SEO tools
Get your site to ranking with this list of the best tools in the SEO world.
If you’re just starting out, there’s some high quality guides for newbies provided by the likes of Google itself and Moz, a popular authority in the space.
Whether you want to analyze your own site’s backlinks or pry into who’s linking to your competitor, there’s plenty of tools out there, presenting various analyses and reports, ranging from free basic tools to pricey tools used by the biggest agencies.
SEO audit tools analyze your site for opportunities, returning detailed reports on any errors or issues on your sites, the performance of your pages and what optimizations you can perform, how your site fares on mobile, SEO concerns like meta tags, and headings, and more.
Use keyword research tools to find keyword suggestions for your niche, or to snoop into the keywords targeted by your competitors. Look into search volumes, competition levels, and details on related cost-per-click campaigns.
SEO backlink checkers
Majestic Site Explorer gives a generous amount of information for free, such as an overall trust index, and some backlink analysis including link types, depth, follow type, languages, and anchor text. Particularly usefully, It also charts your domain’s backlink history for free so you can monitor how your efforts are proceeding.
If you verify your ownership of a domain, you gain access to extended information for free. Upgrading gives you deep analysis on referring domains, anchor text, and backlinks.
An all-in-one SEO tool which gives you all the important functionality, with best-in-class data and analysis on a wealth of aspects of your site: organic keyword and pay-per-click advertising research, backlink analysis, and technical optimizations.
SEMrush really shines when you enter a competitor’s domain - you’ll be presented with their best keywords, and performance reports. It also allows you to analyse your competitors’ ad keywords and budgets.
On top of this it provides an advanced site audit tool, a social media tracker and poster, including post scheduling and analysis, brand mention monitoring and more.
Ahrefs is widely renowned, and near-unparalleled. However this quality comes at a steep price. At the core, they allow you to analyze your competitor’s site, learn what factors are effecting their ability to rank on Google, and therefore what you can do to compete.
This is primarily done with backlink analysis, but Ahrefs includes an overall competitor analysis, along with keyword, and content analysis. You can analyse your competitor’s top pages, and even compare their top keywords with the keywords on your own site, to identify gaps in your content.
Ahrefs also includes an advanced keyword research tool, identifying search volumes and cost-per-click.
One of the top backlink research tools; fast and effective, now owned by Moz.
Like most, this site relies on the freemium model. You get a small amount of queries for free, however.
Includes measures of page and domain authority, and the paid version includes data on social metrics like Facebook likes
A well-presented analysis of your backlinks, including domains, anchor text and URLs, and a comparison tool.
You get a preview of data for free, expandable to a basic analysis by registering - also for free - and much more data when you pay a fair price.
Serpstat is a general SEO tool providing position tracking, backlink analysis, competitor research, and a site audit.
The keyword research identifies Google volume, competition, and cost-per-click rates. It also provides analysis on niche questions.
For backlink analysis, Serpstat gives a detailed report on referring domains, backlinks with historical charts, and a quality score or rank.
Serpstat also provides a site audit functionality, identifying errors and recommendations, analysing meta tags, headings, redirects, accessibility, and inbound links. It’s error reports are detailed and instruct you on how to fix them.
The cheapest tier provides a generous amount of data at a price that won’t put you out of business.
An advanced, paid tool which includes detailed analysis of your site’s backlinks and their quality. Also includes competitor research and site auditing.
Focuses on avoiding Google penalties, with an innovative tool which simulates the risk of a potential new link.
Another innovative tool presents information on how quickly your site is building links so you can compare with your competitors and make sure you’re winning the race.
This tool allows you to bulk check the Domain Authority and Page Authority of a number of sites in one go - a nice time saving tool if you manage a lot of sites. The metric itself comes from Moz.
For free, it allows you to bulk check up to 10 sites.
A free Chrome browser extension which gives an SEO summary for the page you’re viewing in your browser, or a more detailed listing of information with a click providing a pretty detailed overview, including search engine performance, domain analysis, and social analysis.
Also analyzes content for keyword density.
Provides a wealth of information, actually for free. They link off to a more advanced paid tool, but the amount of data you get for free here is pretty substantial, especially compared to the competition.
While the depth of the analysis might not compare to tools like Ahrefs, for those on a budget, this is a great way to look into your backlinks, or your competitor’s. It includes, still for free, an analysis of the context of the links, including the countries and industries of the sites.
SEO audit tools
WooRank is a tool that returns an extremely detailed analysis of your website from many varied angles that influence search engine rank
This ranges from social impact, valid markup, keyword analysis, usability analysis, security and mobile concerns
A very functional interface that clearly indicates any possible problems
Ahrefs is widely renowned, and near-unparalleled. However this quality comes at a steep price. At the core, they allow you to analyze your competitor’s site, learn what factors are effecting their ability to rank on Google, and therefore what you can do to compete.
This is primarily done with backlink analysis, but Ahrefs includes an overall competitor analysis, along with keyword, and content analysis. You can analyse your competitor’s top pages, and even compare their top keywords with the keywords on your own site, to identify gaps in your content.
Ahrefs also includes an advanced keyword research tool, identifying search volumes and cost-per-click.
An all-in-one SEO tool which gives you all the important functionality, with best-in-class data and analysis on a wealth of aspects of your site: organic keyword and pay-per-click advertising research, backlink analysis, and technical optimizations.
SEMrush really shines when you enter a competitor’s domain - you’ll be presented with their best keywords, and performance reports. It also allows you to analyse your competitors’ ad keywords and budgets.
On top of this it provides an advanced site audit tool, a social media tracker and poster, including post scheduling and analysis, brand mention monitoring and more.
Serpstat is a general SEO tool providing position tracking, backlink analysis, competitor research, and a site audit.
The keyword research identifies Google volume, competition, and cost-per-click rates. It also provides analysis on niche questions.
For backlink analysis, Serpstat gives a detailed report on referring domains, backlinks with historical charts, and a quality score or rank.
Serpstat also provides a site audit functionality, identifying errors and recommendations, analysing meta tags, headings, redirects, accessibility, and inbound links. It’s error reports are detailed and instruct you on how to fix them.
The cheapest tier provides a generous amount of data at a price that won’t put you out of business.
This is a tool for local SEO, with Google My Business auditing, review monitoring on recommendation sites like Yelp and Tripadvisor, and citation building and tracking. They also handling submitting your site to business directories and mapping services.
Raven has a suite of tools including site audits, backlink reports, and automated marketing reports. It can pull in data from Google Analytics, AdWords, Search Console, and social ads like Facebook and Twitter.
As a site auditor, it identifies technical issues and metrics like page speed and mobile usability.
Pagelocity is a Web Page Optimization and Performance tool for web developers, designers and web site owners. It provides an in-depth analysis about a web page covering the following: social metrics, on-page SEO, web page resources, HTML/CSS insights and competitive analysis.
Dareboost provides an easy website optimization report, detailing errors and performance metrics. It includes the ability to monitor your site, so you can look back at historical performance, and receive regular reports to your inbox.
Particularly of interest, it allows you to compare your website’s performance with a competitor’s.
SEO keyword tools
Ahrefs is widely renowned, and near-unparalleled. However this quality comes at a steep price. At the core, they allow you to analyze your competitor’s site, learn what factors are effecting their ability to rank on Google, and therefore what you can do to compete.
This is primarily done with backlink analysis, but Ahrefs includes an overall competitor analysis, along with keyword, and content analysis. You can analyse your competitor’s top pages, and even compare their top keywords with the keywords on your own site, to identify gaps in your content.
Ahrefs also includes an advanced keyword research tool, identifying search volumes and cost-per-click.
An all-in-one SEO tool which gives you all the important functionality, with best-in-class data and analysis on a wealth of aspects of your site: organic keyword and pay-per-click advertising research, backlink analysis, and technical optimizations.
SEMrush really shines when you enter a competitor’s domain - you’ll be presented with their best keywords, and performance reports. It also allows you to analyse your competitors’ ad keywords and budgets.
On top of this it provides an advanced site audit tool, a social media tracker and poster, including post scheduling and analysis, brand mention monitoring and more.
KWFinder provides a detailed keyword analysis and report, including historical trends, search volumes, and cost-per-click information. It also analyzes the sites in the search results for authority and other ranking information.
Of particular interest is their long tail keyword analysis which identifies those not targeted by your competitors.
Google’s Keyword Planner would have the most accurate data, one would assume. All the same, they don’t make the full detail available to everyone - the amount of searches isn’t shown as an exact number, but as a broad range, which makes it far less useful.
The tool still provides you with excellent keyword suggestions, allows you to monitor keyword trends, and see how the volumes change over time.
If the name didn’t give it away, SpyFu is a keyword research tool with a focus on analysing your competitors keywords, showing you what keywords your competitors pay for (or rank for organically), the amount of clicks they get, and how much they pay.
It also allows you to monitor your competitors for AdWords campaigns, letting you know when ad spend changes, as well as informing you of competitor’s keywords that you’re not competing on.
One wonders how they come across this data, but they come highly recommended from around the web.
Admirably, SpyFu offers a no-nonsense approach to paying for their services, with low costs and unlimited data and downloads.
This one’s a bit different, it utilizes the auto-complete feature on Google and Bing to identify and track long-tail keywords, with a visualisation breaking up the queries into who/what/where/why/how categories.
Serpstat is a general SEO tool providing position tracking, backlink analysis, competitor research, and a site audit.
The keyword research identifies Google volume, competition, and cost-per-click rates. It also provides analysis on niche questions.
For backlink analysis, Serpstat gives a detailed report on referring domains, backlinks with historical charts, and a quality score or rank.
Serpstat also provides a site audit functionality, identifying errors and recommendations, analysing meta tags, headings, redirects, accessibility, and inbound links. It’s error reports are detailed and instruct you on how to fix them.
The cheapest tier provides a generous amount of data at a price that won’t put you out of business.
An incredible tool in the form of a browser extension which adds search volume, cost-per-click, and keyword competition data to a variety of websites, like Google, Google Trends, Answer The Public, Google Keyword Planner, and more.
This is more powerful than it might seem - it’s a great time saver that allows you to see the keyword analysis without switching between your tools, and for free.
Ubersuggest is a keyword research tool by well known industry man, Neil Patel.
Based on your input, it provides keyword suggestions, estimations of search volume, CPC rates, and keyword competition in both paid and organic contexts.
Best of all, this information is provided for free.
This tool provides a detailed information on keywords, and shockingly, provides a decent amount of information for free.
It includes search volumes on Google as well as Bing/Yahoo, cost-per-click and monthly value information for advertising. It also includes the same data for UK search.