competitive analysis, on-page SEO, backlink analysis, and website auditing.

Over 600,000 individuals and businesses are using SE Ranking to optimize their SEO performance, including brands like Trustpilot, Zapier, and Bed Bath & Beyond.

SE Ranking is also suitable for agencies who are optimizing on behalf of clients. SE Ranking offers the ability to create white-labeled portals for client access and has a wide range of SEO reporting tools.

We also picked SE Ranking as our best rank tracking tool.

Key features

Keyword research - the SE Ranking keyword research tool allows you to analyze 100 search results per keyword analyzed and provides metrics on keyword volume, difficulty, traffic, SERP features, and more. It's possible to build keyword lists and analyze performance for entire niches or target topics in one go
Competitor analysis - view competitor website traffic and identify SERP newcomers with ease using SE Ranking - you can also analyze your competitors top performing keywords and pages so that you can analyze their strategies
Backlink analysis - SE Ranking makes it easy to monitor your backlinks over time. On top of this, you can identify and disavow bad links, spot broken links, create target backlinks, and monitor competitor backlinks
Website audit - analyze every crucial metric related to your on-page SEO performance. SE Ranking's website crawler analyzes over 1,000 pages per minute and can run weekly to identify top problems, and provides tracked reports to show progress
Agencies - for agencies, you can white label the SE Ranking tool to use it as your own SEO reporting interface with clients. It's possible to create branded reports for clients and access the entire SE Ranking SEO suite

Pricing

There are 3 core pricing plans offered by SE Ranking.

Essential - $23.40 per/mo, optimize 10 projects, track 250 keywords, 100 reports per day
Pro - $53.40 per/mo, unlimited projects, track 1,000 keywords, 5,000 reports per day
Business - $113.40 per/mo, unlimited projects, track 2,000 keywords, 10,000 reports per day

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free SEO tool provided by Google to help you stay on top of search engine optimization for your website - it should be the staple of any SEO toolkit.

GSC allows you to verify ownership of your website, and then inspect specific URLs in isolation against key SEO metrics and performance indicators.

It's possible to check page performance vs core web vital metrics, monitor search engine rankings, clicks, impressions, position, and CTR (click-through rate) per page, as well as what search queries you're appearing on.

Google Search Console also allows you to submit site maps to Google, disavow backlinks, check manual actions, and uncover any technical issues with your website.

Key features

URL inspection - check that Google has indexed your content, check crawl details, and confirm that there are no issues with page experience. For new pages, submit them for indexing
Search results - check site performance in Google, understand how many impressions and clicks your pages are driving, and get a view as to where traffic is being driven to your website from Google's search engine results pages (SERPs)
Pages - discover if there are any issues with your pages that are causing them to not be indexed by Google. For example, redirect issues, incorrect tagging, duplicate content
Core web vitals - check how Google is scoring your pages vs their core web vitals metrics. Understand if Google is scoring your URLs as poor, average, or good across devices. If there are errors, understand where you need to clean up the performance

Pricing

Google Search Console is a free SEO tool

SurferSEO

SurferSEO is a leading SEO content writing tool that helps individuals and businesses write better content for organic search.

We walk through how we use SurferSEO at Visualize Value to write all of our search copy in our dedicated SEO course, Compound Content, and also rated SurferSEO the best SEO-content writing tool in our dedicated guide, alongside Clearscope and Semrush.

Thousands of companies are using SurferSEO to write better content, including Lenovo, Square, and Intuit. In fact, Surfer is now measuring over 500,000 pages for clients every month.

Alongside their paid SEO content writing tools, Surfer also offers a free SEO tool that allows you to connect to Google Search Console and receive weekly SEO insights on how to optimize your content and site performance for better search listings - it's called Grow Flow.

Surfer's paid plans start at $49 per month and allow you to add and track 2 websites, audit 20 pages per month, and edit 10 new articles per month. Scale-up plans are available, allowing you to optimize over 70 articles per month.

Key features

Content editor - Surfer allows you to run an analysis on a number of keywords in order to trigger SuferSEO's algorithm, which will then collect insights on the top-ranking sites already driving traffic from your target terms. From there, Surfer will provide you with a framework for optimizing your own content for that group of target terms. Guiding you on content structure and what terms to include in your content to have the best chance of ranking (this includes target word count, number of headings, number of paragraphs, images, etc)
Content audit - plug in your target keywords alongside the page that is already ranking for those terms and get detailed insights on how to optimize that content to improve rankings vs your top competitors. This includes everything from the content score to the keyword density you should include to improve content relevance
Content planner - build content plans and group keywords together to build topic clusters, prioritize key content and create a plan for launching content periodically
Integrations - Surfer integrates with WordPress, and Google Docs so that you create content on the platforms you are already using. Surfer also offers an API and has some bespoke integrations with other SEO tools like Semrush

Pricing

SurferSEO offers a free SEO tool called Grow Flow that you can access for 1 website. To access Surfer's content editor and optimization tools, pricing starts at $49 per month.

Free - $0 per/mo, add and track 1 website with Grow Flow
Basic - $49 per/mo, add and track 2 websites, 10 content edits, 20 content audits
Pro - $99 per/mo, add and track 5 websites, 30 content edits, 60 content audits
Business - $199 per/mo, add and track 10 websites, 70 content edits, 140 content audits

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is another staple of the SEO expert's toolkit.

Unlike all-in-one SEO tools, Screaming Frog focuses on website crawling, helping SEO professionals audit and improve on-page ranking factors.

Screaming Frog allows you to crawl up to 500 domains for free, or buy an annual license to crawl an unlimited number of URLs - which is usually required for established sites.

The paid license starts at just $209 per annum, making it a very affordable SEO tool.

Screaming Frog efficiently crawls small and large sites quickly, and allows you to track crawl results in real time. Once complete, you receive actionable insights on your site's on-page SEO performance so that you can make the required improvements.

In fact, Screaming Frog pulls over 500+ different metrics, helping you spot broken links, discover duplicate content, audit titles and metadata, and check redirects and canonicalization errors.

Screaming Frog Integrates with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights and pulls back insights that tie pages with live performance.

Key features

500+ SEO metrics analyzed - Screaming Frog offers a comprehensive view of your site performance and any of your competitor's site performance - measuring over 500+ SEO metrics per crawl
Broken links - if there are any broken lines on your site then Screaming Frog will identify them and show you how to fix them with ease
Audit titles and metadata - are your titles, metadata, and headers all optimized to their maximum potential? Check that they exist and that they are the right length
Site architecture visuals - get visual link maps to audit how your site is linked together, this is a great way to improve the way your best content links into other parts of your site to strengthen your most important pages
Integrations - Screaming Frog pulls back insights from Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights to provide real-time performance data in one central tool
Run scheduled audits - schedule Screaming Frog to run regular audits on your site so that you can audit any errors as you launch content and upload new pages

Pricing

Screaming Frog offers a free plan that allows you to test on 500 URLs, if you want to purchase an unlimited plan, it costs $209 per annum.

Free - crawls up to 500 domains
Paid - $209 per annum, unlimited crawling

Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO is an award-winning backlink audit tool that is considered by many SEO experts as one of the best SEO tools for improving website rankings.

Unlike other all-in-one SEO platforms that focus on all aspects of the SEO landscape, Majestic is focused solely on backlink analysis.

Majestic's historical backlink index includes over 3.8+ billion domains and 18.5+ billion URLs, and for this reason, Majestic is used by hundreds of thousands of SEO experts globally.

The primary use for Majestic is to understand key performance indicators that validate the quality of an inbound link. Majestic use a couple of important indicators to measure this, including Trust Flow, Citation Flow, Visibility Flow, and Topical Trust Flow.

Alongside measuring link quality, Majestic also allows you to get a map of every single link that points to the website you are analyzing and allows you to analyze referring domains, new and lost backlinks, anchor text, and broken links.

Pricing starts at $49.99 per/mo, allowing you to access 1 million analysis units per/mo - this is more than enough for any small business, but if you need to upgrade there are PRO and API plans available for larger businesses and enterprises.

Key features

Key performance indicators - receive a general backlink score for any website online, and use Majestic's tools to find desirable places online to gain backlinks using their visibility flow, topical trust flow, and flow metric scores
Audit top backlinks - access all the tools you need to find the top backlink opportunities in your niche, audit your competitor's top backlinks, and spot opportunities to broaden your link profile
Link context - link context shows you the wider context that exists around a link. For example, is the link sitting in a directory, or is it a content link? In addition, Majestic can show you where on the page your link exists, and whether there are other sites that the piece of content is also linking to
API functionality - run massive API pulls in minutes, perfect for agencies, and consultancies working at scale

Pricing

Majestic SEO offers 3 pricing plans starting at $49.99 per/mo for small-medium businesses.

Lite - $49.99 per/mo, 1 million analysis units
Pro - $99.99 per/mo, 20 million analysis units
API - $399.99 per/mo, 100 million analysis units, full API access

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights allows you to test your website's page speed and check site performance vs Google's Core Web Vitals guidelines.

PageSpeed Insights makes it easy to complete diagnoses across mobile and desktop, returning performance issues that could be impacting page speed so that you can optimize your on-page SEO for better performance.

Like Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights is a free SEO tool and is incredibly easy to use. Just drop in the URL you're looking to optimize and check the URL status vs key Google metrics like LCP (largest contextual paint), FIS (first input delay), and CLS (cumulative layout shift).

It's a good idea to optimize against these metrics to ensure that Google interprets your site performance in a way that will increase rankings - following these guidelines will also ensure your customers and visitors are provided with an excellent experience.

Pricing

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free SEO tool

Moz Pro

Moz Pro is another alternative to Semrush, AHREFs, and SE Ranking.

It's one of the longest-standing all-in-one SEO tools out there and is used by over 500,000 businesses globally, from startups to large enterprises.

Moz Pro offers tools for keyword research, rank tracking, site auditing, backlink analysis, and SEO reporting.

Pricing starts at $99 per month, allowing you to run 150 keyword queries per/mo. Moz also offers a 30-day trial and plans that scale for larger usage.

Key features

On-page scoring - Moz will audit specific pages on your website and return a priority list of recommended improvements, including technical SEO fixes, and content improvements to increase relevancy when targeting high-value keywords
Keyword research - build keyword lists, and plot groups of keywords side by side to plan your content generation efforts. Understand everything you need to know about target keywords including, keyword volume, difficulty, SERP features, organic CTR, and phrase/matched keywords
Site audit - crawl and audit your site in minutes, run scheduled audit reports, and get alerted to issues that are impacting your ability to improve website rankings. Get advice on which issues need to be fixed immediately, and which you can de-prioritize
Backlink analysis - analyze your link profile relative to your competition, and prioritize link-building efforts using Moz's domain and page authority scores. Track your link-building efforts over time using Moz backlink reporting

Pricing

Moz Pro offers 4 different pricing plans, starting at $99 per/mo. There is also a 30-day free trial available on all paid plans to get you started.

Standard - $99 per/mo, 150 keyword queries, 5,000 backlink queries, 100,000 crawls
Medium - $179 per/mo, 5,000 keyword queries, 20,000 backlink queries, 500,000 crawls
Large - $299 per/mo, 15,000 keyword queries, 70,000 backlink queries, 1,250,000 crawls
Premium - $599 per/mo, 30,000 keyword queries, 100,000 backlink queries, 2,000,000 crawls

Advanced Web Rankings

Advanced Web Ranking is an enterprise SEO tool used by agencies and large businesses.

The Advanced Web Rankings SEO tool is primarily used to track SERP rankings, monitoring your site performance vs the competition. AWR also offers a robust reporting framework for client reporting - hence why it's used by over 24,000 agencies globally.

The entry plan also starts at $49 per month, so you can access the technology without having to spend a fortune. For agencies, and large businesses, pricing ranges between $199 and $499 per/mo.

The features we like:

Rank tracker - monitor and track website rankings in any search engine globally, across mobile and desktop, and in over 170 countries
Scheduled keyword reporting - track keyword and ranking performance on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and interval scheduled reporting for clients working to different schedules
Difficulty metrics - understand the difficulty of ranking on any keyword in seconds with a range of comprehensive difficulty metrics - including domain difficulty, URL difficulty, and content difficulty. It's possible to also aggregate difficulty by topic cluster, and keyword group
Local keyword tracking - analyze keyword rankings based on city, state, country, or GPS coordinates. This is vital for businesses targeting specific locations
Custom reports - build custom SEO reports for client reporting. Paint a clear picture of how keyword performance is trending over time with charts, and graphs that track changes in keyword rankings

Pricing

Advanced Web Ranking offers 4 different pricing plans. The Starter Plan costs $49 per/mo and provides access to 2,000 reporting units. For agencies and enterprises, there are Agency and Enterprise packages that allow for extended usage.

Starter - $49 per month, 2,000 units
Pro - $99 per month, 7,000 units
Agency - $199 per month, 14,500 units
Enterprise - $499 per month, 35,500 units

SpyFu

SpyFu is a broader all-in-one digital marketing tool for SEO, PPC, competitive analysis, and custom reporting.

SpyFu has over 200,000 monthly active users, and a client base including Salesforce, Amazon, and Adobe.

Like other leading SEO tools, SpyFu offers an all-in-one solution for competitor analysis, backlink analysis, rank tracking, keyword analysis, and domain benchmarking.

Additional functionality allows you to track what keywords your competitors are bidding on, and the advertising variation of their digital marketing campaigns over time.

SpyFu is an affordable solution, with pricing starting at $39 per month ($16 per month if you pay annually). This allows you to track up to 5,000 keywords per month.

Unlimited plans cost just $3 more per/mo at $39 per/mo.

Key features

Competitor tracking - spy on your competitors, analyze performance changes over time, and analyze where they are winning and losing across SEO and PPC
Keyword ranking history - discover how your competitors gained their keyword rankings with ranking history data at a keyword level - discover if it was optimizations on their side, or whether it was an algorithm change that made the impact
Analyze backlinks per keyword - discover the backlinks that could be contributing to your competition outranking you on important search terms
Affordable pricing plans- unlimited plans start at just $39 per/mo, and SpyFu offers discounted annual pricing on their Basic plan equating to just $16 per/mo

Pricing

SpyFu offers a 7-day free trial and discounted pricing on their Basic plan if you pay annually upfront. The Professional plan is also affordably priced, giving you unlimited reporting for $39 per/mo.

Basic - $36 per/mo ($16 per/mo billed annually), restricted reports
Professional - $39 per/mo, unlimited reports, 15k tracked keywords, 1 user login
Team - $299 per/mo, unlimited reports, 40k tracked keywords, 5 user logins

Serpstat

Serpstat is an enterprise SEO tool that is used by big brands including Samsung, Uber, and Shopify.

The Serpstat SEO tool includes rank tracking capability, backlink analysis, keyword research tools, and site auditing.

Serpstat's rank tracker includes SERP analytics, historical data, and allows you to group keywords with group tagging,

Serpstat's keyword research module provides insights on core keyword metrics, as well as offering advanced tools like tree-view keyword distribution analysis, and question query insights.

The Serpstat backlink analysis tool contains over two years of historical backlink performance and provides quality scores for individual links.

Pricing starts at $55 per/mo for the Serpstat Lite plan. There are also Advanced and Enterprise plans to support larger businesses.

The features we like:

Keyword clustering - get insights and direction on how to structure your internal linking for better search performance. Cluster keywords by page, and connect keywords across pages with semantic relationship suggestions so that you avoid targeting the same keywords with different pieces of content
Rank tracking - discover trending keywords, track keyword performance over time, and receive daily or monthly updates on ranking performance
Site auditing - receive site health scores, and get alerted to issues that need fixing with scheduled site audits and real-time results
API & Integrations - run batch analysis for Google spreadsheets or integrate with Google Data Studio

Pricing

Serpstat offers 4 different pricing options for startups, through to enterprises. The Lite plan starts at $55 per month and allows you to access the majority of Serpstat features.

Lite - $55 per month, 4,000 searches per day, 15,000 position checks, 150,000 audit credits
Standard - $199 per month, 5,000 searches per day, 60,000 position checks, 400,000 audit credits
Advanced - $239 per month, 8,000 searches per day, 150,000 position checks, 1,250,000 audit credits
Enterprise - $399 per month, 12,000 searches per day, 300,000 position checks, 2,500,000 audit credits
Custom - contact Serpstat's sales team

Sitechecker

Sitechecker works hand in hand with Google Search Console, providing a one-stop-shop for on-page, technical SEO analysis.

It's used by thousands of customers globally, including Sony, Microsoft, and Airbnb to optimize search engine performance and alert SEOs to key technical SEO optimizations that should be prioritized.

First up, you can run site audits using Sitechecker to understand whether your site is healthy, or unhealthy, and identify potential problems that need fixing (for example, broken backlinks, broken redirects, and crawl errors).

From there, you can connect Sitechecker to your Google Search Console and get insights into traffic/ranking changes, as well as real-time optimization opportunities. Sitechecker also provides you with feedback on the optimizations that you have already made, which resulted in improved keyword rankings.

Sitechecker pricing starts at $23 per month, allowing you to integrate with Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and track 500 keywords, 1,500 URLs, and 3,000 backlinks.

Key features

Site audits - run a site audit in 2 minutes, and get insight on your websites health score, and any on-page SEO issues that need to be fixed
Track site changes - get alerted to any unwanted changes in your site code that might impact your website rankings, and get alerted when there is a technical reason that could result in you losing website traffic
Rank tracking - track daily and weekly ranking changes with the Sitechecker rank tracker, analyze the entire SERP for any of your target keywords
Backlink analysis - audit your backlink health, and bring any lost backlinks back to life with alerts

Pricing

Sitechecker offers 4 different pricing plans for startups, through to enterprises. The Basic plan starts at $23 per/mo and allows you to audit 1,500 pages.

Basic - $23 per/mo, 500 tracked keywords, 1,500 pages audited, 3,000 backlinks
Standard - $39 per/mo, 1,000 tracked keywords, 5,000 pages audited, 5,000 backlinks
Premium - $79 per/mo, 2,000 tracked keywords, 50,000 pages audited, 10,000 backlinks
Enterprise - $139 per/mo, 5,000 tracked keywords, 100,000 pages audited, 50,000 backlinks

Google Trends

Google Trends is an SEO tool offered by Google to show you the popularity of a search term or topic relative to its all-time most popular period (from a search volume perspective) on Google.

This metric is measured on a 100-point scale, meaning if you are looking at a score of 95, then the keyword or topic is currently very popular - if you are looking at a score of 50, then it's half as popular as it once was, and so on.

Google Trends is a useful tool to understand the popularity of keywords in your niche and gives you insight into the most popular geographies for your search term, as well as popular related queries and topics.

Google Trends is one of the best free SEO tools for quickly understanding whether your target topics and keywords are getting more or less popular over time.

Pricing

Google Trens is a free SEO tool

SEOquake

SEOquake has historically been one of the best free SEO tools online, featuring a browser extension that provides you with SEO insights on any website on the fly.

SEOquake allows you to carry out SEO audits, examine internal and external site links on any webpage, and compare competitor domains side-by-side without leaving the page you're analyzing. SEOquake, also makes it easy to download data so that you can analyze the results in Excel or Google Sheets.

Unlike paid tools, SEOquake has been one of the best free SEO tools for some time, having been downloaded over 3,000,000 times - it's definitely worth checking out if you are looking to audit the health of any website or benchmark your SEO performance against competitors.

Key features

SEO audits - receive a website health score, and get alerted to issues that need to be fixed
Site comparison - if you are analyzing more than one website, you can do so by comparing metrics side-by-side. For example, Alexa rank, Semrush domain rating, number of backlinks, social media followers, and more
Check keyword density - easily check keyword density within on-page content using SEOquake. See which keywords are prioritized and how often they are mentioned to check contextual relevance
Export - once you have completed the analysis using SEOquake, you can download the data to Excel or Google Sheets to complete further optimization and analysis

Pricing

SEOquake is a free SEO tool

Mangools

Mangools have been around since 2014, and offer an all-in-one SEO toolkit for businesses of any size.

Mangools makes it easy to carry out keyword research, track keyword rankings, find the best backlinks in your niche, and analyze your competitor's performance.

Mangools is a very easy-to-use SEO tool and is extremely affordable, in comparison with other all-in-one SEO tools.

Pricing starts at just $29.90 per/mo, allowing you to complete 100 new keyword lookups per month. The Premium plan increases this number to 500 lookups, and still costs just $44.90 per/mo

Despite the price tag, Mangools is used alongside other SEO tools by over 25,000 paying customers, including big brands like Airbnb, Skyscanner, and Adidas.

For those just getting started, there is a 10-day free trial to help you test the platform.

Key features

Keyword finder - find keywords by searching for your competitor's domains, or by searching for specific topics, understand which competitors are already ranking, and access historical keyword performance
Local keyword volumes - Mangools allows you to drill down and look at keyword volumes in over 50k locations. They have 2.5 billion related keywords, 100 million competitor keywords, and 52k supported locations (cities, districts) available within the platform
Linkminer - search for any domain using Linkminer and get access to that website's complete backlink profile, as well as new and lost links. Get insight on link placement, and consolidate top target links into lists. Mangools provides access to 9.5 trillion backlinks and 2.5 trillion unique domains
Affordable pricing plans - Mangools is one of the best SEO tools for affordability - pricing starts at just $29 per month, and Premium plans are capped at $89.90 per/mo

Pricing

Mangools offers 3 different pricing plans, starting at $29.90 per/mo. Unlike other larger SEO tools, Mangools offers daily rank tracking within their Starter packages.

Starter - $29.90 per month, 200 keywords checked daily
Growth - $44.90 per month, 700 keywords checked daily
Premium - $89.90 per month, 1,500 keywords checked daily

SEOptimer

SEOptimer is an affordable site audit tool that allows you to audit the on-page SEO performance of any website.

It's used by a host of big brands, as well as global media agencies, including iProspect and Ogilvy who use SEOptimer to generate branded reports for clients and run audits on domains in minutes.

SEOptimer works across a number of languages, including English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and makes it easy to generate beautifully branded PDF reports for clients.

For small business owners and agencies, SEOptimer helps identify SEO issues and on-page optimization opportunities and displays how SEO work is impacting SEO performance over time.

There is also a white-label SEO widget that you can embed into your own website to allow your visitors to run a quick site audit, and receive an SEO report with your branding to drive new business leads.

Pricing starts at just $19 per/mo, with white label reporting functionality offered on the White Label plan which costs $29 per/mo.

Key features

SEO crawler and site audit tool - SEOtimizer scans every page on your target website and identifies key issues that might be holding your content back from ranking to its potential - analyze results in real-time
White label reports - SEOptimer produces a range of beautiful reports that can be downloaded to PDF and shared with clients, featuring your branding. These reports feature a complete audit of all of the on-page SEO optimization opportunities and can be produced in a range of languages
Embeddable audit widget - if you are an SEO freelancer or agency, you can also use SEOptimer's embeddable widget to provide visitors to your website analysis on their own domain performance, at the same time you can collect their email address and email them a branded report to their inbox - this works wonders for driving inbound leads

Pricing

SEOptimer offers 3 pricing plans depending on the features you need to access. If you are optimizing your own website, the DIY plan starts at just $39 per/mo. For those using the white labeling services, pricing starts at $29 per/mo.

DIY - $19 per/mo, do-it-yourself site audits
White Label - $29 per/mo, unlimited white-label reports in 15 languages
White Label & Embedding - $59 per/mo, unlimited white-label reports, embedded widget

Why is it important to use SEO tools to optimize your website?

If you are debating whether you need to invest in the best SEO tools to support your growth then it's well worth checking out some key data points on why driving traffic from search engines is so important.

Ultimately, search engine marketing is big business.

According to Semrush data, over 4.3 billion users worldwide use Google with 246 million users sitting in the US alone.

In fact, it's estimated that Google has a global market share of over 92% and that the Google search engine is used to make over 3.5 billion searches every single day - that's 1.2 trillion searches per year.

To put that into context, somewhere around 30% of total web traffic is generated by search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

If you don't know what people are searching for, how often they search, and where existing search traffic is currently heading within your niche, then you are missing out on revenue.

The best SEO tools can provide you with a 360-degree view of the search engine landscape, providing valuable insight into important SEO metrics that can help you win traffic from search engines.

Here's a quick breakdown of what you can expect to find and learn using SEO tools.

Keyword research - the best SEO tools offer keyword research tools that allow you to discover which are the most valuable keywords in your niche based on search intent, keyword volume, and ranking difficulty. SEO professionals use this data to inform site structure and content production
Site auditing - one of the key roles that SEO experts play in analyzing websites is to spot potential errors that could be impacting your website rankings. The majority of top SEO tools offer site auditing capability that allows you to analyze the health of your website from an SEO perspective. Auditing tools give you a priority list of actions to fix key issues so that your pages rank higher
Backlink analysis - Alongside creating high-quality content, driving backlinks from popular sites is one of the major ranking factors that will influence your organic search performance. The best SEO tools provide you with a clear picture of your competitor's backlink structure so that you can spot opportunities to build your own links, steal backlinks, or engage new partners to gain backlinks that will give you an edge
SEO content optimization - SEO content writing tools like Surfer and Clearscope provide you with detailed insights into the quality of your competitor's website content. They provide frameworks for creating best-in-class content and provide keyword suggestions that you should include within your content to help you outrank other pages. Once you generate keyword ideas using a keyword planner, it always helps to utilize SEO content writing tools to ensure that your content benchmarks well against your competition
Local SEO - if you are focusing on driving organic search traffic from the local community, then SEO tools can provide you with a clear picture of what people around you are searching for. The best SEO tools allow you to drill down beyond the country level to get search insights at the city level or even district/neighborhood level

How to pick the best SEO tools to outrank competitors

Once you've decided to invest in your SEO strategy, and you are in a position to start using SEO tools, it's important to consider how each SEO tool is different, and importantly how it will help you drive search traffic.

While SEO tools largely offer a combination of the same broad features, there are nuances between them that make using certain SEO tools more or less valuable for certain businesses.

To make your decision easier, here is a breakdown of the main buying factors that SEO experts consider when opting to purchase a new SEO tool.

Specialist vs all-in-one - the first thing you need to consider is whether you want to use dedicated/specialist platforms for keyword research, rank tracking, backlink analysis, and content development or broader all-in-one tools. SEO platforms like Semrush and AHREFs provide a broad set of features that give you everything you need under one roof, whereas specialist platforms like Majestic and Surfer focus on specific parts of the SEO optimization process
Data methodology - every SEO tool has a slightly different data methodology or way of collecting data. When you opt to use any new tool to inform your digital marketing efforts, make sure you understand how the platform collects data, and how they produce their insights. Ultimately, the value of an SEO tool lies in the accuracy of its data. Look for validation when making a purchasing decision in the form of the number of keywords tracked, the number of backlinks analyzed, and the number of URLs indexed per day. For reference, AHREFs is the second-largest web crawler behind Google
Keyword freshness - another important factor to consider when purchasing the best SEO tools is the freshness and accuracy of keyword data - especially for long tail keywords. Tools like Google Keyword Planner are excellent at providing you with the top-volume driving terms in your niche. However, the data rarely changes, and you see search volume ranges, rather than the accurate search volume at the keyword level. The best SEO tools provide accurate keyword volumes at the keyword level and provide fresh data that is up-to-date, and accurate
Automation - depending on how hands-on you want to be, you may be seeking a certain level of automation when designing your SEO strategy. The best SEO tools allow you to schedule weekly site audits, track keywords, and set automatic alerts to show ranking changes - informing you on key optimization opportunities that could have a positive impact on your rankings. If you want to rely on automation to inform your search engine strategy, ensure that the SEO tool your looking at offers this service
Integrations - the majority of top SEO tools integrate with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other free SEO tools. That way, you can pull actual ranking data back into your SEO tool in order to see the entire SEO landscape from one central location
Rank tracking - keyword tracking tools allow you to input keywords that you specifically want to rank for and to track your performance against those search terms. Check that all-in-one SEO tools offer rank tracking, and that the number of keywords, and frequency of tracking match dedicated solutions that focus on this area of SEO in isolation - SE Ranking is our top pick for keyword rank tracking
API access - if you utilize your own data studio, then it can be useful to pull keyword ranking data into those platforms to analyze keyword data alongside actual revenue and sales performance. If you are also analyzing traffic changes for your website, pulling traffic data from SEO tools can be a very important metric when tracking competitors. If this is a requirement, pick SEO tools that offer API access and a variety of relevant API endpoints
Affordability - determining your budget upfront is a good idea when thinking about investing in SEO tools. There are an endless number of tools in the market to improve and optimize your search engine rankings. But ultimately, purchasing these tools can become expensive, and drown you with too many data points. Based on your budget, pick a mix of 2 or 3 SEO tools that support you in executing the various elements of your SEO strategy. Double down on becoming an expert on those tools, rather than continue to invest in more and more tools that could lead to inefficiency

Sign up for SEO tools that will help you improve your website rankings

Now that you have evaluated the SEO tool landscape, it's time to click through and start utilizing the best SEO tools to improve your search engine rankings.

To summarize, if you want to invest in all-in-one SEO tools then check out our top picks like Semrush, AHREFs, and SE Ranking.

If you are looking to invest in SEO tools that specialize in backlink analysis and content creation, pick Majestic and SurferSEO respectively.

For those just starting out, our 5-star SEO course, Compound Content runs through everything you need to know about keyword research, creating content that will rank, and SEO best practices.

Compound Content offers a great way to get to grips with search engine optimization before you invest in the best SEO tools.

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