Best SEO Tools to Optimize Your Website for Success

1. Google Search Console

Offered for free to everyone with a website, Search Console by Google lets you monitor and report on your website’s presence in Google SERP. All you need to do is verify your website by adding some code to your website or going through Google Analytics and you can submit your sitemap for indexing. Although you don’t need a Search Console account to appear in Google’s search results you can control what gets indexed and how your website is represented with this account. As an SEO checker tool Search Console can help you understand how Google and its users view your website and allow you to optimize for better performance in Google search results.

Key Features:

• Monitor how Google perceives your website.
• Keep track of what keywords visitors are using to reach you.
• Stay on top of any crawl, meta tag, or sitemap errors.
• Update your robots.txt file.
• Monitor your site’s backlinks.
• Get alerts if your site is infected with malware.

2. SEMrush

Marketing SEO tools like SEMRush tend to be fan favorites in the SEO community. Experts love that you can easily assess your rankings and changes to them as well as new ranking opportunities. One of the most popular features of this SEO tool is the Domain Vs Domain analysis allowing you to easily compare your website to your competitors. If you’re looking for analytics reports that help you better understand your website’s search data, traffic, or even your competitors, you’ll be able to compare keywords and domains. The On-Page SEO Checker tool allows you to easily monitor your rankings as well as find some recommendations on how to improve your website’s performance.

Key Features:

• Research the value of specific queries.
• Check out what keywords your competitors are ranking for and how much traffic they’re getting.
• Find information about other website’s backlinks.
• Look into your competitor’s text and media ads.

3. Ahrefs: SEO Keyword Tool

Ahrefs is one of the most recommended SEO tools online. It’s only second to Google when it comes to being the largest website crawlers. SEO experts can’t get enough of Ahref’s Site Audit feature as it’s the best SEO analysis tool around. The tool highlights what parts of your website require improvements to help ensure your best ranking. From a competitor analysis perspective, you’ll likely use Ahrefs to determine your competitor’s backlinks to use them as a starting point for your own brand. You can also use this SEO tool to find the most linked to content within your niche.

4. Moz Pro

Moz Pro is a suite of tools created to help you tackle SEO using a data-driven approach. To give you a quick overview, Moz Pro is somewhat similar to SEMrush, in that it enables you to research both specific long-tail keywords and other domains. You can use this information to avoid keywords with little potential and to improve on what your competitors are doing.

Key Features:

• Research how competitive a keyword is, as well as its search volume.
• Get suggestions on related keywords.
• Investigate your competitors, including which keywords they’re targeting.
• Use a Chrome extension to look into other domains without going to the Moz website.
• Compare multiple keywords using custom lists.
• Get on-page optimization suggestions and error alerts.

5. Google AdWords Keyword Planner

Google AdWords Keyword Planner is one of the most comprehensive keyword research tools you can use. With it, you can look up keywords and get traffic estimates about them. More importantly, it can help you figure out how competitive keywords are, based on their AdWords price.

Key Features:

• Find out the search volume for any keyword you want.
• Determine a keyword’s competitiveness from its CPC.
• Get detailed reports for specific keywords.

6. Woorank: SEO Ranking Tool

As a top SEO analysis tool, Woorank offers free and paid options to track and report on your marketing data. You can plug in your competitors to discover which keywords they are targeting so you can to overlap with theirs. Try reporting on how keywords perform over time to really understand your industry and optimize for users in the best way possible. And most importantly understand the things your website is lacking from both a technical and content perspective as this tools can identify duplicate content, downtime, and security issues and provide guidelines on how to fix them.

Key Features:

• Analyze your website’s overall status, including SEO, usability, performance, and backlinks.
• Receive tips on how to improve your website and tackle SEO tasks.
• Analyze your domain’s authority.

7. Google Trends: SEO Checker Tool

Google Trends has been around for years but has been underutilized. Not only does it give you information regarding a keyword but it offers great insight into trends around the topic which can be invaluable at any stage of a business’s growth. Search for keywords in any country and receive information around it like top queries, rising queries, interest over time and geographical locations depending on interest. If you are not sure which SEO keywords are the ones for you, this is the best SEO tool to use.

8. Screaming Frog: SEO Tools Online

Screaming Frog is considered one of the best SEO tools online by the experts. They love how much time they save by having this tool analyze your website super fast to perform site audits. In fact, every person we spoke to, said the speed at which you can get insights was faster than most SEO tools online. This tool also informs you of duplicate content, errors to fix, bad redirections, and areas of improvement for link building. Their SEO Spider tool was considered the best feature by top SEO experts.

Key Features: 

• Analyze titles and metadata.
• Crawl your site to find and fix broken links.
• Discover and resolve duplicate content and pages.

9. Keywords Everywhere: SEO Keyword Tool

Keywords Everywhere is another great SEO Chrome extension that aggregates data from various SEO tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Trends and more to help you find the best keywords to rank for. They use 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 you a huge amount of time each day.

10. SpyFu: Free SEO Tools

While SpyFu does have an amazing premium version, many of our experts raved about their free features. If you’re just starting out, you can easily grow into the paid features as you start succeeding. You can easily view the number of times a keyword gets searched each month while easily determining the difficulty to rank for that keyword. You can also do some research on your competitors to determine which keywords they use. You can search your competitor’s, or your own, website to easily see how many organic keywords they have, how many monthly clicks they get, who their paid and organic competitors are, the ads they created on Google Adwords and more. It’s one of the most detailed SEO analysis tools on the market.

11. BuzzStream

BuzzStream offers you a collection of tools to help with domain research, email marketing, and project management. It’s a very all-in-one type of platform, and the sheer number of options it provides can be intimidating. With that in mind, let’s focus on how it can help you tackle your SEO needs.

Key Features:

• Research your competitors based on any keywords you want to target.
• Collect data about domain age and authority for specific websites.
• Find out what your competitors’ rankings are in the SERPs.
• Locate the social media accounts for your competitions’ sites.
• Create lists of authors who write for competing websites and follow what they’re doing.

12. KWFinder: SEO Keyword Tool

An SEO Keyword Tool like KWFinder helps you find long-tail keywords that have a lower level of competition. The experts use this SEO tool to find the best keywords and run analysis reports on backlinks and SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Their Rank Tracker tool helps you easily determine your ranking while tracking your improvement based on one key metric. Plus, if that’s not enough, you’ll get a ton of new keyword ideas to help you rank your website even higher.