Did you know that 90.63% of web pages on the internet are not getting organic traffic from Google? SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the most important aspects of online marketing and has been for some time.
Good SEO can help you get organic traffic for free, which can result in more leads and sales for your business. In order to get the best results, you need to use the best SEO tools available. In this blog post, we will rank and review the 7 best SEO tools of 2022!
What Are The Best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools
Ahrefs
Overview
Ahref has a pretty interesting backstory. It was founded by Dmitry Gerasimenko, a young prodigy who made his own search engine that targeted SEO at the age of only 15. Fast forward to 2010, he revisited his work on his search engine and started working on a system that would crawl and index the internet. This led him to eventually develop a backlink index which became Ahref’s first-ever data version for Site Explorer.
Today this SaaS project has developed into the world’s largest SEO tools-providing company and a search robot that ranks second after Google in terms of activity.
Top Features
- Keywords Explorer: Does keyword research for 10 search engines, including Google, Youtube, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, and other engines from China, Russia, and Korea.
- SERP Overview: Helps you keep track of the estimated monthly organic search traffic to the current top-ranking pages.
- Updates about 8 billion backlinks regularly and displays new links for users every 20 minutes.
- It helps in monitoring outbound and inbound links, which can be helpful in tracking any broken ones.
- Content Explorer: Helps find relevant blogs with a high domain authority that can prove to be useful in creating powerful backlinks.
- Content Gap Tool: Find keywords that our competitors rank for, but you don’t at a URL and sub-folder level.
Price
$99 – $999/month
Pros
- Extremely easy to use (great UI)
- Weekly email alerts are sent that show all the keywords a website has started ranking for
- The only tool that shows an estimated number of clicks for a particular keyword
- Multiple search platforms (Google, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, etc)
- Access to all tools typically needed for an SEO project: Site auditing, keyword research, backlink analysis, etc.
- It has an extensive backlink database
Cons
- All plans (even the Enterprise one) have only one seat
- Users using any of their plans are only restricted to generating 500 reports per month
- Has no phone support
- No free trial period
Conclusion
If you’re a serious content marketer or an SEO expert, the closest thing you’ll get to ‘an essential’ tool is Ahrefs. Unlike some of its competitors, Ahrefs keeps its tool updated and occasionally comes up with new or improved features that can help you better your site’s ranking.
Product Rating Summary
Ahrefs has quite a few impressive SEO features that give it a competitive edge over others. It can easily be called the ‘backbone of SEO operations’. With it, you can easily track site rankings, perform keyword research, and explore ney backlinking opportunities. But although it has some awesome tools, the pricing can be a bit budget heavy. If one were to buy each tool separately, they’d easily be looking at a bill close to $300+.
Overall ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(4.8)
Ease Of Use ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(5)
Features ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(5)
Support ⭐⭐⭐(3.5)
Price ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
Semrush
Overview
Semrush is a SaaS platform of an American public company that started back in 2008. Over the years it has evolved into a powerful bootstrapped SEO company with over 10 million users. It was founded by two enthusiastic SEO nerds, Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitri Melnikov. From 2011 to 2020 it has won many rewards, including the European, US, and UK Search Awards.
Top Features
- Position Tracking: Helps you track all your site’s positions on Google’s SERP and the top paid SERP results from Google Ads.
- Helps you identify the top-performing landing pages of your competitor.
- Semrush My Reports PDF Builder: The PDF Builder helps you combine data and create reports from scratch to present to your clients.
- Semrush CRM: A steadfast CRM platform for marketing agencies, freelancers, and consultants to effectively work with multiple clients.
- Backlink Analytics: Semrush helps you analyze your backlink profile and gain insights into metrics and data points that can help develop a better strategy.
- Authority Score: A metric used for measuring and evaluating how backlinks from domains can affect your website’s SEO i.e. measure the overall quality and SEO performance.
Price
$119.95 – $449.95/month
Pros
- It’s easy to perform a domain analysis using Semrush
- The site auditing features give easy-to-follow instructions that can help improve on- and off-page SEO aspects of your site
- Three channels of customer support are available; chat, email and phone
- As compared to Ahrefs, Semrush’s report spending limit is 3000 – 10,000 per day depending upon the plan
- The interface is quite intuitive and laid out in a logical fashion
Cons
- Only provides data for Google
- All plans come with only one user account (and additional seats can be quite expensive)
- Although Semrush has a mobile app, it is often unresponsive
Conclusion
Semrush is like the ‘Swiss army knife’ of marketing. The software offers versatile and extensive tools, comprehensive data reporting, a great keyword researching feature that shows accurate volume, and an easy way to audit your site.
Product Rating Summary
If we compare the prices and plans of Ahrefs with Semrush, the latter offers quite a pleasing bundle with more spending limits. Although there are certain restrictions when it comes to the data overall, its features, customer support services, and usability has managed to wow all.
Overall ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
Ease Of Use ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
Features ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(4.5)
Support ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(4.5)
Price ⭐⭐⭐⭐(3.5)
RankMath
Overview
RankMath started out as a remote company in 2020, but today, it is operating globally in various countries with 1.4million+ active users. It is an acclaimed SEO plugin developed and owned by the makers of MyThemeShop. RankMath is used actively by WordPress site owners to improve their blog post’s SEO ranking instantaneously. Today it is known as the second-best WordPress SEO plugin, right after Yoast.
As far as plugins go, you won’t find anything better than RankMath for your WordPress.
Top Features
- SEO Analytics Module: It has a built-in advanced module that shows you how well your posts are optimized, the keywords which you rank for, the times your site was clicked, the total Adsense earning, and the times your site showed up on someone’s search result.
- The Titles & Meta feature helps suggest suitable titles and optimize both these properties so that your site can rank better.
- Schema Setting: Add or create sitewide Schema Markup (a code in the form of structured data) and Rich Snippets to help you get higher clickthrough rates.
- 404 Monitor: Helps track and fix 404 errors across your site and tells you the time of the error, referring URL and the user agent.
- Sitemaps: RankMath allows you to create a fully compliant, customizable XML sitemap that helps your content get indexed faster.
- Content AI: Their new AI writing tool helps you make your writing process easier by generating content, headlines & titles, gives suggestions like including credible citations, and gives insightful recommendations that can help you rank.
- RankMath’s bulk editing feature lets you update the titles and meta of hundreds of posts all at once.
Price
Free – $499/year
Pros
- RankMath offers a 100% money-back guarantee
- A license key is not required to use the free version
- Its intuitive user interface and setup wizard makes the onboarding process easy
- The free plan offers many robust features
- Its integration with Google Analytics allows you to get detailed feedback on your site.
Cons
- Can only be used on WordPress websites
- Occasionally bugs can be found in some of its minor features
- In case of any issues, customer support can be contacted via email only
Conclusion
RankMath is the best available WordPress SEO plugin on the market (that’s a direct quote from the words of Sam, the VP of Marketing and head of video content at Ahrefs. It is a fantastic SEO tool that can help you improve your ranking on search engines and optimize your website and posts.
Product Rating Summary
RankMath has managed to hit the ball right out of the park with its SEO toolkit that offers not only better features than others but also some unique ones as well that even at an affordable price range! With a reputation for reliability, complaints are very rare, although there is some poor customer feedback in terms of customer support service options.
Overall ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(4.5)
Ease Of Use ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(4.5)
Features ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(4.5)
Support ⭐⭐⭐⭐(3.5)
Price ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
MOZ
Overview
MOZ was founded in 2004 by Gillian Muessig and her eldest son Rand Fishkin. It was previously known as SEOmoz and first started as a blog and an online community. The goal was for SEO experts to share tips and ideas on optimizing their websites and successfully ranking on Google. Eventually, they developed their own SEO tools, and today they rank among the top 5.
Top Features
- Search Visibility Score: Track your keyword ranking on local and national searches with the help of holistic graphs.
- Use crawlers to dig through every corner of your sites and help you find and fix harmful issues.
- Keyword Explorer: Make and save a list of keywords with accurate volume and difficulty metrics.
- On-page Optimization: Helps you optimize pages on your site to improve rankings and user experience.
- Listings Management: Automates the rest of the process for you once you’ve created a listing.
- Moz’s Domain Authority: This feature helps identify the growth of a site over time, determine the difficulty of ranking on SERPs and understand its strength against its competitors.
Price
$99 – $599/month
Pros
- A detailed and comprehensive guide for newcomers
- An abundance of useful SEO-related features
- MOZ offers free trials that last for 30 days
- The statistics and graphs provided are easy-to-read and help businesses determine which aspect of the site needs working on
- Their keyword tracking feature is great and provides updated data making it reliable.
Cons
- Available only as a web-app
- MOZ only targets the US, making it lack data for foreign users
- Many users have faced difficulty in navigating around the website
Conclusion
MOZ is one of the most recommended SEO tools online. It keeps track of your SEO rankings, helps you understand the behaviors of site visitors, improves SERP ranking by optimizing your website, and helps solve performance and SEO issues.
Product Rating Summary
While it might take a while for users to navigate through the tool, the great customer support and the robust features it offers at its price range makes it an appealing tool for website owners looking to beat their competitors and rank their sites on Google’s first page.
Overall ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
Ease Of Use ⭐⭐⭐(3.5)
Features ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(4.5)
Support ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
Price ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
Yoast
Overview
Yoast started out as a one-man company by SEO expert Joost de Valk. He ran the business on his own for two years, but with success came a need to develop a team, slowly evolving into a significant company with over 100 employees. Yoast has been a part of WordPress ever since it first began. It’s the most beginner-friendly SEO plugin you’ll ever come across.
Top Features
- WordProof Integration: This allows you to timestamp your privacy policy page to make your website trustworthy and show users that your content is protected.
- SEO Workouts: Spots for opportunities that can help you optimize your website. It includes identifying pages and posts that have broken links or no links at all and helping you rank your best content.
- Helps you find relevant high-performing keywords and key phrases that you can either rank in or add to your already written content to increase its chances of ranking.
- Internal Linking Blocks: Build a solid internal linking structure and make your content findable for users and search engines.
- The Stale Cornerstone Content Finder keeps your important content up to date, leading to lower bounce rates, the possibility of adding new links and ensuring the information remains credible.
- Image Alt Attribute Checker: Opens a whole new market segment by helping your content reach blind and visually impaired users and increase your chances of ranking in image search.
Price
Free – $299/year
Pros
- Offers a ton of free tutorials via Yoast Academy that can help people who are just starting out on implementing SEO on their websites
- The free plan offers a ton of features that are enough for a newly formed website.
- Helps improve the readability of the content
- Easily customize post sharing Snippets on social media like Twitter and Facebook.
- Yoast SEO’s Google Snippet Preview enables page or post previews on search engines, ensuring that your site looks good.
Cons
- Can cause your website to run a bit slower
- Yoast’s keyword researcher can sometimes show you the wrong search volumes
- The Yoast readability treats all types of content in the same way
Conclusion
Whether you are a content creator, an SEO specialist, an SMM Guru, or a PR manager, Yoast can help you with on and off-page SEO, find the high volume and low keyword density keywords to increase the chances of your content ranking and just generally serves to straighten up your website.
Product Rating Summary
Yoast is the perfect tool to help you reach the SEO heights on your WordPress site. The prices they charge are nowhere near the numerous features they offer. It’s a great place to start your SEO journey.
Overall ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
Ease Of Use ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(4.5)
Features ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
Support ⭐⭐⭐⭐(3.5)
Price ⭐⭐⭐⭐(3.5)
Woorank
Overview
Woorank is the all-in-one digital marketing solution offering every SEO tool at your disposal. Woorank lends itself very well to websites of all sizes, whether you’re a blogger or an owner of an online business. Woorank tracks everything that can affect your website’s SEO performance and gives you a detailed audit of all the important factors that can help you optimize it.
Top Features
- Provides an instant overview of how well your website ranking is based on your current SEO practices.
- The Keywords Tools not only lets you find new keywords for your website, but its suggestion feature gives users keyword ideas to add to already published content.
- Helps you monitor your competitor’s website and their ranking keywords and create a keyword strategy that could bring value to yours.
- Site Crawl: Increases your organic traffic with reliable robust data sets and schedules automated web crawls that can diagnose issues in your content pages and posts.
- Lead Generation Tool: Integrations with Zapier let you capture SEO leads effortlessly and share those leads’ performance with instant reports to show to your potential customers.
- WooRank API: Run reports for thousands of URLs without having to input data manually.
Price
$79.99 – Custom Pricing
Pros
- Offers a 14-day free trial
- Analyzes up to 2500 to 10,000 pages depending on the plan
- Easy user-interface
- Runs in the cloud, so there’s nothing to install
- Detailed analysis of on and off-page SEO
Cons
- Only 1 user can access the Woorank account on plans below the Enterprise one.
- It has a limited number of SEO tools
- Some premium features aren’t available during the trial period
Conclusion
Woorank is the favorite choice for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and freelancers. Whether you need to audit your website, see how well you rank on Google, perform keyword research, or just want to do competitive research, this tool can help you do it all.
Product Rating Summary
Woorank is one of the easiest-to-use SEO tools on the market. While it may not have as many features as its competitors, Woorank is a perfectly useful digital marketing tool that lives up to its promises.
Overall ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
Ease Of Use ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4.5)
Features ⭐⭐⭐⭐(3.5)
Support ⭐⭐⭐⭐(3.5)
Price ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
Ubersuggest
Overview
If you’ve spent any length of time in digital marketing, you will be aware of the well-known personality, Neil Patel. Since 2017, Neil and his team have been developing an SEO tool specifically with the idea of making a salesperson’s job easier. The free version of this SEO toolset is packed with easy-to-understand and amazing features making it the perfect choice for newly formed startups to start their SEO journey.
Top Features
- Keyword Discovery Tool: Helps you find profitable easy-to-rank SEO keywords.
- SEO Opportunities: Analyzes your website and find top SEO opportunities that can increase your traffic and rankings once you optimize them.
- AI Writer: Creates a content outline for a keyword that includes: Meta Description & Title, Headlines, and FAQ Answers. It also lets you rewrite paragraphs.
- Site Audit: This helps you identify and fix SEO issues that are affecting your site’s traffic and lets you check if its speed matches Google’s standards.
- Traffic Analyzer: Discover your or your competitor’s ranking pages and keywords along with the amount of traffic and uncover the strategies they are using.
- Backlink Discovery Tool: Mine and analyze the backlinks behind your competitors’ rankings and track their link-building efforts over time.
Price
Free – $40/month
Pros
- Let’s you audit 1,000 – 10,000 pages per week
- Access to SEO Training & Support program on paid plans
- Ubersuggest offers a 7-day free trial on all plans
- Simplistic and easy to navigate
- Additionals add-ons only cost $5 per feature
Cons
- Nowhere as in-depth or technical as Ahrefs and Semrush
- No social media tracking & brand monitoring
- Lack of integrations
Conclusion
As something of a digital marketing personality, many startups turn to Neil Patel’s SEO toolkit through familiarity alone. It breaks down everything you need to fix in priority from how difficult it can be to implement it to how much traffic you’ll get after fixing it. Its free version is features-packed but the paid ones give you access to a whole host of powerful functionality at an affordable price.
Product Rating Summary
Ubersuggest is the best cost-effective SEO value tool out there that offers a ton of features. While the features aren’t as high-tech as the others mentioned in the articles, they should be enough to adequately research competitors’ top-performing content pieces and rankings, giving you a better idea of how to increase yours.
Overall ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
Ease Of Use ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(4.5)
Features ⭐⭐⭐⭐(3.5)
Support ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
Price ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(4.5)
All In One SEO
Overview
All In One SEO (AIOSEO) is a WordPress plugin that was acquired by Syed Balkhi (the founder of WPBeginner & OptinMonster) in 2020 with the goal of helping beginners by making SEO easy. AIOSEO offers SEO tools that improve your website’s search rankings, and drive traffic to it allowing you to grow your business.
Top Features
- Google News Sitemaps: Increase your rankings by submitting your latest news articles to Google News.
- Social Media Integration: Integrates your social media platforms and control how your content and thumbnails look on them.
- TruSEO On-Page Analysis: Get a more in-depth analysis of your SEO performance and easily add title tags, meta descriptions, and keywords, set a canonical URL, and customize each page’s priority in your sitemap.
- With WooCommerce SEO, optimize your account’s product pages, product categories and tag archive pages.
- SEO Audit Checklist: With the help of crawlers, analyze your website for any critical errors that can harm your rankings.
- Rich Snippets Schema: Get more clicks and traffic to your website with the help of AIOSEO Pro, which offers complete support for schema markup.
Price
$49.6 – $299.9/year
Pros
- Simple and easy to set up
- Makes it easy to edit the title and description
- Offers a 100% money-back guarantee if the plan is canceled within 14 days
- You can preview not only your website content but social media ones as well
- Gives a more actionable approach to optimizing your content
Cons
- Do not provide support via phone or chat
- The basic plan lets you optimize only 1 site
- Only for WordPress sites
Conclusion
With All In One SEO, you can easily optimize your site from top to bottom with the help of its packed features. It is definitely one of the most popular SEO plugins on the WordPress platform for content enhancements and optimization.
Product Rating Summary
Choosing a good plugin will help with SEO efficiency. All In One SEO’s simplicity, paired with its powerful features and customization options, makes it an attractive choice.
Overall ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
Ease Of Use ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(4.5)
Features ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(4.5)
Support ⭐⭐⭐⭐(3.5)
Price ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)
What Are SEO Tools?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools are typically software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that help website owners improve their rankings on search engines like Google. They help with link building, keyword research and rank tracking, and on- and off-page SEO, all the things that can optimize your site and increase its traffic.
The best SEO tools have a simple interface that users can easily navigate, are packed with many useful features that are up-to-date with the changing Google algorithms, and let you easily rank your website.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How To Choose The Best SEO Tools?
Currently, numerous SEO tools are available on the market – hundreds in fact. This can make it challenging to select the best one for you according to your website’s requirements. So, we have put together a few tips to help you select the most suitable for your own individual requirements.
- Choose a platform that offers maximum accuracy in keyword research and presenting reports.
- Check customer reviews of each tool on websites like TrustRadius and SaaSworthy.
- An SEO tool should have basic functionalities like gathering information on how customers and visitors reach your page, understanding the SERPs better, and analyzing the typical behavior of your website’s visitors.
What Are Some Important Must-Have Features An SEO Tool Should Have?
While SEO tools offer a wide range of features, some important ones that are must-have in every tool are,
- Rank Tracking: As a website owner, it’s important to know how your website ranks in Google Search, how your competitors rank, and what needs work.
- Keyword Research Tools: A high-quality keyword can bring loads of traffic to your website. An SEO tool should have a proper keyword research feature that gives you accurate data.
- Crawlers: A crawler can audit your pages, find critical errors, and give you ideas to improve them.
What Are Some Free SEO Tools?
If you’re new to the world of SEO, you might be a little hesitant to buy paid tools. You’d want to determine whether investing in this is even the right step. Here are some of the best free SEO tools that are a great place to start with,
Google Search Console: This is a free SEO tool offered by Google that lets you monitor metrics like clicks and impressions and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.
Google Analytics: This freemium tool offers an easy way to track and analyze visitors. It collects data from your websites to create reports that provide insights into your websites.
Seobility: This is another free tool that provides a quick website SEO audit with many useful ways to improve your website’s performance. It allows you to perform your SEO strategy flawlessly.
Panguin Tool: You’ll likely find the best SEO tool that’s free and also offers accurate information regarding your website’s content. It shows your website’s organic visibility on search engine results pages, monitors your highly ranked pages and provides global insights on your keywords.
Wrap Up
With Google’s ever-changing algorithm, having an SEO tool in your arsenal can help keep your website up to speed with these changes. Whether you’re a business owner, a SaaS company, or a blogger, these SEO tools are necessary to have a noticeable online presence and compete on search engines.
We’ve listed some of the best tools that have taken the digital marketing world by storm, providing you with insights on your website that would otherwise take ages to gather. If you’re a bit hesitant, then all of these also offer free trials you can take to test them out before making a final decision.