Best Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Tools
Taking control over Search Engine Optimisation can be hard.
It’s even tougher when you have just started out and you don’t have an SEO Agency to help out. But hey! Don’t forget, we are living the best times of our lives – we have the free world of the Internet!
You can find hundreds of free online SEO tools that can help you achieve your goals and track them at the same time. But to make it easier for you, we have found the best free SEO tools and compiled them here on this list.
Ahref – 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.
Syed Irfan AjmalSyed Irfan Ajmal, a Growth Marketing Manager at Ridester, loves the SEO keyword tool Ahrefs. He shares, “Ahrefs is surely our most favourite tool when it comes to various facets of SEO such as keyword research, rank tracking, competitor research, SEO audit, viral content research and much more. That would be the Domain Comparison tool. We add our site and those of 4 of our competitors to it. This helps to find sites which have linked to our competitors but not us. This helps us find great link opportunities. But this wouldn’t have been so great if Ahrefs didn’t have the largest database of backlinks. Ahrefs has been instrumental in getting our site ranked for several major keywords, and getting us to 350,000 visitors per month.”
Google Search Console: Top SEO Tool
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 optimise for better performance in Google search results.
SEMRush – Marketing SEO Tools
Marketing SEO tools like SEMRush tend to be fan favourites 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.
Liraz Postan – SEO ExpertsLiraz Postan, a Senior SEO & Content Manager at Outbrain, recommends SEMRush as one of the best SEO tools. She says, “My favourite SEO tool is SEMrush with the feature of “organic traffic insights”. This feature lets me see all my leading articles with one dashboard, along with keywords related, social shares and word count- lets you a quick overview of what’s working and where to optimise. I generally use SEMrush on my daily work, love this tool, as well as site audit to optimise our site health. We improved our site health by 100% more since we started using SEMrush, and we increased conversions by 15% more from our content pages.”
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.
George Perry, an SEM Specialist at Bandwidth raves about SEO keyword tool KWFinder. “I like that not only does it show me information on the keyword that I was searching for, but pulls in good suggestions for related terms, and how those compare (volume, CPC, difficulty, etc) to the term I originally looked at. I’ve been able to help them target not only those big, pie in the sky vanity terms, but to better target those terms that are lower in the funnel and more likely to convert, allowing me to target them through focused content that answers the questions they’re actually asking.”
Moz – SEO Software SEO Software
Moz kept popping up as one of the best SEO tools that experts actually use. Some raved about how Moz was always up to date despite Google’s regular algorithm changes. Others raved about their chat portal because it allowed them to always get an insightful response to every question asked. Whether you’re looking for keyword recommendations or a site crawl, Moz is a full-service powerhouse. You can get great insights into how your website is performing but also how to improve it. They also have a free MozBar toolbar that you can download for free that allows you to see your store’s metrics while browsing any page. If you’re looking to learn more about SEO you should also consider checking out MozCon, their annual conference.
Keri LindenmuthKeri Lindenmuth’s, a Marketing Manager at Kyle David Group, go-to SEO tool is none other than Moz. She says, “My favourite feature of the tool is its ‘page optimisation feature.’ It tells you exactly what steps you can make to improve the SEO of every single page on your website. For example, it will tell you to ‘Include your keyword in this page title’ or ‘Add an image with a keyword alt tag.’ This tool has substantially improved our client’s business simply by the fact that it gives increased transparency. We can compare their site’s traffic and optimisation to that of their competitors. We can see which pages and search terms their competitors are performing well in and alter our web practices to compete against theirs. Without a tool like Moz, SEO really becomes a guessing game. You have no idea where you’re doing well and where you can use improvement.”
Ubersuggest: Keyword Tracking Tool
Ubersuggest, developed by Neil Patel, is a keyword finder tool that helps you identify keywords and also the search intent behind them by sho.wing the top ranking SERPs for them. From short to long-tail phrases, you can find the right terms to use on your website with hundreds of suggestions from this free great keyword tool. Metrics they include in their report are keyword volume, competition, CPC, and seasonal trends. Great for both organic, SEO and paid, PPC teams this tool can help determine if a keyword is worth targeting and how competitive it is.
Answer The Public: Free SEO Tools
Free SEO tools like Answer The Public allow you to easily find topics to write about for your ecommerce blog. I’ve used this tool in the past to create content around specific keywords to better rank online. Say you’re in the ‘fitness’ niche. You can use this free SEO tool to create content around for keywords like fitness, yoga, running, crossfit, exercise and cover the entire spectrum. It’s great for finding featured snippet opportunities. Say you hire a freelancer to create content for you, all you need to do is download this list and send it over to them. And it would’ve only taken you five minutes of effort making it one of the most efficient ways to come up with SEO topics for new websites.
Matt JacksonMatt Jackson, Head of Content at Wild Shark, loves free SEO tools like AnswerThePublic. He shares, “One of my favourite tools when compiling SEO content for a site is AnswerThePublic.com. The best feature of the tool is that it presents a list of the questions that web users are asking about a particular keyword. If I’m running out of genuinely useful content ideas, or if I’m compiling an FAQ page, it provides invaluable guidance as to what, exactly, people are searching for. It is not only useful for SEO content, it means that our clients can answer questions on their site, minimising the number of customer service calls they receive and giving greater authority to a page and the overall business. And here’s a quick tip: prevent neckache by hitting the Data button, rather than straining to read the question wheel.”
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.
Adele StewartAdele Stewart, Senior Project Manager at Sparq Designs, can’t get enough of SEO software SpyFu. She shares, “I have used SEMrush and Agency Analytics in the past and SpyFu has the one-up on my client’s competitors. All of SpyFu’s features are great, but my absolute favourite is the SEO Research feature. You’re able to plug in a competitor’s domain and pull up information on their own SEO strategy. You can see what keywords they pay for vs their organic standings, review their core keywords and even assess their keyword groups. Using SpyFu has been integral to my client’s SEO successes. There’s so much more to track and report on, plus I don’t have to put in as much effort in research as I did with other SEO software. SpyFu pulls the information I need and organizes reports in a way that is presentable and understandable to my clients. I’ve already seen increases in indexing and rank for keywords that we didn’t even think of.”
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 optimise 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.
Majestic: Marketing SEO Tools
Majestic is one of the best marketing SEO tools according to experts. It has countless useful features like The Majestic Million which lets you see the ranking of the top million websites. Did your website make the cut? The Site Explorer feature allows you to easily see a general overview of your online store and the number of backlinks you have. It also works as an SEO keyword tool allowing you to find the best keywords to rank for while also having features geared to site comparisons and tracking your rank.
Ryan Scollon, SEO Consultant at RyanScollon.co.uk recommends the SEO tool Majestic. He says, “My favourite SEO tool is Majestic, with its main feature allowing you to check the backlinks of a website that you specify. My favourite feature is the ability to add your own client’s site and a bunch of competitors, allowing you to easily compare a bunch of SEO metrics such as trust flow, referring domain count and external backlinks count. Not only does it help us understand the [client’s optimisation] weaknesses, but it also provides a simple table that we share with our clients, so they too can understand the problems and how they stack up to their competitors. We also use Majestic to audit competitors backlinks, as we can sometimes find a handful of easy opportunities to tackle before moving onto other link building tactics.”12.
Google Trends: SEO Checker Tool
Google Trends has been around for years but has been underutilised. 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.
SEOQuake: Free SEO Tools
ToolsSEOQuake is considered one of the best free SEO tools. This Chrome extension acts as an SEO checker tool that performs on-page site audits, assesses both your internal and external links while also doing website comparisons to help you determine how you perform against your competitors. Other features of this SEO analysis tool include keyword analysis such as keyword density, an easy to read SEO dashboard, and an export feature that allows you to easily download and send data to key people on your team.
Brin Chartier, an expert digital marketer, and SEO content creator, loves the free SEO tool SEOQuake. She says, “I love a good browser extension, and SEOquake is the best free SEO tool for instant SEO metrics on any website or SERP. I can instantly pull an on-page SEO audit for myself or competitors, and the SERP overlay feature is an awesome visualisation of key page metrics that I can export to CSV & share with my team. This tool saves me hours of manual work that I can use to actually move the needle creating SEO optimised content instead.”
