Search engine optimization is a crucial aspect of creating a successful website. To advance your organic ranking, you’ll need the right SEO tools to help you out. There are many helpful tools that can help research keywords, optimize the content or test your website or web page to get a sense of its performance.
On-Page SEO Tools
Creating and optimizing your content can be a demanding process. Especially when there are many elements like topics, keyword research and title tags to consider. Below are a few tools that will go a long way in making the content creation process a little easier and enjoyable.
Keyword Keg
Keyword Keg offers a number of tools and features for keyword research. Their tool allows you to find keywords and tells you the volume of searches, competition, cost per click and SEO rank difficulty. Keyword Keg also allows you to add seed keywords, filter the country and use APIs.
Price: $40 – $280 per month
Keyword Planner
Keyword Planner is a free Google Ads tool to help create new Search Network ad campaigns. This helps to research keywords based on terms that are relevant to your website, landing page, product or service. Keyword Planner also provides historical statistics and traffic forecasts to help you decide which keywords will perform the best. With monthly volume, predicted range cost-per-click and level of competition, you can get an idea of how each keyword might perform for a given and budget.
Price: Free
SEMrush
SEO Writing Assistant
SEMrush offers a smart Chrome extension for Google Docs called SEO Writing Assistant. It helps to ensure your content is written in an SEO-friendly style by analyzing your writing simultaneously comparing your Google top 10 competitors. The SEO Writing Assistant grades your content with an overall score based on the general quality of your articles. This is calculated based on metrics such as readability, target keywords, word count and tone of voice.
Readability refers to the recommended reading-ease score based on the competition. Target keywords allow you to input the keywords that are most important to your content or related to your content. Recommended keywords show related keywords to be used within your content to get better SEO results. The tone of voice helps to make sure every content is consistent with your brand voice and the voice of your competitors.
Keyword Difficulty
SEMrush also offers a keyword research tool called Keyword Difficulty. This tool allows you to research which keywords are the most difficult to rank for discovering the strongest competitor for every keyword. It showcases the percentage of difficulty to seize competitors’ positions along with the search volume.
Price: $99.95 – $339.95 per month (Includes all SEMrush tools)
Yoast SEO
Yoast also provides a similar plug-in tool called Yoast SEO, but for WordPress. They offer a free and paid version of the tool. This tool will help to optimize your content for the right keywords, show you the quality of your content and suggest embedded links as you write.
Price: Freemium, Starting at $89
Answer The Public
Answer The Public is a search query data tool. You can enter a keyword and Answer the Public will present questions, prepositions and lists related to your search query. This is a good source of information to get a sense of what people are searching for. It works best combined with keyword tools like Keyword Keg.
Price: Freemium, $99 per month
Technical SEO Tools
Technical tools are beneficial in assuring your website runs smoothly and quickly. A technically-sound website could be the difference between earning a conversion or losing a customer. Below are some free and paid tools to help analyze your website to make sure it’s up-to-speed.
Monitoring
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool from Google to help analyze your website traffic. It uses a tracking code to record data about those visiting your website, how they interact with it and the role that different channels play. All you have to do is sign up with your website’s information to start reaping the benefits. Keep in mind mastering Google Analytics will take some time.
With Google Analytics you can use customer segmentation to identify your core audience and buyer persona for your business. This information can help you tailor your messaging and digital ads. Segmentations are also used to identify specific trends in your business like cart abandoners or product sales.
Google Webmasters Tools or Google Search Console is a free service that helps to monitor and maintain your website to make sure it continually appears in Google’s search results. Google Search Console offers reports and tools on traffic data for your site, fixing indexing problems, troubleshooting issues and more.
Price: Free
Bing
Similarly, Bing offers Bing Webmaster Tools which uses reporting tools to help you understand why visitors get to your site and what to focus on how to increase traffic. Bing Webmaster Tools also includes diagnostic tools that give critical information on what users are searching for and how to leverage that information to expand your site.
Price: Free
Moz
Moz, as part of their Moz Pro Solutions package, offers on-page optimization monitoring where you can keep track of your page optimization score. They also offers step-by-step guidance recommending how to optimize your pages and content suggestions.
Moz also offers a free SEO toolbar compatible with the Chrome web browser. With MozBar, you can access and compare Page Authority and Domain Authority scores. You can also find keywords and compare link metrics on pages of your viewing.
Price: Moz Pro Solutions, $99 – $599 per month
Price: MozBar, Freemium, $179 per month
SEO Crawler
SEO Crawler provides an analysis tool called SEO Web Crawler Spider that covers both on-page and off-page tactics. It monitors your site rankings across any search engine, comparing you to your competitors. SEO Crawler also analyzes your site speed and checks for errors site-wide.
Price: $29.95 – $149.95 per month
Pingdom
Pingdom is another tool that focuses on website performance monitoring. It tracks the applications and services that are crucial to your website. They also track real-time visitor data along with the loading speed so you can understand how to improve your site.
Price: $14.95 – $249 per month
Page Speed
Google has two PageSpeed tools called PageSpeed Insights and PageSpeed Module. PageSpeed Insights reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved. PageSpeed modules are open-source server modules that automatically optimize your site.
Google also offers a free tool to test your mobile site called Test My Site. By simply inputting your website’s URL, in a few seconds Google will calculate your mobile page speed and give you a rating. You can also test other pages of your website to see their performance. In the end, Google can generate a free report containing the results from all tested pages offering solutions to improve.
Price: Free
GTmetrix
GTmetrix also provides monitoring for site speed. You can actually test your site by visiting their homepage giving you a free analysis. But to fully benefit from this tool, GTmetrix offers full packages of analytics that cover important metrics like site and page speed, load times, page speed testing. Starting from a free version all the way up to $149.95 USD per month, GTmetrix has you covered depending on your website’s needs.
Price: Freemium, $14.95 – $149.95 per month
Local SEO Tools
Your local listing can be a factor in attracting more in-store traffic. These are some helpful tools that will help to keep your business information accurate and consistent and track your local rank and interactions.
Moz Local
Moz Local is a tool that can be used for small and large businesses and helps to keep your online listings correct and consistent. It only takes one listing and Moz will automate the rest for you.
Moz Local will then send your listings data to major search engines and directories. You will receive notification alerts when there are new interactions with your location. Moz also gives you location reports to help you track your growth and determine key consumer interactions on listings.
Price: $129 – $299 per year
Whitespark
Whitespark offers many SEO tools like Local Citation Finder, Local Rank Tracker, Reputation Builder and Link Prospector. The Local Citation Finder helps to find all citation opportunities to increase your local search rankings and compares competitors’ citations. Local Rank Tracker monitors local and organic search performance by tracking local packs, local finders and organic rankings. Reputation Builder makes it easy for customers to review your business on popular review sites and calculates customer experience with NPS (Net Promoter Score).
Price:
Location Citation Finder, $17 – $80 per month
Local Rank Tracker, $14 – $117 per month
Reputation Builder, $35 – $215 per month
Yext
Yext similarly offers a variety of products and tools to help you improve local SEO. Their Knowledge Graph is a centralized hub to manage all the important information consumers want to know about you — from locations to credentials to events.
Yext Pages help to ensure the consumer can find optimized and accurate information about your business. You can simply update listings to ensure that your business information is accurate.
Yext Listings allows you to take control of the information you share about your business. With this feature, you can schedule updates, find improvement suggestions and set up integration with other tools.
Yext Reviews is a customer review management program that monitors and analyzes reviews. This allows you to easily engage with customers by responding to their reviews.
Price: $4 – $19 per week
Related Content: The Complete SEO Checklist for Your Website
Off-Page SEO Tools
Off-page SEO focuses on the different ways of promoting your website. The tools below will help to promote your website through link building, backlinks and guest blogging.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs provides a free version of their Backlink Checker tool. It shows the top 100 backlinks to any website or webpage. It also shows the total number of referring domains, Domain Rating and URL Rating.
Ahrefs also offers Site Explorer, a backlink checking tool that helps to analyze competitors. Site Explorer showcases an in-depth report of the organic search traffic and backlink profile of any website. You can see what keywords your competitors are ranking for and which pages bring the most search engine traffic. You can also see which websites link to your competitors’ sites and gauge the quality of backlinks.
Price: Freemium, $99 – $179 per month
BuzzSumo
Mainly used for content research, BuzzSumo can be used as a blogger outreach tool. BuzzSumo is used to find the top-performing content based on specific topics. It allows you to filter your search by type, location and topic. But, you can find popular content and reach out to the website to ask about a guest blog or a backlink.
Price: $79 – $499 per month
Conclusion
Throughout the SEO market, there are many tools that can immediately help you understand how to improve your website optimization. These tools provide a lot of useful features that can produce crucial results. But, there are many more tools that you can use, as well. If you’re serious about SEO, using these tools will go a long way in determining the success of your business and website.
