The traffic that comes to your website is how you make your money and expand your user base. The number of people who can find you is largely determined by how well your site matches the parameters that the Google search algorithms are looking for when they direct people to sources in their search results. The principles of how to do this better are outlined by Search Engine Optimization or SEO methods. These include everything from placing the right keywords in the right spot to linking to authority sites from your own.
Utilizing these methods, however, requires knowing which keywords are important in the first place. A comprehensive keyword research checklist can be invaluable for this purpose. Without painstakingly learning the principles and editing the pages manually, you can use tools to do the work for you to make your website refined for SEO. Here are the 9 best tools trusted by SEO companies across the world for search engine optimization research and planning.
Best SEO Tools
Google Search Console
Using Google Search Console means going to the source of the SEO practices to find a guide. This tool gives you readouts of the keyword rankings that are relevant to your site, as well as the record of your visitors’ impressions, including which pages they visited and for how long.
The main features you will be able to use with Search Console include:
- Site performance readouts, including impressions and keyword analyses
- Speed tests
- Mobile-optimized functioning
- Indexed URLs and link checks
Despite a delay in its reporting speeds, Search Console is an essential monitoring tool for upping the SEO game on your site.
Google Search Console can be downloaded by anyone with a website to see a readout of your site’s presence in search engines. It’s an ideal tool for people just getting into SEO who are looking for a user-friendly guide to its principles and includes troubleshooting and constant updates.
Specifically for seeing how visible your site is on Google, Google Search Console is a great SEO and spam-detection tool.
Majestic SEO Tools
Since 2011, Majestic has been giving sites access to its expertise on backlinks in the form of indexes on its dedicated app. These Fresh and Historic Indexes help you track your website’s activity recently and historically, culminating in the Majestic Million, which is the Majestic CEO Tools’ ranking of the top million sites.
There are two versions of Majestic Tools. The lite version includes the backlink checker, which allows you to monitor negative comments on your website, which you can use to improve your visibility.
SEMrush SEO toolkit
These SEO tools give you a window into the data of your competition’s site activity. They’ve been providing people intuitive dashboards to monitor their competitors since 2008. As a comparative tool, SEMrush leads the market.
Whether you want to analyze backlinks or traffic, you can see how your website competes with others and also the keywords that your competition uses to get ahead of the game. Beginners may find its specific use of SEO terminology hard to understand, but those who know what they’re looking at should take advantage of this robust tool.
SEO Spider
Though SEO Spider has a free version, experienced users may find it overly limited. The advanced version includes Google analytics integration and the customizable robots.txt file.
Using SEO Spider to search URLs (they call it “crawling”), you don’t have to click on links that are in error. You can easily check all the links on a page and correct duplicate tags through one app.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool that includes a Site Audit and Keyword Crawler feature. These allow you to examine your site for what you can improve and can help you improve your backlinking with a log of over 16 trillion links.
Despite having no free version, Ahrefs is often recommended as an organizational and backlinking tool.
Moz Pro
This community-supported marketing tool helps people accustomed to SEO manage their traffic and increase their ranking and visibility in search engines. The intuitive toolbar gives you access to the metrics that you need and lets you see the website’s suggestions for the best keyword combination you should use. It has a free trial, but all full versions are priced according to the services you need.
Live Keyword Analysis
Excessive use of keywords can be as bad or worse than not using them at all because new Google analytics have subroutines that exclude websites they deem to be “scam.” Using too many obvious keywords is one way to get accidentally flagged by their program.
Live Keyword Analysis allows you to input keywords to get a density analysis that helps you optimize your copywriting for the best results. You could then use tools like Ranktracker.com to track the rankings for the keywords in your SEO campaign.
Google Optimize
Google Optimize helps you balance your content with your rankings by providing you comprehensive tests to compare elements on your webpages, such as its A/B test. It has customized tools that help you understand how your site’s SEO works and how to improve it based on comparisons to other pages. Google Optimize is designed for people who already know their way around SEO principles and it’s one of the best such tools that is also completely free.
SEO Quake
SEO Quake gives detailed reports on your site’s relationship to multiple search engine metrics, including the number of visitors to your pages and what countries they accessed your site from. It has a “cheat sheet” that allows you to diagnose issues you may be having with your traffic. Its guide comes with dedicated buttons for backlinks and index updates so you can examine the information from any angle you prefer.
Best of all, SEO Quake is completely free.
The Takeaway
SEO tools are available online both for novices and those experienced in website metrics. Many of those offered at premium prices come with various tools that you can use to get ahead of your competition.
These tools include examining keywords on your pages, comparing keyword density to effective results, identifying the marketing strategies of your competition, refining your backlinks, showing your visitor records, and improving your traffic.
These ten tools offer a mix of these features at prices that range from free to various premium services. The ones listed have intuitive controls, toolbars, and troubleshooting features. Some, like the Google tools, only show your metrics in terms of Google while others branch out and give you more general readouts from the internet as a whole.
Depending on your needs as a website and your experience as an SEO technician, one of these programs should do the trick to give you the information you need to become more visible and relevant in this search engine-driven marketplace.