The best SEO tools make it simpler and easier to ensure that your website is optimized for performance, as well as manage and monitor your search engine rankings. At its heart, SEO developed as an extension to web accessibility by following HTML4 guidelines, in order to help better identify the purpose and content of a document.
This meant ensuring that web pages had unique page titles that properly reflected their content, as well as keyword headings to highlight the content of individual pages, and that other tags were treated the same accordingly. This was necessary, not least because web developers were often only focused on coding issues rather than the user experience, let alone following web publishing guidelines.
This slowly changed as it became increasingly known that search engines used these “on-page” signals to provide their “Search Engine Results Pages” (SERPs) – and that there was an advantage to ranking higher on these to tap into free and natural organic traffic.
We’ve tested and judged the best SEO tools across various factors, from their documentation and user interface to the pricing and types of tools they offer.
Best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools
- Google Search Console: a free tool from Google that delivers invaluable insights into how your website is performing in search results. All major search engine optimization efforts should begin here. Simply verify your website by adding a code to your site or linking to your Google Analytics account. Having a Search Console account is not a necessity to show up on Google’s search results, but it does permit you to manage what gets indexed and how your website presents itself.
Acting as an SEO checker tool, Search Console helps you comprehend how both Google and its users perceive your site, enabling you to make improvements in order for better functioning when searching through Google’s database. It is especially useful for new websites since it allows webmasters the ability to submit their pages to get searched by indexing them.
- Ahrefs: an all-in-one SEO suite designed for marketers of all skill levels. It offers powerful analytics and keyword research tools. Ahrefs is one of the most popular SEO tools available online, second only to Google in terms of website crawling. Furthermore, experts highly recommend its Site Audit feature because it’s simply the best tool for analyzing and improving your website ranking on search engines.
What makes Ahrefs stand out is that you can easily analyze competitors’ backlinks data as a way to build up your brand – making this an invaluable resource for any marketer or business owner! With this SEO tool, you can uncover the most popular content in your industry, identify and repair broken links on your website, and even view a summary of pages with the highest performance (so you understand what data is attracting visitors).
- SEMRush: an SEO audit tool that helps you identify problems and optimize your website for better performance. SEMRush is a favorite among SEO experts for its ability to quickly assess rankings and spot new opportunities. One of its most beloved features, Domain Vs Domain analysis, allows you to compare your website with those of competitors side by side in one view.
Moreover, SEMRush provides analytics reports that can help you comprehend search data and traffic patterns on both yours as well as competitor’s websites better through comparison of keywords and domains. The On-Page SEO Checker tool is your ideal solution to effortlessly keep tabs on your rankings and receive advice on how to enhance your website’s performance.
- Moz Pro: an all-inclusive SEO suite that offers analytics, keyword research, link building, and more to help you achieve online success. Moz has garnered praise from many specialists for its ability to keep up with the frequent changes in Google’s algorithms. Additionally, customers have lauded Moz’s chat portal, which always offers insightful responses to any questions users may have.
For amazing keyword ideas and thorough website crawls, Moz stands out among the competition. It offers incredible insights into your page’s performance and how to enhance it.
- KWFinder: a keyword research tool that uses real-time data to provide accurate insights into keywords and related terms. SEO experts know that KWFinder is the go-to keyword tool for finding competitive yet low-hanging long-tail keywords. This SEO tool also runs analyses of backlinks and SERP – using its Rank Tracker to measure website rankings as well as any improvements over time, all at once glance. And if that weren’t enough, you can benefit from plenty of ideas on how to rank your own website even higher!
- Woorank: Woorank is a premier SEO tool that offers both free and paid options to track your marketing analytics. Try using Woorank to uncover the keywords of your competition, allowing you to overlap with their strategies. Additionally, monitor how keywords evolve over time in order for the best chances at optimization for users as well as search engines.
And most importantly, see what aspects are missing from your website – be it technical or content-related matters – so you can address them promptly! Thanks to Woorank’s range of features including duplicate content identification, downtime detection, and security issue reporting; you’ll have all the guidance necessary on fixing these issues quickly.
- SERPWoo: an SEO automation tool designed to track your competitors’ rankings quickly and accurately so you can outrank them. This tool is especially powerful for tracking keywords as SERPWoo provides comprehensive metrics on keyword trends such as click-through rates, impressions, and rankings. It also offers real-time notifications whenever your competitors appear in top search results, giving you the chance to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Last but not least, advanced analytics will help you understand why certain changes have resulted in a ranking boost, or why certain actions are having the opposite effect. SERPWoo is an invaluable asset for any SEO professional.
- Screaming Frog: an SEO spider tool that crawls websites to identify common technical and optimization issues. The tool runs a comprehensive audit of the website, including content, images, internal and external links, broken links, and more. Screaming Frog makes it easy to identify technical issues that need to be addressed in order to increase visibility on search engines.
Additionally, users can benefit from insights on how popular their content is with visitors as well as receiving suggestions on possible improvements. Screaming Frog is an essential SEO tool for any business looking to improve their website’s search engine optimization.
- DeepCrawl: a web-based crawling solution designed to uncover website performance issues, broken links, duplicate content, and more. With DeepCrawl, you can improve website usability and search engine visibility. The tool provides insights into the website hierarchy, allowing you to optimize your link structure for better SEO performance.
It also offers access to powerful analytics such as keyword rankings and crawl errors that need to be addressed immediately. All in all, DeepCrawl is an impressive crawler tool that provides detailed insight into the website’s performance, allowing you to make informed decisions on how to improve it.
- Sitebulb: an SEO auditing software that helps you discover site issues quickly and easily. It also provides comprehensive data analysis for informed decisions about your SEO strategy. Sitebulb’s features include a crawl map to visualize your website, automated reports with detail on page speed and technical SEO issues, plus an audit of backlinks and internal linking.
It also allows you to track keyword rankings over time, analyze SERP data for keywords related to your site, and monitor mobile optimization for improved user experience. Sitebulb is a great tool for anyone looking for an easy way to audit their website and make informed decisions about their SEO strategy.
What is an SEO crawler?
An SEO crawler can help you discover and fix issues that are preventing search engines from accessing and crawling your site. It remains an essential yet elusive tool in the arsenal of any good SEO expert. We caught up with Julia Nesterets, the founder of SEO crawler Jetoctopus to understand what exactly an SEO crawler is and why is it so important.
If you are a webmaster or SEO professional, this is probably the most heartbreaking message you may receive. Sometimes Google’s bots may ignore your content and SEO efforts and avoid indexing your page. But the good news is that you can fix this issue!
Search engines were designed to crawl, understand, and organize online content to deliver the best and most relevant results to users. Anything getting in the way of this process can negatively affect a website’s online visibility. Therefore, making your website crawlable is one of the primary goals and can highlight any issues you have with your web hosting service provider.
By improving your site’s crawlability you can help search engine bots understand what your pages are about and by that leverage your Google ranking. So how can an SEO crawler help?
- It offers real-time feedback. An SEO crawler can quickly crawl your website (some crawls as fast as 200 pages per second) to show any issues it gives. The reports analyze the URL, site architecture, HTTP status code, broken links, details of redirect chains and meta robots, rel-canonical URLs, and other SEO issues. These reports can be easily exported and referred to for further action by the technical SEO and development teams. Thus, using an SEO crawler is the best way to ensure your team is up to date on your website crawling status.
- It identifies indexing errors early. Indexing errors like 404 errors, duplicate title tags, duplicate meta descriptions, and duplicate content, often go unnoticed as they aren’t easy to locate. Using an SEO crawler can help you spot such issues during routine SEO audits, allowing you to avoid bigger problems in the future.
- It tells you where to start! Deriving insights from all available reports may be intimidating for any SEO professional. Therefore, it’s wise to choose an SEO crawler that is problem-centric and helps you prioritize issues. A good crawler should make it possible for webmasters to concentrate on the main problems by estimating their scale. That way, webmasters can keep fixing critical issues in a timely manner.
How do Google SEO spiders work and many more backlink questions
An SEO crawler can help you discover and fix issues that are preventing search engines from accessing and crawling your site. It remains an essential yet elusive tool in the arsenal of any good SEO expert. We caught up with Julia Nesterets, the founder of SEO crawler Jetoctopus to understand what exactly an SEO crawler is, why is it so important, and a bevy of questions about backlinks in general.
Google’s SEO spiders are programmed to collect information from web pages and send it to the algorithms responsible for indexing and evaluating content quality. The spiders crawl the URLs systematically. Simultaneously, they refer to the robots.txt file to check whether they are allowed to crawl any specific URL.
Once spiders finish crawling old pages and parsing their content, they check if a website has any new pages and crawl them. In particular, if there are any new backlinks or the webmaster has updated the page in the XML sitemap, Googlebots will add it to their list of URLs to be crawled.
So is it worth retrospectively adding backlinks? It’s worth adding backlinks to content that was posted a while ago, especially if a page is high-quality and on the same subject. This will also help preserve the equity of that page.
Is there a hierarchy of backlinks? Technically, there is no hierarchy of backlinks, as we can’t structure and scale them the way we want. However, we can increase the quality of backlinks based on several criteria like:
- Anchor text relevance
- Relevance and quality of a linking page
- Linking domain quality
- IP address
- Link clicks and a linking website traffic
- Few links on the linking webpage
The links of the highest quality have relevant keywords in the anchor text and come from trustworthy websites. But again, there are no hard and fast rules on how Google evaluates backlinks. Some backlinks can still be of proper quality even if they don’t fulfill these parameters.
How often should a site audit links?
Though there’s no right or wrong way of auditing links, there are a few pointers to bear in mind when determining the frequency.
- If your website has a long history of inorganic link building, it’s wise to do a monthly disavow.
- In most cases, a quarterly audit is recommended. It allows webmasters to keep a website’s link profile clean and track new backlinks pointing.
- Links on a website that has been growing ethically and isn’t in a competitive domain can be checked half-yearly as the risk of negative SEO is low.
Consider a website with hundreds of old, very low-traffic pages with no links (e.g. eCommerce/news). Is it worth either 301 these pages to relevant key hubs or updating the page with backlinks to the relevant key hubs without updating the dates?
In such a case, choose the pages with the best content and update them. Set up 301 redirects for the pages you do not want your audience to see and point them to the relevant key hubs. The key term here is ‘relevant.’ The 301 redirects should point to thematically relevant hubs. Otherwise, Google will treat them as soft 404s.
Are social media backlinks any good?
Most webmasters may feel that social media backlinks are pointless primarily because they are Nofollow links that do not impact SEO. However, social signals are an important ranking factor for Google. People are constantly clicking on links they see in their newsfeeds. If you offer great content, then this can be a great advantage for you. That’s why, do not ignore social backlinks.
