The 20 Best SEO Tools
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Strong search engine optimization (SEO) tools can make the difference between a high-traffic website and content that disappears into obscurity. At its heart, SEO works to connect users with relevant content and make web content accessible for search engines. Luckily, many SEO tools exist to help streamline your formatting and provide insight into the keywords your potential market uses regularly to connect them with relevant content.
Why Are SEO Tools Important?
Image via Flickr by SEOPenrith01
SEO tools help optimize web content and get webpages to rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs). By ranking higher on result pages, you can tap into free and organic traffic from users searching for the keywords that live on your site. Ensuring that your content is tagged properly with the best keywords can be tedious when you try to gather all the information on your own. Because SEO involves compiling the collective inquiries of search engine users, you can’t get an accurate read on the market simply using your own intuition.
This is where SEO tools come in. They make your job easier by generating hundreds and even thousands of keywords and analyzing content for those coveted backlinks, also known as incoming or inbound links.
The Best SEO Tools
Whether you’re a digital marketer, content creator, or small business owner, you want to take advantage of the free and paid SEO tools out there to boost your web traffic and convert it into sales and recognition. A variety of these tools exist, with some offering a wide range of functions and others focusing on one area of SEO, such as long-tail keywords.
Finding the best keywords and phrases for SEO optimization is easy with the help of these top SEO tools:
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the largest search engine SEO tools online and offers a variety of useful functions, including its popular Site Audit feature. Ahrefs Site Audit analyzes your webpage’s SEO content and identifies which sections need improvement. It also provides insight into the most linked sites within your field. This helps marketing professionals focus their efforts on improving search engine rankings.
Ahrefs has a massive database of well-researched backlinks. This database powers the popular Ahrefs Domain Comparison tool, which helps businesses find pages that could be linking to their content.
AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic generates content ideas by connecting keywords with SEO search terms. This free tool with expanded paid access is great for marketers working in a specific niche looking for a wide variety of questions and topics to suggest for content creators. AnswerThePublic develops data-driven questions that are useful for targeting a featured snippet or creating an FAQ list. AnswerThePublic displays its data in list form or in a visual chart wheel to encourage visualization of the questions users are searching.
AWR Cloud
AWR Cloud claims to be the most accurate and longest-running tool for rank tracking. This SEO tool is a smart choice for small-to medium-sized businesses and offers lots of features for its modest monthly fee. It produces good localized ranking results, backlink and domain data, search rank tracking, and integration with Google Search Console for finding keywords. It has an intuitive interface and includes hoc keyword searches, position monitoring, and website crawling. AWR Cloud also monitors Google algorithm updates, so you’re always keeping pace with the ever-changing SEO landscape.
Cora
If you’re looking for a more advanced SEO tool, check out Cora. While it’s not free, it’s about as comprehensive as they come. If you’re a medium-to-large-sized business, this is the type of SEO tool you should be using to better understand areas of weakness and opportunity for your website. Cora works by comparing correlation data of ranking factors after evaluating the top 100 websites for a search term. By empirically measuring data, it can provide in-depth analyses and recommendations far beyond typical SEO.
Cora identifies more than 400 correlation factors that impact SEO. It then calculates the essential factors and suggests which elements need the most attention.
FatRank
SEO Chrome extensions such as FatRank allow you to easily analyze your website’s performance. This SEO keyword tool gives you the ranking of your keywords. You can add keywords to your search to find out what your rank is per page for each keyword you optimized for. If you don’t rank in the top 100 results, it will tell you that you’re not ranking for that keyword. This information allows you to better optimize your online presence for that keyword so you can make adjustments as needed.
Google Search Console
Search Console by Google is a free service you can use to access data about your Google SERP rankings. The Google Search Console is accessible and easy to use. Simply add its basic code to your website to gain valuable data about how Google interprets your site. You can also use Google Analytics to index your site and control certain elements of how your website presents itself in Google searches.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a long-running but often underutilized SEO tool. It gives you information about a keyword as well as insight into trends around the topic that can be invaluable at any stage of your business’s growth. Search for keywords in any country, and receive related information such as top queries, rising queries, interest over time, and geographic locations depending on interest. If you’re not sure which SEO keywords to use, give this SEO tool a try.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is another SEO Chrome extension that aggregates data from various SEO tools, including Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Trends, and more, to help you find the best keywords to rank for. It uses a combination of free SEO tools to simplify the process of determining the best keywords for your website. So rather than going through several websites each day, you can use this one tool to save significant time.
KWFinder
KWFinder is a basic but useful SEO keyword tool that specializes in finding long-tail keywords that are more specific than common keywords. Perfect for coming up with unique keywords for your site, KWFinder provides a tailored service to help you attract visitors who are most likely to respond to your marketing content. While some marketers neglect long-tail keywords, they offer an effective way to increase your conversion rates. KWFinder also analyzes your SERP ranking and backlinks.
Majestic
Majestic has innovative features such as The Majestic Million, which shows a live ranking of the one million top-ranked sites on the web. Majestic also offers its own take on the SEO keyword search tool that targets rank and website comparisons. It allows you to easily compare lots of SEO metrics, including trust flow, referring domain count, and external backlinks count. You can also use Majestic to audit competitors’ backlinks, which might provide you with easy opportunities to pursue before moving on to other link-building tactics.
Moz
Top SEO software Moz has a reputation as a reliable resource for up-to-date information, despite constantly changing search algorithms and user behaviors. Moz offers a full suite of SEO tools and a chat portal with nuanced user support. Moz services help businesses be mindful of competitor strategies and implement those strategies in their SEO content. Its free toolbar, MozBar, shows live updates to your data. It addresses all aspects of page optimization, including title suggestions, page formatting feedback, and keyword tagging ideas.
Screaming Frog
Many digital marketing experts consider Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool to be one of the best SEO tools online. This website crawler tool saves significant time by quickly analyzing your website to perform site audits. It provides these insights faster than most other online SEO tools. SEO Spider also informs you of duplicate content, errors to fix, bad redirections, and areas of improvement for link building.
Searchmetrics Essentials
This is another good all-in-one SEO tool for smaller businesses and beginning digital marketers. It provides most of the basic features you need, including keyword research, position monitoring and rankings, competitor analysis, visibility history, pay-per click (PPC) research, backlink tracking, and social media link tracking, in its most basic package. You have to upgrade to higher plans for more advanced features such as historical keyword rankings that go back four weeks (compared to the standard plan’s two weeks), subdomain analyses, and more detailed data.
Semrush
Semrush is a marketing-focused SEO tool that offers users an easy interface for comparing traffic, search data, and keywords with that of competitors. Semrush offers a convenient On-Page SEO Checker tool that allows you to monitor your statistics and gives you insight into similar sites competing for the same traffic. On-Page SEO Checker also provides basic analysis with suggestions for improving your website’s rankings. Semrush includes tools that target reach through social media as well.
SEOquake
Many digital marketers consider SEOquake to be one of the best free SEO tools. This Chrome extension acts as an SEO checker tool that performs on-page site audits, assesses both your internal and external links, and compares websites to help you determine how you perform against your competitors. Other features of this SEO analysis tool include keyword analysis such as keyword density, an easy-to-read SEO dashboard, and an export feature that allows you to easily download and send data to key people on your team.
Serpstat
Serpstat is a growth-hacking platform for SEO, PPC, and content marketing goals. If you’re looking for an affordable all-in-one tool to solve SEO tasks, analyze competitors, and manage your team, Serpstat is a great choice. Many digital marketing experts now use the tool, as it has collected keyword and competitor analysis data for all the Google regions in the world.
Serpstat is also known for its unique features. The most popular one is a Missing Keywords feature, which identifies the keywords your competitors are ranking for in top 10 search results that you aren’t. The user interface is also aesthetically pleasing and easy to use.
Siteliner
Siteliner is a free SEO checker tool (with a paid version that includes more features) that helps find duplicate content on your website. With this SEO tool, you can scan your entire website to find duplicate content, broken links, average page size and speed, the number of internal links per page, and more. It also compares your website to the average of websites it checks to help you better understand where you rank. As a result, Siteliner can help you reduce cannibalization and add more context to a page.
SpyFu
SpyFu offers premium paid SEO services in addition to impressive free features that serve as a fantastic resource for anyone just starting to tackle SEO optimization on their website. SpyFu provides specific numbers for how many times users search a certain keyword each month. It also analyzes which keywords have the best opportunities to give your website a high rank in searches.
Competitor monitoring features allow you to view the statistics and advertising efforts of other sites within your niche. SpyFu’s SEO Research feature identifies organic keywords and compares them to paid keywords, giving you valuable insight into common marketing strategies within an industry.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a free, versatile keyword finder tool designed to draw connections between common search keywords and their user intent. Capable of finding long-tail and short-tail keywords for your content and sharing the most relevant SERPs, Ubersuggest includes an impressive range of features for a free service, including keyword volume, CPC, competition, and seasonal trends.
WooRank
WooRank is another SEO ranking tool with free offerings that can help you discover patterns in your SEO use and other marketing data. WooRank provides a comprehensive perspective on SEO that tackles both content and technical aspects of user experience. It can analyze keyword performance over time, flag duplicate content, measure downtime, identify possible security issues, and suggest improvements.
These are just a handful of the many SEO tools available to businesses and digital marketers. Choose the best one to optimize your online presence based on the features and functions you need.
CopyPress writer
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