Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be challenging. Trying to figure out the best way to gain visibility for your website and rank is tough competition. But thankfully, you don’t have to navigate it on your own. 

Thanks to individuals and companies who seek to make marketers’ lives easier and more efficient, SEO tools are available to the masses of people looking for smarter and efficient ways of marketing their business. 

A wealth of information and software is at your fingertips.  We’ve put together a list of 10 of the top SEO tools, both free and paid, that you need to try.

It’s not about trying all of them, it’s about finding the best SEO tool for you and your business.

Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Tools

1. SEMrush: SEO Marketing Tool

SEMrush started out with a small group of IT and SEO professionals looking to make online competition fair and transparent.  They are now one of the top paid SEO tools for marketing professionals. 

Their SEO tool does your keyword research and tracks the keyword strategy used by your competition. Get recommendations on related keywords and even explore multinational and multilingual environments. They also provide you with over 20 million keyword ideas to help provide you the best targeted keywords for your business.  

One of their most popular tools is their side-by-side domain comparisons, allowing you to easily compare your website to your competitors and identify strengths and weaknesses in your SEO. With many more features like analytics reporting and their On-Page SEO Checker, you’ll have a comprehensive tool to drive business success.

2. Ahrefs: SEO Keyword Tool

Ahrefs is one of the most recommended SEO tools online and the second-largest web crawler after Google. Their most popular feature is their Site Audit tool, which crawls all the pages on your website and provides each page with an overall SEO health score and notifies you of issues to help improve your SEO. 

You can also use Ahrefs to see your competitor’s backlink and rankings to help you leverage your own website and rankings.

3. Google Search Console

Who better than Google to help improve your SEO? This free tool is a great start for newbie webmasters to get started in SEO. 

Google’s Search Console helps you to measure your site’s search traffic and performance, along with providing an in-depth analysis of your site’s impressions, clicks, and position in Google Search. This helps to ensure your site is Google-friendly.

Google’s suite of tools is a great way to get started, and help is always available via the Webmasters Help Community.

4. MozPro: SEO Software

As one of the leading SEO tools, it’s no wonder marketers choose Moz.  Their suite of SEO tools helps you to target the right keywords and understand how people are searching for your product/service as you can create high-quality content.

Moz also crawls and audits your site to gives you insight into how your site is performing and how you can improve it. Ensure maximum potential for rank with their on-page optimization and find link opportunities to gain an edge on your competitors with Moz Pro’s Link Explorer.

5. Siteliner: SEO Analysis Tool

Siteliner is a free SEO analysis tool that explores your website, revealing key issues that affect your site quality and SEO ranking. Their tool addresses issues such as duplicate content, broken links, and on-page reports. 

Siteliner also identifies pages on your site that are the most prominent to search engines based on link patterns on your site. This is a simple yet perfect tool to help identify and remedy potential problems on your site and improve quality and value.

6. SpyFu: Free SEO Tool

While SpyFu does have a premium version, their free version is great if you’re just starting out. SpyFu’s successful search marketing formula allows you to easily view the number of times a keyword gets searched every month, while also seeing how difficult a keyword is to rank for. 

You can also monitor your competitor’s PPC campaigns and find keywords you have yet to capitalize on. You can search your competitors or your own website to find how many organic keywords you have as well as the quality of backlinks for a specific keyword. They are by far one of the most detailed SEO analysis tools out there.

7. Screaming Frog: Online SEO Software

Screaming Frog is considered one of the industry’s leading SEO analysis tools for technical SEO audits. The speed at which their tool analyzes a website is faster than most SEO tools.

Their tool also informs you of broken links and duplicate data, along with on-page analysis of your site’s page titles and meta descriptions. This is a fantastic tool to help you crawl competitor sites and get a broad overview of what they’re doing.

8. Majestic: SEO Marketing Tool

Majestic helps build the strongest SEO backlink campaigns to drive organic traffic. They mainly focus on one aspect of SEO and that is backlinks – but they do it very well. Their Site Explorer feature allows you to see an overview of the number of backlinks that you have, as well as top keywords driving backlinks. 

If you’re looking for a tool to help you build backlinks and, then Majestic is a great tool.

9. Ubersuggest: Free Keyword Tracking Tool

Ubersuggest, created by Neil Patel, is a free keyword tool that helps you generate 100s of keyword ideas. From short to long-term keyword phrases, this tool will help you generate lists of keywords based on what is working for your competition. You’ll also see the volume and seasonal trends of your keywords. 

This tool isn’t only for keyword research, Ubersuggest also gives you insight into your competitor’s SEO and content marketing strategies, helps you generate content ideas based on content in a given keyword, as well as issues with backlinks and opportunities to improve.

For a free tool, this is a great way to optimize your SEO content strategy.

10. Answer the Public: Free SEO Tool

Answer the Public is a free tool that allows you to find topics to write about around a specified topic or keyword. When you’re looking to find content to write about, this tool is a great way to help you create it. Simply type in a keyword or topic that you’re looking to write about and this tool with help you find content around your given keyword or topic. 

It’s also a great way to understand what questions people may be asking about a specific topic and how you can write content that helps address their questions. It’s one of the most effective SEO tools to help you generate topics for your website.

While this list only touches the surface of tools out there, it helps give you a great baseline of where to start. It’s going to take finding what works for you and putting in the work to see the results. Instead of trying all at once, pick 1-2 tools you feel will best fit your needs and test them out. See what you can glean from them and how they can help you improve your SEO.

If you’re on a budget, play around with the free tool or go for a trial run. Try them out and find what works for you.

Posted in Articles