Top 5 Best SEO Tools that the Pros Really Use

Surfer SEO excels in content optimization but comes with premium pricing. It’s perfect for agencies who prioritize organic rankings but less ideal as your only SEO tool. Ahrefs is the gold standard for agencies prioritizing backlink analysis and technical SEO. Its SEO Anomaly unmatched data depth makes it essential for competitive niches and authority-building campaigns.

It streamlines the outreach process, allowing me to nurture relationships with potential partners effectively. I remember the days when you could get away without doing any link building in SEO. That’s how we built the KISSmetrics marketing blog to over 700,000 visitors per month.

• Or you can customize it further with the drag-and-drop tools.
• Unlike the cloud-based tools dominating today’s SEO software for agency market, SEO PowerSuite takes a different approach with its desktop-based platform.
• But again, there are no hard and fast rules on how Google evaluates backlinks.
• Once it’s finished, you’ll get an emailed report with a list of content that could rank and get more traffic once it’s refreshed.
• This helps you find rising trends months or even years before they become popular.

Affordable alternatives often deliver most of the essential functionality at a fraction of the cost of premium tools. This makes quality SEO accessible to businesses watching their budget. Good SEO tools don't need to cost hundreds of dollars per month.

How to Choose Free SEO Tools

The tool specializes in Etsy keyword research, offering data on search volume, competition levels, and trending tags that shoppers are actually using. You can also audit your own listings, monitor how they rank, and track how competitors position similar products. This makes it easier to optimize your titles, tags, and descriptions with terms that match buyer intent. It’s a beginner-friendly tool that walks you through the key steps of optimizing your site for search engines.

By analyzing keyword trends, I can tailor my content to meet user demands and optimize for search engines effectively. 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. The Site Explorer feature allows you to easily see a general overview of your site and the number of backlinks you have.

Yoast SEO Alternative: Rank Math

That’s why my team will continue to do that for us and our clients. AI content detection test shows that AI content is detectable using small, publicly available tools. The problem is that there are hundreds of AI SEO tools out there, and new ones pop up daily.

Speaking of traffic, Semush has an AI traffic prediction feature. First, they’ve integrated PKW% (personalised keyword difficulty percentage). Phrasly is clearly the best AI humaniser available right now but it isn’t perfect. They have their own advanced algorithms, which do a good job of humanising your content without disrupting the flow or changing the meaning. That means they control the technology and can update their humaniser whenever new AI models or content detectors are created. The truth is that humanising content is harder than you think.

While Backlinko is famous for detailed SEO guides, they also share a variety of free SEO tools (some proprietary, some external). Occasionally, you might find a free mini-audit resource or checklist to help verify best practices. WordStream is well known for its PPC and keyword research resources. They also offer useful free SEO tools to help you find new keywords or fine-tune the ones you already target. If you like basing your SEO strategy on keyword intent, WordStream’s free resources are worth considering. It’s ranked as the #1 platform for AI SEO and is built to write and optimize for search engines with unparalleled ease.

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. Set up actual client projects and let your team thoroughly test the tools in real-world scenarios before making a commitment. On the other hand, sometimes the tools don’t have a flexible pricing model, and you have to pay for something you won’t use. Analyze it well and calculate before committing to a subscription for a year or more, tempted by promotional prices for an annual subscription. DashThis won’t replace your dedicated SEO tools, but it will save your sanity when it comes to client reporting.