Blogging is one of the best ways you can build your brand and share your expertise. But it’s also a lot of work!
That’s why we’ve put together this list of SEO tools for blogging—so you can spend less time doing the heavy lifting and more time focusing on what matters: writing.
Whether it’s optimizing your keyword research or getting insights into how well your content is performing, these tools will help you take your blog to the next level.
Seo Tools For Blogging
In the digital world, online presence matters more than big productions and huge investments in paid ads.
Well, money always helps. But doing your SEO right is what makes any strategy worth its price.
So, it doesn’t matter how much you have to invest, with good SEO tools and intelligence is possible to climb the ranks and put your company’s website at the top of the search results.
But which ones to use? We listed the 14 best SEO tools to improve your blog’s performance and use Content Marketing to amplify your visibility online.
Keep reading!
1. SEOCrawler
When any professional plans the company’s SEO strategy, they need to follow a logical path from building a structure, producing content, and analyzing data.
It is a cycle that rewards those who never stop improving. So let’s give you an idea of some of the best tools in each stage of that process.
We start with on-page SEO. The right tags, the right experience, and speed can help a lot when Google is analyzing your blog for ranking it and keeping visitors around longer.
SEOCrawler is a full suite for Search Engine Optimization, but its brightest points are its Site Auditor function.
The tool can automatically analyze your site in search of technical problems like bad titles, missing tags, and broken links.
Then it shows you a report so you can address them and avoid dropping positions on Google — or move up quicker.
SEOCrawler is free to try, so you can see for yourself if its benefits will give you the return you expect from paid plans.
2. Keyword Explorer
After on-page SEO is sorted, a blog needs content to fill it and find the right audience. Then we go to the planning stage of this strategy.
Your main work will be finding keywords relevant for your buyer persona and generating more interest.
Keyword searching is all about understanding what your buyer persona is searching for and offering high-quality content about it. The purpose of Content Marketing is to educate the lead until he’s ready to purchase from you.
For that to be done, it is important to discover the relevant keywords and their volume of search.
Keyword Explorer, by Moz, analyzes keywords, suggests similar (but better) options, and even predicts performance when using each one.
The feature allows you to do 10 searches for free per month. The Pro paid version integrates it with a lot of other tools to complete an SEO strategy.
3. Google Keyword Planner
And if you are going for search results data, why not get it right from the source?
Google has its own tool to explore and analyze performance from keywords.
The catch is that the Keyword Planner is focused on Google Ads, a paid service. But if you are already investing in that other side of an online presence, you can use it to help you write the right content.
4. Yoast SEO
With the best keywords found, what will make them work for you is producing good content. And there are some tools to help you here too.
Google will always value unique, relevant, well-structured content — posts, videos, images, and the combination of all of them.
If your blog uses WordPress, you have at your disposal one of the best, most used SEO tools in the world for writing and publishing online.
Yoast SEO is a plugin that helps you write more attractive texts, but not only that. It can check for keyword usage and its variations, readability, and internal linking.
But not only inside the text content itself, it can also boost your content improving indexation, telling Google what your page is really about, and even giving content insights based on what you have already written.
The free version will give you the core features to start, but Yoast Pro is not expensive and can give you great SEO returns.
5. Copyscape
Copyscape is not an SEO tool (it is actually a plagiarism checker), but it is really useful to boost your position on Google.
When going for more popular keywords, your content will have to compete with many people and companies. Even if not deliberate, it is common that some of those texts seem very similar.
Google rewards unique and relevant pieces when there is a lot of the same subject online to be read. So, even the free version of Copyscape can help you analyze and compare how your content will perform when published.
6. Google My Business
If the company going for an online presence is a physical shop or a restaurant, it can’t be just digital. You have to attract people to where you are.
In this case, local SEO is the main strategy for CMOs and marketing teams. And no other tool is better for that then Google My Business.
With it, you can create an official profile for your company that is shown as an informative card when someone searches for businesses close to them.
You can have contact information, photos, posts, opinions, all embedded in a Google search. When your brand comes first, it will begin to convert a lot more people in your area.
If you want to know how to set up and optimize your Google My Business account, read our guide about it!
7. Google Analytics
After finding the right keywords, writing great content, and publishing it, your job is only starting.
SEO is an ever-improving game.
You have to gather data, analyze, and find the rights and wrongs that can be addressed now and in the future.
Google Analytics is the world’s best as a full SEO suite. It can show you not only the blog’s performance but also keywords, conversions, traffic sources, and everything you need to guide your strategy.
It is even a great way to know your audience better: when and how they visit your pages, where they are, what content generates more interest, and keep them longer.
8. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another SEO tool for blogs from the world’s largest search engine and has great value for SEO professionals.
It allows you to track relevant data for blogs, correct errors, and demand faster indexing.
Among the available resources, the ones that ensure highlighting when it comes to blog performance are:
- Search queries — indicates what searches guided users to your blog.
- Sitelinks — unwanted links to your blog.
- Web crawling errors — informs about errors founded in your blog by Google search engine.
There are several other resources of Google Search Console, of course. We listed some functions which are part of the SEO professionals’ routine and can help you to guarantee excellent performance on your blog strategy.
9. Stage Analyzer
Stage Analyzer is one of the most complete SEO tools for blogs that will help you to analyze your website’s performance. We can highlight among its resources:
- SEO tips and optimizations.
- Technologies’ diagnosis.
- Traffic estimate.
- Alexa Rank.
- Server information.
In addition to checking your site, you can analyze other sites ranking and also which technologies, servers, and frameworks to use.
Thus, it is possible to see which are the main points to improve your website and outmatch your competitors.
10. SEMrush
SEMrush is a keyword research tool and one of the most famous SEO tools for blogs, even though many bloggers don’t know that.
It is also an excellent resource for monitoring your blog. First, you enter your domain to access essential data in an SEO strategy, such as:
- Keywords that bring more traffic to your blog.
- Keywords your content is ranking for.
- The estimated cost of PPC according to your organic traffic.
- Number and analysis of backlinks.
Intuitive charts and graphs present all the information collected on the blog. This data visualization model helps to gain valuable insights into the right actions in a Digital Marketing strategy.
SEMrush is not limited to your blog’s data. After all, it is also a competition analysis tool. It displays strategic data from other blogs, which support comparative reports between related domains.
It is possible to compare the number of keywords, traffic, organic positions, among other information, all of them displayed in detail in the user interface.
11. MozBar
MozBar is a browser extension provided by one of the leading companies in SEO software development for marketing in the world.
It gives a score from 0 to 100 for specific domains and pages. So, the higher the grade, the better and more reliable the webpage is.
Moz’s SEO tool for blogs scores your domain based on several factors, such as the number and reliability of backlinks, organic positions, and consistency of blog posts.
In your SEO strategy, it is always important to keep track of that score. But it can also help you to make comparisons between your domain and the ones from your main competitors.
12. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a valuable tool to do a complete SEO audit on your blog. It helps to identify optimization errors on multiple URLs, making it easier for professionals who deal with SEO optimizations every day.
SEO errors can damage the domain and affect the ranking in SERPs. With an SEO tool for blogs, professionals can act more quickly, identifying problems and correcting them automatically before the website is penalized.
The free version is available with some feature limitations.
13. Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is one of the best SEO tools for blogs dedicated to backlink analysis. It has a free version for blog owners and a premium version for marketers who demand more robust information. It is necessary to subscribe to one of the available paid plans to evaluate competitors’ domains.
The tool offers valuable metrics to track. Among the main ones that can help you to analyze your blog’s performance regarding SEO efforts we can mention:
- Number of backlinks.
- Main reference domains.
- Main referenced pages.
- Main used anchors.
Majestic SEO also evaluates two relevant metrics that help to rank and assess the relevance of a domain on the web. These metrics can also help prioritize link building:
- Trust Flow — a metric that shows the level of trust and authority that a domain has on the web.
- Citation Flow — a metric related to the earning link, that is, the number of citations (links) received by a domain on the internet.
14. Google Page Speed Insights
At last, we list Google Page Speed Insights, a very intuitive SEO tool for blogs that aims to evaluate the loading time of a page, just as its name suggests.
As you can imagine, the webpage load-time is a relevant factor for SEO. From the user’s point of view and for search engines, a speed-based web page with the best loading times provides the best experiences for users.
For that reason, loading time and responsiveness are essential for a good SEO strategy. Therefore, you can use Google’s Page Speed Insights to check your blog’s performance and ensure a better user experience for your visitors.
There is not a recipe for the success of an SEO strategy. But you can improve your website considering factors such as website security, page loading speed, and user experience.
Using the best SEO techniques, you can increase the visibility of your blog, reaching better rankings in the SERPs and the perceived value by your visitors.
Search Engine Optimization needs work, time, and constancy. But with the right SEO tools, you can reduce all of those requisites and increase visibility at a faster rate.
Make your plan, define the steps towards your goals, and choose the right solutions to follow you in each of them.
Do you want to know more about how to do great SEO? Check our complete guide on the subject!
best seo tools for blogger
12 – Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
Sometimes the simplest tools are the most useful. If you’ve ever tried manually inserting or updating the Google Analytics code into your site, you know how frustrating it can get over time. Every little change or addition requires a new copy-paste, and if something goes wrong, you lose a tremendous amount of data, including traffic and search phrase tracking.
The Google Analytics WordPress plug-in by MonsterInsights does one thing and it does it well. Installing this on your site instantly populates every page on your publication with your custom Google Analytics code. There’s no need to configure anything, just slide it into the settings page and you’re set.
Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights rely on the stats that matter.
Along with basic insertion services, MonsterInsights also lets you leverage Google Analytics’ more powerful features, including engagement tracking, file downloads, affiliate links, and RSS feed clicks. You can even view most of these reports directly in your WordPress dashboard with an upgraded MonsterInsights plan.
Tool Type: Analytics monitoring
Price: Free with plan upgrades
11 – Readability Test Tool
In the SEO world, things like keyword density and backlinks tend to get the lion’s share of attention. But at the end of the day, what really matters is whether or not people find your content interesting and informative. The best way to reach a wider audience in this arena is to focus on readability, or making your content as digestible as possible so that visitors, both young and old, native or foreign will want to spend more time on your site.
The Readability Test Tool is a quick and simple service that analyzes the content of your site and spits out a results score that shows the youngest age of reader who could read and comprehend the content. A grade level of 4, for example, could be easily understood by 9-10-year-olds. Ideally, you’ll want to aim for grade levels between 6 and 8, but as long as you don’t creep too high, you’ll do just fine.
Readability Test Tool
With Readability Test Tool you can test the readability of your work
The Readability Test Tool is a final stage service that lets you put the finishing touches on any piece of written content. By drawing in a wider audience with less technical jargon, shorter sentences, and more direct language, you’ll increase the engagement rate and encourage visitors to stick around and read a few more pieces of content before clicking away.
Tool Type: Text analysis
Price: Free
10 – KWFinder
It doesn’t matter what type of content you create or how far your social media reach extends, one thing all bloggers obsess over is SEO difficulty. Should you go after the long tails with a low impact but less competition? How about aiming for the high end and duking it out with the big publications? There’s no single answer for this quandary, which is why services like KWFinder are so crucial to your success.
KWFinder is an easy to use SEO research tool that aims to deliver the perfect keywords straight to your screen. It analyzes backlink quantity (among other things) for any given phrase to help determine the overall difficulty of those keywords, giving you an idea of how much time and effort you’ll need to spend to capture a piece of that SEO pie. With that information in hand, you can continue your research with the company’s other tools, including SERPChecker and LinkMiner.
Find the perfect keyword with KWFinder
Find the perfect keyword with KWFinder
Long tail keywords are the hidden gems of the SEO world. KWFinder helps you uncover the right ones for your business so you can spend less time fretting and allocating more time to reaching success. It also has an extremely user-friendly interface, which is always a nice touch.
Tool Type: SEO keyword difficulty researcher
Price: Free with plan upgrades
9 – Serpstat
A powerful all-in-one SEO service that does everything from keyword research to link analysis. Serpstat offers a broad range of standard SEO tools just about everyone will find handy, including long tail keyword research, cost per click analyses, PPC competition insights, and search volume analytics.
Find the perfect keyword with KWFinder
Serpstat – Analyze your site with a powerful all-in-one SEO tool
Arguably Serpstat’s most useful feature is performing thorough audits of any website, right down to lost backlinks and keywords themselves, and it’s all completely automatic. This audit includes pinpointing website loading speed issues and suggesting improvements for reclaiming that lost time. It also identifies redirect issues, looks for duplicate content, and hunts down both broken links and lost backlinks.
Serpstat has a lot going for it, including a prestigious list of enterprise clients that use the service to refine their SEO strategies on a daily basis. It’s also extremely easy to use, and it comes with one of the better free trials in the business.
Tool Type: Site audits; keyword, backlink, and competitor research
Price: Free use-limited trial with paid subscription upgrades
PRESSLABS FACT
Did you know that you can keep an eye on your site loading speed directly from the Presslabs dashboard? We provide detailed performance metrics for all our customers.
8 – BuzzSumo
Once you’ve done your research on SEO topics and chosen a few focal points, your next step is to make up some titles and start creating content. Or… is it?
BuzzSumo is a clever tool that helps refine your SEO efforts even further. Instead of racking your brain for viable keyword-based topics, you can use BuzzSumo to look for highly-shared content on social media and shape your efforts based around that.
BuzzSumo facilitates a deeper understanding of what content is trending on Social Media
BuzzSumo facilitates a deeper understanding of what content is trending on Social Media
With one quick search, you can see what content is trending on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit, complete with engagements, backlinks, and the total number of shares. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of coming up with topic titles, as you can simply use the popular suggestions to inspire better targeted phrases.
Tool Type: Content title research; SEO keyword refinement
Price: Feature-limited free trial with pro plan upgrades
7 – Moz Tools
Moz has long been one of the best resources for SEO insights on the web. Bloggers use it to learn tricks of the trade while refining their strategies for content creation success. The team’s SEO for Beginners is practically the handbook for starting SEO strategies, serving as a launch point for new entrepreneurs dipping their toes into the world of online content publishing.
Moz Tools is a collection of free resources for link building and analysis, webpage performance, keyword research, site metrics, listing audits, and more. The star of the show is the Keyword Explorer, one of the largest and most accurate SEO phrase databases on the web. In a matter of seconds, pro bloggers can use it to discover and prioritize keywords for their site. No complicated charts to analyze or stats to sift through, just straight-up SEO recommendations by the boatload.
Moz – Find the best keywords to target
Moz – Find the best keywords to target
Moz offers a plethora of tools bloggers can use to up their SEO game. Most of these are offered for free with minimal limitation. Moz Pro delivers the entire SEO toolset with higher limits and more advanced features. When you’re ready to get serious about your SEO game, Moz has the tools you need to succeed.
Tool Type: SEO keyword research
Price: Free, with a premium version
6 – Netpeak Spider
Many SEO tools focus on keywords, link building opportunities, organic search, backlinks and so on, but what about the content you already have on your site? You might be surprised how many issues your site has that you weren’t even aware of.
Here is where Netpeak Spider comes into play. Just like a search engine robot, it crawls your site’s URLs and performs a detailed audit of the SEO problems it encounters. The issues are grouped into 3 categories, based on their severity degree for SEO: errors, warnings, and notices, thus indicating which ones you should tackle first.
The Spider checks website optimization issues, analyzes incoming and outgoing internal links, finds broken links, duplicated content and canonical issues, missing titles and descriptions, links with bad URL formats, dead-end pages, pages blocked by the X-Robots-Tag and many more.
Netpeak Spider – personal SEO crawler
You can crawl your entire website, a certain page or set custom rules to crawl only a certain part of your site and you also have the possibility to save or export your data to work on it later.
Netpeak Spider is a desktop tool that for now only works on Windows platforms, but they have plans to make it available on Linux and macOS soon.
Tool Type: SEO crawling analysis
Price: free use-limited trial with paid subscription upgrades
5 – Yoast SEO
Pro WordPress bloggers around the world swear by Yoast SEO. This multi-purpose tool works as a fast and free WordPress plug-in to analyze and suggest improvements to every post and page on your site, including live guidance as you add new content. Are your titles too long or short? Yoast will let you know. Keyword density too forceful? Yoast will catch it before you hit the publish button.
The biggest benefit of using Yoast is the ability to fine-tune your SEO strategy down to the microscopic level. The tool keeps a sharp eye on readability while suggesting tweaks you can make to take your SEO writing to a new level. Coming up with keyword and content plans is difficult enough, why should you struggle when it comes time to push content live?
Along with its per-post features, Yoast SEO also keeps an eye on sitewide concerns that can cripple your SEO rank. Duplicate content and breadcrumb errors practically become a thing of the past. And even if you’re not familiar with sitemaps, robots.txt files, or best practices for permalink URLs, Yoast can guide you towards the light without overwhelming you with technical details.
Yoast SEO can be used to improve your blog’s content
Yoast SEO can be used to improve your blog’s content
Yoast SEO is probably the best overall tool you can use to improve your blog’s SEO. It’s worth it for the writing insights alone, but when you add things like site tweaks, search previews, and keyword optimization, you practically can’t live without it.
Tool Type: SEO optimization for websites and individual blog posts
Price: Free and premium versions
4 – Majestic
The Majestic SEO toolkit is a multi-purpose backlink checker, site explorer, and all-around link profiler. Majestic doesn’t just give you insights into your own blog’s statistics, it also serves as a spy of sorts into your competitor’s backlinks situation. After all, what better way to get ahead than to copy and improve upon your peers?
Majestic’s toolkit includes everything from a site explorer to flow metrics, domain comparisons, and keyword checkers. Most of this is fairly standard stuff as far as SEO services are concerned. Where Majestic really stands out is the quality of its link analysis. The site has crawled nearly 500,000,000,000 unique URLs, providing historical data as far back as 2013. This allows you to check and track the backlink history of any given domain, which is something few, if any, competing tools can do.
Majestic – Explore your site metrics
Majestic – Explore your site metrics
Tool Type: Analyze on- and off-site links
Price: Free with pro upgrade options
3 – Ahrefs
Once your blog is established and stable, the next thing on your mind should be growth. This area of SEO is arguably the most complicated, as there are countless strategies you can implement to increase outreach, boost keyword rankings, and so on. How do you know which next-step is the right one, and how do you take it? One of the answers could be through constant monitoring along with a little thing called research.
Ahrefs is a powerful research tool that helps you gather information and monitor your blog’s niche. It also lets you research competitors to see why they rank so high, giving you insights into what you can do to outrank them. Use Ahrefs to perform a full site audit, then take the resulting information and run with it.
Ahref helps you monitor your niche
Ahref helps you monitor your niche – ahrefs.com
Ahref provides domain comparisons charts, content gap insights, backlink and SERP checkers, keyword generators, and broken link scans. It also allows for content, backlink, and keyword research along with competitive analysis charts and rank tracking for your site. It’s a fantastic tool professional bloggers can use to take their site to the next level.
Tool Type: SEO research and performance analysis
Price: Premium subscription
PRESSLABS FACT
Did you know that you can visualize how accessible your site is to your customers straight from the Presslabs dashboard? The distribution of front-end and back-end responses offers you a keen insight into the availability of your site for both humans and bots.
2 – SEMrush
It doesn’t matter if you’re new to SEO or a seasoned veteran, SEMrush is one of the best all-around general purpose tools you can get your hands on. SEMrush does it all, from analytics reports on competitors to keyword research, advertising insights, backlink checking, keyword difficulty, branding reports, and much more. You can even use it to discover new competitors and monitor changes in domains, helping you to stay ahead of the curve.
With SEMrush you have access to a huge amount of data
With SEMrush you have access to a huge amount of data
SEMrush has access to a huge amount of SEO and search data from both Google and Bing, allowing you to research keywords to an incredible degree of detail. It provides all of this data in an incredibly convenient package, as well, complete with full site audits and ongoing tracking. If you only use one tool for your professional blogging business, make it SEMrush. You won’t be disappointed.
Tool Type: All-purpose
Price: Premium subscriptions billed monthly or annually
PRESSLABS FACT
Did you know that you can also visualize the bot traffic split by types directly from our dashboard? You can use these stats to check if your site is correctly crawled by Google bot and other bots.
1 – Cognitive SEO
If you are a SEO professional, and experienced webmaster or a digital marketer, then it’s very likely you know about Cognitive SEO and that it offers an advanced all-inclusive SEO toolkit, made in Europe. It does have indeed a steep learning curve, but the promised results are worth the effort.
It provides you with advanced analysis and tracking features, as well as suggestions for improvements and fixes, all packed in a neat interface with interactive charts and descriptions. The tool creators promise that you’ll get top rankings in 3 easy steps: Keyword Research, Ranking Analysis and Content Optimization.
Cognitive SEO – Increase your traffic
Have a glimpse at what you can achieve with Cognitive SEO:
complex site audits for both your site and your competitors
easy to comprehend and visualize data, along with recommendations on how to fix the issues on your site
check for broken links both internal and external
keyword and content optimization; the tool analyzes all your site’s pages and posts and provides you with a content performance score, based on keywords, and also with a readability score
in-depth backlinks analysis
detect unnatural links that led to Google penalties
desktop, mobile and local rank tracking for all locations and languages
analyze content visibility based on social shares
check Google algorithm changes – CognitiveSEO tracks how Google rankings fluctuate on a daily basis and provide you with an illustrative chart when you can see when there were significant changes made in SERPs. If you suddenly notice a significant drop for one of your pages, you can check their chart to see if it corresponds with a change in Google’s algorithms.
track Google Analytis metrics directly from the Cognitive SEO interface
schedule reports to be send automatically to your clients
Competitor Analysis – uncover the Google visibility of your competition as well as understand their marketing strategies: link building, content marketing strategy and many more
They also offer free limited use for 3 of their SEO Tools: Site Explorer, Keyword Tool and Google Algorithm Changes.
Tool Type: Complete SEO Software Suite
Price: Free use-limited trial with premium subscriptions billed monthly or annually
Bonus: Google Search Console
Google’s Search Console should be the first site every pro blogger visits when starting their day. The console provides insights into how Google views your website, everything from clicks to impressions to CTR percentages. It also reports on crawling errors and notifies you if potential problems arise that might negatively affect your SEO rating. Think of it like a safety net, the last line of defense against you and a costly drop in Page rank.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console helps your site to be found on the web
Tool Type: Search engine crawling analysis
Price: Free
Final Thoughts
There are countless tools on the market that can help you refine your blogging strategy. The services above are great places to start, but don’t let them be the end of your research! The more you learn, the better you’ll become at the wild and unforgiving practice that is SEO. With a little time and a lot of research, you can find your niche!
Conclusion
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