35 of the Best SEO Tools
35 of the Best SEO Tools
Quality SEO tools help you create a better SEO strategy, whether you’re a beginner or a pro.
There are hundreds of free and paid SEO tools available, and fortunately for you, we’ve compiled a list of the best software out there to save you time!
We’ve categorised these marketing tools by area so have a scroll through and thank us later.
Keyword Research tools
Want to know what your audience is searching for? You want to invest in a keyword research tool.
Keyword research tools help you identify what you should optimise for, helping you spot terms that could drive a lot of traffic.
It’s worth bearing in mind keyword research is essential for content marketing, so you can also consider these to be useful content marketing tools!
So, here’s a round-up of some of the best keyword research tools in 2020!
Ahrefs is well known in the SEO software space for going big on data.
Not only is Ahrefs a popular SEO tool, but it’s also a great general digital marketing tool.
With their Keyword Explorer, it’s no different.
Ahrefs claim to have the most significant keyword database, but not only does it have the biggest, but it also pulls keyword data from across ten different search engines in a wide range of countries.
Ahrefs Keyword Explorer also has lots of useful metrics, including a keyword difficulty metric which helps you prioritise by telling you how easy it is to rank.
Another perk, Ahrefs allows you to see keywords in a variety of different ways based on your input.
One of the most useful is the questions report that shows common questions your audience has around whatever topic you enter, making this ideal software for content marketing.
While this free tool from Google doesn’t identify new keywords, it does provide you with live search data on what you are currently ranking for and how your audience are finding you.
Use the performance reports from this tool to research what you currently rank well for and get optimising!
SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool and Keyword Overview Tool
SEMrush has two keyword research tools; the Keyword Magic Tool and the Keyword Overview Tool.
The Keyword Magic tool identifies new keywords with an emphasis on low competition keywords.
The Keyword Overview tool runs an analysis on your current keyword set to provide an insight into the traffic potential.
This tool focuses on finding those long-tail keywords that are easily forgotten about – but shouldn’t be.
KWFinder excels at identifying keywords that might not receive as many monthly clicks, but they’ll be much easier for you to rank for.
Everyone has heard of Moz, it’s a great all-in-one piece of SEO software, but one of their better parts of the toolkit is their keyword explorer.
With Moz Keyword Explorer, you can build keyword lists, analyse keywords by search volume and gain insights into many other metrics such as difficulty and click-through rate.
Additionally, you can also look at keywords by competitors to identify what is working for them.
Want to generate content ideas? This free keyword research tool helps you generate ideas based upon what your audience is searching for within a topic.
It allows you to deep dive into the precise keywords, phrases and questions that are being asked every single day.
SEO competitor analysis tools
These tools help you understand how your competitors are driving traffic and what content is working. They can give you valuable market insights that can help inform your overall SEO strategy.
This tool provides insights into popular content across different websites and topics. You can use it to analyse any site as well as social media channels.
Buzzsumo identifies the content format your audience most resonate with, and on social media sites, it identifies trending posts and topics and posts that are shared most.
SimilarWeb enables you to see how competitors are getting traffic for all of their marketing channels, making a great general digital marketing tool.
Similar also allows you to benchmark yourself against your competitors and identify new trends, opportunities and up and coming businesses within your niche.
Sistrix offers a wide range of research options; however, their Visibility Index is, without a doubt, the cornerstone of their tool. This tool enables you to see the visibility in search each site has on a weekly or daily basis as well as their top ranking keywords.
Referred to as ‘the ultimate research tool’ you get a whole host of market insights in one place.
Searchmetrics allows you to keep on top of your competitors, stay up to date with the latest trends and get a comprehensive review of content performance for any domain.
Content optimisation tools
These tools help to improve your on-page SEO efforts and better optimise the content on your site.
Ryte content success is all about optimising your content using their TF*DF algorithm.
One benefit of this tool is helping you create better content in less steps as it includes automated keywords suggestions and recommendations on how you can improve your content.
Marketmuse provides everything you need to create the ideal content strategy for your website.
This tool determines the content that is likely to perform best for you and even includes comprehensive briefs to help you perfect your content. These briefs include word count recommendations and various KPIs you should strive for based upon their AI.
Marketmuse’s most significant selling points is their natural language generation AI engine. This allows you to not only create better content, but create it a lot faster with minimal human editing.
Wordmetrics is an excellent tool for content writers and will guide you to write content that is optimised for SEO.
It analyses your content and provides a score of its readability, relevance and length.
One unique feature of Wordmetrics is that while you’re writing, it will tell you what keywords to add and optimise for automatically saving research time.
Clearscope focuses on the relevancy of content to the audience to boost organic rankings.
It includes recommendations of terms they advise should be included within the content as well as breaking this down into what terms should be included in headers.
As well as giving your content an overall grade, they’ll also include terms that you didn’t cover and therefore, should add.
Link building tools
Link building software helps you to build an outreach plan and attract new backlinks to your site. They’ll help you to discover new prospects and save time when sending out outreach messages to multiple contacts.
Here are some of the best link building tools we could find.
An easy to use tool, Hunter finds email addresses to help speed up your outreach process.
With Hunter, you have two options to find an email address. The first is to enter a domain to find email addresses that are linked with that site.
The second option is that you can enter a person’s name, and it will return a list of potential email address.
They also have a free tier making this a great free link building tool.
A chrome extension is available here.
Pitchbox identifies the influencers, bloggers and publishers within your niche.
It allows you to automate email outreach and follow-ups saving you time while still having full control and customizability.
Pitchbox also includes a variety of 3rd-party API connections to pull in things such as Ahrefs, SEMrush or Majestic data straight into the tool to aid outreach prospecting. Thanks to these integrations, it also makes Pitchbox an excellent option for a backlink analysis tool.
Pitchbox becomes especially useful for anyone who is planning on outreaching at a large scale.
A handy tool that automates outreach to reach more people in less time. One benefit is that it has a link tracker within the emails so you can have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
Not only is Snov a platform that offers an excellent email automation service, but it also makes link building much easier.
Snov enables you to source leads from the website and make direct contact with the site owner/influencer.
BuzzStream enables you to research relevant websites/influencers, run an outreach campaign, track responses and manage relationships all in one place.
Other benefits are access to outreach templates that you can attach to your messages, saving you the time of copying and pasting.
There is even the option of automating follow up emails as well as the opportunity to create customisable reports to understand what’s working and what isn’t.
SEO website auditing tools
These SEO audit tools for websites help identify technical issues of your site and how you can fix them and structurally be better optimised for search engines.
If you require an in-depth analysis of the technical aspect of your site, this is the SEO audit tool for you.
DeepCrawl works for both beginners and advanced SEOs. While it provides the expected information on technical issues, if you’re pro, there is a whole heap of customisation options and even integrated log-file analysis capabilities.
As this is a cloud-based crawler, it is also not limited to your computer’s memory which means no matter the size of your website you’ll be able to crawl it.
You can also organise crawls to run on a schedule that works for you, providing ongoing reporting for site changes.
Sitebulb is a desktop SEO crawler that not only crawls your site to identify SEO issues in record time; it also advises how you should prioritise each issue.
It’s known for having great UX so no matter whether you’re new to the world of SEO or experienced, you’ll get on with this tool.
One of the most popular tools out there, Screaming Frog is another desktop crawler that identifies SEO at scale, helping you with your technical auditing.
It includes structured data validation, hreflang auditing, custom extraction of elements using XPath/CSS – and that’s just to name a few features.
Within the free trial, you can crawl up to 500 URLs which is excellent if you’re looking for a free tool for an SEO website audit.
OnCrawl is a multi-functioning auditing tool, and as the name suggests, its primary purpose is to crawl your site.
It’s all cloud-based, and after a crawl, it will pinpoint any SEO issues it comes across.
This tool also analyses the quality of your content and can recognise any duplication issues. As well as all of this, it is also great at highlighting internal linking opportunities as well as a whole host of other things.
Use this tool if you want comprehensive reporting giving you the data of where you need to improve and how to do so.
ContentKing is a real-time SEO and content tracking software. This is our pick for the best SEO monitoring software around.
This tool runs an analysis on each page as well as providing an overall website health score. One of the top benefits of this tool is that it saves on-page changes so you can look back at old pages and measure progress made.
SEO reporting tools
The below SEO reporting software gives you everything you need to analyse and monitor your onsite SEO data to understand how you’re getting traffic and what users are doing on your site.
They’ll help you recognise what marketing activity is working and what you could do to provide a better experience for your audience.
This reporting software gives you back keyword-level data that Google Analytics used to provide you with.
From linking up with various APIs, Keyword Hero provides you insights into which keywords are converting best for you on the organic channel.
Everyone knows Google Analytics. It’s the most popular analytics tool out there and is installed on most sites you’ll come across.
Google Analytics provides a wide range of data on how you’re acquiring users and what they are doing on your site. Use this free tool better to understand the customer at every step of their journey.
An enterprise-level tool that enables you to track your site’s analytics at scale. In Adobe Analytics, there are a wide range of reports to track how you’re acquiring customers and all their touchpoints.
This tool goes back to basics and shows you the necessities in a privacy-friendly way. See metrics such as page views, top pages and screen sizes used and more.
Mixpanel reports on your customers’ experience on your site, helping you better understand their behaviours.
Where Mixpanel excels compared to other analytics tools is measuring what your users are doing on your site combined with easy-to-use reporting.
SEO rank tracking tools
These tools report on and track how well your site is ranking within search results on an ongoing basis, which is excellent for SEO management.
Most keyword ranking checkers also give you competitors insights, information on SERP features and tracking for localised results.
Advanced Web Ranking is one of the longest standing SEO ranking tools around, so they know what they’re doing.
Get daily reports on where you and your competitors are ranking across a keyword set of your choice.
Advanced Web Ranking takes tracking seriously, use this tool to understand everything that is happening on a search result including tracking of all known Google SERP features.
Accuranker is known for accurate rank tracking that is also fast. Get daily updates with the option to refresh a keyword set whenever you choose.
This rank tracking software even has 3rd party integrations with the likes of Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, Databox, Adobe Analytics and more, making it easier for you to keep track all under one roof.
This keyword ranking tool allows you to monitor how you are ranking with data that is continuously updated.
One massive benefit is that you can track rankings from almost any search engine and location. There is also the option to review ranking history and keep an eye on progress made.
Nightwatch allows you to track rankings on both a local and global scale, anytime, anywhere in a slick dark interface.
Nightwatch takes a slightly different approach to rank tracking. It could be better described as SEO ranking report software that allows you to build custom reports to visualise the data in a way that works for you.
SERPWatcher allows you to track your rankings, but they also offer a Performance Index in their ranking software.
This provides insight into keywords that are performing well and what their search volume is. The performance index helps you get an idea of the opportunity available that you may not be capturing.
They also have an email alert system available so if anything changes with your rankings, you’ll be alerted.
Conclusion
So there you have 35 of the best SEO tools to help streamline or enhance your strategy.