- Lauren Petrullo
- Max 9min read
14 Best SEO Tools Every Business Must Have (Free + Paid)
- By: Lauren Petrullo
- 10 mins max
- March 23, 2023
Looking to get ahead and stay ahead of your competition? Want to ensure your website reaches the right people with organic search engine optimization (SEO)?
Then join us as we explore the 14 best SEO tools for every business in 2023 and how they can help improve your online visibility, traffic, and engagement.
These cutting-edge tools are all proven solutions that can help you measure, adjust, analyze, and ultimately optimize your website so you can get ahead in a crowded digital marketplace.
Keep reading to find out more!
Best Free SEO Tools
1. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is like a mother to all live websites. This is probably the best free SEO tool that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google search results.
If you’re a marketer or website owner, Search Console can help kickstart your website’s SEO analysis from zero or update your current strategy with new keywords. The best part is that you don’t need to be a developer or software nerd to use this multifunctional tool.
Curious about how it works? Here are a few ways this can help you:
- Find out the keywords that are currently dominating search engine results!
- Uncover any and all crawl errors that may be lurking on your website with just a few clicks.
- Analyze how mobile-friendly your website is and identify potential improvements in the user experience that can be done on a small screen.
- Find out how many of your website pages are listed within Google’s Index (if they’re not, you can easily use the URL Inspection Tool to request indexing).
- Analyze your website’s performance with important metrics like clicks, impressions, average click-through rate (CTR), and average position.
2. Google Analytics
Even though Google Analytics has a paid edition, you can easily pair its free version with Google Search Console to oversee your website’s SEO.
Not only will it help you store your website’s SEO data in a central location, but it will also help you find improvement areas to rank on your desired keywords.
Besides, you can use Google Analytics for:
- Traffic segmentation: Eliminate the traffic that can negatively impact your SEO reports, such as false clicks, by filtering out referral traffic.
- Traffic comparison: Differentiate between organic and paid (non-organic) traffic. Know about traffic sources and optimize them for better results.
- Tracking engagement metrics: With Site Content Reports, get invaluable insight into the engagement of your web pages and directories, as well as track page exit metrics. You can also track and understand data about behavior and conversions of landing pages all in one place!
- Evaluating the Multi-Channel Report’s Assisted Conversions feature: Uncover which of your channels offer the highest returns (conversions) and analyze their impact on your business.
Overall, Google Analytics is one of the best SEO audit tools to track your website performance and activity.
3. Bing Webmaster Tools
The Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools is just like Google Search Console. Although the Bing tool is a little basic, it’s effective for website owners who want to rank on Bing and keep an eye on their site’s traffic and performance.
The tool comes packed with SEO functions to help you oversee backlinks, keywords, and overall site optimization.
Here’s what you can do with the tool:
- Take a peek at your backlink profile to discover the referring pages, domains, and anchor links that drive traffic to you.
- Find what keywords and phrases your target audience is looking for, as well as the search volumes of these words and expressions.
- Take advantage of the automated scan feature to crawl your website to spot any technical SEO errors that may be hindering your website’s performance.
- Look at SEO reports to find out errors on your website and even on individual pages.
4. Check My Links
This free Chrome extension helps you identify and spot broken links on web pages quickly, making it a top SEO tool.
With this tool, you can find out the number of links that are on a page, check for any redirects, and find out which ones are valid or not.
Take Wikipedia for example; if you search for a term on it, Check My Links will let you know how many links the page contains, and which of those are broken.
Imagine the impact it will have when you do the same for your website. You can save precious time and resources by quickly identifying broken links and fixing them.
Here’s what more it can do:
- Pinpoint broken links: Inspect every link on your webpages and discover all broken ones.
- Help distinguish links: Identify the high-performing links appearing in green and any broken ones showing up in red with a single glance.
- Export data: With a single click, you can copy all broken (or bad links) to the clipboard and paste them anywhere you want.
5. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a powerful tool that works with Google Ads. It helps you research and figure out the right keywords for your website. It provides you with valuable keyword insights into your target audience and gives you volume estimates to see how frequently these keywords are being searched.
The total is massively popular because it is owned by Google and hence offers authentic insights.
With this tool, you can:
- Research keywords related to your product or service and find out the most relevant ones with accurate data.
- Find out the cost needed to target them through ads.
- See search volume estimates for various keywords and get an idea of their popularity.
One of the most notable features is that you can uncover related keywords based on semantics. While other keyword tools suggest long and short-tail keywords, Google Keyword Planner will give you secondary keywords that are conceptually related to your primary keyword.
For example, other tools will suggest keywords like “best running shoes near me,” “best running shoes for men” when you type best running shoes.
Google Keyword Planner will suggest conceptually related words like “jogging,” “workout,” “cardio,” or even “sprints.” – that’s powerful and unique!
6. Google Trends
The above-listed SEO tools work great for keyword research and monitoring if your business is already established. But if you’re just getting started and want to identify popular industries, topics, or ideas worth exploring, Google Trends is the way to go.
Google Trends shows you how different topics have evolved over time and can provide useful data about the hottest trends in a certain industry.
You can use Google Trends to:
- Discover trends in your target regions (continents, countries, and even cities).
- Find hot topics and related high-volume long-tail keywords.
- Study a trend’s trajectory over time.
7. RankMath
RankMath is a WordPress SEO plugin and an excellent on-page optimization tool. It comes with a powerful, intuitive dashboard that provides insight into your website’s SEO performance via Google Search Console data.
What else does it do?
It saves your time by letting you add meta tags, titles, and descriptions to your posts in a single, user-friendly dashboard, which will otherwise take much time if you do it with coding.
Moreover, RankMath has a schema generator that allows you to add schema code to your content. Schema code basically helps search engines understand the context of your website better and display rich snippets that boost click-through rates.
Besides everything above, this SEO software helps with:
- Tracking keyword rankings.
- Monitoring Search Console data inside RankMath.
- Setting up URL redirects.
- Identifying and correcting dead links.
Best Paid SEO Tools
8. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the best SEO audit tools that helps you monitor your website’s performance from the inside out. This means it can help you identify errors, analyze your website’s backlink profile, find keywords that are ranking in search results, and much more.
Ahrefs also features an intuitive user interface for more efficient monitoring, reporting, and analysis. For example, with the Ahrefs Site Explorer tool, you can quickly identify all external and internal links pointing to any page on your website. You can even use the tool to compare data from different websites, track backlink changes, and spot link building opportunities.
Additionally, Ahrefs can assist you with:
- Competitor analysis: Monitor the SEO performance of your competitors to determine how you can better your own website.
- Keyword research: Discover the most relevant keywords for your business along with search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic.
- Content analysis: Analyze the content of your competitors to understand what type of content drives more visitors and engagement.
- Backlink monitoring: Keep track of changes to your backlink profile and identify any malicious links or other issues.
- SEO auditing: Scan your website for potential SEO errors, such as broken links, duplicate content, and more.
Overall, Ahrefs provides an extensive suite of SEO tools that can help you accurately monitor, analyze, and optimize your website’s SEO performance.
Pricing
You can choose one of the following plans:
- Lite: $99 per month
- Standard: $199 per month
- Advanced: $399 per month
- Agency: $999 per month
9. Keyword Tool
Keywordtool.io is another amazing keyword research tool that works for multiple platforms like Google, Bing, YouTube, eBay, and Amazon. Plus you can use it to find trending keywords for social media websites like Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter.
Its free account offers a bunch of relevant keyword ideas while the paid version will also include insights like keyword difficulty and search volume.
What makes Keywordtool.io a top SEO tool?
- It supports 46 languages and all Google domains, which is essentially data from 192 countries.
- The Keyword Tool API lets you find keywords on a much bigger scale.
- You can optimize your social media content for multiple platforms.
Pricing
You can choose one of the following plans:
- Pro Basic: $69 per month
- Pro Plus: $79 per month
- Pro Business: $159 per month
10. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a unique SEO tool that crawls websites, runs a robust analysis, and examines the URLs to identify possible issues.
Its free version can analyze up to 500 URLs without any cost, but you would need to buy the yearly plan to examine more URLs.
Why is the tool popular?
Well, manually examining URLs is a time taking process. For instance, large ecommerce websites have hundreds of URLs and it could take hours or days to check themthe all manually.
This tool drastically reduces the time and effort invested in this tedious process, allowing you to achieve results quickly.
Pricing
You can either use the limited version for free or pay $259 per year for advanced access.
11. SEMRush
SEMRush is a top SEO tool that provides insights into the organic performance of your website and competitor websites.
It can help you identify organic ranking opportunities, identify competitors’ rankings for the same keyword, and track changes to your website’s SEO metrics. It also offers an in-depth keyword research tool, which allows you to easily find relevant keywords for your content.
In addition, SEMRush can help you with:
- Displaying organic search traffic for any keyword.
- Identifying the top-ranking pages from a certain domain.
- Running backlink analysis to understand what type of links your competitors are using.
- Analyzing the SERP competition to see how many competitors are ranking for a particular keyword.
- Optimizing your website and content with customized recommendations.
Overall, SEMRush is a great tool for every SEO expert who wants to get a better understanding of their organic performance and make informed decisions.
Pricing
You can choose one of the following plans:
- Pro: $199 per month
- Guru: $229 per month
- Business: $449 per month
12. Surfer SEO
Surfer SEO is an on page optimization tool that helps you write highly optimized articles and blog posts. How does it work?
Surfer SEO will analyze what type of content ranks in the top positions for a specific keyword and then provide you with data-driven optimization recommendations. From comparing the word count and structure of your content to optimization suggestions based on 500+ on page signals, Surfer SEO can help you create content that ranks.
Content editor is the primary feature of this SEO software. It allows you to create highly optimized, keyword-rich content. The content editor has a scoring system that grades your content based on optimization and structure (headings & paragraphs).
Other than this, the tool offers:
- Location-based keyword research
- Competitors’ content analysis (with a score)
- FAQ suggestions
- Domain planner to organize your content creation & optimization
- Audit of your top-performing pages
Overall, it’s an amazing on page SEO tool that can help you write content that is optimized for SEO and readers at the same time.
Thankfully, the tool now comes with the Jasper integration option, which means you can now create content faster. Jasper.ai is an AI-powered content creation & optimization tool that uses real-time data to generate unique, relevant, and keyword-optimized content.
Pricing
You can choose one of the following Surfer SEO plans:
- Basic: $49 per month
- Pro: $99 per month
- Business: $199 per month
- Enterprise: Varies
13. Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a popular keyword research Chrome and Firefox extension that helps you find relevant keywords for your website.
It shows you a keyword’s volume, AdWords CPC (cost per click) & competition level, and past trend — all of it while you conveniently browse through Google or other search engines.
Doing so saves you a lot of time and you don’t have to switch between tabs to copy and paste keyword data.
Moreover, this amazing tool shows you PPA (People Also Ask) and related keyword data to improve your topic research efforts.
SEO professionals love using it because of how easily they can see real-time keyword stats while searching for them.
Overall, it’s an exceptional SEO software that helps you save time and resources while researching the best keywords for your website.
Pricing
They have a pay-as-you-go pricing model. The prices are:
- $10 for 100,000 credits
- $50 for 500,000 credits
- $100 for 1,000,000 credits
14. Moz Pro
Moz Pro is an all-in-one SEO tool that helps you track your website performance, research keywords, analyze backlinks, and optimize your website.
Moz Pro allows you to easily monitor your website’s performance with its keyword tracking or rank checker SEO tool. It also has a robust keyword research tool that provides keyword suggestions and competition insights.
In addition, Moz Pro offers its on-page optimization feature which helps you identify the most effective title tags, meta descriptions, and other SEO factors that are important for rankings. With its backlink analysis feature, you can easily find high-quality backlinks to help boost your website’s ranking.
Finally, the tool also offers a number of helpful resources such as guides and tutorials to help you get started and stay on track with your SEO efforts.
Overall, Moz Pro is an excellent tool for all levels of SEO professionals who want to take their SEO strategies to the next level.
Pricing
You can choose one of the following plans:
- Standard: $99 per month
- Medium: $179 per month
- Large: $299 per month
- Premium: $599 per month
Utilize SEO Tools To Boost Your Website's Ranking
These are some of the best free and paid SEO tools that every business should use to improve their website’s ranking in search engine results pages.
With so many options available, it can be overwhelming to choose which ones to use.
However, by understanding what each tool does and how it can benefit your business, you can narrow down your choices and find the right fit for your needs.
Learning to use these tools can save you time and help you stay up-to-date with the latest SEO trends and best practices.
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