SEO Tools: 14 Most Essential Tools

 

More and more new websites come into existence every day. Every three seconds a new website is built. As of February 2023, there are over 1.13 billion websites in the world of which around 200 million websites are active.

So, driving a decent amount of traffic to your site is a real challenge, isn’t it?

Also,

The Search Engines’ Algorithm changes constantly.

So, to keep up with the latest developments in SEO, you need to be well-equipped with some of the good SEO tools.

And, to work with SEO smartly, it becomes essential to have the right tools in your arsenal.

You cannot do SEO manually. Nobody can!

It’s crucial to have the right tool for a specific task.

In this article, we’ll be discussing the 14 most essential SEO tools that can help you in your SEO work to drive more traffic and rank higher in results pages.

And, the best part?

Most of the tools are free and easy to use.

 

14 Most Essential SEO Tools:

#1. KWFinder

#2. SEMRush

#3. Long Tail Pro

#4. SEO Quake

#5. Ahrefs

#6. Google Search Console

#7. Google Analytics

#8. Google Ads Keyword Planner

#9. Screaming Frog

#10. Majestic

#11. Buzz Sumo

#12. Ubersuggest

#13. GTMetrix

#14. Responsive Design Checker

Related Articles:

• What is SEO and What are its Different Types?
• 7 Key Techniques to Increase Referral Traffic to Your Website
• What is Website Structure and How to Create SEO-Friendly Site Structure?
• Mobile SEO: The Ultimate Guide to Optimize for Mobile-Friendly SEO

 

Let’s get started.

 

#1. KWFinder

 

An amazing tool for keyword searches.

This tool can bring you perfect keyword ideas and is very easy to use.

It not only shows you information on the keyword that you were searching for but also gives you suggestions for related terms.

And those terms compare in terms of volume, CPC, difficulty, etc. to the term you originally looked at.

 

 

#2. SEMRush

 

 

This tool is one of the favorite tools among SEO communities.

It’s an all-in-one SEO tool. You can easily compare your website to your competitors, find the exact keywords your competitors rank for, analyze your backlinks from other websites to your site, and more.

 

 

#3. Long Tail Pro

 

Earlier, this tool was a downloadable application. But now it is cloud-based i.e., you can use it in your browser.

You don’t need to be an expert to use this tool. Once you start using it, you will get used to it very quickly.

 

 

No matter what kind of website you are building, one of its features “Rank Value” could be very profitable for your website. You can find hundreds of low-competition keywords.

 

#4. SEO Quake

 

This is a free Chrome extension.

SEO Quake is an all-in-one SEO tool available. This tool can help you conduct an SEO audit, examine internal and external links, compare domains and URLs, and export all data into a file. You can easily download and share the data with your team.

 

 

#5. Ahrefs

 

Ahrefs is the most favorite tool among the SEO community. It’s the best backlink and SEO analysis tool.

Using this tool, you can learn why your competitors rank higher and what exactly to do to get an edge over them.

Four of its main tools are:

a) Site Explorer:  With this tool, you can search for traffic and backlink profiles of your competitors.

Also, you can learn whether your competitors are doing a paid search.

b) Keywords Explorer:  Just enter up to 10 “seed” keywords into Keywords Explorer and you get thousands of keyword suggestions. Using this tool you can also check the “keyword difficulty” score as it helps you to determine how hard it would be to rank in the top 10 search results.

c) Content Explorer:  This tool helps you find the most popular content for any topic or keywords. You can learn about high-performing web pages for specific keywords.

d) Rank Tracker:  Using this tool you can monitor your site’s Google ranking over time on desktop and mobile. This helps you chart your performance against your competitors.

Just input or import a list of keywords, add multiple countries per keyword and tell us your competitors’ URLs. Ahrefs will start tracking data and send you updates.

 

#6. Google Search Console

 

It’s the best tool to monitor the performance of your website in Google search results. It helps to measure your site’s search traffic and fix issues if any.

All you need to do is submit your sitemaps and individual URLs for crawling. And your content is on the Google search results.

Why is this tool so important for an online marketer?

You can optimize your content by analyzing your site’s impressions, clicks, and position on Google Search.

Using one of its features “Mobile usability”, you can test and improve your site’s mobile usability.

More data, More power!

This tool is indispensable as far as SEO is concerned.

 

#7. Google Analytics

 

According to Neil Patel,

“Google Analytics is to the online marketer like air is to the human being. You can’t live without it”.

If you are into online marketing, you simply can’t ignore Google Analytics.

It gives you all the data you need to analyze for your business in one place.

You get to understand how people interact with your site. Thus, you know your customers deeply, so you will take proper action to improve your content.

 

#8. Google Ads Keyword Planner

 

This tool gives you a number of keyword ideas to build your campaigns.

How to find Keyword Planner?

Just log in to AdWords → Tools → Keyword Planner

How it works:

 

#9. Screaming Frog

 

This tool is one of the most essential SEO auditing tools. You can crawl, analyze, and perform site audits.

It saves time if you want to analyze the structure of a site. You can use this tool to crawl both small as well as large websites where checking manually every page would be literally impossible.

How to use the Screaming Frog SEO spider?

Just check out this video:

 

 

Free as well as paid versions are available. But with the free version, there are some limitations. With the free version, only 500 URLs can be crawled and you won’t have access to the configuration, saving of crawls, Google Analytics, Search Console, and link metrics integration.

#10. Majestic

 

Majestic claims to be the planet’s largest Link Index database.

This tool is for almost all online marketers, be it SEO professionals, Media Analysts, Entrepreneurs, or Developers.

 

 

You can explore a domain or URL in a detailed manner using its Site Explorer tool.

The backlink history tool will give you the number of backlinks for specific domains, subdomains, or URLs. This could be very helpful for SEO campaigns.

And, you can use its Search Explorer tool to generate a quick list of topical URLs matching your keyword.

 

#11. Buzzsumo

 

This tool helps you analyze the content.

Just enter a topic or URL and it allows you to analyze the content that performs best for that topic or URL.

 

 

This tool could be of great help in your SEO campaign, content marketing, and social media marketing.

Content is the king.

And Buzzsumo helps you to develop smarter content strategies and find the key influencers to promote your content.

#12. Ubersuggest

 

 

This is a free keyword-tracking tool. Just enter the keyword and you have hundreds of suggestions.

Ubersuggest gives you almost all the relevant data on a specific keyword. It shows the volume, seasonality, CPC.

And, the best part?

Negative keywords are also there which may help you find the right keywords.

 

#13. GTmetrix

 

This tool gives you a complete insight into how well your site loads.

And, it also gives you recommendations on what actions to take to optimize your site.

This is the best tool around to analyze your site’s speed and make it faster.

 

#14. Responsive Design Checker

 

Just enter a URL and this tool shows you how it looks on mobile, tablet, and desktop.

As Google has made it mandatory for a site to be mobile-friendly, it is very important for your site to be responsive.

 

This tool even shows you how your site looks on most of the popular mobile devices (for example, iPhone X, Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel, etc.) and various desktop resolutions.

If your website is responsive, Google improves the rankings in search results.

 

Conclusion

 

These are the tools that are going to help you greatly in your SEO work to rank your website higher in search results.

There are hundreds of SEO tools out there. In this article, I have tried to list only those that are valuable and easy to use but will give you amazing results.

All you need to do is identify your business goals and choose the SEO tools that can help you in your SEO to reach those goals.

SEO is a long-term process. So you have to be selective to ensure that you pick the right tools to serve you in the months to come.

What other SEO tools would you like to add to this list? Feel free to share your favorites in the comments section below.