The world of SEO software is crazy.
As the founder of a Content-Marketing-Agency I spend a lot of time with SEO software. Given the size of the industry, I've always been impressed by how many SEO tools there are.
Maybe it's because there are so many inventors, tinkerers, hackers and technical marketers in this industry.
That's nice, but it can also be overwhelming, especially if you're new. It's like shopping for toothpaste, except there are actually key differences in SEO tools (although there are just as many seemingly similar options).
That's why I took the time to list the most useful ones for me. SEO Tools list to share with you.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is clearly number one for us. There's probably no website I've spent more time on. It's the only SEO tool I use every day.
Ahrefs is a full-fledged SEO software. It offers a wide range of functions, from Keyword-Research and SERP-snapshots, website and backlink explorers through to Ranking-tracking and site audit functions. If I could only choose one SEO tool, it would be this one.
We use Ahrefs for pretty much everything. When I have a Content-marketing strategy for my clients, it begins in Ahrefs. I use it for quick SEO audits for new websites. I track the search results of my website and those of all my clients with the tool.
I use the tool to find options for BacklinksI find lucrative keywords to write about and carry out competitive analyses.
Basically, it is the starting point for our SEO strategy work.
It's hard to find a more comprehensive and trustworthy SEO tool that can do all of these things. I think it's because, unlike many others, the company is really product-focused. It also shows in their marketing - they are the absolute best when it comes to product-related content.
In addition to the great SEO insights that Ahrefs offers, they also have a tool called "Content Explorer", which I can use to find out what's popular on social media. This helps me to plan buzzworthy content that is intended for social media sharing, thought leadership or link building.
An Ahrefs subscription covers most of the tasks of an SEO agency:
- Keyword-Research (volume, difficulty, trends)
- Competitor analysis
- Backlink monitoring and analysis
- Rank Tracking
- Website review
... and more
There's plenty of educational content and helpful tips within the tool on the Ahrefs blog to make sure you understand how things work and how to get the most out of it.
With Ahrefs, you may have a few small gaps in your SEO tool stack, such as no white-label reports or irregular Ranking-Updates.
Ahrefs is an important product for us when it comes to content marketing.
Price: Starts at €99 per month.
SurferSEO - your content tool
The next item on our list is a content optimization tool that allows you to write SEO-friendly content. SurferSEO has several features, but the main reason to use it is its content editor. Using artificial intelligence, Surfer looks at the current top rankings and creates recommendations for your texts. It can help you
- define an appropriate number of words
- use the right keywords (in the right density)
- Cover relevant subtopics
- answer relevant questions
... and many other things that increase your chances of ranking well on Google.
In addition to optimizing content, Surfer also offers functions for creating content briefs, for Keyword-research and for clustering topics. However, Surfer does not have a built-in AI write generator.
Prices start at 59€/month. There is currently no free trial, but you can register with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
SEMRush
I know I've already raved about Ahrefs above, but SEMRush is another incredibly impressive tool. It can do almost everything Ahrefs can do, but it also includes paid advertising and PPC data, making it a comprehensive package for SEM marketers.
There are also a number of helpful micro-tools, my favorite being the SEO Writing Assistant for Google Docs (which helps you optimize on-page content, similar to Clearscope, Frase or SurferSEO).
I would say that both tools, SEMRush and Ahrefs, are so feature-rich that you should basically get by with either one. So it's up to you which one you choose. You may find the interface and overview at SEMRush more pleasant.
One thing that I think SEMRush is particularly good at is local SEO analysis and research.
If you do local SEO or work with local small businesses, or if you do a lot of Google Ads and need competitive research functions, SEMRush is the best in its class.
SEMRush is one of the few SEO tools that nobody really wants to do without. In contrast to most Keyword-SEMRush shows you the top keywords of your competitors. Instead of searching through the Google Keyword planner, you simply enter the URL of a competitor into SEMRush and see each individual Keywordfor which it ranks.
Price: Starts at 99€ per month
Screaming Frog
The Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you improve your onsite SEO by extracting data and checking for common SEO issues that come directly from your website
What does it mean?
It means that you can check your entire website and all web pages, the link structure, broken links and other errors, sitemaps and other technical SEO issues.
You receive the raw data from the crawler and can do a lot with it, especially if your website has many pages.
If you're involved in SEO, you should know how to perform a quick crawl to identify issues like missing title tags, Meta descriptionredirects and internal linking options. There are many low hanging Fruits to find!
Screaming Frog is not a Cloud-based application, but a downloadable desktop application developed and managed by a UK SEO agency. It offers a comprehensive technical solution for SEO and, in the free version, enables the Crawl of up to 500 URLs. This makes it an excellent alternative to all-in-one platforms such as Ahrefs or Semrush for smaller websites with a limited budget.
It can help crawl the following:
- Orphaned pages and crawl depth
- broken links
- Redirects
- Meta titles and descriptions too long or too short
- Problems with images (e.g. images that are too large, missing Alt text etc.)
... and much more
Price: Starts free of charge and the paid version costs 150€ / year.
AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic is another one of my favorite tools for Keyword-Research and idea generation.
The principle is simple. Enter a Keyword and you will receive a huge number of long-tail variants on this topic:
Every time I create a content roadmap report for a client, I use this tool to find low-competitive long-tail topics.
Price: Free of charge
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another free tool that helps webmasters to improve their organic Traffic understand and increase.
While Google Analytics helps you understand what's happening on your site as a whole, Google Search Console goes deeper into organic search performance on Google. With it you can
- find out from which search terms your Website traffic receives
- view your clicks, impressions, click rates and average positions (by page, country, device, etc.)
- an XMLSitemap so that Google finds your web pages better
- display possible penalties, security problems or basic web problems
... and more
Like Google Analytics the Google Search Console is also a must for SEO agencies that use it for their clients.
All you have to do is confirm that you are the owner of the website and you have access to a wealth of SEO data.
Cool feature: Go to "Overview"->"Performance" to get a list of keywords you are currently ranking for. Sort by "Position", so that your Ranking is at number 1 at the top. Then scroll down until you find the 10th to 25th places in the Google search results. These are the pages that you can sometimes get to page 1 with a little extra SEO love (e.g. by placing a few internal links to this page).
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you understand:
- Where your website visitors come from
- Who your website visitors are (e.g., demographic and geographic data)
- How the content of your website works
- Information about new and returning visitors
The software is easy to install and, due to its popularity, there are many good instructions on the Internet on how best to use it.
For an SEO agency, the main reason for accessing the Google Analytics-You can use your clients' SEO accounts and monitor them to measure organic traffic conversions. You (or your client) can set goals and events to measure the ROI of your SEO investment. Depending on your business model, you can track contact forms, purchases, free trials or other events.
At E-commerceSaaS and other more complex website models, you may reach your limits with analytics. A fast-growing trend in analytics is to invest more in tracking user behavior, which requires tools like Amplitude.
For simpler websites, however, Google Analytics is perfectly adequate. And for any website, it offers a wealth of useful data that is available completely free of charge. It is a must for every SEO agency.
Yoast SEO
Yoast was probably one of our first SEO tools, if you are like me with building your own website your first experiences in the Online Marketing you might already be familiar with Yoast SEO.
Yoast is a WordPressPlugin, which provides a whole range of functions for Search engine optimization offers. It helps you to optimize the content of your page for a specific Keyword to optimize. But it also helps you with more technical things, like redirecting pages (301) and the selection of URL-Slugs and meta descriptions.
The best thing about this tool is that it's embedded in your WordPress editor. You don't have to leave your CMS to get these insights, which greatly increases your productivity.
I always install Yoast on new WordPress sites, even if I'm already using other content optimization tools (because Yoast has so many other great features, even in the free version).
Price: Starts free of charge, the premium version is €89
OnPage SEO - Keep an eye on your performance!
Google PageSpeed Insights
You know that Google uses the loading speed of your website as a ranking factor.
With Google PageSpeed Insights you can find out whether Google classifies your website as lightning-fast or turtle-fast. You will also receive specific suggestions on how you (or your web developer) can increase the speed.
Official website:
PageSpeed-Insights
GTmetrix
Google Page Speed Insights analyzes the code of your website. GTmetrix actually loads the website.
When we want to measure the actual loading speed of a website, we always use GTmetrix. It also gives you recommendations on how to spruce up your website (literally).
Official website:
GTmetrix | Website Performance Test and Monitoring
Sitelin
Siteliner is one of the most important SEO tools when creating a new website. By identifying and fixing potential problems, the quality and value of a website improves almost automatically. It reduces cannibalization and adds more context to a given page when done correctly - that's the real reason for using this tool. When a free tool (more features are available in the paid version) makes it possible to identify duplicate layers, broken links and the reasons for page skipping (robots, no-Index etc.) to check, you can not complain.
The most important feature that makes Siteliner better than all the others is the Duplicate Content Table. It simply and clearly displays URLs, matching words, percentages and pages. And since the program is smart enough to detect pages with no-Index-tags, you can be sure that most of the pages will need to be edited with a high percentage.
Siteliner is an SEO checker tool that helps with this, Duplicate Content to be found on a website. What is Duplicate Content? Same content on other pages. Google penalizes websites with such content. With SEO tools like this one, you can check your entire website for Duplicate Contentbroken links, the average page size and speed, the number of internal links per page and much more. It also compares your website with the average of the websites checked with this tool so that you know better where you stand.
Official website:
Siteliner - Find Duplicate Content on your site
WOLF OF SEO Checker
If you want to take a quick look at the on-page SEO of your content, you should use our SEO Checker try it out. Our free tool quickly analyzes your page and shows you if there are any problems (e.g. missing image alt texts or broken links) that keep you away from page 1.
SEO PowerSuite
A set of high-quality, desktop-based SEO tools, including a rank checker, a backlink analysis tool, a site auditor and a Keyword-Research Tool.
Official website:
SEO software - all-in-one SEO tools for complete SEO optimization
Other recommendations:
UberSuggest
This was the first tool to analyze Google Autocomplete data. It has recently been extended with many new functions (e.g. Keyword-suggestions from YouTube, competition and filtering).
Official website:
Ubersuggest: Free Keyword-Research-Tool - Neil Patel
SE Ranking
SE Ranking is a high quality Ranking-tool, which comes with some bonus features like Keyword-suggestions and website check.
Official website:
SE-Ranking
Sistrix
Sistrix is an SEO platform for companies that Ranking the own website, Social Signals, Backlinksthe distribution of anchor texts and much more. Unlike many SEO tools with a million functions, Sistrix is so simple that even my mother could use it.
Cool feature: "Keyword Opportunities" shows you a list of keywords that your competitors rank for... but you don't.
Official website:
SISTRIX Toolbox
Ryte
A first-class technical and On-page SEO Tool developed with German engineering.
Cool feature: My favorite feature of Ryte is the TDIDF analysis. TDIDF identifies keywords that pages that rank for your target keyword like to use. These terms are great LSI keywords that you can incorporate into your content to improve your on-page SEO.
Official website:
The #1 platform for website usability
ScrapeBox
ScrapeBox is the self-proclaimed "Swiss Army Knife of SEO". Although this tool was developed for black-hat SEO, ScrapeBox can also be used for white-hat SEO.Linkbuilding-tasks (e.g. for searching for links, contact information and even for the Keyword-Research).
Official website:
ScrapeBox
Google Trends: SEO Checker Tool
Google Trends has been around for years, but has been underutilized. It not only provides information about a Keywordbut also provides great insight into trends around the topic, which can be invaluable at any stage of a business's growth. Searching for keywords in any country will give you information on top searches, search query growth, interest over time and geographic distribution by interest. If you're not sure which trends are relevant to you, this is the best SEO tool you can use.
These were our favorite SEO tools.
Of course, there are many that are missing from this list. I like Ahrefs and SEMrush.
I like SEMRush and Ahrefs better as a fully-fledged SEO platform, which is why I chose them for the list. Again, this is a subjective assessment and not a list of all SEO tools in the world.
In addition, there are different ways of working in different companies and therefore not every tool is equally suitable for every company or private individual. You simply have to find your own flow.
You will also notice that this list mainly contains tools for Google and less for other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo. That's because most of my SEO strategy revolves around Big G.
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