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When running a blog or a website, mastering SEO optimization tools can be one of the toughest tasks. Especially when you are at the beginning and Search Engine Optimization is still an unknown game.
Besides, the way Google and other search engines rank the websites changes constantly. So, if you want to surpass your competition, you have to keep up not only with the Off-Page and On-page SEO best practices but also with the latest SEO developments.
The good news? There are plenty of great tools out there you can use for your on-page and off-page SEO and for getting the data you need to improve your ranking in SERPs. If you know them and what they can do for you, you’ll be well equipped for success.
In this post, I’ve put together a list of top 10 of my favorite SEO optimization tools that are either for keyword research, competitor analysis, link building, and rank tracking. You don’t have to try them all. You just need to figure which ones fit best to your needs and start using it for your website optimization.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is one of the best free SEO tools and it’s offered by Google, so you can use to figure out how the search engine sees your website and improve your ranking. It provides you with a large number of tools and resources, covering many aspects of SEO.
For example, you can check out any crawling error that has occurred on your website so you can fix it. Also, you can find out when your website is affected by malware, the keywords used by people to find your website, the backlinks you receive and the internal links, page speed, mobile usability and much more.
If you are concerned about your performance in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs), this service is almost a necessity due to its many features. Even if it focuses specifically on the results on Google, there are good chances to have the same results in other search engines, too.
Google Search Console is very simple to understand and use. So, you don’t have any reason to avoid adding your website and getting started. Plus, you can easily also link it to Google Analytics and have a deeper understanding of your online presence.
Price: free
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most recommended suites of SEO optimization tools and it’s used to grow your search traffic, monitor your niche and research your competitors. With Keywords Explorer you can search a database of 7.4 billion keywords, analyze their ranking difficulty, calculate their potential traffic and generate keywords ideas in just a few minutes.
The Site Audit is a tool for getting an objective overview of your website and shows how you can fix weaknesses. From the competitor analysis perspective, you can use Ahrefs to check the keywords your competitors are ranking for and see which websites link to their sites, so you can use this information as a starting point to grow your own brand.
In terms of discovering the most popular content for your niche (by backlinks, organic traffic, and social shares), Content Explorer is an unmatched resource. You can combine advanced filters to refine your results and when done right, you can easily find link-building prospects, low competition topics, partnership opportunities and more.
Price: starting from $99/month, with a seven-day trial for $7.
Moz Pro
Moz Pro is an all-in-one suite of tools designed to help you with the data-driven SEO approach. To give you a quick glimpse, Moz Pro removes the SEO complexity and enables you to search short and long-tail keywords and other domains. On one side, you can use this feature to avoid keywords with low traffic potential and to surpass your competition. On the other side, if your blog or website is new, you might want to find keywords with a lower search volume and create content that ranks higher in SERPs.
When using Keyword Explorer, you’ll find a series of metrics that will help predict your ability to rank and drive traffic, such as search volume, keyword difficulty, organic click-through-rates (CTR), and the priority score. You can also see keywords suggestions and a SERP analysis for that keyword.
Like Ahrefs, Moz Pro can provide suggestions about on-page SEO optimization, analyzes your links and alerts you about crawling errors. What makes Moz unique is that the platform offers a Chrome extension you can use to get information about any website you visit and a series of other free tools to improve your ranking.
Price: starting at $99/month for the Standard Plan, with a free 30-day trial.
SEMrush
All-in-one marketing toolkit SEMrush is one of the favorites in the SEO community, providing you the data related to SEO, content performance, paid traffic, social media and helping you with your market research.
In terms of keyword research, Keyword Magic Tool provides you with information about the search volume, difficulty, cost-per-click (CPC) and competitive density, related keywords, and phrase match keywords.
Along with being an excellent keyword suggestion tool, SEMrush also offers you the data about your competitors’ strategies. For example, the platform can show you from where their backlinks are, the traffic they have and how much from that comes from paid ads.
SEO Writing Assistantis one of the SEMrush greatest features and saves you a lot of time while helping with on-page SEO. The function allows you to optimize the content for targeted keywords, fine-tune your content readability, check it for originality with Plagiarism Checker and maintain your brand’s tone of voice across all content pieces. You can use this feature by installing Google Docs Add-on, as a WordPress plugin or directly from the SEMrush interface.
Price: You can get up to 10 results for free per day or sign up for a premium account, starting at $99.95 per month.
Ubersuggest
Developed by Neil Patel, Ubersuggest is a free SEO optimization tool that helps you to choose the best keywords for you, providing information about the search volume, SEO difficulty, cost-per-click (CPC), paid difficulty and seasonal trends. You can easily find also hundreds of suggestions, from short to long-tail keywords and starting from there, explore the new content ideas.
Neil Patel has continuously improved Ubersuggest, so, using the Traffic Analyzer tool you can easily check your website or that of your competitors. The keywords they rank for, monthly organic traffic, the domain score or the backlink they get are some valuable information for your SEO strategy.
Price: free
Yoast SEO
Used by over 9 million people, Yoast SEO is often considered the number-one WordPress SEO plugin and one of the most valuable SEO optimization tools. Its features cover the whole spectrum, due to the multiple functionalities. For example, you can check your content for readability and optimize it for keywords, keyphrases, synonyms and related keywords that are relevant for your audience.
You can also preview your pages in Google, Bing, Facebook and Twitter, get a good idea of how they may look in search results and make the right adjustment to convince the people to click through.
Yoast SEO Premium also adds canonical URLs and allows you to set them, to avoid confusing Google with duplicate content. The upgraded version of the plugin also helps you with real-time suggestions for internal links as you write pages and posts.
Excepting the WordPress SEO plugin, you can also download and install WordPress plugins for Video SEO, local SEO, News SEO, and Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin.
Price: starting with €79/year (ex, VAT) including 1-year free updates and support, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Linkody
Linkody is a backlink management tool that provides all the features for managing them efficiently. The tool allows you to monitor your backlinks and gain an advantage over your competitors. It also helps you to find out who’s linking to your website and the keywords they are using. In addition, you can see which backlinks are valuable and which potentially harm your website traffic and position in SERPs and remove the bad ones by using the disavow tool.
While the main attraction is the backlink reports, Linkody also offers a few notable features. For example, it allows you to generate reports related to your own domain and for your clients. You can also monitor your site’s social shares, connect to Google Analytics and have a clear overview of SEO metrics such as TLD, Moz metrics and Spam Score.
Overall, it’s a pretty interesting tool, and quite useful if you need help with your link building strategy. More importantly, it’s much cheaper than the massive all-in-one SEO optimization tools.
Price: starting at $13,90/month, all the plans including a free 30-day trial.
Mangools
Mangools offers the best value for money in terms of SEO optimization tools. With a new approach to how SEO tools can look like, the team created an easy to use suite of instruments with great design. They are not complicated and have only the features you absolutely need.
KWFinder is their most popular tool, providing you with very accurate information related to keyword metrics and helping to find long-tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. Along with that, by using the SERPChecker, you can analyze the search results in more than 52k locations worldwide and compare your website with the top-ranking sites to find out where you can position.
At the same time, the SiteProfiler function enables you to Inspect the authority and popularity of your competition using the essential SEO metrics, such as Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA) and more. You can also analyze the traffic, most valuable content, backlink profile and find competitors you might have previously missed.
Mangools also has a handy browser extension that basically uses the most important data from all their SEO tools so you can do a lot of stuff while browsing the internet.
Price: Starting at €44/month (if paid monthly), with a free 10-day trial.
Morningscore
Morningscore is one of the simplest all-in-one SEO optimization tools you can find out there. The platform offers all the standard features, such as keyword rank tracker, backlink checker and onsite crawler, all of them done with the purpose of making SEO easy for you.
Besides that, it also offers completely new functionalities like the value of SEO, missions and activities. The platform uses gamification combined with smart suggestions that help you to prioritize the most important tasks both for you and your SEO clients. Therefore, you’ll find here a completely new workflow, which is combined with a very user-friendly interface, saving you lots of time.
The platform focuses on connecting businesses and SEO, which is great both for SEO agencies, consultants and digital companies.
Some of their main features are:
Keyword rank tracker - see which keywords you rank for, their metrics, and how they compare to your competitors ranks on that specific keyword
Health reports - get an overview of your on-page performance, basic ranking factors, technical factors and ideas for optimization
Full backlink profile – their partnership with Ahrefs brings you all the important backlink data
Traffic analyzer - see how much organic traffic you and your competitors get from Google every month, and how much traffic your competitors have on your keywords
SEO missions – you can manage your campaigns straight in the platform and get relevant suggestions to complete them.
Price: starting at $49/month (if paid monthly), with a 14-day free trial.
LongTailPro
Long Tail Pro is a powerful keyword research tool that helps you to easily find less competitive keywords, which can get you high-converting traffic regardless of your niche. Based on one single root keyword or multiple root keywords at once, the app allows you to generate hundreds or thousands of unique long-tail keywords in a matter of minutes.
Besides that, the tool also shows search volume (monthly search volume), advertiser bid, number of words, rank value, and keyword competitiveness. The last metric helps you judge the competition and keyword difficulty.
Price: starting at $37/month (if monthly paid), but you can start with the 7-day free trial if you want to see if LTP is the right SEO tool for you.
Bottom Line:
In terms of running a website or a blog, SEO is just one piece of the puzzle. However, to get the desired results, you have to pay special attention here. After all, the search engines don’t care too much how effort you put in writing and publishing content and blog posts if they aren’t optimized.
While there are dozens of free and paid apps you can use to improve your search engine rankings, I hope this post helped you to find some of the best SEO optimization tools. You can use them to conduct professional keyword research, audit your site and improve your SEO strategy.
SEO, Content Marketing, Business
Roxana Arsene
