Best SEO Tools Serious SEO Experts Use

In the real SEO world – You’re only as good as the tools you’re using and perhaps how you’re using them. 

They say if you can’t measure something, you can’t figure out how to improve on it. In SEO, this statement makes perfect sense. 

See, professional SEOs never leave anything to chance. They track everything – from rankings and keyword performance to conversion and lost links, and anything in between that they think might help them drive that sweet organic traffic.

And yes, this can only be achieved when you have the right set of SEO tools.

Now, with over 8000 martech tools filling up the market, how do you choose the right tools, considering you only need just a couple of them?

Well, we promise, we’ll get to that. But first,

What Are SEO Tools?

An SEO tool provides data and alerts on the overall success and health of your SEO campaign.

They help to identify weaknesses and uncover areas of opportunity, as well as all the issues that stand between you and your quest to gain more search engine visibility. 

Every SEO tool has a specific role it plays, even though these roles intertwine quite a lot. 

That said, here are some of the things an SEO tool can help you out with: 

• • Auditing: By auditing we mean the tool will crawl your website and identify all the areas with a negative impact on your ranking. 
  • Backlinking Tools: Backlinks represent a vote of confidence. It’s like having an authority figure endorse your content or website. The problem comes when the endorsement is from a shady character or when the sites that link back to your website have poor search engine authority.  

Backlinking tools help you analyze both the volume and quality of these links. With this information, you can troubleshoot the linking issues affecting your ranking and even run a competitive analysis. 

• • Competitive Research: These tools help you research your competition. Find out who your competitors are. How are they ranking? What gives them an edge? An what are some of the gaps you can fill?
  • Data Mining: This often goes unmentioned. But some tools are primarily dedicated to mining, tagging, aggregating, categorizing, and even preparing reports on a large set of keywords.  
  • Keyword Discovery: While there are so many platforms to provide you with an accurate ranking of some of your keywords, only a few will help you discover which keywords have potential.  
  • Keyword Research: You have to begin by researching what keywords are related to your products or services. This may demand that you do some thorough keyword research.  

Use a keyword research tool to identify co-occurrence keywords, long-tail keywords, related keywords, etc.  You can also use them to check out keyword competitiveness. That should save you from wasting your time on keywords that are impossible to rank. 

• • Keyword Monitoring: Keyword monitoring platforms allow you to enter a list of keywords that you’ll be monitoring and find out how they’re ranking. 

They’re a great way to find if your effort to improve keyword ranking is paying off or if there are adjustments to be made. 

• • Local Keyword Monitoring: How are your keywords performing locally? The location of the searcher plays a critical role in their purchase decision. For all we know, your website may be driving massive amounts of traffic, but from the wrong region. 

So, how about you start tracking your keywords based on your geographical location? The good thing is that there are tools to help you out with this. 

• • Scraping and Internal Analysis: The tools in this category analyse your website’s hierarchy, page speed, page construction, and other related issues. They might even offer you some suggestions on how to get them fixed. 

From what we know, some of the SEO-related issues facing your website might be less obvious than you think. So, it helps to have a scraping or internal analysis tool to look under the hood and sniff them out.

• • Social Influence:  There’s a strong correlation between the attention you’re getting on social media and the authority you’ve built with search engines. 

The good thing is that there’re SEO platforms the specialize in providing in-depth insights into this correlation. 

• • YouTube Research: One of the biggest mistakes that SEOs make is ignoring YouTube. Next to Google, YouTube is the second-biggest search engine in the world. 

Every day, consumers flock to the platform with research topics, looking for product profiles, how-to guides, and video explanations.

Other things an SEO tool can help you out with include:

• • • On-page SEO
    • Site Speed
    • WordPress SEO
    • Rank checking

• • • Mobile SEO

Needless to say, an SEO tool will only be useful to you if you understand how to use it. 

Some SEO toolsets stretch far beyond the utilities we’ve mentioned, with some even giving you an all-at-once glance into your SEO performance.  

Why Are SEO Tools Important?

SEO tools are to SEO what saws, drills, measuring tapes, and screwdrivers are to carpentry.

You wouldn’t get that far, let alone get anything done, without them.

Without these tools:

• You wouldn’t know how many people visit your website
• You wouldn’t know if your website has HTML errors
• You wouldn’t understand why your website traffic suddenly dropped
• You wouldn’t know which sites link to your website
• You wouldn’t know what keywords attract the most visits
• And so on

20 Best SEO Tool Serious SEO Experts Use

1.  Ahref Keyword Research and Analysis Tool

Overview

Ahrefs is a great tool for keyword opportunities and backlink analysis. The primary use of this keyword research tool is to analyze your backlinks and those of your competitors.

It’s ranked top as the most detailed SEO analysis tool around. It can crawl your website and identify all the areas that could use some improvement. 

You can even use it to analyze your competitors’ backlinks to gather some insights on how to proceed with your own. 

SEOs use it to find the most linked-to content within their niche, find broken links on their website and get to learn more about best-performing web pages. 

Purpose

This tool provides you with a list of keywords and their search volume, competition, difficulty level to rank for etc. It also gives you suggestions on how to optimise your site content for each keyword. 

Target group

Beginners and advanced users such as marketing agencies/consultants and entrepreneurs. 

Services 

• • Rank tracker (frequent updating, track keywords, mobile ranking)  
  • Site auditing (check backlinks, broken links, duplicate content, internal linking structure, page speed, meta tags etc.) 
  •  Site Explorer (backlink index, historical index, top pages, top referring domains, top referring IP addresses) 
  •  Content explorer (find link opportunities, find new topics, find broken pages, find trending topics, find related words, get social and SEO metrics) 
  •  Keywords explorer (SERP updates, find new keywords, find new competitors, find new niches, find new ideas) 
  •  Extra tools (Rows per month, batch analysis, keyword difficulty, monthly report, competitive research, competitor analysis, domain checker, link building) 

Pricing

There are four monthly pricing plans (Lite, standard, advanced, and agency) 

• • Lite cost $99 with a start trial of $7 for 7-day 
  • Standard cost $179 with a start trial of $7 for 7-days 
  • Advanced cost $399 
  • Agency cost $999 

The Best Way to Use Ahrefs

There’s no one particular standard way to use Ahrefs.

But you might want to check out their New Backlinks report to find out which sites linked to your posts in the last 24 hours. 

You also want to check out their “Best By Links” report to find highly linked-to pages with high page authority that you can link to your new or mid-tier ranking content. 

Your favourite Ahrefs feature should be Keywords Explorer, which lets you find the keywords to target. It’s a great feature for finding new topics to blog or write about. While looking for topic ideas, you want to choose a keyword with low competition but higher monthly searches. 

2.  Google Search Console

Overview

This is one tool that no serious marketer would want to miss in their marketing arsenal. 

It’s free but powerful. 

It’s a great starting point for reviewing and understanding the current state of your site SEO.

With this tool, you should be able to see and analyze the traffic your site is getting from Google. You’ll see what keywords or keyword phrases your website is ranking for, and in what position.

Purpose 

Offered for free to all webmasters, this SEO tool helps analyse your website’s performance and search traffic and solve issues that may affect your website’s rankings in SERPs.  

Target group

All websites owners who want to improve their website’s organic search visibility.  

Services

• • Analyse Search Console data  
  • Find out what is causing your site not to rank well in search results 
  • Fix any issues that may be affecting your site’s performance 
  • Get insights into your site’s search traffic. 

Pricing: Free 

The Best Way to Use Google Search Console (GSC)

It’s an easy tool to get started with; in fact, all you have to do is sign up and verify your website by adding the JavaScript code block provided to the site.

You’re even allowed to submit your sitemap for indexing. 

As an SEO tool, Google Search Console offers you a glimpse into how Google and its users view your site. With this information, you can optimize your website for better performance in the SERPs. 

3.  Ubersuggest 

Ubersuggest is relatively new when compared to the other SEO tools on the list.

But it’s always stacking up new features. But even without this, the tool is rich with all the data you might need to make smart SEO decisions and see results. The best part, it’s cheaper than most tools on the list. 

Ubersuggest is committed to providing you with a detailed report on your SEO positioning.

You can use it to find the current state of your website’s SEO. Find out how your website stacks up against your competitors, and what exactly you should be doing to grow your traffic. 

The Best Way to Use Ubersuggest

Just visit the site and enter your website’s URL to check out the current state of your website’s SEO.

There’s a lot you’ll learn about your website’s SEO from the report provided.

Next, enter the competing domain section and enter your website’s URL to see some of the websites you’re competing with on Google.

Remember to also click on “view all” (in the keyword gap column) to find out what keywords your competitors are currently ranking for and which you aren’t.

4.  Google Keyword Planner

If you’re looking for a tool that can help you out with keyword ideas, then look no further.

Guessing is not an option. SEOs that take this path always end up ranking for the wrong set of keywords. 

Google Keyword Planner offers to help you take away the guesswork so you can start making smart keyword decisions.

It’s a free tool that’s there to guide you all through the process. And since it’s from Google, you can bet the data provided will be as accurate as you could have wished it to be. 

How to Use Google Keyword Planner

After visiting the site, you’ll be provided with a simple form, where you have to enter the following details:

1. 1. The type of product or services you’re offering – for example, content marketing, web design, electronics, mobile devices, women clothing, and so on.
   2. Your website or landing page – www.abcdef.com/page
   3. Your product category – choose from the dropdown menu

In addition to checking search volume trends, you also want to pay close attention to:

• • Average monthly searches the keywords are getting
  • List of search terms
  • Competition

5.  SEO Site Checkup

   

SEO may be hard, a bit complicated, but it’s attainable. 

Things might not make sense to you early on, but after you get to experiment with a few things, and get used to using some of these tools, things will slowly begin coming together for you.  

One tool we suggest you check out is SEO Site Checkup. For us, SEO Site Checkup is like our swiss army knife SEO tool, boasting a range of features such as:

• • SEO monitoring
  • Competition monitoring
  • SEO Issues Analysis
  • Ability to create detailed SEO reports

The Best Way to Use Site SEO Checkup

You can get started by running a free search. All you need to do is type in your website’s URL in the search box on the homepage.  

You’ll be provided with a detailed on-page SEO report about your website.

If you did a good job optimizing your site for SEO earlier on, the site will receive a perfect SEO score. That’s their way of congratulating you for doing a good job.

But it isn’t something to anticipate. The chances are good that there’s at least one SEO issue that they’ll be pointing out. No need to fret though – just click on the “how to fix’” button for some advice on how to resolve the problem and have your website graduate with a clean bill of health. 

6.  SimilarWeb

   

SimilarWeb is a free tool that lets you analyze your website’s performance across a variety of metrics.

You can also use it to get a detailed scoop of the other sites you’re competing with.

Better still, they have one of the easiest interfaces you’ll ever come across. And their data is broken down into small, easy-to-read chunks for your easy understanding.

The Best Way to Use SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb will review your website and provide a detailed report. We suggest you soak up everything keenly. Go through each section and find out what they have to say. 

Take note of any data that’s relevant to your SEO campaign, and figure out how to improve on it in your future SEO marketing plan. 

We particularly ask you to go through the search data with a fine-tooth comb. Here, there’s a lot you can learn about your website’s traffic and where it’s coming from –top keywords, paid keywords, search, and more. 

SimilarWeb isn’t a tool that you’ll be using every day. But once in a while, you want to use it to check on your website’s health and even track your competitors. 

7.  SEMrush

Overview

SEMrush is widely used by SEOs, and there’s a good reason for that.

For one, the tool does a great job of helping SEO folks out there access their rankings and identify all the possible ways they can develop new SEO opportunities.

It’s a simple tool that tries to bring all of your analytics data in a central place, thus making the life of an SEO expert a lot easier. 

You can use it to compare keywords and see how well your website is performing against those of your competitors.

Purpose 

This SEO tool helps you identify which keywords will drive more traffic to your website. You can use it to discover new keywords, monitor current ones, or even create custom lists based on your needs. 

Target group

Anyone looking to increase their online presence and generate more leads. 

Services

• • Keyword research (Organic research, keyword gap, organic traffic insight, keyword overview, keyword magic tool, keyword manager, keyword suggestion, keyword planner) 
  • On-page SEO (On-page SEO checker, site audit, log file analyser, site map generator) 
  • Local SEO (position tracking, social media toolkit, listing management, on-page SEO checker, keyword research tools) 
  • Rank tracking (Monitor updates, tracks SERPs volatility, position tracking, keyword research) 
  • Link building (Backlink audit tool, bulk backlink analysis, backlink analysis, backlink gap, link building tool, link building software)  
  • Competitor SEO analysis (Keyword gap, backlink analytics, reports, organic research, keyword research tool) 

Pricing

• • Offers a 7-day free trial and have access to services like content marketing, advertising and social media, SEO, market research, paid promotion, mobile optimisation, and video creation. 
  • The pro plan costs $119.95 per month and includes additional features like keyword research, competitor analysis, and PPC management. 
  • The Guru plan costs $229.95 per month and offers unlimited searches and keyword suggestions. 
  • The business plan costs $449.95 per month and provides access to all the other plans. 

The Best Way to Use SEMrush

SEMrush’s key area of focus is on-page SEO.

They have a built-in checker you can use to monitor your site’s ranking and even look for suggestions on how to improve your ranking for a selected list of keywords. 

8.  Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

Help a Reporter Out is how you get backlinks from A-list publications such as Forbes, CNN, BBC, and so on.

It’s the only one of its kind, and a very powerful link building tool for those who know how to use it.

It’s a platform for connecting journalists with news sources or stories. 

But that aside. For an SEO marketer, all you want to do is position yourself as the source for upcoming stories or news. 

How HARO works is rather simple. All you have to do is sign up and provide some basic information about your company. HARO will pick up from there and start sending you three emails per day with different media opportunities.

The Best Way to Use HARO

Go through each of the three messages you receive daily and see if you can pitch yourself as a source for some of them. If the pitch lands, you can go ahead and provide the journalist with a quote. Remember to also answer their questions and provide them with any other information they have requested. 

Here’s how you get to benefit from all this:

• • Your name and company name will be included in the article, which works great when you’re working on building a personal brand. 
  • The journalist may link back to your website. This is not always the case. So, you want to find out with the journalist first before you can proceed with anything. 

9.  KWFinder

KWFinder is an excellent choice of tool for finding longtail keywords with less competition.

SEOs use it to find high-potential keywords and run analysis reports on SERP and backlinks.

Using their Rank Tracker, you can easily determine your ranking and track your keyword performance to see if there’s any improvement. 

Not only that, but you’ll also be provided with a ton of new keyword ideas to rank your website for. 

The Best Way to Use KWFinder

Forget about those big, highly competitive keywords and instead use KWFinder to find those lower-on-the-barrel keywords that not so many marketers are paying attention to. 

The point is to try and focus on content that directly answers the questions that people are asking. 

10.  Inlinks

This is a fairly new tool on the market and one you wouldn’t want to miss in your marketing pellet.

Inlinks was created by Dixon Jones, the same creator behind Majestic Backlink Software. 

Their key feature is a content brief that helps you craft perfect SEO content. They have a unique optimization tactic that’s second to none.

What they do is take all the top-ranking pages on Google and analyze them to suggest the right angle and approach you can take, especially on the topical relevance, search intent, and overall article comprehension. 

The best way to use Inlinks

Inlinks is a great tool for automating your schema markup and internal linking on autopilot. 

Its primary method of optimization is topics, which makes it easy to find out other similar topics that are easy to link internally. 

You can even create a semantic schema markup that you can easily integrate into your website using JavaScript. 

11.  MOZ Pro

Overview

Moz is appreciated by lots of SEO experts. If not for anything, then it’s for always being up-to-date despite the regular search engine’s algorithmic changes.

Moz is a powerful, all-inclusive SEO platform. Whether you’re looking for a tool to help you out with crawling your website or some insights on how to best improve on it, Moz got you covered. 

They even have a free toolbar (called MozBar) that you can download to see any website’s metrics as you browse through the pages.  

Purpose 

This is an SEO software that helps you perform keyword research, backlink building, competitor analysis, site audits, etc. 

Target group 

Anyone looking to improve their search engine optimisation skills. 

Services

• • Moz Pro helps you with keyword research by analysing data collected from Google Search Console. It also helps you find new keywords using its “Explore” feature. 
  • The tool also helps you build backlinks by finding relevant websites to link to yours. 
  • You can get insights into your competitors’ sites through the “Competition Explorer” feature. 
  • You can create sitemaps and manage them using the “Site Map Creator” feature. 
  • Moz Pro has a “Keyword Difficulty” feature which tells you how difficult it would be to rank for a particular keyword. 
  • You can check if your website is secure or not using the “Security Checker” feature. 

Pricing: 

 This is free SEO software. 

The Best Way to Use Moz Pro

Moz has one of the best domain SEO analysis tools you’ll ever come across anywhere. 

You can use it to learn more about your website’s SEO performance. You can even run a side-by-side comparison of two different domain names.

Another one of their features worth checking out is their “page optimization” feature, which tells you what steps you should take to improve the SEO performance of every single one of the pages on your website. 

12.  Answer the Public

This is another free SEO tool for those with a shoestring marketing budget. It’s one of the tools that SEO experts use to find the topics to write about for their blogs. 

So many people use this tool to find content around specific keywords to rank. For instance, if you’re in the fitness industry, the tool can help you create content around keywords such as yoga, running, exercise, or cross-fit.

The best way to use Answer the Public for SEO

You can use Answer the Public to identify featured snippet opportunities you can exploit. This is particularly important if you’ve hired a freelance writer to help you create content for your website or blog.

All you have to do is download the keywords topics provided by the tool and send them over. 

13.  Spyfu

Spyfu is an amazing SEO tool, with a paid and free version. 

If you’re just starting, then we suggest you go with their free version and gradually grow to their paid version once things start working for you.

With this tool, you’ll get to view the number of times a particular keyword gets searched online per month. 

You also get to see the ranking difficulty of that particular keyword.

What’s more? You can research your competitors to find out what keywords they’re ranking for or targeting. 

What’s the Best Way to Use SpyFu

Use SpyFu to research your website or your competitor’s website to find out more about your keyword situation. Find out how many keywords you’ve successfully managed to rank for so far, how many clicks you are getting, and who are your competitors.

Suffice it to say SpyFu is one of the most detailed keyword research and analysis tool you’ll ever come across online.

It sure blows so many other SEO tools out of the water. The tool comes with lots of A-list features. But one feature that will blow out your mind is the Research feature. Imagine plugging your competitor’s website URL and the tool pulls up a lot of information on their SEO strategy. 

You get to see everything they’re doing. How much they’re paying for paid ads, what keywords they’re ranking for organically, and so on. 

14. WooRank: SEO Tool for Ranking

WooRank also comes with both paid and free options for tracking and reporting your marketing data.

SEOs mostly use it to track their competitors and find out what keywords they’re targeting. 

All you have to do is plug in your competitor’s website URL and the tool will reveal some really interesting information about their SEO strategy.

The tool will also reveal a few things that they still haven’t gotten right, both technical and from a content perspective. 

The Best Way to Use WooRank

Use WooRank to understand your website and SEO strategy as well as that of your competitors. See if you’re making any progress and if there’s anything you should improve.

You can use WooRank to find out if there’s duplicate content on your site, security issues, or downtime.
They’ll even provide you with a detailed step-by-step guide on how to fix them. 

15. Majestic Marketing SEO Tool

Majestic has been receiving lots of raving reviews from SEOs. This should tell you something about its capabilities. 

The tool comes with lots of amazing features, starting with The Majestic Million, which gives you a microscopic view of the top 1 million ranked sites on Google. 

The Best Way to Use Majestic SEO

You can start by using Majestic to find out if your website made the grade. 

Use their Site Explorer feature to get a general overview of your site’s SEO performance and how many backlinks it has garnered so far.

It also doubles as an excellent SEO keyword analysis tool that lets you discover the best keywords to optimize your website for. 

16.  Google Trends

SEOs hardly talk about Google Trends as an SEO tool.

It makes it safe to say it’s one of the most underutilized tools out there.

In addition to providing more information about a keyword, the tool offers great insights into trending topics. 

The Best Way to Use Google Trends

Use Google trends to discover trending topics. 

All you have to do is plug a few keywords (even country-specific ones), and the tool will provide you with more information around it, like rising queries, top queries, geographical locations, interest over time, and so on. 

If you’re unsure of what trends are right for you, Google Trends is a great companion of a tool for you. 

17.  Cyfe

Cyfe is a free, feature-rich SEO tool that lets you collect data from different online platforms and bring them to a central place where you can easily track, analyze, and compare.

It can connect to almost all the major social networks and applications, including:

• • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • Google Analytics
  • Stripe
  • Zendesk 
  • Shopify
  • Salesforce
  • Pinterest

The Best Way to Use Cyfe

And that’s just about the few sites we know. But the odds are pretty good that if you’re thinking about pulling data from any other sources apart from the ones we’ve listed, then Cyfe can get it done for you. 

All you have to do is use their pre-configured widgets. And just in case you can’t find the widget, then there’s an option for building one yourself. 

18. SEOWorkers

Plug any website’s URL into their search bar and get a detailed SEO report. The website doesn’t necessarily have to be your own. You can even plug your competitor’s website and do a little bit of spying on them.

All the tool does is generate a report on various aspects of on-page SEO without asking you too many questions, apart from the simple captcha arithmetic test that’s there to ensure they’re only interacting with humans, not bots. 

The Best Way to Use SEO Workers

We get it, there are a lot of other SEO tools that do pretty much the same thing SEO worker does, perhaps more. 

But what makes SEO Workers unique and the go-to SEO tool for most marketers is the fact that it does save you a lot of time on analysis. They also go the extra mile by providing a little bit of background information on this data.

Their report is generated quick and it’s quite detailed than most of the reports you can get elsewhere.  

19. ClickFlow

ClickFlow is a little different from the other SEO tools on the list.

When growing your traffic, all that marketers care about is creating new content and building new content.

Once they have created this content, promoted it, and gotten it a few backlinks; that usually marks the end of the story. 

Clickflow has a way of making you go back to your old posts to find out which ones are still performing well and which ones are not. 

It will pull out outdated posts for you to update and refresh them to boost their performance. 

How to Best Use Click Flow

You first have to connect their Content Decay Feature to Your Google Search Console. 

ClickFlow will import data and provide you with a detailed report on which pages have lost the most traffic over the last 12 months. 

20.  Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Overview

Screaming Frog is another valuable SEO tool that’s worth mentioning.

It’s a great tool for analyzing your on-page SEO. It essentially just crawls your web pages to provide detailed information on broken links, metadata, page titles, robots, duplicate content, and redirects. 

Better, you can even copy this data into a Google spreadsheet or process it into a more useful report that you can present to a client.

Purpose 

The purpose of this SEO spider software is to crawl and index your entire website so you can easily find all pages and files on your website. It also allows you to extract meta tags from each page, as well as the title tag.  

Target group

Anybody looking to optimise their website for SEO purposes. 

Services

• • Analyse metadata and page titles 
  • Screaming frog software help analyse metadata and page titles. Extract metadata from each page. It also helps Crawl and index your entire website. 
  • Audit hreflang attributes  
  • This tool helps you analyse hreflang attributes. Extract hreflang attributes from each page. 
  • Site visualisation  
  • It helps you see how your website looks visually. 
  • Crawl comparison and configuration  
  • This tool helps compare your website with another one. And configure crawling settings according to your requirements. 

Pricing

Free version available. A license of €149 per year is required to enjoy all its features. 

The Best Way to Use Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs for free, of course with restricted functions. To access more functions and crawl more web pages than the specified 500, you’ll be required to pay 99 Euros per year for their premium version. 

1. SEO Powersuite

SEO Powersuite is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

You need to download and install SEO Powersuite on your machine.

The tool covers almost all aspects of SEO.

It’s an excellent package of SEO tools, combining backlinking and auditing tools. It comes with a complete set of tools that makes SEO a snap and straightforward. 

It offers the following SEO data:

• • Keyword Research and rank Monitoring: Get accurate rank reports based on their rank tracker locations.
  • Site Auditing and On-page Optimisation: Analyse your site’s keywords and see how you rank against your competitors. Check to see if you have any issues with on-page SEO.
  • Link Building: Find new link-building opportunities, analyse the anchor text of the links you already have, and more.
  • Backlink Research and Auditing: Analyse your competitors’ backlinks, find out how they’re performing, and see if you can get any link opportunities.

SEO Powersuite has a free version, good enough for occasional SEO checks.

There are two paid options, however: 

• • Professional for $299
  • Enterprise for $699

1. WooRank

Woorank provides a web-based SEO analysis.

It’s a website review tool and SEO checker, all in one package, with tons of powerful tools for web admins.

Woorank offers the following SEO data:

• • In-depth Website Review, Downloadable in PDF: Find out how your website performs against the latest SEO best practices and discover opportunities to improve.
  • Competitive Analysis: Get an in-depth analysis of your competitors’ SEO efforts and rankings.
  • Technical Review: Discover the technical issues that may be affecting your website’s performance in search.
  • Marketing Checklist: Crosscheck your marketing efforts against best SEO practices. See what problems or issues your website may have.
  • Powerful Keyword Tool: Get accurate keyword suggestions based on your seed keywords.
  • On-page Analysis: Check if your website is SEO-friendly or not. Get more insight into what’s going right and what’s going wrong.

Woorank is a great tool for web admins and SEOs, quite affordable, as well. They have a 14-day free trial, after which you’ll have to choose from three of their paid plans:

• • Pro plan for $59.99/m
  • A premium plan for 179.99/m
  • Enterprise for 249.99/m

The Pro plan should work just fine if it’s your site or a single project. But if you’re juggling up to five projects, then perhaps you should consider the premium plan. 

The enterprise plan works great with SEO agencies with dozens of clients. 

1. BrightLocal

Bright Local provides small businesses with an affordable way to manage their online reviews.

It offers the following SEO data:

• • Tracking Local Rankings: Run an SEO audit to improve your local search performance.
  • Monitor and Respond to Reviews: Track your reviews and build a good reputation with your customers. 
  • Maximise Your Local Visibility: Use the citation builder to get listed on important directories and maximise visibility. 
  • Conversion: Convert Your Site’s Visitors into Sales-Ready Leads. 

Bright Local’s local SEO software is available for a 14-day free trial, after which you’ll have to choose from their four pricing plans: 

• • Single business plan @29/m (track up to three locations)
  • Multi-business plan @49/m (track up to six different locations
  • SEO-pro plan @79/m (track up to six different locations
  • Enterprise plan, prices available upon request (track more than 100 different locations

SEO Tools: Honourable Mentions

 SE ranking 

Purpose

This is one of the leading SEO software that helps you analyse your competitors’ websites and rank them in Google. 

Target group 

Business owners who are looking to improve their search engine rankings. 

Services

• • SE Ranking helps you compare your website against your competitors. It gives you an overall score and ranks your website accordingly. 
  • Find out what keywords they are using. 
  • You can find out what keywords your competitors are using by entering their URLs into the software. 
  • Create a keyword list  
  • With the help of this tool, you can create a keyword list that will be used to generate new ideas for your next project. 
  • Get traffic insights 
  • This tool helps you get traffic insight about your website. You can also use it to find out where your visitors come from, what pages they visit most often, etc. 
  • Backlink checker 
  • This tool checks if there are any broken links or 404 errors on your site. If you find any broken links or 404 errors, you can fix them with ease.  
  • Backlink monitoring 
  • This tool helps you monitor backlinks to your website. You can view the number of incoming and outgoing backlinks, along with the referring domain name.
  • Website audit  
  • This tool helps you evaluate your website and gives you recommendations on how to make it better. It analyses your website based on various parameters and tells you whether your website needs improvement or not. 
  • On-page SEO checker  
  • This tool helps identify duplicate content, missing alt text, empty headings, etc., and suggests ways to resolve these problems. 
  • Keyword research 
  • Using this tool, you can find out what keywords users are searching for. You can then use those keywords to drive more traffic to your website. 
  • Competitor analysis 
  • This tool helps you analyse your competitor’s website. You can even download their source code and copy some of their best practices. 

Pricing

It employs a pricing plan calculator to show you the cost of purchasing the product. It also gives you a 14-day free trial period. 

• • Essential plan costs range from $31-55/month. The essential plan includes basic features like Keywords, Backlinks, Competitors, Site Audit, Social Media Analysis, etc. 
  • Pro plan costs range from $71-119/month. The Pro plan includes additional features like Page Speed Optimisation, Website Security, etc. 
  • Business plan costs ranges from $151-719/month. The business plan includes all the features included in both the plans mentioned above. 

Custom plan costs depend on the agreement. The custom plan allows you to add certain features according to your requirements.

 SERPWoo- Deep SERP Tracker Analysis & Reporting 

Purpose

This tool is designed to track changes in your website’s ranking over time. It provides detailed information about the changes that occurred in your website’ rank over time. 

Target group 

People who want to keep track of their website’s rankings over time. 

Services

• • Track the changes in your website’s ranking over time 
  • Detailed reports on the changes that happened in your website’ rankings 
  • Analyse the performance of different keywords 
  • Monitor the performance of each page within your website 
  • See the impact of each change made to your website 

Pricing 

This tool offers four pricing plans. 

• • The bronze plan costs $49.95 per month. With this plan, you will be able to track only 750 keywords per month. 
  • The silver plan costs $99.95 per month. With this package, you will be able to track 2000 keywords per month. 
  • The gold plan costs $199.95 per month. With this pack, you will be able to track 4000 keywords per month. 
  • The platinum plan costs $299.95 per month. This plan is suitable for large-scale businesses. It lets you track 8000 keywords. 

Tools for Finding Topics Ideas

SEO and content marketing go hand in hand.

The more content you create, the better your search rankings. However, creating high-quality and unique content isn’t easy.

You can start by finding brilliant post ideas and great topics to write about. That requires a good deal of research.

The good thing is that there are plenty of SEO tools that you can use to analyse popular queries and organise them into brilliant topic ideas. 

• Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a popular Idea generation tool designed by the PR giant CoverageBook. It offers terrific content ideas. All you have to do is enter a seed keyword, and the application will work out its magic and churn out hundreds of content ideas.

The tool is 100% free to use. But it also has a pro plan that generates content ideas based on additional metrics, like geo-location. 

The tool generates tons of content ideas, like the ones listed in the picture below:

The platform has both free and paid plans.

The free plan is a bit limited. It’s a good plan for your own SEO if you’re only looking to generate a few content ideas.

Their pro plan offers unlimited searches, customer support, location-based results, data comparison, and more.

• Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyser

EMV Headline Analyzer is a free tool designed to evaluate your headline and determine if it’s emotionally friendly or triggers the right feelings. 

Let’s run this article’s headline, “the Best SEO Software for the Year 2022,” and see what it says:

As you can see, this headline doesn’t evoke strong emotional feelings. It has a pretty low Emotional Marketing Value Score. Therefore, it might not motivate the reader well enough to continue reading.

Now let’s try to improve on it and see what we get.  

This second headline increases the EMV score to 30.77% (from the initial 14%). It shows that given the two options; users are more likely to click on the second headline than the first.

• Portent Ideas Generator

Portent Ideas Generator is another free tool that offers unique content topics.

It works like Answer the Public, only that it doesn’t give you additional metrics. It’s focused entirely on generating content topics, one at a time.

You just have to enter your keyword, and the tool will generate a topic for you. If you don’t like it, click on “See another title,” and it will proceed to create another article title for you.  

Some of the generated ideas will be a bit off. But you can always refresh it for new ones. After all, the tool is 100% free. 

• HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator

HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator is another excellent choice of blog topic generator. It’s also simple — just open the tool and enter up to five keywords noun and leave the rest to the tool.  

You’ll be provided with five topic ideas to write about. You can also fill a special form and unlock 250 more ideas.

The tool is 100% free.

Tools for Conducting Competitor Research

SEO is a competitive profession. You have to stay ahead of your competitors and beat them at their own game.

Assuming your competitors are doing SEO the right way, you should try to find what they’re doing and see if there’s any way to one-up them.

Remember that SEO is a zero-sum game. The more you rank higher, the less your competitors will.

SEMRush 

SEMRush is the most popular competitor research tool on the market, and for a good reason. It’s great for tracking your competitor’s keywords, content marketing efforts, pay-per-click ads, backlinks, organic traffic, and more.

SEMrush will give you deep insights into any website’s traffic. You’ll get to know where the traffic is coming from and how users engage with your website. 

The tool will generate a full report such as the one shown below: 

SEMrush provides the following SEO data: 

• • The number of visits the websites is getting
  • How long does an average visit last
  • How many people bounce off the website after visiting it (after only viewing one page)
  • What’s the website’s source of traffic
  • Top organic keywords the website ranks for
  • What’re the website’s main organic competitors 

SEMrush has four different pricing plans to choose from:

• • Pro plan for $99/m (the basic tools plus five projects for tracking your website and monitoring your competitors). You can track up to 500 keywords under this plan. 
  • Guru plan @199/m (extended tool features, up to 50 projects). You can track up to 1500 keywords with this plan. 
  • Business plan @ $399/m (extended tool features, 200 projects). You can track up to 5000 keywords with this plan.
  • The enterprise plan comes with more advanced features. You can also track an unlimited number of keywords. However, you have to apply to the company to receive a custom quote. 

Opt for annual billing to receive a major discount on your chosen plan.

SEOQuake

SEOQuake is a browser extension available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. 

It’s a free plugin that allows you to see the metrics for any website or page you’re tracking. 

It also features an SEO bar that generates instant stats on any webpage you visit. If you don’t like reading the SEO report from the additional bar in your browser, you might want to opt for the SEO dashboard. All the information you need is just one click away.

Not only that: You’ll also get a full report of that page’s keyword usage, downloadable in a CSV format. 

Serpstat

Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO tool that’s particularly good with competitor research. The tools boast an impressive number of features.

Here are some of its SEO features:

• Your Direct competitors
• The keywords they’re ranking for
• Statistics on their source of traffic
• Their ad budgets
• and more

You’ll fall in love with this tool. If not for the simple reports, it’s for infographics and visualisation. 

Their free version offers a daily limit of 30 queries. 

To run more queries than that, you’ll have to choose from their four pricing plans: 

• The lite plan at $69/m
• The standard plan at $149/m
• The advanced plan at $299/m
• The enterprise plan at $499/m

Opting for an annual billing will get you a 20% discount. You have to note that each plan gives you access to over nine Yandex and 230 Google databases.

Mangools

Mangools is another versatile tool perfect for spying on your competitors. It’s a feature-rich tool that allows you to spy on your competitors and monitor their backlinks, organic traffic, keywords, social media visibility, domain authority, SERP analysis tools, and more.

Here’s a simple rundown of some of these features:

• KWFinder: You can use KWFinder to access your competitors’ keywords, keyword difficulty, and a few other metrics. 
• SERP checker: Gain insights into what users search for in over 52 countries. 
• Site Profiler: Place your competitors under the spotlight. Learn about their link profile, their traffic, and so much more. 

You can take advantage of the tool’s 10-day free trial. As for price, choose from one of their pricing plans:

• Basic plan @$49/m
• Premium plan @$69/m
• Agency @$129/m

Every advanced package gives you access to more options and features. 

We recommend you pay year to enjoy up to 40% discounted rates. 

Word tracker Scout

Word tracker is a chrome extension that analyses your competitors’ websites for keywords.  

It then generates a list of keywords your competitors are ranking for (searched by volume). 

It’s a simple tool with a straightforward user interface

Most users have reported that keyword Scout is an excellent tool for those just starting and are looking for an SEO tool with a low learning curve. 

Word tracker scout is free to use.

Google-tailored SEO Tools

As the dominant search engine, Google leads by example. They have plenty of tools that cater to the needs of both webmasters and their crawlers. Their SEO tools show us that they’re dedicated not only to crawling the web but to bettering it as well.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool for web admins and SEOs at all levels. 

It provides a clean and detailed report that gives you insight into your site’s current performance, what it lacks, and how it can be improved.

Sign up for a free account, and you’ll get access to lots of valuable features:

• • SEO stats: The tool features a handy SEO stats section. It helps you identify and monitor your site’s position (on the SERP).
  • Internal links: You can use the GSC to monitor your internal links. Access all of them, whether they’re present on the XML sitemap or not.
  • Crawl: Check crawl errors and other crawl-related issues such as duplicate or missing pages, redirects, index, lock, and so on.
  • URL Parameters: Access your site’s URL parameters for more comprehensive navigation.

The GSC will help you out with the following:

• • Optimise your content: It will help you optimise your site content by showing you which search queries people use to get to your site. 
  • Help You Rank Your Pages: The tool will show you which pages rank high in the Google search results.
  • Help You Correct Errors: It will send you timely notifications on your site’s errors. 

The tool also comes with a simple and intuitive user interface. 

There’s no need to be intimidated by the search console.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is Google’s free web analytics tool. 

It shows you information about your website’s performance, your site’s audience, and how to improve it.

It will give you a clear picture of how people interact with your site.

Features included in this SEO tool include:

• • Audience: Gives you a demographic analysis of your site’s audience.
  • Geo-locations: Find out where your visitors are located. 
  • Behaviour Flow: Identify the paths users take when navigating your site.
  • Device Performance: Find out which devices your visitors are using.
  • Behaviour Reports: Get insights into how users behave on your site.

You can improve the way Google Analytics works by adding code snippets to your website, creating profiles (for multiple sites), or configuring your accounts to track specific activities.

It’s a free tool that will help you optimise the way people interact with your site.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a free tool that lets you see how frequently specific terms are searched in different parts of the world. 

It also shows you the popularity of various search queries over time, among other things.

Google Suggest

Google Suggest is a simple tool that provides search engine users with more ideas for their search queries. When you type something in the Google search bar, the tool will serve up different suggestions based on what you’re typing.

You can use it to find additional ideas for keywords. 

Simply enter your keyword, and the search bar will give you similar keywords that you can potentially rank for. It’s a free tool – all you need to do is enter your website’s URL in the search bar, and you’ll get a helpful list of keywords to optimise your site for. 

Bulk Google Rank Checker

Bulk Google Rank Checker is a free tool that lets you check how your website ranks for a particular keyword.

It’s a simple tool to use. Open the site, and in the table provided, choose a search engine, enter the website you want to check, and add your keyword(s). Note that you can add up to 10 different keywords.

Lastly, check the captcha before clicking on “Perform Check.”

Panguin Tool

The Panguin tool is a powerful optimisation tool used by many digital marketers to track their pages’ ranking fluctuations.

You can use the tool to investigate if you’ve failed to comply with Google’s algorithm updates. 

If there’s any scheduled Google update, you can use the tool to figure out if your site was affected by it and get some suggestions on how to fix it. 

The tool also provides you with insights into the organic traffic changes after any Google update or other significant events that may affect your rankings.

Mobile-Friendly Test Tool

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool is an easy-to-use tool that lets you test your website for mobile friendliness. 

All you have to do is enter the URL of your page. The tool will then analyse your page, determine whether it’s mobile-friendly or not, and give you some suggestions on how to make it more mobile-friendly.

The tool will also provide you with a screenshot of how the site looks on a mobile device. 

Tools for Conducting Keyword Research

Now let’s get to the most critical part of SEO — keyword research.  

This step plays a crucial role in your SEO efforts; you get to pick which keywords to focus on in your optimisation process. The following tools can help you conduct optimised keyword research:

KeywordTool.io 

KeywordTool.io is a simple keyword research tool that helps you generate new keywords using Google’s Autocomplete. 

To use the tool, simply enter your target keyword in the search bar and click on “Generate Keywords.” The tool will then give you a list of long-tail keywords related to your initial seed keyword.

Their pro plan lifts some of its limitations and unlocks more metrics, such as search volume, trend, CPC (in USD), and level of competition (low, medium, or high). 

Ubersuggest 

Ubersuggest is a free keyword research tool that delivers loads of keyword suggestions in seconds.

Simply enter your domain name or target keyword and choose your location to use the tool. Then, click on “Search.” Ubersuggest will then generate hundreds of keywords that you can use to build your website.

The tool provides the following list of SEO data:

• • How many organic keywords do you rank for?
  • What is the estimated amount of traffic your website receives per month? 
  • What’s your domain authority?
  • How many backlinks does your site have? And how many of these links are NoFollow?

KWFinder 

KWFinder is a simple analytical tool that provides keywords and domain overview. You can even adjust its settings by country or language.

However, you need a Mangool account to use KWFinder. So, go ahead and sign up with Mangool and then use the logging details to sign into KWFinder.

Next, you can enter your seed keyword, and the tool will analyze its popularity, KD, CPC, PPC, and other characteristics.

What’s more? The tool will also generate long-tail variations of the keyword specific to your particular location.

SpyFu 

SpyFu is a spying Kung Fu as the name suggests.  

The tool lets you analyse your competitors’ websites, uncover their keywords, examine their backlink profiles, and so on. 

Find out what keywords the site ranks for, what keywords they buy, and their estimated PPC clicks.

Every provided research field has a detailed explanation of what the measurement means and what it signifies. 

The tool isn’t free. It offers three pricing plans to choose from:

• • Basic plan @39/m
  • Professional plan @78/m
  • Team plan @299/m

Each of these plans offers unlimited access to all the metrics and tools. The only difference is that the more expensive you go, the more you gain access to additional perks, such as more sales leads, domain contacts, and so forth. 

Seed Keywords

Seed Keywords is a free keyword research tool that lets you research keywords by creating a scenario.

For example, let’s say you’re selling bags online and want to know what kind of keywords your customers use when searching for a bag online. 

You can create a scenario where you type in “bags” as the seed keyword and then select characteristics that describe a typical searcher of a bag. You can even add other details such as location, interests, income level, etc.

In the above example, the scenario you create can be something like, “Are you a lady and would love to buy a Louis Vuitton bag? How would you search for it on Google?”

You can then share it with your contacts and get to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth instead of relying on data analysis.

CaniRank 

CaniRank is a simple SEO software that uses AI to provide real recommendations for promoting your website. Every recommendation comes with detailed DIY instructions.

They also have a keyword research feature that informs you on what your competitors are trying to accomplish. 

You can filter keywords based on search volume, ranking difficulty, and ads. 

The tool comes with four pricing plans:

• • Free
  • DIY Individual @$49/m
  • DIY Pro @$79/m
  • DIY Agency @$299/m

Majestic

Majestic updates its data several times per day to provide accurate, real-time results.

It’s a simple tool that lets you enter a keyword and determine what pages are ranking for it.

The tool has three pricing plans:

• • The Lite plan @$49.99/m/user
  • The Pro plan is @99.99/m/user. This pricing plan comes with more SEO features and metrics. 
  • The API plan @399.99/m/five users. 
  • It’s worth mentioning that the search explorer option is only available under the pro plan.

Keywords Everywhere 

Keywords Everywhere is a browser extension that works with Firefox and Chrome. 

You can start by installing the extension.

Next, head over to Google.com and enter your keyword in the search bar.  

The extension will then appear on the right-hand side of your browser and automatically start displaying tons of keyword data: search volume, level of competition, and cost per click.

It will also show other variations of the keywords and their corresponding metrics.

SEO Auditing Tools

SEO auditing is where you evaluate your website based on the best SEO practices provided by Google. These practices are never constant. They are subject to change. 

The developers often change the tools we will be reviewing in this section, but generally, each follows Google’s guidelines.

These tools assess your website based on factors such as keyword presence, content quality & authority, technical SEO, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, site speed, backlink profile, and so on.

SEOptimer

SEOptimer is a popular SEO auditing and reporting tool. It’s a simple tool that reviews your website content to pinpoint some of its failures and suggest necessary fixes.

Just enter your website’s URL in the box provided and click on Audit. The site will analyse it and present a full SEO audit report to you.

Here’s what makes SEOptimer special:

• • Simple interface, newbie-friendly
  • White-label PDF reports
  • Ability to customize the report in your preferred language and other perks

The tool comes with four pricing plans to choose from:

• • DIY SEO @$19/month
  • White Label @$29/month
  • White Label + embedding @$59/month

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a downloadable SEO audit software available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. 

The software gathers on-site data to analyse it in real-time and provide you with a full report.

The tool analyses the following:

• • Any trace of broken links
  • Page titles and metadata
  • XML site maps
  • Site architecture
  • Duplicate content

Also, it seamlessly integrated with Google Analytics and a host of other SEO tools. 

Their free version has all the basic site audit features with a 500-crawl limit. Their pro version goes $149/year and has more advanced features and no crawl limit. 

The following are the top ten advantages of SEO tools:

1. Increases the percentage of pure discovery and high-quality online traffic a website receives.
2. Provides a significant return on investment.
3. It raises the level of credibility and confidence.
4. It offers promotion on a 24-hour basis.
5. It targets customers throughout the whole marketing funnel.
6. It reaches every member of your target audience.
7. It improves the overall user experience.
8. It increases the likelihood of PPC success.
9. It is a marketing plan with a lengthy time horizon.
10. Is essential for search engine exposure.

How to Know If It’s Worth It to Spend in SEO Tools

SEO involves a wide range of activities, from keyword research and link building to competitor analysis and content production, as well as on-page and off-page optimization techniques. You should spend in the tools that will simplify each component.

It does not have to cost lots of dollars every month, which is encouraging news.

Expensive SEO tools that do it all are difficult to come by. It is possible to employ them effectively and efficiently, and they may be highly effective. Nonetheless, it is widely believed that they are the only method to successfully optimise your site in order to advance up the search engine results page (SERP).

If you don’t have the funds for a premium SEO tool, you may utilise a combination of the free tools on our checklist in tandem with each other to get the best possible results.

You can consider upgrading to premium tools or an all-in-one solution as your rankings boost and you begin to see an increase in organic traffic, which increases revenue. Subscription tools or an all-in-one solution will save you time and allow you to further optimise your site for search engines as it is faster than the free tools alone.

After a while, you’ll have earned enough money to make the investment worthwhile.

In response to the issue of when to make an investment, always remember that it’s never too soon to begin. For businesses with websites that want to appear higher in search results and a basic grasp of how search engine optimization works, any Tools on the market are a wise investment.

Mechanism for Selecting the Most Effective SEO Tools

In contrast, many “best of” lists, naming the greatest SEO tools does not imply just selecting one tool and disregarding the rest. Instead, it is a matter of selecting the combination of tools that properly meets your specific requirements and goals. Several factors should be taken into consideration before making that decision.

A comparison of all-in-one vs. specialised

Using an all-in-one SEO solution that allows a company to manage nearly every aspect of SEO on a fundamental level would be beneficial to any business.

However, it is possible that you may require or value particular activities such as competition analysis, link outreach, or niche-based keyword research, and that you would wish to go further into these. An all-in-one tool that is too simple may struggle to meet your needs in that situation.

You won’t have to waste a lot of time going through duplicate information because many specialist SEO tools work in conjunction with their all-in-one equivalents.

Extensive prior experience is required

Some tools will be simple to use straight away, even for total beginners. Other tools have a rather steep learning curve as compared to others. How much SEO knowledge you currently have and how familiar you are using its phrases, chores, and methods will play a significant role in determining which ones are best for you. Choosing SEO tools that are appropriate for your level of expertise will significantly affect your SEO experience.

The size and growth of businesses

Are you planning to take control of these tools personally, or will a member of your team take care of it for you? Have a little website with just a handful URLs to administer, or a huge site with hundreds of URLs to maintain?

Are you actively aiming to grow your business in the near future, or are you comfortable with where you are right now? These questions will assist you in identifying the most appropriate SEO tools and membership plans for your business, ensuring that you do not cut corners or take on too much.

6 Easy SEO Tips: How to Boost Traffic to Your Website Making Your Premium Tools Worth It.

1. Conduct keyword research that is relevant to your business.

Keyword research is vital for identifying the SEO of your website as well as the SEO of your rivals’ websites. It is fortunate, though, that you don’t have to become an SEO specialist in order to understand which keywords to utilise.

Keyword research tools are your most valuable resource.

2. Tools that are both free and paid

In addition to several free SEO tools, there are also premium SEO tools available that can guide you through each stage of analysing words that you wish to target. The majority of SEO tools are available in both free and paid editions.

The free version normally comes with restrictions, such as a limiting the amount of keyword searches allowed each day, meanwhile the subscription versions come with additional capabilities for each tool.

SEMrush is a keyword research tool that is highly recommended. It provides you with fundamental statistics that you should take into consideration when creating your list of targeted keywords, such as the monthly popularity and demand and the cost-per-click for each of the words. Also available is a list of similar keywords for the terms you’re looking for to help you come up with content ideas.

As during keyword research stage, it’s easy to become bogged down in the minutiae. You should streamline your keyword research technique to the greatest extent possible. Your procedure should be comprised of three straightforward phases.

3. Customer Persona Research is a must.

Creating customer profile before beginning your keyword analysis is the most effective strategy to ensure that your results are as accurate as possible. Take a look at the search terms they’re entering into search engines.

Make a list of their most pressing problems and objectives, and then look for search terms that connect to them. 

4. Keywords and Phrases

Make a list of all the relevant keywords queries you can see your user personas using, and then include essential research information to help you select which keywords to focus on first.

You may achieve interesting content based on keywords that are relevant to the interests of your target user as well as keywords that have a good mix of search traffic and degree of difficulty for ranking in search engines.

One other fantastic keyword research tool is Moz Keyword Explorer, which is available for free. They employ a proprietary technique for ascertaining level of difficulty in order to demonstrate how tough it can be for you to surpass your rivals on the first page of search results.

The importance score, which is also represented as a number between 0 and 100, is calculated by combining various indicators (such as pure click-through rate) to determine how important a keyword should be in your overall strategy. The greater your quality score, the deeper you are to the sweet spot of high search traffic, natural CTR, and low complexity that Google is striving to achieve.

5. Content Marketing Strategy

Once you’ve completed this step, you may brainstorm comprehensive ideas for blog pieces, whitepapers, webinars, and any other type of content that will captivate and create engagement.

Maintain a target keyword in mind for each type of content that you create and post online. With this process, you can improve the article for the keyword, increasing your chances of ranking higher for that query in search results.

6. Keep an eye on your competition.

SEO professionals recognise the importance of staying on top of their rivals’ moves. However, it takes more than merely browsing these blogs and watching them on social networks to do this.

You should start by investing in the correct match analysis tools. This is the most important move you can take. 

Simply choose the term sample you’re interested in researching, such as organic keywords, and you’ll get a side-by-side analysis of these sites based on keywords, position on search engine results pages, and other factors.

Knowing where you are in relation to your competitors will help you to direct your lead generation and content strategy in order to obtain an advantage over your competitors. This assists you in prioritising possibilities for certain keywords that you wish to acquire traction on.

Use an On-Page SEO Assessment to make sure everything is in order.

Use your chosen keywords in the tools mentioned above of your most highly ranked pages to indicate in term of searching the web that your article is related to the terms being searched for.

By using solutions such as BrightEdge, you can take the uncertainty out and get faster results. This tool generates suggestions for you including terms in the most significant page elements, based on their popularity.

It is also possible to configure the tool to inform you when words are omitted from webpages and meta descriptions, as well as to recommend which terms to use.

Nevertheless, regardless of all of the on-page marketing efforts, the most crucial factor that any SEO specialist should concentrate on is creating high-quality, informational content for their clients.

Produce Outstanding Content

It is much easier to produce ideas and to create focused, insightful, instructional material when you have a clear understanding of who your target readers is and what kind of information they are looking for.

Utilise social media to your advantage.

You are not required to manually post each and every article that you generate. This is where social marketing solutions may be really beneficial.

The use of automation makes the job of SEO specialists easier. As far as social media is concerned, they routinely plan for posts in advance in order to stay on the radar of their followers and maintain it engagement levels.

There are countless good tools available to help you build up your social network schedules and keep track of your journal article social media posts.

Another fast and simple idea is to include sharing links on your blog posts so that your visitors can easily share your information with their own networks of friends and family. Creating shareable, personalised graphics is one of the most effective methods to motivate users to share their content.

In fact, posts containing images are more apt to be shared than ones without it. 

By using the proper photos, you can make your inbound marketing material more shareable, which may increase the number of followers you have and the number of external links that go to your site.

You do not, however, need to be a visual author in order to encourage your readers to share your material. Create pictures such as banners, social media images, and infographics using graphic design tools such as Powerpoint, Canva, or other similar products, such as Adobe Illustrator.

Make Friends With Influencers.

Influencer marketing is among the most hyped-up kinds of inbound marketing, and businesses of all sizes may take part in this popular form of promotion. Using influencers who have already established themselves as trustworthy or respected by thousands upon thousands of people to advertise products and services may be a successful strategy for businesses looking to increase their market reach.

However, the amount of money you spend on marketing or any other type of recompense will almost likely to have an impact on the number and popularity of influencers who promote your products or services.

Several social media celebs, such as those who post on Instagram, are offered hundreds of dollars for each post. You may still draw the interest of similar high-profile social media pages if you don’t have the money to pay for these Instagram influencers. Offer free items or services in return for their reviews or sponsored posts.

SEO Automated Solutions 

• Site audit/monitoring

To help keep your website safe from hackers, malware, viruses and other security threats, it’s recommended to instal a web application firewall solution such as Cloudflare’s WAF. 

Cloudflare’s WAF protects against common attacks, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, clickjacking, session fixation, CSRF, and more.

• Backlink analysis

Backlink analysis helps you understand what kind of links are pointing towards your website.

• Rank tracking

 Rank tracking tools allow you to monitor your website’s position in various search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex. 

• Competitor monitoring

 Using a competitor monitoring tool, you can easily see all the details related to your competitors’ websites, such as domain age, the number of indexed pages, social media followers, Alexa traffic rank, etc. 

•  Analysing log files 

Logfile analysers help you identify potential issues with your website by checking logs like Apache access logs, IIS logs, PHP error logs, and MySQL error logs. 

• Keyword intent analysis 

Intent analysers help you determine the purpose of a specific phrase or sentence. You can use these results to optimise the content on your website. 

• Reporting

Reporting tools help you generate reports that include information about your website’s performance over time. These reports can be used to make decisions regarding future actions. 

Global statistics of Automated SEO solutions 

• SEO spending by region/country 

The expenditure of SEO services varies across regions and countries. In 2019, the expenditure was $43.3 billion, which grew in 2020 to $47.5 billion. This means that the global market for SEO services is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5% during the forecast period. 

• SEO spend by tools/agencies 

Ahrefs in 2019 surveyed up to 357 consultants, digital marketing agencies and freelancers to evaluate major statistics in SEO pricing. Surprisingly, the result showed that an agency’s average cost per month to hire an SEO specialist is around $2,500-5,000.  

 Current and Future SEO Trend 

• Mobile performance

In 2019, up to 59% of shoppers surveyed said they were willing to pay more for mobile optimised products and services. The survey also found that a huge percentage of consumers expect their online shopping experience to be fast and easy. This is because up to 73% of internet users have access to smartphones and tablets. 

•  AI progression 

Google has announced that its AI system will now be able to read through articles and commentaries to find out whether they’re factually correct or misleading. 

According to Google, this new capability is part of the company’s efforts to improve the quality of its search results. 

The move comes after the tech giant launched a similar program last year to detect fake news. 

As part of the initiative, Google says it will work with publishers to verify facts and feedback. 

Ranking trends 

• Local search engine optimisation 

With the rise of local searches, there is a growing need for businesses to focus on local SEO. Local SEO is different from traditional SEO; it involves optimising a website for a particular location. 

For example, if you own a restaurant in New York City, you should target keywords like “New York restaurants” and “best New York restaurants”. 

• Personal branding  

The internet is becoming increasingly personalised, so companies are starting to tailor their content according to each user’s needs. 

This is why personalisation is one of the most important aspects of SEO today. If you want to get ahead of your competition, you need to start thinking about personalising your business to increase conversions. 

• Changing SEO strategies  

 The old ways of link building are no longer effective as links are being devalued due to the prevalence of social media. Social signals are still very valuable, but they are not the only factor influencing rankings. 

Companies must use other methods such as content marketing and backlinks to achieve higher rankings. 

• Content Marketing  

Content marketing is a strategy where marketers create unique and engaging content for specific audiences. It helps build trust and authority among customers.  

• Backlinking  

Backlinks are hyperlinks pointing towards a page. They help websites gain credibility and boost traffic. However, many people believe that backlinks are dead. But they aren’t! 

They just require a slight change in approach. Instead of focusing on quantity, you need to think about quality. You need to make sure that your backlinks are relevant and high-quality. 

New ways of SEO 

Voice search 

Research has that voice search queries account for 20% of all web searches. People are currently using these devices to look for information about everything from travel to sports to politics. 

It seems that we are moving away from text-based searching to an audio-based model. 

There are two main reasons behind this shift: accessibility and convenience. Voice search allows us to do things quickly without having to type anything into our phones. 

However, it does come at a cost. We lose some control over what we are looking for. 

Evidence of increased use of SEO tools 

Google is constantly updating its algorithms to ensure that users receive the best possible experience when they search online. 

 In fact, the company recently announced that it would be rolling out changes to its algorithm to better understand searchers’ intent. 

These updates include: 

A new ranking signal called “authoritative sources” will measure the trustworthiness of a source by examining factors such as domain age, freshness and reputation.  

Other benefits of SEO 

Research has that 93% of consumers use Google to find local businesses and products. This means that SEO plays a vital role in helping people find the right products and helping businesses stand out from the crowd. 

Furthermore, there is evidence that shows that SEO leads to more sales than any other digital channel. 

So, if you are looking to grow your business, SEO is definitely something worth investing time and money into. 

As competition for the top spots in SERPs continues, you need a robust SEO tool to help you monitor various website metrics such as organic traffic, CTR, and bounce rate. These metrics will inform every decision that you make regarding your website SEO.

The is no shortage of SEO tools online that you can use to get your business on the top SERPs. Surprisingly, some of the free tools work better than the premium tools. Let’s dive in and look at free SEO tools that won’t cost you a penny but will significantly impact your SEO campaign.

Best Free Analytics Tools

Gone are the days when you would try to make educated guesses based on the market or website data.

Here are the best free analytics tools available online today. 

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics has, over the years, undergone tremendous changes as Google strives to provide the most accurate results to its users. This tool does a comprehensive and detailed analysis of your website to help you pinpoint the specific areas you should improve. Some of the valuable information that it offers include:

• • Pageviews
  • Conversion rates
  • Demographic data
  • The geographical location of website visitors

This information will enable you to create content relevant to the audience and offer an exceptional user experience.

2. Google Trends

One sure way to create a buzz online for your business and generate massive organic traffic without spending a fortune is by covering trending topics in your niche. Google Trends is a free analytics tool designed to assist you in finding the trends. You can filter the results based on category, location, time frame, and keywords to narrow down to trends that have the potential of generating the most engagements with your audience.

3. Google Keyword Planner

As the name suggests, Google Keyword Planner is a keyword research tool that will take your content creation and optimisation strategies to the next level. It offers valuable information about keywords such as competition level, traffic volume, and suggested bids if you plan to run a PPC campaign on Google. Knowing the exact keywords to use in your blog post and website pages will increase your site’s overall performance and visibility in SERPs.

4. Google Consumer Surveys

Google Consumer Surveys is another free tool from Google that is meant to help marketers understand their audiences better by asking them questions online. The questions can be customised using different variables such as age, gender, and location – it all depends on the goals of the content marketing campaigns. 

With the survey results at hand, you will create content that best resonates with the audience’s interests. You will no longer spend hours writing content on topics and hoping that it matches the searcher’s intent.

5. Google Search Console

Google Search Console was previously known as Google Webmaster Tools. It is a powerful analytics tool also from Google that offers details of whether the search engine bots have indexed a website. It generates additional information to improve your websites, such as crawl errors, pages with the highest traffic, backlinks, keywords, and many more. 

Also, you can submit sitemaps to Google to help the bots crawl and index your website accordingly. When creating the sitemap file, make sure that you indicate which pages you want to be indexed and the ones that bots should ignore.

6. Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing is another popular search engine that rivals Google. Bing Webmaster Tools is its custom analytics tool tailored to generate almost the same reports as Google Search Console. Use it to know which keywords the website is currently ranked for and the cached pages and crawl errors. It’s imperative to ensure that both search engines correctly rank your website to get the most results.

7. Panguin Tool

Understanding the Google algorithm is not a walk in the park for most marketers due to the plethora of factors that control them. Luckily, Panguin tool, a free SEO tool, can help you know changes on Google algorithm. It also goes a step further to provide details of indexed pages, backlinks, and keywords to help you optimise the website to rank better, generate organic traffic and sales online.

8. MozCast

MozCast is another invaluable free SEO tool that provides insider details of the Google algorithm. It will analyse your website to identify fluctuations that could be affecting your site ranking. Also, it offers recommendations of precisely what you should do to get better results.

9. SEMrush

SEMrush is best known for helping brands do competitor analysis. It offers valuable information about the websites, such as keywords, estimated organic traffic, and backlink profile. Use this information to optimise your website for a higher ranking and conversion rate.

Top 7 Best Free Link Tools

A backlink is Google’s strongest ranking factor. Sites with plenty of quality backlinks and a healthy backlink profile are ranked higher than sites with a poor backlink profile. Hence, it’s essential to develop a robust link-building strategy after your website goes live to get ahead of the curve. 

The truth is, you don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars to get a robust tool.

Here are the top 7 best free link tools used by hundreds of content marketers worldwide.

1. Open Site Explorer
2. Majestic SEO
3. Ahrefs
4. Linkody
5. OpenLinkProfiler
6. Backlink Watch
7. Link Research Tools

Please evaluate the features, functionality and the reputation of each of them online to incorporate the best ones into your content marketing strategy.

Top 8 Best Free Indexing and Crawling Tools

The internet is dynamic, and search engine algorithms are equally unpredictable. Sites are de-ranked or completely wiped off the database for different reasons. The website owners may also decide to delete their websites, migrate to a new URL, or use the services of a different hosting company.

All these reasons result in the website leaving behind a broken list on blog posts that had previously linked to the websites and on directories and search engine databases.

Having too many broken links can hurt your website ranking by making it difficult for the Google bots to crawl and index your pages accordingly. Therefore, it is vital to do regular backlink audits to identify and resolve all broken links. 

Here are the top 8 best free indexing and crawling tools you can use for this task.

1. Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker is a powerful tool wired to crawl three pages on your website and prompt you if it identifies any broken links. You get to select which pages you want it to crawl. Choosing pages that receive the most traffic and have high conversion rates is recommendable.

2. Site Mapper

Site Mapper allows web admins to analyse up to ten different websites for free at a go. It’s ideal for checking links on directories where your business is cited. Correct all citations that are listed for having broken links to continue channelling SEO juice to your website.

3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a popular tool that is more advanced than the previous two tools. Using the free version, you can analyse up to 500 URLs simultaneously. We recommend using the free version, but shift to the premium version as your business grows and website pages increase to get detailed reports and insights.

4. Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Most people consider Xenu’s Link Sleuth a medieval link analysis tool as it has been around for now. Nonetheless, it’s still effective in crawling websites and generating reports of all broken links it finds on the pages and blog posts. You can also download the report in plain text format for sharing with your in-house or outsourced SEO team. 

5. SEOlyzer

SEOlyzer is another excellent free indexing and crawling tool that you can use to run tests on a maximum of 200 pages of any websites available on the web. Like its predecessor, you can download the report for further analysis offline.

6. Beam Us Up

Beam Us Up is a pretty decent tool that allows users to crawl a maximum of five different websites per day at no cost. It’s perfect for doing a basic competitor analysis or checking the condition of your links in directories.

7. Link Redirect Trace

Link Redirect Trace allows users to crawl five pages for free. It generates reports of all redirects uncovered, such as 302 and 301 redirects. Resolve these redirects to avoid annoying potential customers by sending them to the wrong pages.

8. Redirect Path

Redirect Path goes the extra mile to crawl a website and pinpoint all redirects. You won’t ever have to follow the links manually. The reports are detailed and will guide you in fix the broken links.

How to Select the Right SEO Tool 

The above tools will help improve the performance of your website by pinpointing all the things that you should improve on to rank better and connect with the target audience. It can be challenging to select the right one though due to the many options available. 

Here are five tips on selecting the right SEO tool to help you make the right decision.

1. Compare the Number of Keyword Suggestions

Apart from the free SEO tools discussed above, most premium tools are priced based on the number of keywords you intend to track. Thus, take time to know the keyword volume you are interested in and then check if the tool can meet that requirement. 

Ideally, the volume of keywords is dependent on the number of pages on your website. Targeting one keyword per page is a bad SEO tactic that won’t give you substantial results. Strive to rank well for ten keywords per page.

2. Determine the Tool’s Accuracy

Today, search results are highly localised and personalised. Your selected SEO tool should provide keyword suggestions and recommendations with high accuracy and precision. If the reports are inaccurate, you will end up making wrong decisions.

3. Choose a Tool That Also Tracks Mobile Ranking

With most people using smartphones and other mobile devices to search for information on Google, it makes sense to use an SEO tool that tracks your site ranking on desktop SERPs and mobile SERPs.

4. Goes Beyond Google

Sure, Google is the largest search engine, but it’s not the only engine the audience uses to find your website and information related to your industry. Therefore, you are better off using a tool that analyses your website across multiple search engines than one which focuses on only Google.

5. Check if the Tool Offers Geo-Based Rank Tracking

Local SEO is more crucial than ever before for businesses that operate in specific locations. Using a tool that offers geo-based rank tracking, you can create custom content optimised not only for the search engines but also for customers in different locations.