The Best SEO Tools to Help You Optimize Your Website

The best SEO tools are among the most important resources today’s businesses can access. In a world where countless transactions begin with searches online, it’s crucial to ensure you’re reaching your audience at the right time in their purchasing cycle. Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO” is the process of manipulating your content to appeal effectively to the search engines.

While it’s possible to enhance your SEO strategy without the use of any specialist software, the right tools can be extremely helpful. Some will assist you with managing and monitoring rankings, while others make it easier to find keywords for your campaigns. You’ll still need to keep up to date with the latest Google trends, algorithm updates, and CPC strategies, but your SEO tools will make it easier to stay one step ahead of the competition.

What are the Best SEO Tools?

Search Engine Optimization tools can provide behind-the-scenes insights into your campaigns, give you the guidance you need to make better decisions about your marketing strategy and more. Today, we’re going to be looking at just some of the top solutions on the market, championed for their ease of use, efficacy, and performance.

Semrush

Ranked by many as one of the most comprehensive and insightful SEO tools on the market, Semrush is a fantastic solution for small and mid-sized businesses. The end-to-end SEO tool-kit delivers a full range of online marketing tools, including detailed keyword analysis reports, and competitor analysis, so you can compare your campaigns to other companies.

With Semrush, you can get full visibility into which of your marketing strategies are generating better awareness and opportunities for your business online. Companies can check the quality of backlinks to their website, and use traffic analysis to understand their top referring sites. There are also overviews into things like “bounce rates”, which tell you how long your customers are likely to stay interacting with your website before clicking the back button.

There’s a domain overview page, where you can detect some of the specific keywords competitors have targeted, and look for gaps in your own strategy, Semrush also provides useful recommendations on how you might be able to improve your campaigns with content optimizations and new keyword strategies. Features include:

• Link building and link analysis
• Magic Keyword tool for tracking campaign opportunities
• Insights into competitor strategies
• Recommendations on how to enhance your traffic
• Site auditing and content marketing support
• Instant tracking of SERP positions

Pricing

While Semrush isn’t the cheapest SEO solution on the market today, it does offer a lot of value in each package. You can also save up to 17% if you pay annually. Plans include:

• Pro: $119.95 per month for up to 5 projects, 500 keywords, and 10,000 results per report, as well as a host of SEO, social, and PPC tools such as keyword research, website auditing, and backlink analysis for your website.
• Guru: $229.95 per month for up to 15 projects, 1,500 keywords, and 30,000 results per report. You’ll get all the features of Pro, plus the content marketing toolkit, historical data, device and multi-location tracking, GDS integration and more.
• Business: $499.95 per month for 40 projects, 5,000 keywords, and 50,000 results per report. You’ll have all the features of Guru, plus Share of Voice reports, API access, PLA analytics, free migrations with third-party tools, and more.

Clearscope

Among blog creators and freelance writers in particular, Clearscope has become a must-have tool for search traffic and SEO analysis. The easy-to-use AI platform makes it easy to discover the best long-tail keywords, related keywords, and linking opportunities for your content. ClearScope focuses heavily on content creation, offering an intelligent platform where you can produce pieces.

When you write content with the Clearscope application, you’ll get tips on how to make it more relevant to your audience, improve your headings and meta descriptions, and generally enhance your presence on the search engines results page. The solution is easy for beginners, and it comes with various convenient integrations to boost your workflow.

For instance, you can add Clearscope directly to Google Docs or WordPress, so you don’t have to jump between different tools when producing content. Even the basic packages come with tons of great features, including:

• In-depth content reports and auditing
• Support for multiple languages
• Keyword discovery and recommendations
• Google Doc and WordPress integrations
• Collaboration tools for teams

Pricing:

While there’s no free version of Clearscope available, the pricing is relatively straightforward and easy to understand. Your options include:

• Essentials: $170 per month for 3 users, 20 content report credits, Google and WordPress integrations, 100 keyword discovery credits, and support for 5 languages.
• Business: $1,200 per month for everything in Essentials, plus Unlimited user seats, 100+ content report credits, 200+ content inventory pages, SSO and custom onboarding.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for all the features in Business, as well as custom keyword discovery, and report credits, and custom Google TLDs.

Ahrefs

An advanced SEO resource designed to examine your website property and produce a host of keyword, ranking, and link profiles for every business, Ahrefs is one of the most popular SEO tools there is. The solution comes with the largest backlink index of all SEO tools, with more than 295 billion indexed pages, and trillions of backlinks. There’s a comprehensive keywords explorer, tools for monitoring your competition, and excellent guidance for beginners.

With everything you need to grow your online presence in one place, Ahrefs combines a central dashboard with a host of customizable reports. The features offered by Ahrefs are broken down into 5 key areas, including the site auditing and optimization features, analytics for competitors, industry content tracking, and rank tracking. There’s also an extensive keyword explorer.

Everything you need is organized into a visual dashboard, so it’s easy to immediately spot where your rank is improving, or dropping. Plus, the resources included for anyone attempting to improve their SEO education are phenomenal. Features include:

• A comprehensive SEO dashboard with visual insights
• Site auditing and exploring
• Keyword tracking and insights
• Rank tracking
• Competitor and domain analysis
• Alerts, mentions and notifications

Pricing

Ahrefs has a selection of four pricing packages to choose from, depending on your needs. You can also save a little extra cash by option or the pay annually method. Options for packages include:

• Lite: £79 per month for a SEO dashboard, site explorer, keywords explorer, site auditing, rank tracking and alerts.
• Standard: £159 per month for all the features of Lite plus 6 months of history, position history charts, SERP updates, advanced site exploration, advanced content explorer, mentions, domain comparison, batch analysis and report sharing.
• Advanced: £319 per month for all the features of Standard plus 2 years of history, a site structure and HTML source analysis, Google Data Studio access, dashboard folders and Ahrefs search functionality.
• Enterprise: £799 per month for all the features of Advanced, plus unlimited history, access management, invoice payments, APIs, directory listings, audit logs and SSO.

Moz Pro

Another all-in-one platform of SEO tools excellent for today’s business leaders, Moz Pro aims to help companies expand their traffic, rankings, and visibility across the search engines. With Moz Pro, organizations get assistance in understanding their audience, so they can strategically target the right keywords and phrases. You can even save keywords to update and track as needed.

There’s an in-built system for auditing your website with the Moz Spider, which tells you any issues you might have immediately and provides information on how to enhance your SEO. There’s also the ability to track site rankings across hundreds or thousands of keywords per website. The Moz Pro system ensures you have the maximum potential to rank for all of your keywords with specific and intelligent recommendations for improvements.

You can find link opportunities with metrics like Page Authority, Spam Score, and Domain Authority. Plus, you can design custom reports if you want to show important data from different environments to your shareholders. The reports even come with drag-and-drop modules. Features include:

• Comprehensive keyword tracking and ranking
• Page crawling insights
• In-depth audits
• Intelligent SEO recommendations
• Customizable reports and analytics
• Scheduled grader reports
• Backlink analysis

Pricing

Moz Pro has a range of different packages to choose from, including some basic free tools which can help with finding simple keywords and ranking opportunities. The Pro plans include:

• Standard: $99 per month for 300 keyword rankings, 3 campaigns, 100,000 pages crawled, 60 performance metrics, and 6 on-demand performance metrics.
• Medium: $179 per month for 10 campaigns, 1,500 keyword rankings, 500,000 pages crawled per week, 200 performance metrics, 20 on-demand performance metrics, full keyword research tools, and advanced features.
• Large: $299 per month for 25 campaigns, 3,000 keyword rankings. 1.25 million pages crawled per week, and 500 performance metrics tracked, plus 50 on-demand metrics. You also get endless backlink queries and keywords.
• Premium: $599 per month for 50 campaigns, 4,500 keyword rankings, 2 million pages crawled per week, 1000 performance metrics, 100 on-demand URLs, speed crawling, and premium support.

Majestic SEO

Constantly regarded as one of the best SEO tools on the market, Majestic SEO is one of the top software solutions on the market, with a huge range of amazing features. The product consistently maps the web to help you understanding your link intelligence data, so you can form credible connections with other businesses.

Users can access proprietary metrics in their backlink reports, like trust flow and citation flow, which helps you to understand the quality and quantity of different linking opportunities. There’s the option to jump between “Fresh index” insights and “historical index” information, so you can determine exactly where your backlink strategy will begin.

Majestic also has an exclusive feature called “link context”, which allows you to determine whether a link is included editorially in a page, or as part of a directory, among other things. There are phenomenal features to keep you up-to-date on your SEO strategies too, such as email alerts and experimental rank tracking features. Capabilities include:

• Full API access
• Raw data exports and custom reports
• Site comparisons
• Trust flow and topical trust flow
• Contextual link insights
• Email alerts and business profiles
• Site explorer
• Keyword generator

Pricing

Majestic SEO tools keeps pricing relatively simple with a selection of 3 options to choose from. You can also save some cash by paying annually. Monthly packages include:

• Lite: $49.99 per month for Fresh index, site explorer, keyword generator, link graph, link context, trust flow, related sites, referring domains, and more for 1 user and 1 million analysis units. You’ll also have full backlink campaigns and bulk backlink checking.
• Pro: $99.99 per month for all the features of Lite plus 20 million analysis units, custom reports, flow metric history, clique hunting, email alerts, network neighbourhoods, full business profiles, and search exploration.
• Full API: $399.99 per month for comprehensive API access and 100 million analysis units. You also get everything in Pro, and custom monthly data

BuzzStream

Widely regarded as one top SEO tools on the market, Buzzstream is an all-in-one kit designed to help business leaders get more traffic, links, and boost brand awareness. The end-to-end outreach platform focuses specifically on the “backlink” part of the search engine optimization journey. When you’re struggling to find authorities to help you grow your online presence, Buzzstream can help.

Buzzstream automatically collects metrics and contact information for prospective link-building opportunities, to help you create a database of promotional opportunities. The built-in CRM solution also helps you to develop stronger outreach emails to connect with other brands. You can track activity, responses, and conversations in one environment, and leverage insightful data to improve your results. Buzzstream isn’t just great for finding backlinks either.

The solution supports all forms of marketing outreach and promotion. You can use the press list building and pitching features to access earned media opportunities, and tap into valuable content promotion strategies with influencers.

Features of Buzzstream include:

• Research tools to help you find qualified lists
• Email marketing with built-in CRM
• Manage and track responses and insights
• Email scheduling, automated follow-ups and reminders
• Conversation tracking across social media
• Link monitoring and Ahrefs integration

Pricing

There are four pricing packages to choose from with Buzzstream, including:

• Starter: $24 per month for 1 user and 1,000 contacts: This plan includes contact info discovery, email tracking, email templates, scheduling and reminders, automatic follow-ups, Twitter conversation tracking, a chrome extension, performance reports, link monitoring for 1000 links, 30 prospecting searches, and more.
• Growth: $124 per month for up to 3 users and 25,000 contacts: This plan includes all the features of Starter, plus a bulk email sending option, team template sharing, project performance reporting, customizable permissions, Ahrefs integration, phone and email support, link monitoring for 25,000 links, and 250 prospecting searches.
• Professional: $299 per month for up to 6 users and 100,000 contacts: This plan includes team performance reporting, unlimited report customization, web service API integrations, a dedicated account manager, all the features of Growth, and link monitoring for 100,000 links, as well as 1,000 prospecting searches.
• Custom: $999 per month for 15+ users, 300,000 contacts, and all the features of Professional, as well as an implementation plan and onboarding tools.

Surfer SEO

One of the top tools used by marketers and branding experts around the world, Surfer SEO is designed to make search engine optimization simple. Rather than spending hours editing every piece of content you create, you can use this tool to access a step-by-step workflow on how to optimize every post. Surfer SEO provides everything from keyword lists to guidance on how you can boost your traffic with backlinks and images.

Surfer connects directly with the Google Search Console, so you can get accurate and up-to-date insights on your website at all times. The system will send you personalized task lists designed to boost your SEO efforts, by intelligently analyzing your pages and determining exactly what you need to do to enhance your position on the search lists.

There’s a built-in content editor, where you can create blog posts and web pages designed to rank higher than the top-trending articles on Google. Plus, there’s access to features like post-publishing optimization, so you can access tips on how to enhance the results of your previously created content.

Features include:

• Intelligent content editor with SEO guidelines
• Comprehensive content planner with personalized workflows
• Auditing functionality for your entire website
• An AI growth management platform
• Free AI outline generation for paragraphs
• Plugins for WordPress and Google
• A content editor and keyword surfer extension

Pricing

There’s a 7-day money back guarantee with all paid packages on Surfer SEO, and you can save 17% by paying for an annual package, instead of using a monthly option. There’s also a completely free plan, where you can add and track unlimited early-stage websites to your list, and receive content optimization suggestions for every topic. The paid plans include:

• Basic: $49 per month for tracking one website, and unlimited early-stage websites, with new SEO insights every 7 days, full access to the content editor for 10 pieces per month, auditing for up to 20 pages per month, 1 extra team member, and guidelines with built-in NLP.
• Pro: $99 per month with all the features of Basic, plus tracking for 5 full websites, content editor access for 30 pieces per month, auditing for 60 pages per month, and 3 team members. Plus, you get full NLP guidance.
• Business: $199 per month for all the features of Pro, as well as tracking for 10 full websites, up to 70 optimized articles per month, auditing for 140 pages per month, and support for 10 team members. You also get a dedicated customer success team, backlink building and metric reports, white labelling, and API access.

KWFinder

A powerful tool for digital marketing, KWFinder by Mangools is a phenomenal option for accessing keyword ideas, collecting organic traffic, and improving your search rankings. This keyword analysis tool is a fantastic solution for learning more about the search terms you need to rank for. The tool provides overviews of keywords with insights into both search volume and difficulty. This ensures you can pick your terms based on your chances of a higher ranking.

The competitor keyword research tool included in the software gives users a behind-the-scenes look at what their competitors are ranking for too. Simply enter a domain or URL, and the SEO software will show you all the terms connected to the page. You can even get historical insights into search volumes, so it’s easier to keep an eye on long-term trends.

KWFinder assists with tracking different types of keywords too, such as location-specific phrases unique to your target audience. There’s also a handful of other features not related directly to keyword searching too, such as:

• A link miner for backlink analysis
• A site profiler for SEO metrics and insights
• SERP rank tracking functionality
• Full SERP analysis with insights into how to improve your position
• Free SEO tools like a keyword browser extension

Pricing

While there are free SEO tools available from KWFinder, small businesses will need to choose from a selection of 3 paid packages to access the full user experience. The plans include:

• Mangools Basic: $29.90 per month for up to 100 lookups in 24 hours, 200 suggestions per keyword search with keyword difficulty, 25 competitor terms per search, 100 SERP lookups a day, 200 tracked keywords,100,000 backlink rows per month, plus 20 site lookups per day.
• Mangools Premium: $39.90 per month for 500 lookups a day, unlimited keyword suggestions, 700 keywords per import, unlimited competitor keywords, 500 SERP lookups a day, 700 tracked keywords per day, and 500,000 backlink rows. There are also 70 site lookups a day and up to 3 simultaneous logins available.
• Mangools Agency: $79.90 per month for up to 1,200 keyword lookups a day, all the features of Premium, plus 1,200 SERP lookups a day, 1500 tracked keywords a day, 1.2 million backlink rows monthly, 150 site lookups a day, and 10 simultaneous logins

Choosing the Best SEO tools

The best SEO tools for your needs can help you go beyond the basics of Google analytics and search console options, to explore new opportunities for ranking online. Some solutions focus on helping you find broken links, repair site issues which might cause you to struggle with the SEO algorithm, and build crucial connections online. Others use crawler technology to help you choose keywords for Google, Bing, and other search engines, while pinpointing duplicate content and quality issues.

Whether you’re working on enhancing your Google ads, or you need more guidance than you can get from the basic Google keyword planner, there’s a SEO solution out there to suit every need. We’d definitely recommend testing out some free trials were you can, so you can determine how different functions impact your presence in Google’s search results.