“A bad workman blames his tools.” Well said, right?
What if the tools are really crooked or the wrong ones for the job?
So, if your SEO campaigns have not been performing well, it is time for you to consider/reconsider your SEO tools.
What is an SEO Tool(s)?
An SEO tool helps you with your SEO data management and devising optimum strategies. A good one allows you to see the overall health and your website and conduct the SWOT analysis. Thus, you can see strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that can hinder ranking your website in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
Is one tool enough?
No, one tool is not enough because there is no one-size-fits-all SEO tool on the market since many aspects are needed to be considered before launching an SEO campaign. Therefore, I have considered the following aspects in order to compile this exhaustive list. By the way, this list filled my blood with more coffee than hemoglobin at one point.
- Keyword research
- Analytics
- Content optimization on the website
- Rank tracking
- Competitors’ links
- Status and strength of the current links
- Technical SEO and audit
- Website speed
- Local and mobile SEO factors
Without further ado, let’s see the best SEO tools in 2023 to give a drastic boost to your marketing plan. (At the end of this post, I have also listed the factors you need to consider in order to choose the best ones.) Also, I have divided the list into two categories—paid tools and free tools.
Best Paid SEO Tools in 2023
Thoughthe following tools are premium, they also offer free versions and trial versions too. So, trying them will always be a win-win situation for you.
1—AHREFS
It is no exaggeration if I say that Ahrefs is a universally agreed top SEO tool. With this multi-feature tool, you can do the following:
- Analyze customers’ searches
- Conduct the site audit to see where your website requires improvement and find broken
- Find and assess competitors’ backlink profiles through competitive analysis
- Identify pieces of content or pages on your website that are performing well
- Rank Tracker: This feature shows rankings of your selected keywords in 170 countries and also sends rankings reports to your specified email address.
- Alerts: Once you set up alerts for a website, it will keep sending you alerts about every activity, i.e., loss of links, gaining new links, web mentions, and ranking of new keywords, including the ones you have not added in Rank Tracker.
Content Explorer
This feature helps you find some good content ideas as it conducts content research and identifies the best industry-related content. Thus, you can get to know low-competition content topics along with link-building prospects.
You will also have a dashboard to access all features in one place.
The availability of all the features will vary based on your selected package.
Official Link: www.ahrefs.com
Price:
If you purchase your desired package with annual billing, you will get two months free.
2—SEMRush
Founded by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitri Melnikov, it is also a multipurpose SEO tool. SEMRush is well-known for its accurate results and for showing the problems that are causing the low performance of your website.
Rank Tracker
Along with showing rankings, it also helps you recognize the changes that can give a push to the keywords to rank higher.
SEO Audit
This feature shows the current backlinks, types of links, anchor texts, and the online traffic your website is receiving.
Domain Vs. Domain
This feature allows you to compare your website against your competitors’ websites. Thus, you can explore well-performing content and see the best keywords.
On-Page SEO
It suggests various ways to improve website performance by showing you search data and traffic of your own website and as well as of the competitors’ websites.
The free version allows you to conduct ten searches a day. For more searches, you will be required to go for premium access.
Official Link: www.semrush.com
Price:
3—Moz Pro
I just love Rand Fishkin—one of the top SEO gurus of our time. Founded by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig, this tool has a great reputation for staying updated in spite of constant changes in the Google algorithm. It ensures admirable insight into how your website is doing and ways to improve it further.
With this all-in-one SEO tool, you can do the following things:
- Keyword research
- Track keywords
- Backlink analysis
- Site audits and site crawls
- Find broken redirects and missing title tags
The MozBar tool will show you the SEO metrics as you browse web pages on your website.
You will also get access to the chrome extension while they also provide 24-hour customer support.
Official Link: www.moz.com
Price:
4—SE Ranking (All-in-one SEO software)
It is comprehensive but easy to understand. You can analyze the website’s health, optimization of all web pages, see your website’s existing backlinks, find organic and paid keywords, and analyze competitors’ backlink profiles and SEO strategies.
- Its visibility rating feature lets you identify your competitors.
- The competitor research gives insight into your competitors’ websites’ traffic, keywords for organic and paid campaigns, and top-performing web pages.
Keyword Research
The keyword research option helps you improve and clean your keyword list, and it also identifies search queries on which your competitors’ websites are already ranking. In addition, you can check keyword metrics in bulk.
Rank Tracker
It lets you see the rankings for keywords for any website in various locations, so you can also see the keyword rankings of your competitors.
Website Audit
This feature allows you to see the technical aspects that need improvement and suggests the needed solutions.
Official Link: www.seranking.com
Price:
5—UberSuggest
It was developed by Neil Patel, a seasoned digital marketer. This tool helps you determine the best keywords; it also shows search volume, seasonal trends, CPC, and competition level of those keywords. It works great for organic as well as keywords for paid campaigns.
To search keywords, you just need to type in a URL or your targetted keyword into the search bar, and press enter. You will get a number of ideas to choose the well-performing ones.
Ubersuggest Chrome extension is also available for free.
Official Link: www.neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/
Price:
6—SpyFu SEO Tool
Spyfu shows you the domain’s 14-day history of Google Ads. Thus, you can see what keywords your competitors have been using for the PPC campaigns. Also, you can learn how you can contact those websites through social media and email, among others.
On the whole, Spyfu empowers you with the following functions:
- Keyword research
- Backlink research
- Domain overview
- PPC keywords
- Rank tracking
Spyfu Kombat
This feature lets you see the dead ends, i.e., keywords that are not worth the effort, so that you can focus on other more productive keywords.
It also searches for the two best-performing competitors of yours and shows their strengths, and what reports what you should do to do better than your competitors.
PPC keyword research will help you optimize your PPC campaigns.
Official Link: www.spyfu.com/
Price:
7—WooRank
It is an all-in-one online marketing solution for businesses of various sizes. It was founded by Jean Derely in 2011. In 2016, he sold it, and it was later acquired by Bridgeline Digital.
WooRank helps you with keyword tracking and shows you the issues related to on-page and off-page SEO, and also presents you with their solutions.
As for the competitor research, you can find the keywords that are performing well. It is also helpful to identify security issues and duplicate content.
You can also integrate it with any CRM or ERP.
It also offers a free version.
Official Link: www.woorank.com/
Price:
8—KW finder
Founded by Peter Hrbáčik in 2014, it helps you explore long-tail keywords that usually aren’t competitive. Thus, it helps you find keywords that you can rank with ease comparatively.
It also offers backlinks analysis and rank tracking.
You get a good number of new keyword ideas to use on your site in order to rank higher.
You can also discover keywords by domain and the target country.
Official Link: www.kwfinder.com/
Price:
9—Keyword Tool
It allows you to explore relevant suggestions for keywords within your desired industry.
Enter the keyword, select the search engine, and the target country. It will bring back short-tail and long-tail keywords up to 750 search terms, which can be filtered according to negative keywords, country, search engine, Google, and other platforms like YouTube, and Amazon, among others.
The number of results will vary according to your selected package.
Price:
Official Link: www.keywordtool.io/
10—AIOSEO
All in One SEO is a well-known WordPress plugin. You can set it up easily with the most effective SEO settings.
It offers the following features:
- Keyword research
- Smart XML sitemaps (also for news and videos)
- Integration on social media platforms
- Headline Analyzer
- Module for local and image SEO
- Redirection Manager
- 404 Error Tracking
- Multi-site support
TruSEO Analysis
It gives you a detailed analysis along with the course of action to resolve the issues.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity shows visitors’ engagement on your site.
IndexNow Integration
It allows you to quickly get the content indexed or re-indexed on search engines.
It works well for all kinds of websites such as eCommerce, business, blogs, and news, among others. Since it is an all-in-one solution, you may not need to install other plugins.
WooCommerce SEO
It specifically offers eCommerce SEO support for WooCommerce SEO in order to help you with the optimization of product pages and categories.
Official Link: www.aioseo.com/
Price:
11—Majestic SEO Tools
Founded by Alex Chudnovsky in 2004, they haven’t looked back ever since. Mostly, the tool focuses on the backlink profiles of the websites. The main features are as follows:
Majestic Million
It allows you to view the rankings of the topmost one million websites.
Site Explorer
It allows you to see an overview and backlink profile of your website.
Keyword Tool
It allows you to explore keywords.
Historical Index
It contains the backlink data since 2006.
Fresh Index
It’s crawled and updated on a daily basis.
Other features include:
- Referring domains, IPs, and subnets
- Bulk backlink checker
- Open site explorer
- Site comparison
- Rank Tracker
Official Link: www.majestic.com/
Price:
12—XML Sitemaps Generator
A sitemap contains all web page links of a website and helps search engines to see see the pages in order and allow them to crawl a website in a more efficient and easier fashion. It also points to search engines to see the more important pages on a website. A sitemap generator is an important tool in terms of technical SEO. With XML Sitemaps Generator, you can create a sitemap in XML and HTML.
To create the sitemap, enter the website URL, and this tool will generate the sitemap. The sitemap will contain the number of pages, broken links, and XML file content. You will receive the sitemap file to your specified email that you can put on your website.
For sitemap generators, you can also consider the following options:
- Slickplan
- Dynomapper
- Writemaps
- Mindnode
- PowerMapper
- Inspyder Sitemap Creator 5
- Google XML Sitemaps
- Yoast
Official Link: www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Price: The basic is free, while the Pro version costs $3.49 per month.
13—Yoast SEO
It’s also a well-known WP plugin and lets you optimize web pages in terms of SEO.
It helps you add titles and descriptions to the web pages along with Open Graph metadata and social media images.
The main features include:
- Built-in content analysis to improve readability
- Duplicate content management
- Sitemaps creation and optimization
- Social features
- Rich snippets
It also allows you to import SEO settings from different plugins.
Official Link: www.yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
Price: It costs an annual fee of $99 year.
14—Siteliner
Duplicate content is a no-no in the eyes of search engines, and Siteliner is here to help you locate duplicate content on your website.
Just enter the URL in the search box and hit “Go.” As it scans each and every web page on your website, it will return with the following info:
- Percentage of duplicate web pages
- Broken links
- Skipped pages
It will also compare your website with others pertaining to the following aspects:
- Average page size
- Page load time
- Total number of words on each page
- Internal backlinks
- External backlinks
- Total links
- Inbound links
The downloadable reports are available in PDF form.
Official Link: www.siteliner.com/
Price: It costs an annual fee of $99 year.
The free version lets you scan 25,000 pages. If you need more page scans, Sireliner will charge one cent per page.
15—Screaming Frog
For technical audits, Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is one great tool and works well for all types of and sizes of websites.
SEO Spider is a downloadable desktop program, so you can install it o your desktop computer or laptop.
It functions as a website log analyzer and crawler.
It identifies onsite SEO problems as it fetches and audits the data.
Having installed it, enter the website and hit “start,” and it’ll begin collecting the data for audit.
With the SEO Spider tool, you can see the audit reports pertaining to the following aspects:
- Meta title
- Meta descriptions
- Server errors
- Broken links
- Redirects
- Near duplicate and ditto duplicate content and pages
- Blocked URLs
- Missing elements
You can integrate it with Google Analytics, where the users can report any error on the website.
You can also create XML Sitemaps.
It even identifies spelling and grammar errors.
They also offer technical support without any charges.
The free version allows 500 URLs.
Official Link: www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Price:
16—Rank Math
A substitute for AIOSEO and Yoast, RankMath has been gaining its ground quite steadily over the years. One good thing is its user-friendly interface, so people with no technical skills and beginners find it very helpful. It comes with a setup wizard.
If you have been using some other SEO tool, you can easily import the data to RankMath.
With its features, you can do the following things:
Add meta title, meta description, and Open Graph
- Create XML sitemaps
- Conduct local SEO research
- Link to Google Search Console
- Content Optimization Score
You can see how well optimized your content is on a scale of 0 to 100. A good score is 80. The score metrics show the errors, so you can very easily optimize your page.
Official Link: www.rankmath.com
Price:
Official Link: https://seositecheckup.com/
Price:
