You’d be crazy not to have an SEO strategy in 2019.

It helps drive organic traffic to your website, generating customers without you needing to lift a finger.

However, SEO isn’t easy.

Backlink building is time consuming and difficult, and on-page needs constant attention.

That’s where SEO tools step in to save the day.

They help you study competitors to beat them, find weak points in your site to fix, and keep constant tabs on your progress.

Check out some of these online SEO tools if any of that sounds appetizing!

SEMrush

SEMrush homepage

If there’s one SEO monitoring tool that I use every day, it’s SEMrush. I personally use it to watch how my organic traffic, backlinks, and rankings are moving over time. I find their data to be pretty good, although sometimes a bit delayed or off.

SEMrush features

So, what do you get with SEMrush? Here are some of the features that really stand out.

Organic research

Get insight into your exact ranking positions and how they have moved over time. You will be able to narrow down weak content to revamp, snoop on competitors for ideas, and neat graphs make all of your data easy to digest.

Paid advertising research

Do you use PPC to drive traffic to your site? Great, because SEMrush also features PPC reporting that enables you to determine the effect of your campaigns. You will be able to see your competitors ads for inspiration, discover new keywords, and break down the competitions advertising strategies to learn from.

Keyword research

It’s all in the keywords. If you target phrase that are too competitive, you may never rank and see the fruits of your labor. That’s why the keyword research feature is so useful.  You will be able to uncover high volume keywords that have low competition to skyrocket your visitor count.

Backlink analysis

Let’s be real. Backlinks are very important. If you don’t keep tabs on how your link profile is progressing, you’ll miss out on new opportunities and the competition can get ahead of you.

I love using the backlink reporting feature because it shows me where links are coming from and how important they are. It’s also amazing for finding where other websites get links from to use the same techniques.

SEMrush pricing

SEMrush pricing

SEMrush offers a free website analysis every day if you don’t want to invest into their paid plans immediately. Try out their platform and see if it’s right for you, because $100 to $400/month is some serious coin.

Their pricing isn’t necessarily out of the ordinary for paid SEO tools, however. As you will see ahead, the $100/month range is fairly common.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is hands-down the most powerful SEO ranking tool available. I’m not affiliated with them in any way, but the features speak for themselves. Neil Patel, Brian Dean, and some of the best internet marketers swear by it. Here’s why.

Ahrefs features

Ahrefs is extremely extensive. You gain access to a huge array of tools to boost your SEO that you won’t get with any other software. Here’s a glimpse of what to expect.

Backlink profiles with a twist

Gain insight into what websites are linking to you and the individual strength of each link. You can also see which sites are linking to your competitors, which creates the opportunity to perform the classic skyscraper technique.

One of the most unique features of Ahrefs is the broken link checker. You can type in any domain and instantly find which pages of theirs are broken. From there, check which referring domains they have and voila! You now have plenty of websites to reach out to for broken link building.

Website audit

We like to think our websites are perfect and that we’re the best marketers ever, but some times you need a reality check. That’s where the website audit tool steps in.

It uncovers what’s holding you back from ranking, analyzing things like:

  • Page speed, HTML, and CSS size
  • Title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags
  • The quality of your content, including duplicate content and low word count articles
  • No-follow links
  • Broken pages and outgoing links
  • Image sizing and other resources

Content explorer

Content marketing is all the craze right now. It helps build trust with your customers, drive organic traffic to your site, and turn your brand into a thought leader.

If you produce regular content, you’ll love the content explorer feature. Research the most shared and viral traffic for any niche, and recreate it to reap the same results.

You can then check the referring domains of these popular pieces of content, reach out to them, and ask to get a link to your better article.

Ahrefs pricing

Ahrefs pricing

You can see that the plans for Ahrefs are very similar to SEMrush. The basic package is $99/month and the advanced is $399. Agencies will need to dish out $999 per month if they need 5 users, up to 100 campaigns, and all of the other bells and whistles.

One thing I don’t like about Ahrefs is that there’s no free trial. You have to pay $7 for a week trial instead. It’s only the price of a Starbucks coffee, but in a world where there’s always free demos it’s a slight drawback.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest

This is one of my favorite keyword research tools, and it’s also owned by my favorite internet marketer Neil Patel 🙂

Ubersuggest is a fantastic resource to find keyword suggestions, understanding how difficult it is to rank for them, and snooping on competition.

It displays everything you need to know about a search phrase, including volume seasonality, and PPC costs. If that wasn’t enough, Ubersuggest gives you endless suggestions for other keywords, creating more opportunities to rank.

It’s completely free to use, so give it a try today!

Keywordtool.io

Keywordtool

This is another free keyword research tool that’s recommended by some of the most successful internet marketers. One very unique feature is that it isn’t just for Google, but other search engines like Amazon, YouTube, and Instagram.

Do you sell products on Instagram or create videos for YouTube? Me, too! And Keywordtool.io have been a priceless part of my keyword research strategy.

But, here’s the thing. It’s only free to a certain extent. You’ll have to upgrade to one of the paid plans, which start at $49/month, to gain access to metrics like search volume, competition, trend, and CPC.

However, I highly recommend keeping it in your rotation for new search phrase ideas.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog

This is a fantastic alternative to Ahrefs and other monthly subscription SEO software. You only pay an annual license fee to use Screaming Frog, and it does just as much, if not more, of what you’d expect from other services.

Some of the many things you can do with this software includes:

  • Find broken links: Run any URL through the software and filter by error codes like 404. This can help you find broken links to fix on your own site, or to use as a apart of a broken backlink building strategy.
  • Analyze page data: Narrow down meta descriptions and title tags that need optimizing.
  • Find duplicate content: Duplicated pages and posts can send a bad signal to search engines and hurt your rankings. Discover if you have any duplicated content with this feature to get a quick win with your SEO.
  • Integration: Imagine being able to instantly plug in data from other tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic right into Screaming Frog. Well, you can! Simply enter your API keys and you can import all of your  data from these external sources, giving you more information to work with.

I believe the pricing is very fair, as it’s only £149.00 for the yearly license. If you paid $100/month for other tools, that racks up to $1,200 per year! Screaming Frog’s pricing is clearly a huge area you need to consider.

Majestic SEO

Majestic

Majestic is one of the longest run and largest SEO databases ever. It’s used by affiliate marketers, managers, executive, and entrepreneurs worldwide. Their tool is used to for backlink building, improving website traffic, analyzing competition, managing reputation, and more.

The site explorer feature is Majestic’s most popular feature. You will be able to uncover how search engines are using topical trust flow to determine what your site is about. You can then use this knowledge to shape your content, keywords, and more to improve rankings.

Majestic also has one of the largest databases of links, referring domains, and similar data. This is useful to finding broken backlinks, improvements in your own properties, and lost links that you can reclaim.

Moz

Moz

I don’t know about you, but when I think SEO, I think Moz. While Rand Fishkin has moved onto new ventures, Moz remains as the go-to authority for SEO information and one of the most useful tools in the industry.

Currently, Moz offers their Moz Pro and Moz Local products. You’ll appreciate that they offer a free 30 day trial, which seldom is available among these types of services. Here’s what to expect from both of these tools.

Moz Pro features

Use the keyword explorer to determine what keywords are being used to find your website, which new phrases can boost traffic, and get all of the metrics you need.

The rank tracking feature will ensure that you know how your SEO efforts are paying off with exact rankings of individual search phrases. Not like your position? No problem. Improve that page or content with the other areas of your Moz toolbelt and you’ll fly ahead of competitors.

Next, the site crawler digs through your web properties to find little issues that you may have not have known existed otherwise. As you know, SEO is composed of little wins and tweaks that build up your brand into an authority. The site crawler function will help you achieve that.

Lastly, the link explorer helps users keep track of their domain authority, page authority, inbound links, outbound links, and overall backlink profile. Links are one of the most important ranking factors, so monitoring them is crucial.

Wrapping up

SEO can be a headache. Trust me, I’ve been there.

Investing into SEO tools can save you time and energy, while you boost your rankings and traffic.

I recommend starting out with free trials to get a feel for different platforms and services.

This will help you determine which one best suits your individual business needs.

From there, don’t be afraid to upgrade because the ROI can be incredible.

What’s your favorite SEO software?

Contact me if you require content writing services to help grow your traffic, leads, and revenue.