Ahrefs is a great tool for SEO. It is easy to use and very powerful. It provides a lot of information about the backlinks, keywords, domains and pages. The tool also shows the estimated traffic and the search volume for keywords. You can easily find out what keywords your competitors are using in their content and use them in your own website’s content.
The best thing about this tool is that it helps you identify the most valuable links that are pointing towards your site. You can also use this tool to find out which links have stopped working or have been removed by Google Penguin update. This will help you to improve your website’s performance.
It also helps you find any broken links on your site so that they can be fixed quickly and improve user experience as well as rank better in search engines like Google and Bing etc..
Free Seo Tools Like Ahrefs
This is a list of legit alternatives to the popular SEO tool, Ahrefs.
In this post I’ll:
List out 7 SEO tools that you can use instead of Ahrefs
Show you how each of them compares to Ahrefs
My personal experience with each tool
So if Ahrefs isn’t a good fit for you, check out the list below for your best options.
The 7 Best Ahrefs Alternatives
- Ubersuggest
In my opinion, Ubersuggest is one of the best free SEO tools on the market.
Ubersuggest – Homepage
Why?
Because it has a wide range of features, including:
Keyword research
Topic research (like BuzzSumo)
Backlink analysis
SEO audit reports
And more
And each of them are solid.
In fact, if you’re just starting out with SEO, Ubersuggest is a solid option.
Now: Ubersuggest used to be 100% free. But they recently rolled out a paid plan.
Ubersuggest – Pro Version Pricing
The free version is still solid. But if you want to access more features or get more reports, the paid plan might be a good option for you. For example, with a paid plan you get unlimited SEO audit reports.
Ubersuggest – Pro Unlimited Reports
Which is helpful if you have SEO clients or manage a bunch of websites.
How Ubersuggest Compares to Ahrefs
Like I said above, Ubersuggest is a high-quality tool. That said: it’s not quite as feature-rich as Ahrefs.
So if I had to compare Ubersuggest and Ahrefs side-by-side based on features alone, I’d go with Ahrefs.
But there’s another important factor to consider: cost.
Ahrefs starts at $99/month.
Ahrefs – Lite-Pricing Monthly
Ubersuggest is a flat $29/month.
If you have a large marketing budget, I’d still probably go with Ahrefs. But in terms of pure value, Ubersuggest definitely comes out on top.
- SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the most popular SEO tools on the market.
SEMrush – Homepage
And for good reason: it’s REALLY good.
In fact, I’ve been a paying SEMrush customer for over 8 years now:
SEMrush –Profile Registration Date
Over that time I’ve seen it evolve from a keyword research tool for PPC to a full-on SEO software suite.
Today, besides its standard keyword research features (like search volume, CPC etc.), SEMrush also has a ton of helpful features like:
Traffic analytics (where a site gets its traffic from)
Backlink analytics
Rank tracking
SEO site audits
On-page SEO analysis
And lots more
In my opinion, SEMrush is probably the closest tool to Ahrefs out there (both in terms of feature quantity and quality).
How SEMrush Compares to Ahrefs
I already wrote a complete SEMrush vs. Ahrefs breakdown here. So if you want a super-detailed list of how Ahrefs and SEMrush compare, check out that review.
But the bottom line is that Ahrefs and SEMrush are VERY similar.
Similar in terms of features. Similar in terms of quality. And even similar in terms of pricing.
Ahrefs And Semrush Pricing
I do personally prefer Ahrefs. Mostly because I really like their UX. Specifically, Ahrefs’ excellent UX makes it easier for me to do my work.
So even if SEMrush has the same exact feature as Ahrefs, they’re harder to find and harder to use.
For example, when you analyze a site in Ahrefs, you have a SUPER helpful sidebar that links directly to important reports (like broken links, internal links and anchor text).
Ahrefs – Site Report Sidebar
In SEMrush, you also have a sidebar. But it only links to features.
SEMrush – Domain Overview Sidebar
To find something specific, you need to dig into each feature to find the exact thing you need.
Now, this is obviously a personal preference. Some people actually like SEMrush’s UX better than Ahrefs.
But in terms of pure features, Ahrefs and SEMrush are pretty much tied. So if you want an Ahrefs alternative with a list of similar features, I recommend trying SEMrush.
- Monitor Backlinks
Monitor Backlinks claims to have “The best monitoring tool for backlinks and keywords, period.”
Monitor Backlinks – Homepage
I first signed up for Monitor Backlinks in 2015. And I just gave the tool another try today.
Now: it does have some pretty cool features. For example, a disavow tool.
Monitor Backlinks – Disavow Tool
But the main issue with the tool is that there’s really nothing unique here. Monitor Backlinks basically just pulls data from Majestic and Moz. And adds a few bells and whistles (like a rank tracker).
How Monitor Backlinks Compares to Ahrefs
In my opinion, Monitor Backlinks doesn’t begin to compare to Ahrefs. They’re not close.
For example, with Ahrefs you can pull 10k rows of backlink data.
Ahrefs – Rows Per Report
With Monitor Backlinks, you only get 4k.
Monitor Backlinks Daily Rows
There’s also the fact that it lacks a keyword tool, competitor analysis feature, domain comparisons, organic traffic reporting… and a laundry list of features that you get in Ahrefs.
Monitor Backlinks does have a free trial. Which can give you feel for the tool. So if you want to give it a spin, go ahead.
But in my opinion, Monitor Backlinks is so limited that it barely qualifies as an Ahrefs alternative.
- Mangools
Mangools isn’t your typical SEO software suite.
Instead of a bunch of integrated features, Mangools is actually 5 completely different tools.
Mangools – App Shortcuts
For example, let’s say you want to see the keywords that a site ranks for in Google.
Well, you’d open up “KWFinder” hit the “Search by domain” tab, and type in the domain you want to look at:
KWFinder – Domain Search Backlinko
And now you want to see that site’s backlinks. Well, now you need to go back to your dashboard, hit “LinkMiner” to open up their backlink tool, and start the whole process over again.
Link Miner – Search Backlinko
So yeah, this setup isn’t ideal. And it makes using the tool MUCH harder than it needs to be.
That said: as I write in my recent Mangools review, the tools themselves are actually pretty solid. Not quite at the level of SEMrush. But not bad.
I just wish the tools weren’t stitched together.
How Mangools Compares to Ahrefs
In my opinion, Mangools isn’t even in the same universe as Ahrefs.
And I’m not just talking about the fact that it takes 3-5x more clicks to do something in Mangools than in Ahrefs.
The features themselves also aren’t nearly as solid as Ahrefs.
For example, the backlink analysis feature Mangools doesn’t have that many filters.
You basically have filters for dofollow vs. nofollow, active vs. deleted… and that’s about it.
Link Miner Analysis Filters
With Ahrefs, you can filter by literally hundreds of things, like link type, language, to URL Rating, and more.
Ahrefs – Backlinks Search Filters
Which is super helpful if you want to drill down on a specific type of backlink.
So it’s clear that Ahrefs is overall a better SEO tool than Mangools. But is it a better value?
Mangools’s “Basic” plan is is about half the price of the Ahrefs “Starter” plan.
Mangools – Basic Pricing Monthly
(Note: if you sign up for an annual plan, the price of Mangools Basic goes down to $29).
I personally don’t think the tradeoff in price is worth it. I rather pay 2x more for a tool that’s 10x better. Which is why I happily pay for Ahrefs every month.
But it’s ultimately your call. If you’re on a super tight budget, you can still get a lot out of Mangools. But if you can swing 100 bucks a month, I recommend going with a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush.
- Moz Pro
I’ll cut right to the chase:
Moz Pro isn’t a bad SEO tool.
MOZ Pro – Product Page
But it’s not quite at the level of its two main competitors: Ahrefs and SEMrush.
The main issue with Moz Pro is that it’s features haven’t really kept up with the competition.
While Ahrefs and SEMrush are constantly rolling out improvements, Moz Pro has really only rolled out one recent feature improvement: their keyword tool known as “Keyword Explorer”.
Granted, Moz’s keyword tool is great. And it’s especially good at generating long tail keyword suggestions. But I can say the same thing about Ahrefs and SEMrush.
How Moz Pro Compares to Ahrefs
I recently put a bunch of the top backlink checkers to the test.
Backlinko – Best Backlink Checker Post
And we found that Moz was actually on the same level as the other tools. Both in terms of findings links quickly. And the total number of backlinks in its index.
Backlinko – Site Data Table
The main issue with Moz Pro is that they charge $99/month. And in my opinion you’ll get much more from that investment with SEMrush or Ahrefs.
- Majestic
Even though it’s getting a little dated, Majestic SEO is still one of the top SEO tools on the market.
Majestic SEO Homepage
Majestic is 100% focused on backlink reports. So if you want a tool that takes care of all of your SEO tasks in one place, Majestic SEO probably isn’t a good fit for you.
But if all you care about is backlink data, Majestic SEO is actually pretty solid.
In fact, in that backlink checker comparison I mentioned earlier, Majestic wasn’t too far behind other major SEO tools.
In fact, for some sites, it actually found more backlinks than SEMrush.
MOZ – Truvani Site Data Table
As you can read in my full Majestic review, I can’t criticize the data you find in the tool all that much. It’s actually solid tech.
The main problem is that the UX is super outdated.
Majestic Backlink Search Interface
And I’m not just talking about the look and feel. I don’t really care about that. It’s more that the backend is tricky to use. Especially compared to Ahrefs.
How Majestic Compares to Ahrefs
In terms of pure backlink data, Majestic SEO isn’t a bad Ahrefs alternative.
But you can’t really evaluate a tool based only on the data it provides. You also need to take into account UX, key features, customer support, and more.
And when you take all that stuff into account, Ahrefs comes out way ahead.
For example, you can use Ahrefs for pretty much all of your SEO tasks. Keyword research. Technical SEO. Rank Tracking. And more.
Majestic doesn’t have any of that stuff. It’s a 100% pure link building tool.
That said, the price of Majestic reflects the lack of features. It starts at $50/month.
Majestic SEO – Pricing
Which is about half the price of Ahrefs.
So if you’re someone that pretty much ONLY cares about backlinks, then you’ll probably get an insane amount of value from that 50 bucks.
But if you want an all-in-one piece of SEO software, Ahrefs is probably your best bet.
- BuzzSumo
Next up, let’s take a look at BuzzSumo.
BuzzSumo – Content Search Backlinko
Unlike some of the other tools that I listed here, BuzzSumo isn’t super SEO focused. It’s more of a content marketing tool.
So why does BuzzSumo make this list of Ahrefs alternatives?
First, up SEO and content marketing overlap. A LOT.
In other words: your site can be perfectly optimized. But to rank today, your content needs to be GREAT.
Plus, BuzzSumo does have a few SEO-focused features (like a decent backlinks tool):
Buzzsumo – Backlinks Tool
So yeah, BuzzSumo is one of my favorite marketing tools. And it’s improved my SEO indirectly by making my content better.
How Buzzsumo Compares to Ahrefs
To be clear: Ahrefs and BuzzSumo are very different tools.
For example, BuzzSumo lacks a lot of the key SEO features in Ahrefs, like a site audit tool.
And Ahrefs lacks a lot of the content-focused features in BuzzSumo, like mention tracking.
That said, there is some overlap between the two tools. For example, both Ahrefs and BuzzSumo have features that help you find content with lots of social media shares.
BuzzSumo Ahrefs Side By Side
So the question here isn’t: “How does BuzzSumo stack up against Ahrefs?”. It’s more: “Do you want a tool that’s focused on SEO (Ahrefs)?
Or a tool that helps with content marketing (BuzzSumo)?”.
If you’re 100% focused on improving your Google rankings, then I’d stick to Ahrefs or one of the other tools that I listed here. But if you want SEO to be more of a byproduct of your content marketing, you’ll get a lot of value out of BuzzSumo.
So yeah, there’s no right or wrong answer. It depends on the type of digital marketing that you’re focusing on right now.
I personally use both all the time. And because I’m more focused on SEO I tend to use Ahrefs more often than BuzzSumo.
But I know plenty of people that use BuzzSumo every day and only login to Ahrefs once and a while. So it really depends.
Bonus. Serpstat
Our last alternative to Ahrefs is Serpstat.
Serpstat is billed as an “All-in-One SEO platform”.
Serpstat – Homepage
And it largely delivers. Serpstat has the features you’d expect from an SEO software suite, like backlink analysis, organic rankings reports, and more.
That said, I’m not sure if the features themselves are all that great.
For example, when I look at the top SEO keywords report for Backlinko, it says that my top 3 keywords are YouTube views, pogosticking… and “press released”?
Serpstat – Domain Search Top Keywords
I obviously don’t expect this report to be 100% accurate. You’d need my Google Analytics for that. But these numbers are way off.
That said, it’s “Backlink Dashboard” is pretty good. I used it to analyze my backlink profile. And it found that Backlinko has 21.4K referring domains.
Serpstat – Backlink Dashboard Reffering Domains
That pretty much aligns with what Ahrefs’ Site Explorer report.
Ahrefs Site Explorer – Reffering Domains
How Serpstat Compares to Ahrefs
Serpstat has many of the same features as Ahrefs.
But I don’t think any of them are as good as Ahrefs.
For example, my organic keywords report in Ahrefs is much more accurate than Serpstat:
Ahrefs – Organic Keywords Top Three
They both technically have the same feature. But one is way better than the other.
The one Serpstat feature that’s comparable to Ahrefs is their backlink analysis tool. It has a massive index. Plus, it’s pretty easy to use.
best seo tools
Why Use SEO Tools?
SEO tools save you from tedious keyword research and data analysis. With these tools, you’re able to see what’s working and which parts of your strategy could benefit from some tweaking. The best SEO tools also provide reports about how you measure up to competitors and where the greatest opportunities lie. What’s more, they allow you to measure search performance countries, regions, or languages.
It gets better. If you’re managing more than one website, SEO tools can help you assess each site’s performance on the fly. Many entrepreneurs with multiple websites end up putting a lot of data in spreadsheets and analyzing it manually. But that soon becomes overwhelming and raises the risk of the reports being inaccurate. Fortunately, you can use SEO software to save hours of effort and generate accurate reports at a click.
Best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools
- Ahrefs: SEO Keyword Tool
Ahref – SEO Keyword Tool
Ahrefs is one of the most recommended SEO tools online. It’s only second to Google when it comes to being the largest website crawlers. SEO experts can’t get enough of Ahrefs’ Site Audit feature as it’s the best SEO analysis tool around. The tool highlights what parts of your website need improvements to rank better in search engines. From a competitor analysis perspective, you’ll likely use Ahrefs to determine your competitor’s backlinks to use them as a starting point for your own brand. You can also use this SEO tool to find the most linked to content within your niche, check and fix broken links on your website,and get an overview of your best-performing pages (so you can see what information is drawing in the visitors).
Syed Irfan Ajmal
Syed Irfan Ajmal, a Growth Marketing Manager at Ridester, loves the SEO keyword tool Ahrefs. He shares, “Ahrefs is surely our most favorite tool when it comes to various facets of SEO such as keyword research, rank tracking, competitor research, SEO audit, viral content research and much more. We add our site and those of our competitors to it. The tool then shows us the sites which have backlinked to our competitors but not us. This helps us find great link opportunities. But this wouldn’t have been so easy if Ahrefs didn’t have the largest database of backlinks. Ahrefs has been instrumental in getting our site ranked for several major keywords, and getting us to 350,000 visitors per month.”
- Google Search Console: Top SEO Tool
Best seo tools
Offered for free to everyone with a website, Google Search Console lets you monitor and report on your website’s presence in Google SERP. All you need to do is verify your website by adding a code to your website or going through Google Analytics and you can submit your sitemap for indexing. Although you don’t need a Search Console account to appear in Google’s search results, you can control what gets indexed and how your website is represented with this account. As an SEO checker tool, Search Console can help you understand how Google and its users view your website and allow you to optimize for better performance in Google search results. It’s especially useful for new websites as it lets site owners submit web pages for search indexing. - SEMRush: Marketing SEO Tools
SEMRush – Marketing SEO Tools
Marketing SEO tools like SEMRush tend to be fan favorites in the SEO community. Experts love that they let you easily assess your rankings as well as identify changes and new ranking opportunities. One of the most popular features of this SEO tool is the Domain Vs Domain analysis, which allows you to easily compare your website to your competitors. If you’re looking for analytics reports to help you better understand your website’s search data, traffic, or even your competitors, you’ll be able to compare keywords and domains. The On-Page SEO Checker tool allows you to easily monitor your rankings and find some recommendations on how to improve your website’s performance.
Liraz Postan – SEO Experts
Liraz Postan, Senior SEO & Content Manager at Outbrain, recommends SEMRush as one of the best SEO tools. She says, “My favorite SEO tool is SEMrush with the feature of “organic traffic insights”. This feature lets me see all my leading articles with one dashboard, along with related keywords, social shares and word count. This gives me a quick overview of what’s working and where to optimize. I generally use SEMrush on my daily work, love this tool, and love using its site audit to optimize our site health. We improved our site health by 100% more since we started using SEMrush, and we increased conversions by 15% more from our content pages.”
- KWFinder: SEO Keyword Tool
KWFinder – SEO Keyword Tool
An SEO keyword tool like KWFinder helps you find long-tail keywords that have a lower level of competition. The experts use this SEO tool to find the best keywords and run analysis reports on backlinks and SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Their Rank Tracker tool helps you easily determine your ranking while tracking your improvement based on one key metric. Plus, if that’s not enough, you’ll get a ton of new keyword ideas to help you rank your website even higher.
George PerryGeorge Perry, an SEM Specialist at Bandwidth, raves about KWFinder. “I like that not only does it show me information on the keyword that I was searching for, but pulls in good suggestions for related terms, and how they compare (volume, CPC, difficulty, etc.) to the term I originally looked at. I’ve been able to help my clients target not only those big, pie in the sky vanity terms, but to better target those terms that are lower in the funnel and more likely to convert, allowing me to target them through focused content that answers the questions they’re actually asking.”
- Moz Pro: SEO Software
Moz Pro SEO software
SEO software Moz Pro keeps popping up as one of the best SEO tools that experts actually use. Some specialists raved about how Moz was always up to date despite Google’s regular algorithm changes. Others praised Moz’s chat portal that allows them always to get an insightful response to every question asked. Whether you’re looking for keyword recommendations or a site crawl, Moz is a full-service powerhouse. You can get great insights into how your website is performing but also how to improve it. They also have a free MozBar toolbar that you can download to see your website’s metrics while browsing any page. If you’re looking to learn more about SEO, you should also consider checking out MozCon, their annual conference.
Keri Lindenmuth
Keri Lindenmuth’s, Marketing Manager at Kyle David Group, go-to SEO tool is none other than Moz Pro. She says, “My favorite feature of the tool is its ‘page optimization feature.’ It tells you exactly what steps you can take to improve the SEO of every single page on your website. For example, it will tell you to ‘Include your keyword in this page title’ or ‘Add an image with a keyword alt tag.’ This tool has substantially improved our client’s business simply by the fact that it gives increased transparency. We can compare their site’s traffic and optimization to that of their competitors. We can see which pages and search terms their competitors perform well in and alter our web practices to compete against theirs. Without a tool like Moz, SEO really becomes a guessing game. You have no idea where you’re doing well and where you can use improvement.”
- Ubersuggest: Keyword Tracking Tool
Ubersuggest: Keyword Tracking Tool
Ubersuggest, developed by Neil Patel, is a free keyword finder tool that helps you identify keywords and also the search intent behind them by showing the top ranking SERPsFrom short to long-tail phrases, you can find the right terms to use on your website with hundreds of suggestions from this free great keyword tool. Metrics Ubersuggest includes in its reports are keyword volume, competition, CPC, and seasonal trends. Great for both organic SEO and paid PPC, this tool can help you determine if a keyword is worth targeting and how competitive it is.
- Answer The Public: Free SEO Tools
Answer The Public – Free SEO Tools
Free SEO tools like Answer The Public allow you to easily find topics to write about for your blog. I’ve used this tool in the past to create content around specific keywords to better rank online. Say you’re in the ‘fitness’ niche. You can use this free SEO tool to create content around keywords like fitness, yoga, running, Crossfit, exercise and cover the entire spectrum. It’s great for finding featured snippet opportunities. Say you hire a freelancer to create content for you, all you need to do is download this list and send it over to them. And it would only take you five minutes, making it one of the most efficient ways to come up with SEO topics for new websites.
Matt Jackson
Matt Jackson, Head of Content at Wild Shark, loves free SEO tools like AnswerThePublic. He shares, “One of my favorite tools when compiling SEO content for a site is AnswerThePublic.com. The best feature of the tool is that it presents a list of the questions that web users are asking about a particular keyword. If I’m running out of genuinely useful content ideas, or if I’m compiling an FAQ page, it provides invaluable guidance as to what, exactly, people are searching for. It is not only useful for SEO content, it means that our clients can answer questions on their site, minimizing the number of customer service calls they receive and giving greater authority to a page and the overall business. And here’s a quick tip: prevent neckache by hitting the Data button, rather than straining to read the question wheel.”
- SpyFu: Free SEO Tools
SpyFu – Free SEO Tools
While SpyFu has an amazing premium version, many of our experts raved about its free features. If you’re just starting out, you can easily grow into the paid features as you start succeeding. You can easily view the number of times a keyword gets searched each month while easily determining the ranking difficulty for that keyword. You can also do some research on your competitors to determine which keywords they use. Additionally, you can search your competitor’s, or your own, website to easily see how many organic keywords they have, how many monthly clicks they get, who their paid and organic competitors are, the campaigns they’re running with Google Ads, and more. It’s one of the most detailed SEO analysis tools on the market.
Adele Stewart
Adele Stewart, Senior Project Manager at Sparq Designs, can’t get enough of SEO software SpyFu. She shares, “I have used SEMrush and Agency Analytics in the past, but SpyFu has the one-up on my client’s competitors. All of SpyFu’s features are great, but my absolute favorite is the SEO Research feature. You’re able to plug in a competitor’s domain and pull up information on their own SEO strategy. You can see what keywords they pay for vs. their organic standings, review their core keywords, and even assess their keyword groups. Using SpyFu has been integral to my client’s SEO successes. There’s so much more to track and report on, plus I don’t have to put in as much effort in research as I did with other SEO software. SpyFu pulls the information I need and organizes reports in a way that is presentable and understandable to my clients. I’ve already seen increases in indexing and rank for keywords that we didn’t even think of.”
- Woorank: SEO Ranking Tool
woorank seo ranking tool
As a top SEO analysis tool, Woorank offers free and paid options to track and report your marketing data. You can plug in your competitors to discover which keywords they are targeting so you can overlap with theirs. Try understanding how keywords perform over time to optimize for users and search engines in the best way possible. And most importantly, understand the things your website is lacking from both a technical and content perspective. Woorank can help you identify duplicate content, downtime, and security issues and provide guidelines on how to fix them. - Majestic: Marketing SEO Tools
Majestic: Marketing SEO Tools
Majestic is one of the best marketing SEO tools according to experts. It has countless useful features like The Majestic Million which lets you see the ranking of the top million websites. Did your website make the cut? The Site Explorer feature allows you to easily see a general overview of your site and the number of backlinks you have. It also works as an SEO keyword tool to find the best keywords to target while also having features geared to site comparisons and tracking your rank.
Ryan Scollon
Ryan Scollon, SEO Consultant at RyanScollon.co.uk recommends the SEO tool Majestic. He says, “My favorite SEO tool is Majestic, with its main feature allowing you to check the backlinks of a website that you specify. My favorite feature is the ability to add your own client’s site and a bunch of competitors, allowing you to easily compare a variety of SEO metrics such as trust flow, referring domain count, and external backlinks count. Not only does it help us understand the [client’s optimization] weaknesses, but it also provides a simple table that we share with our clients, so they too can understand the problems and how they stack up to their competitors. We also use Majestic to audit competitors’ backlinks, as we can sometimes find a handful of easy opportunities to tackle before moving onto other link building tactics.”
- Google Trends: SEO Checker Tool
Google Trends Wireless Phone Charger
Google Trends has been around for years but has been underutilized. Not only does it give you information regarding a keyword but it offers great insight into trends around the topic, which can be invaluable at any stage of a business’s growth. Search for keywords in any country and receive information around it like top queries, rising queries, interest over time, and geographical locations depending on interest. If you are unsure which trends are the ones for you, this is the best SEO tool to use. - SEOQuake: Free SEO Tools
SEOQuake – Free SEO Tools
SEOQuake is considered one of the best free SEO tools. This Chrome extension acts as an SEO checker tool that performs on-page site audits, assesses both your internal and external links, and also does website comparisons to determine how you perform against your competitors. Other features of this SEO analysis tool include keyword analysis such as keyword density, an easy to read SEO dashboard, and an export feature that allows you to easily download and send data to key people on your team.
Brin Chartier
Brin Chartier, an expert digital marketer, and SEO content creator, loves the free SEO tool SEOQuake. She says, “I love a good browser extension, and SEOquake is the best free SEO tool for instant SEO metrics on any website or SERP. I can instantly pull an on-page SEO audit for myself or competitors, and the SERP overlay feature is an awesome visualization of key page metrics that I can export to CSV & share with my team. This tool saves me hours of manual work that I can use to actually move the needle creating SEO optimized content instead.”
- Siteliner: SEO Analysis Tool
Siteliner – SEO Analysis Tool
Siteliner is an SEO checker tool that helps you find duplicate content on your website. What’s duplicate content? Identical content to other websites. And Google penalizes websites with it. With SEO tools like this one, you’ll be able to scan your entire website to find duplicate content, broken links, average page size and speed, the number of internal links per page, and more. It also compares your website to the average of websites checked with this tool to help you better understand where you stand.
Tieece Gordon
Tieece Gordon, a Search Engine Marketer at Kumo Digital, recommends the SEO tool Siteliner. He shares, “Siteliner is one of my go-to SEO tools whenever I’m presented with a new site. Identifying and remedying potential problems almost automatically improves quality and value, reduces cannibalization, and adds more context to a specific page if done correctly, which is the whole reason for using this tool. For a free (paid version offering more available) tool to offer the ability to check duplicate levels, broken links, and reasons any pages were skipped (robots, no-index, etc.) though, there can be no complaints at all. The key feature here that Siteliner does better than any other I’ve come across is the Duplicate Content table. It simply and easily lays out URLs, match words, percentages, and pages. And because it’s smart enough to skip pages with no-index tags, it’s a safe bet that most showing a high percentage need to be dealt with. I’ve seen a lot of ecommerce sites relying on manufacturer descriptions, service sites that want to target multiple areas with the same text, and sites with simply thin pages – sometimes a combination of these, too. I’ve seen that adding valuable and unique content has seen rankings, and in turn, sessions and conversions jump up for clients. All of this has stemmed from Siteliner. It may not be the enterprise-level, all-singing, all-dancing software that promises the world, but its simplicity is perfect.”
- Fat Rank: SEO Tools
Fat Rank – SEO Tools
SEO Chrome extensions like Fat Rank allow you to easily analyze your website’s performance. This SEO keyword tool lets you know the ranking of your keywords. You can add keywords to your search to find out your rank per page for each keyword you optimized for. If you don’t rank for the top 100 results, it’ll tell you that you’re not ranking for that keyword. This information allows you to better optimize your website for that keyword so you can make adjustments as needed.
Blake Aylott
Blake Aylott’s, SEO expert at Project Build Construction, favorite free SEO tool is one no one ever really talks about. “The SEO tool is called Fatrank. It’s a Chrome extension, and it shows the rank for any search query you type in as for a URL as long as you’re on that URL. If I need to know how I am currently ranking for a keyword, I can simply type it in and see. It is extremely accurate and live. The tool is a lifesaver when clients want to know their current ranking for something, and I can tell them with 100% accuracy. Fat Rank is free and should be a part of every SEO’s arsenal of tools.”
- Keywords Everywhere: SEO Keyword Tool
keywords everywhere seo tool
Keywords Everywhere is another great SEO Chrome extension that aggregates data from various SEO tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Trends, and more to help you find the best keywords to rank for. Free SEO tools like these simplify the process of determining the best keywords for your website. So rather than going through several websites each day, you can use this one tool to save you a huge amount of time.
Eagan Heath
Eagan Heath, Owner of Get Found Madison, is a huge fan of the SEO tool Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension. He shares, “It allows both me and my clients to see monthly U.S. keyword search volume right on Google, which is great for brainstorming blog topic ideas. It also allows you to bulk upload lists of keywords and see the data, which Google now hides behind enormous ranges unless you pay for Google Ads. Unbelievable value for a free tool!”
- Screaming Frog: SEO Tools Online
Screaming Frog – SEO Tools Online
Ribbit, Ribbit. Screaming Frog is considered one of the best SEO tools online by experts. They love how much time they save by having this tool analyze your website super fast to perform site audits. In fact, every person we spoke to said that the speed at which Screaming Frog gives you insights was faster than most SEO tools online. This tool also informs you of duplicate content, errors to fix, bad redirections, and improvement areas for link building. Their SEO Spider tool was considered the best feature by top SEO experts.
Jon Hoffer
Jon Hoffer, Director of Content at Fractl, loves the SEO tool Screaming Frog. He shares, “I wouldn’t be able to do my job without it. It lets me crawl client and competitor sites and get a broad overview of what’s going on. I can see if pages are returning 404 errors, find word counts, get a list of all title tags and H1s, and analytics data all in one place. Upon initial glance, I can find opportunities for quick fixes and see which pages are driving traffic. Maybe meta descriptions are missing, or title tags are duplicated across the site, or maybe somebody accidentally non indexed some pages – it’s all there. I also love the ability to extract certain data from pages. Recently, I was working on a directory and needed to find the number of listings that were on each page. I was able to pull that information with Screaming Frog and look at it next to analytics data. It’s great to know what competitors actually have on their sites. This is great for content ideas. Overall, Screaming Frog gives me the chance to run a quick audit and come away with an understanding of what’s going on. It reveals opportunities for easy wins and actionable insights. I can determine if site migrations went off without a hitch; they usually don’t. With the inclusion of traffic data, I’m also able to prioritize tasks.”
- Serpstat: All-in-one SEO platform
Serpstat
Serpstat is a growth-hacking platform for SEO, PPC, and content marketing goals. If you’re looking for an affordable all-in-one tool to solve SEO tasks, analyze competitors, and manage your team, Serpstat will be a great choice. Many experts are now switching to the tool, as it has collected keyword and competitor analysis data for all the Google regions in the world. Moreover, Serpstat is known for its awesome features. The most popular one is a Missing Keywords feature, which identifies the keywords that your competitors are ranking for in the top-10 search results, and you aren’t.
Dan Taylor
Dan Taylor, Senior Technical SEO Consultant & Account Director at SALT.agency, switched to Serpstat after trying other tools: “I’ve used a lot of keyword research and analysis tools in the years I’ve been working in digital marketing, and a lot of them have become really lossy and tried to diversify into different things, losing focus on what people primarily use the tool for. Serpstat is a great tool for research, doing some performance tracking, and monitoring multiple data points. It’s also user-friendly, and the fact it allows multi-user on the 3rd tier plan is a game-changer. To sum up, Serpstat is a great addition to the suite of tools that we use and is a very capable, cheaper, and less lossy alternative to other popular platforms.”
- Bonus Tool: Incognito
incognito tool
Switching to Incognito mode and performing Google searches will give you unbiased, ‘clean’ searches to understand what your user sees and the results they get when searching for keywords. Using the autofill options will give you suggestions of semantic keywords to use. As one of the free and best SEO tools, searching in Incognito is helpful as it shows where you truly rank on a results page for a certain term.
Top SEO Experts
SEO has become a huge discipline in the past 10 years and all the above SEO tools wouldn’t have existed without the SEO experts behind them. We wanted to give a quick shout out to these people for their hard work to help websites rank better and convert more.
Eric Enge
top seo experts
Eric Enge is the founder and CEO of award-winning digital marketing agency Stone Temple, acquired by Perficient in July 2018. Now the general manager of Perficient Digital, he is a writer, researcher, teacher, and keynote speaker. He won the 2016 Search Personality of the Year Award and CEO of 2016 Best SEO Agency of the Year award.
Rand Fishkin
Rand Fishkin
As the most well-known SEO expert in the industry, Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz and Sparktoro. Known for his infamous ‘Whiteboard Friday’ videos, Rand shot to fame by being outspoken about SEO and the many different content you can use to rank better in search engines. We even mentioned his SEO tool, Moz, in our list above.
Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is the master of sharing content around anything to do with SEO. Normally the first person to write about algorithm updates (sometimes even before Google), Barry is the news editor of Search Engine Land and runs Search Engine Roundtable, both blogs around the topic of SEM. Barry also owns his own web consultancy firm called RustyBrick.
Vanessa Fox
Vanessa Fox
As an amazing contributor to many SEO blogs in her time, Vanessa Fox’s career didn’t start in Google, but she definitely left her mark there. Vanessa is an author, keynote speaker, and created a podcast about search-related issues. Interested in how people interact online and user intent Vanessa’s impact SEO’s future is sure to be very active.
Aleyda Solis
Aleyda Solis is a speaker, author, and award-winning SEO expert. She is the founder of Orainti, an international SEO consultancy Agency, that helps international clients scale their organic search growth. She has won the European Search Personality of the Year in 2018 Award and was mentioned in the 50 online marketing influencers to follow in 2016.
Conclusion
The best SEO tools on this list are gold. They give you insights that would otherwise take ages to generate. That said, you’re going to have to put in the work to get the results you want. That means producing content that’s SEO optimized, rewriting all your product descriptions, and taking what you’ve learned from these SEO tools, and making adjustments. Check out this SEO checklist to make sure you’ve got all your bases covered. If you’re on a budget, most of these tools have free features or trials you can play around with. Try them out. Do it. Discover what you need to improve to rank higher in SERPs. And follow the tool’s suggestions to skyrocket your growth. Your success falls on you. Take that next step.
Conclusion
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