The Optimum Guide to the Best Digital Marketing Tools – Paid & Free (Tried and Tested)

Don’t think that we do not know your struggles. We do! When it comes to finding the appropriate SEO tool to use, whether paid or free, many people are at crossroads. However, here at grownle.com, we endeavor to give you FREE information on this important subject. In the end, you will be in a better position to decide which SEO tool works for you.

We are going to look at the various aspects of professional SEO exercise. In addition, we’ll look at the different types of SEO tools our experts have tried and tested. 

These SEO tools can be free or paid, but they will help you make an informed choice. Before we do that, let us look at some of the important questions:

What are SEO Tools?

Put simply, these are tools designed to help you with the kind of data and alerts are necessary for site building. They tell you whether your website is health and define the success of your online business.

These tools aid in uncovering opportunities that you can capitalize on to improve your online business. Besides, they help you identify issues or weaknesses that may prevent your site from ranking and earning the right visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

There are many SEO tools and each performs a different role. You can find those that are good in keyword research, marketing research and finding backlinks while others are good in local SEO, analytics, On-page SEO, mobile SEO, and site speed among others.

Are SEO Tools Important?

The short answer is YES!

SEO tools are very important. Here is an example to help you get the picture on how useful SEO tools are:

Imagine trying to design or build a coffee table using your bare hands. How far can you go with your plan? The honest answer is you cannot go past assembling the materials. Soon or later, you will realize that for you to build the coffee table, you’ll need several tools – the RIGHT TOOLS.

With that in mind, now you know that having the right SEO tools will go a long way in helping you build a successful online business.

Importance of SEO Tools

Whether you are just starting up or you are an online guru, SEO tools are important. Here are some of the reasons you need to invest in the right SEO tools:

SEO Tools Help in Saving Money and Time

You may be surprised to learn how a good SEO tool helps save money and time. However, here is what to think about: 

How many days would it take you to travel (by foot), from New York City to Paris? Chances are you may never arrive alive if you will ever dare. However, it takes a matter of hours by boarding a plane.

That is how easy SEO tools make our online work.

A comprehensive site audit using SEO tools delivers a ton of knowledge. Within seconds, you are able to assess a whole website, something that would take you days, perhaps months if you were to do it manually.

Besides, it’d cost you a lot of money if you were to pay an expert do the manual site auditing for you.  We are grateful that experts have come up with ideas of making the work easier and faster by creating SEO tools.

With the right SEO tools, you are able to know, among other things:

• Missing page tittles;
• Broken links;
• Page server errors;
• Missing data descriptions;
• Orphaned pages and;
• Poor page depth.

Interestingly, some premium SEO tools automate the whole process, making it super exciting.

They Help in Finding the Right Keywords

Without a doubt, no website would rank without the help of an SEO tool in finding the right keywords. Thankfully, the right SEO tools can help you identify keywords that have decent search volume while on the other hand, have low competition.

Good SEO tools with advanced features go an extra mile in identifying keywords:

• That your site is ranking for but may need a little optimization to create a huge difference;
• Which are not performing well thus, unworthy to target;
• That your site is ranking for but you do not want and;
• That are hanging.

Aid in Looking into the Competitor’s SEO Strategy

That’s true. Some advanced SEO tools come with a feature that allows you spy peep into your competitor’s SEO strategy. In a world filled with millions of online businesses, everybody is fighting to have a space in the top 3 positions on the search engine.

Getting to those positions is not an easy thing. That is why, you might be forced to look into what your competitor is doing to beat you in the SERPs and the best way to do so is to find the right SEO tool to help you.

For instance, experts give praise to Raven Tools and SEMrush, two premium SEO tools when it comes to spying into your competitor’s SEO strategy. You can try them at your own time. 

Apart from spying on your competitor’s SEO strategy, some SEO tools help in looking at hanging keyword opportunities and probing into your competitor’s backlink profile.

Aid in Tracking SEO Progress and KPIs

While many webpreneurs measure their website performance by looking at the overall rankings, there is more into running a successful business. The site’s organic traffic and conversion are key to determining the success of an online business.

The only way to know if your online business is doing well is by inspecting SEO progress as well as other key performance indicators (KPIs) such as organic traffic and conversions. 

Of course, organic traffic and conversions are not the only things that will help you determine the success of your online business. Other things to watch for with the help of SEO tools include:

• Clicks;
• Shares;
• Form fills if any;
• Domain authority;
• Number of backlinks and;
• Social media comments.

Help in Ensuring Better Conversions

This is the second time we are speaking about conversions. The truth is, no website can just start and maintain quality sales. However, with good keyword research and proper SEO practice, thanks to a good SEO tool, you will have steady flow of income.

This income can be in the form of selling a service via email list, promoting other people’s physical or digital products or listing your own product(s). 

With those few yet important benefits of using SEO tools, it is now time to look at the specific tools, and their part in you running a successful online business. Some of the categories we’ll discuss in this blog include:

• Keyword research tools;
• On-page SEO tools;
• Link building tools;
• Local SEO tools;
• Rank tracking tools;
• Analytics tools;
• Technical SEO tools and;
• Multi & other tools.

Let’s start with the most basic of them all …

Keyword Research Tools

Different SEO tools perform different functions. As such, keyword research is among the first things any website owner would like to carry out.  For that reason, we are going to talk about some of the tools that will help you in identifying the right keywords.

As you may beware, the right keywords are those with relative (decent) search volume but at the same time, less competitive. To help you identify those keywords, here are the keyword research tools we have tried and tested in our lab: 

AnswerThePublic

If you are in the verge of starting out your online business journey, then AnswerThePublic is a good place to start. The tool brings together Google autocomplete data, something that shows what people are searching.

What readers are searching could be in a form of question, statement, or just a phrase but the tool quickly completes up to 150 suggestions of what people are looking for online.

One of the interesting things about this keyword research tool is the way in which it presents the search results. You can view the tool’s findings as a list or as a mind map. Besides, you can also export the results to a CSV file, which enables you to review at your own time.

Most of the keywords this keyword research tool will help you find are in the form of questions. As such, if the questions have reasonable search volume and low competition, chances are you will rank fast.

Thanks to the type of keywords, this keyword tool is able to assist you find and the manner of presenting data, it is very easy to carry out topic research among other searches.

AnswerThePublic is a free keyword research tool, which is why the tool limits you to do two searches a day.

Google Keyword Planner

As the name suggests, this is Google’s keyword research tool. The good thing about this tool is you can generate up to ten keyword ideas from a single seed keyword. It is true that Google Keyword Planner does not have many features such as showing you the keyword’s search volume, but it’s one of the best tools that will help you come up with keyword ideas.

In fact, some of the ideas this keyword research tool brings to the table may not be the same ideas that you will get when doing your research using other tools. 

You may need to read several materials before you know how to effectively use Google’s Keyword Planner keyword research tool. What is more, Bing, another search engine, has its own keyword planner thus do not confuse the two.

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer 

Also referred to as Ahrefs Keyword Generator, the tool has the ability to pull up to 100 keywords at  once. What is more, this keyword research tool picks these 100 plus keywords from any seed, phrase or idea.

By using Ahrefss Keyword Generator, you are not only threading on a robust SEO tool but also one that has a database of a whopping 10 billion plus keywords spread across more than 170 countries.

One special thing we like about this tool is it shows an estimated monthly search volume for all the keywords it suggests. In addition, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer shows keyword difficulty (KD) for its first 10 keywords ideas.

To make it even more better, the keyword research tool helps you see the top 50 questions related to the keyword that it has already suggested.

It is also important to note that Ahrefs Keyword Explorer can help you find keyword ideas for other top search engines such as YouTube, Bing or Amazon.

Keyword Surfer

This free Chrome Extension delivers exceptional results. It works by showing you global search estimates as well as monthly search volume for queries typed into Google. The sidebar shows similar and related keywords alongside their search volume.

The good thing about this free keyword research tool is it helps in conducting ‘competitive keyword analysis’ as you keep an eye on the SERPs tab.

This tool is almost similar with another free keyword research tool known as WMS Everywhere but the difference is the latter offers an additional feature – cost-per click (CPC) data.

KWFinder

KWFinder is a popular keyword research tool. I have seen another blogger call it a ‘no-nonsense keyword research tool’. You will probably fall for this keyword research tool because of its ease of use.

It is easy to think that the tool is basic. That’s not true. In fact, the tool has many benefits. For instance, thanks to the Link Profile Strength (LPS) feature, the tool informs you on the number of backlinks you’ll need to rank for a particular keyword.

In other words, if the tool suggests that the keyword you’ve selected has an LPS of 50, that means you will have to find fifty or more high-authority backlinks to rank for that keyword. 

In my view, the LPS feature alone makes KWFinder a great keyword research tool. 

Ubersuggest

If you are not new to online business, then you know Ubersuggest. This is one of the greatest keyword research tools in the market. The tool is adorned with quality features. Ubersugges comes with a myriad of features that you can only find in most premium tools.

However, for Ubersuggest, you will get these features absolutely free. 

To use the tool, all you need to do is to type the keyword you intend to use or the name of the website you want to outrank. The tool will then provide you with rich information including keyword SEO and paid difficulty, the keyword’s monthly search volume, cost per click, and many more.

What is more, you get dozens of keyword suggestions based on the seed keyword or phrase you typed. 

The other unique thing about this keyword research tool is the ‘Comparisons’ feature. It may be true that these kinds of keywords may not have decent search volume but they are highly converting.

Besides, chances are Ubersuggest is the only keyword research tool that analyses X vs Y keywords in the best way possible.

On-Page SEO Tools

After you’ve done your keyword research and written the best content from the keywords you’ve found, it is time to give your readers the content.  Before you publish the content, two things should guide you, namely, the search engine, and your readers.

The only way your readers will get to see the content is if you do proper On-page SEO. Thankfully, the market has several tools to assist you achieve this. 

Proper On-page SEO tricks ensure your content ranks on the search engine (appears on page one and if possible, in the number one position).

The following On-page SEO tools will help you in ensuring your content performs well in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs):

Rank Math

The name tells it all. In other words, the work of this tool is to help you ‘do the mathematics’ on how your ‘content can rank’. To date, there are over 300k installations worldwide.

Rank Math is a WordPress SEO plugin. Although basic, the plugin goes a long way in helping you with on-page SEO as well as a little technical SEO stuff. It has a unique ability of presenting Google Search Console and Google Analytics inside your WordPress dashboard so that you are able to work from the same page.

Before you decide to use this WordPress plugin, here are some of the things it will help you achieve:

• Add titles, OG tags, meta descriptions, and meta tags to your posts and pages;
• Redirect urls;
• Give you the Rank Tracker tool that helps you track your posts’ ranking progress;
• Monitor 404 errors;
• Add structured data markups for rich snippets and;
• Find and fix dead links on your website.

Rank Math on-page SEO tool works in a similar way to other tools such as Yoast SEO, The SEO Framework, and All in One SEO Pack. The free version can help you achieve a lot but if you want to upgrade to premium features, you can start with $59 per month.

Yoast

Yoast has been around for many years. In fact, over 30 million sites have installed this plugin. This WordPress plugin is available in free and paid versions. Many webprenuers regard this tool (whether free or paid) because of its ability to handle technical SEO issues.

Whether free or paid, you need to check or uncheck some boxes manually. For instance, the tool asks you the question, “Should search engines follow the links on this page?” You are left with the decision to check ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Yoast’s dashboard is also elaborate. Thanks to an easy-to-use interface, you are able to check your post’s SEO standard, readability, as well as schedule and monitor your social media shares.

It is still on this dashboard that you are able to key in the focus/main keyphrase and insert your meta description. You can also edit the snippet, monitor SEO analysis, add related keywords, and make the post cornerstone content or not.

With Yoast WordPress plugin, you do not have to worry about your site map every time you add a new page. The tool generates and updates your site’s XML sitemap automatically.

The other good thing about Yoast is you don’t need to be a tech savvy to operate it. The tool is simple. If you are an experienced person, the tool makes things even simpler thus saving you a lot of time.

With the readability census feature, the tool tells you how readable your content will be to your readers. In the event the tool detects something and feels it should be rectified, the tool uses red and orange dots for worst and need improvement parts respectively. 

The accompanying words tell you what to do.

If you opt for Yoast premium, be ready to pay $89 per year.

Copyscape

Any serious online investor knows how dangerous duplicate content can affect a website. Because of that, Copyscape, an on-page SEO tool comes in handy. The good thing tool is its ability to detect how much the content you are about to publish has appeared verbatim elsewhere in the internet.

To help you identify parts of the content that appears elsewhere in the internet, Copyscape highlights the parts. With the highlight, which is done in a vivid color, you are able to edit and fix the content.

The tool only shows duplicate content that appears verbatim in another website. In most cases, the tool looks beyond the ideas and topicality thus it analyses your content to see if you copied the exact ideas and maintained the same arrangement. 

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is more of a page speed analysis tool. With it, you are able to know how your site is doing especially on mobile as well as PWAs devices. In fact, Google recommends site owners to use this tool to assess how their sites load on mobile devices.

Rumor has it that Google, the world’s largest search engine uses similar evaluations when it decides which site ranks.

Google Developers Page Speed Insight

This on-page SEO tool is similar to Lighthouse but it comes with an additional feature. The feature, called Field Data makes use of metrics. The data, which is Chrome User Experience Report, helps you to know how real users are fairing with your site.

It is true that not all pages of your site may have data but whenever it does, the tool helps you decide whether your readers are happy with your site or not. According to Google PageSpeed Insights, if a page takes several seconds or minutes to load, then that is bad user experience.

Very few readers if have the luxury to wait much longer until your page loads. They argue, “This’s not the only website with the kind of information we are looking for.” As such, a page that loads slowly is bad for SEO and a turn off.

SEOCrawler

SEOCrawlers are mostly used for crawling website pages in a similar way to what search engine crawlers do to get valuable information about SEO. A well-functioning SEOCrawler is a very indispensable tool that will ensure technical SEO work is easier and consumes less time.

One can use many SEOCrawlers to do site crawling. Some of the common SEOCrawlers include Moz, Botify, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and DeepCrawl, among others. Even with many SEOCrawlers, there are only two types of SEOCrawlers namely cloud-based crawlers and desktop crawlers.

In order to use desktop crawlers, you must install them on your computer. As for cloud-based crawlers, you do not need to install them because they rely on cloud computing to provide more flexibility and scalability.

Link Building Tools

After publishing a couple of articles and your site has started to gain traction, it is time to think about how to build links. It is arguable that a site can do well without links but if you want to beat others in the game, which many do, you need to build links.

Finding high-authority sites for linkbuilding is not a joke. However, with the right link building tools, the work becomes softer. 

This section will dissect some of the free and paid link building tools our team of experts have tried and tested.

Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker

As the name suggests, this backlink checker from Ahrefs can help you identify up to 100 backlinks that are directed to any web page or website. If you are doing your website audit, the tool does even more.

It shows up to five most linked pages or posts on your website. Besides, it reveals the most common anchor texts, referring domains, the sum of backlinks, your URL Rating (UR) Score, as well as Domain Rating (DR).

Thanks to its premium features, the too has so far identified up to:

• 16 trillion known links;
• 7 billion pages crawls each day and;
• 170 million unique domains.

Link Explorer

It is argued that Link Explorer is the most accurate and perhaps the largest linkbuiding tool in the planet. The tool’s accuracy in matters domain authority and link indexing is unmatched. Thanks to its unique features, the tool has amassed up to 35 trillion links so far.

The free version gives you limited features but still the information the tool will give you will push you miles. For instance, the Link Explorer’s free version delivers up to 10 queries and 50 rows of raw data for each query every month. 

In addition, the tool provides you with basic link metrics, which pay a fundamental role in you finding the right backlinks from authority sites.

Ahrefs Site Explorer

Ahrefs Site Explorer is a combination of three very powerful SEO tools that are all in one interface. These tools include Backlink Checker, Organic Traffic Research, and Paid Traffic Research.

The Backlink Checker assists in determining which websites link to your competitor as well as checking the quality of the backlink profiles.

Organic Traffic Research helps in seeing the types of keywords that your competitors are using to rank for and the kinds of pages that bring high search engine traffic.

As for Paid Traffic Research, the tool helps you know if your competitors are doing any paid advertising searches and in which places the paid traffic is funneled.

JustReachOut

You don’t need a big budget to have this tool yet, you can build high-profile backlinks with this tool. The tool is geared towards helping you build links with not just high-authority websites but also with market influencers and journalists.

Most of these high-profile personalities often have die-hard followers, who can easily become your clients. To make it a reality, you will have to write an email to your prospective profiles and once they accept, they join your email list.

The tool presents data in an organized manner, something that helps you to decide who or what site to build links with. 

Bering a premium tool, you will need to make monthly or annual payment for you to use JustReachOut. For now, the tool has three plans namely:

• Solo: $99 per month but it goes down to $79 per month if you take a yearly package;
• Simple Outreach:  $199 per month or $159 per month if you decide to go for an annual plan;
• Advanced Outreach: $399 per month or $319 each month if you settle for the annual option.

PitchBox

PitchBox is one of the best content marketing and influencer outreach tools. With it, you can easily and quickly find high-profile people that have a huge following such as publishers, bloggers, and renowned journalists.

The tool has been integrated with other premium tools such as Semrush, which makes it possible to get extensive data without necessarily leaving the site. 

One of the greatest advantages of using this tool is it sends automatic follow-up messages to your potential clients saving you time if you were to do the whole exercise manually.

PitchBox has four payment plans namely:

• Basic: retailing at $195 per month;
• Small Business: going for $295 per month;
• SEO Agency: retailing at $395 each month and;
• Enterprise: that goes for a whopping $1500 per month.

BuzzStream

Most bloggers understand this tool well, and it’s important. BuzzStream is an SEO tool that is designed to ensure your email outreach is on point. The tool is easy to use and efficient in what it does. It performs most of the outreach work, like finding email addresses, researching prospects, tracking the rate of reply, and sending follow-up emails.

With BuzzStream, you will grow your digital public relations, organize your platform, and give results from your link building. BuzzStream mostly discovers contact information and metrics for prospects while still assisting in database building of past promoters in order to get more traffic and links.

Linkody

Linkody assists with link building strategy by ensuring you monitor all your backlinks 24/7 as well as delivers reports on a daily basis about lost or new links. One of the most important parts of successful SEO is link building.

One special feature you will love about Linkody is that it helps you save money and time by offering a user-friendly and affordable application. The app aids in monitoring and managing your backlinks. Besides, it ensures you connect your Google Analytics account in order for Linkody to do the rest for your site.

Local SEO Tools

As the word suggests, the work of local SEO tools is to assist you improve your site presence in the local SERPs as well as keep your audience engaged. They go a long way in helping you track your site rankings, develop keywords that are optimized for the search engine, and provide competitor insight.

In addition, local SEO tools encourage audience engagement, monitor site performance, and other things. Here are some of the best local SEO tools our team has tried and tested:

SEMrush Listing Management

This local SEO tool is famed for its features that help you to add your online business to notable business directories. In the event that you want to update certain data, the tool allows you to add the new information to the directories even those that are outside the United States of America.

The tool makes your work even easier when your business listings are live. You can log into your account and make any necessary adjustments as much as you want thus making the information as accurate as possible across all directories.

Thanks to SEMrush Listing Management tool, you are able to monitor how your online business ranks in the cities that you’ve targeted. Besides, you can check your customer reviews and configure the tool to send you notifications on how your site is performing via email.

With this last feature alone, you do not have to log into your SEMrush Listing Management tool every time. Instead, you can read all the important information via mail.

Google My Business

Are you struggling with making your business’ phone numbers and physical addresses available to your audience? If yes, Google My Business is the solution. The tool makes it easy to add and update important business data such as location to your clients.

You can also use this tool to discover your local competitors, monitor and respond to customer reviews, and compare various businesses. One of the unique things you will love about this local SEO tool is the ‘book an appointment’ feature.

The ‘book an appointment’ segment encourages your customers to go beyond commenting. If interested, they are likely to engage you further by booking an appointment. 

Whitespark

Dareen Shaw, a local SEO expert founded this local SEO tool in 2005. Back then, Shaw’s intent was to make Whitespark an agency for web designing. Over time, the agency has transformed to what it is now – full-fledged SEO company primarily doing local SEO for other companies.

With its goal set, Whitespark has gained unprecedented acclaim in helping companies that include high-end businesses and agencies achieve their local SEO goals. Hitherto, Whitespark is not a tool but the company behind a renowned local SEO tool.

The company’s local SEO tool is called Whitespark’s Citation Finder. When it started, a few people knew about the tool but today, it is one of the popular local SEO tools in the market. Several marketing agencies are satisfied with what the tool helps them achieve.

Some of the benefits of this tool include:

• Building citations;
• Earning reviews;
• Building quality backlinks;
• Manage local SEO search;
• Show up in local SERPs;
• Win customers and;
• Track your rankings.

Apart from the Citation Finder, Whitespark also gives its clients a few other tools to help them manage their online businesses. Some of these valuable tools include:

Local Rank Tracker – This tool allows you to monitor your local standings including organic search performance.

Link Prospector – As the name suggests, this tool will helps in automating link prospecting exercise, which leads to finding link building opportunities.

Reputation Builder – This tool aids in reviewing how your business is fairing in popular platforms. The data collected from the probe will help you find and strike new business deals. In addition, this feature calculates the Net Promoter Score (NPS), a business indicator that tells you whether your business is gaining or losing.

The same feature helps you respond directly to your clients who leave their comments on Google as well as Facebook.

Review Monitoring – This tool alerts you the moment a client or reader leaves a bad or negative comment. The aim is to help you act fast before other readers see the bad review, which might impact your business negatively.

You won’t pay a dime if you limit yourself to three searches a day. However, you will pay $33 per month if you choose to be billed annually. With this, you will be able to do up to 20 searches in a day.

Rank Tracking Tools

Rank tracking/monitoring/checking tools help you monitor your site’s rankings in the targeted locations. They are responsible for tracking keyword positions and report any changes that might happen to the keywords. 

With the right data, it is easy to compare your site’s keywords and those of your competitors.

While it is now possible to check how your site ranks for particular keywords across all search engines, most rank tracking tools often give better results if you choose a smaller location.

In short, rank tracking tools help you achieve the following things:

• Monitor rank drops/increases;
• Increase site visibility;
• Monitor and spy your competitors;
• Improve your revenue and;
• Identify potential keyword opportunities.

With that in mind, here are some of the rank tracking tools our team has reviewed and can speak about them with freedom.

Zutrix

Zutrix is hailed as one of the best tools to track your site’s performance on the SERPs. The tool makes use of proprietary AI software, which monitors and tracks keywords rankings. The tool gives you alerts around the clock via email, Slack and Telegram.

The tool enables you to view label reports, build keyword lab and share the data with teammates. You can also add as many competitors as you can to the Zutrix dashboard.

Basic paying plan starts at $9 per month, which allows you to check 50 keywords.

Serpstat

Serpstat poses as one of the most affordable rank tracking tools today. This powerful tool helps you track your site’s keyword rankings, content marketing, and PPC among other things. You can also do backlink analysis as well and competitor research.

The tool is a perfect remedy for SEO agencies who work in behalf of their clients, small business owners and other digital marketers.  

Some of the tool’s features that stand out include:

• Freemium model, which helps starters to use it without pay.
• Clean and easy to use interface.
• Powerful plugin that helps carry out extensive site audit.

Apart from the free version, the tool has other payment plans. The four plans are:

• Lite: $69 per month;
• Standard: going for $149 each month;
• Advanced: $299 per month and;
• Enterprise: going for $499 per month.

Each of these payment plans come with different features.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking is yet another great tool when it comes to monitoring SERPs for your online business. Like most rank tracking tools on this article, SE Ranking is extremely easy to use. 

The other thing you will love about this tool is you are able to monitor and track your website’s search terms on a majority of search engines. The search engines given dominance include Google, Yahoo, YouTube, and Yandex.

Like most rank tracking tools, SE Ranking lets you monitor your keywords based on the type of device and your target location. 

To monitor your keywords, you need to enter your website’s url, the keywords you intend to track, specify the type of search engine you want to monitor, and choose the country.

The tool gives you the liberty to connect the account to your Google Search Console and Google Analytics accounts. Besides, you can add up to five competitor sites for tracking purposes.

Apart from tracking how your keywords are performing on the SERPs, SE Ranking will help you analyze your site’s traffic, do comprehensive site audit, create an elaborate marketing plan, monitor backlinks, and measure your site’s SEO potential among other things.

SE Ranking basic price is set at $31 per month, which enables you to track up to 250 keywords.

AccuRanker

According to AccuRanker, it is the best rank tracker tool in the market. The designers behind this tool claim it offers the most accurate data. Besides, they also claim that it takes a few seconds to deliver the kind of data you are looking for.

Whether their claims are true or not, the fact is our team has proved something – AccuRanker gives instant results! That is not all. The tool does even more.

The other thing you will love about this tool is it shows which SERP features bring traffic to your website. The in-depth site audit allows you to monitor and filter results, which you can then share with your teammates easily.

AccuRanker is made in such a way that makes it easy to integrate with other digital marketing tools including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Adobe Analytics, Google Sheets, Databox, and Google Data Studio.

With this rank-tracking tool, you can add and manage several domains, organize keyword data, and tag as many landing pages as you can. If you have subscribed for higher plans, AccuRanker lets you add as many users including clients as you please.

As for pricing, AccuRanker lets you decide the amount you can pay by choosing the number of keywords you intend to track per month. For instance, if you intend to track 1,000 keywords, you will need to part with $109 per month.

The price will rise or come down if you increase or decrease the number of keywords you want to track.

SERPWatcher

This tool is a product of immense work by Mangools’ SEO experts. With this tool, you can easily and effectively track your site’s SEO performance on the SERPs.

The first good thing with this tool is the moment you sign up for the account; you not only access a variety of SERPWatcher features but also additional Mangools tools.

Some of the tools that you are likely to access thanks to having SERPwatcher account include:

• Keyword finder;
• Site Profiler;
• Link Miner and;
• SERPChecker.

Thanks to the easy-to-use interface, you can start to use the tool a few minutes after signing up. To be able to do this, follow these four simple steps:

1. Add your website;
2. Select the location you intend to track;
3. Choose the platform (desktop or mobile) and;
4. Enter the keywords you want to track.

The beauty of this tool is it shows every important information you need. For instance, after following the four steps to the letter, you are able to see how your site is performing in the SERPs.

Besides, you will see how your keywords are ranking, their change in position if any, keywords with the best position, their search volume, as well an estimated number of visitors per month.

You can see these updates on a daily basis via email alerts. Pricing is also super friendly. With just $29.90 per month, you are able to monitor your site’s ranking and other related information.

Analytics Tools

The name of these tools says a lot about what the tools do. In short, analytics tools help you carry out data analysis on your website. Unlike some other tools on this list, data or web analytics tools go a long way in helping you fetch important information that help you gauge the performance of your site.

Some of the important information these tools will help you understand include the number of visitors that were on the site at any given time, the time they spent, bounce rate, and the number of sessions they spent.

Besides, you can use analytics tools to compare how visitors interacted with your pages and posts at different times. The tools show you which device(s) bring few or many visitors to your site. As such, the following free and paid tools come in handy:

Google Analytics

To say the truth, Google Analytics isn’t an SEO tool. That doesn’t mean it is a mistake for GA to be included in this list of free and premium SEO tools we’ve tried and tested. We are almost certain that it’d be extremely hard to run a successful SEO campaign without this free tool.

One of the main reasons Google Analytics is important to any webpreneur is its data. According to our experts, the data that GA collects and presents in an easy to read and understand manner will help you know whether your SEO efforts are worthy it.

As mentioned at the beginning of this section, Google Analytics and other tools in this section will help you collect important data on your website. We are talking of data such as:

• Organic traffic;
• The time visitors spend on your site;
• Bounce rate;
• Page speed and;
• Traffic sources.

On its own, GA is super powerful. However, the strength doubles even triples when you combine this tool with Google Search Console. In addition, when the two are integrated, you are able to see even much data.

Some of the data the two tools will help you unearth include the specific keywords visitors use to get to your site, your site’s CTR, clicks, and several other things.

Google Search Console

There is no doubt that you’ve seen this name on almost every blog that talks about SEO tools. The truth is no list would be complete without the mention of Google Search Console (GSC). One of the reasons SEO experts include this tool in their blogs is its rich features.

You are going to agree with me that while you may doubt some information spelled out by certain SEO tools in the market; GSC’s data is clean and extremely legit. The simple reason why you should trust Google Search Console’s legitimacy is it comes straight from Google, the world’s biggest search engine.

With Google Search Console, you can track your site’s rankings and see how it’s performing in the SERPs.

The other details GSC will help you discover include:

• Your site’s top queries (those that are bringing people to your site);
• Top pages;
• Countries with a majority of visitors;
• The type of device(s) people are using to access your site;
• Number of clicks;
• Number of impressions for each page/post among others.

Google Search Console also allows you to inspect any of your site’s url (to see if it is live, indexed, or device-friendly). The Index Coverage Report, which is part of the GSC features, shows you a list of pages that have not been indexed.

With these and other important information, Google Search Console stands out as one of the important analytics tools that are a must have. It’ll help you put things on track.

Bing Webmaster Tools

The name tells it al – Bing Webmaster Tools is designed to help you optimize, crawl, and submit your website for Bing search engine. Gone are the days when webpreneurs dependent solely on Google Search engine.

Diversifying to other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, and YouTube is worthy it and Bing Webmasters Tools will do a good job to put your site to Bing search engine. The tool has several important features but notably the Keyword Research Tool.

Thanks to Bing WMT’s Keyword Research Tool, you will get fresh keyword ideas straight from Bing search engine. When compared to Google’s Keyword Planner, Bing Webmaster Tools Keyword Research Tool gives you only organic search. That means, the feature doesn’t support Adwords or Bing PPC.

• So far, here are some of the reasons why you shouldn’t ignore Bing WMT:
• Submit your website to Bing search engine for indexing and subsequent indexing;
• It’ll help you monitor and track your site’s performance and see the keywords that your site ranks for;
• Remove any content you are not satisfied with (one that you do not want Bing to index);
• Monitor how Bing crawls and indexes your site and;
• Track and resolve any spam, malware, and potential threats to your website.

Bing WMT is free!

Data Studio

Data Studio is a free SEO tool by Google. It is a given out freely to webmasters as part of the giant company’s Cloud Platform token to help clients convert their data into something that they can read with ease.

Data Studio stands out in many ways. According to Google, Data Studio tool will help you visualize your data by use of configurable table and chats. You can use DS to connect with ease to a number of data sources, collaborate and share reports with your teammates and your readers.

Besides, you can include clickable images, links, create video libraries, and as many product catalogues as you want.

The tool is useful in branding and annotating reports using images and texts. You can also apply color themes as well styles such as art, which makes visualization of data and data stories easy to read and understand.

Other ways Data Studio can help you present your data include the creation and use of:

• Customizable dashboards;
• Drag and drop editing platform;
• Lines;
• Bars;
• Geo maps;
• Pie charts;
• Paginated data tables;
• Area and bubble graphs and;
• Pivot tables among others.

You do not need to be a tech savvy to use Data Studio because it doesn’t require programming.

In just a matter of seconds, you can connect Data Studio with other data sets that include:

• Google Consumer products that include the GSC, YouTube, and Google Sheets;
• Social media handles such as Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter;
• Google Cloud Storage as well as flat files through CSV file upload;
• A variety of databases such as MySQL, BigQuery, and PostgreSQL and;
• Marketing platforms such as Analytics, Google Ads, Search Ads 360, and Display & Video 360.

This analytics tool is easily sharable, something that enables you to work with your teammates concurrently. 

Technical SEO Tools

Perhaps you’ve read and heard of on-page and off-page SEO several times on this article alone. Besides, you’ve also read about local SEO. Even with this information, you may still wonder what of technical SEO is. Like the other SEO terms, technical SEO involves comprehensive search engine optimization tweaks.

Technical SEO aims at giving your content the needed tweaks, something that will ultimately lead to your keywords ranking on Google. While other SEO practices many segments, technical SEO looks deeper into how well you analyze and organize your site for easy search engine crawling.

Here are some of the technical SEO tools you can trust:

Google Search Console

Recently, this critical technical SEO tool has been overhauled. With the new version of Google Search Console, it has replaced most of the old version while adding features, more data, and reports, making it better for webmasters.

Of all the technical SEO tools, Google Search Console should always be the primary SEO tool. But what is Google Search Console? It is a service that is for free offered by Google to assist you maintain, monitor as well as troubleshoot the presence of your site in Google Search results.

To be added to Google Search results, you don’t necessarily need to sign up for Google Search Console, but this Search Console will assist you to better understand and improve how Google views your site.

The Google Search Console provides webmasters with different reports and tools to perform some of these actions:

• Receive information alerts when Google experiences spam, indexing, or other issues related to your site.
• Verify that Google is able to find and crawl your website.
• It shows you different sites that are linked to your own site.
• Fix indexing issues as well as request re-indexing of updated or new content.
• Troubleshoot problems with mobile usability, AMP, and other different search features.

Screaming Frog

Screaming frog is a common technical SEO tool that is used by webmasters almost every day. If you don’t have this tool as a webmaster, I bet you are missing a lot. One of the main purposes of having access to this tool is that it will help you crawl the features of your domain to help you with the process of your technical process.

This technical SEO tool also aids with on-page SEO. It finds all the page descriptions and tittles. It also examines the structure of the URL to determine the issues that need to be fixed. In order to create a considerable audit for your website, it is very important to ensure that you perform a website crawl using screaming frog.

Depending on some of your settings, it is likely to introduce some false errors or positives into your website audit that are hard to know about. The Screaming Frog can help you identify some fundamentals such as:

• Large images.
• Missing page titles, meta descriptions, as well as meta keywords.
• URL errors.
• Incorrect response codes.
• Canonical errors.

Screaming Frog can also help you with other advanced things, such as diving deep into the architecture of your website, identifying some problems with pagination and diagnosing issues with international SEO implementation.

Cloudflare

Every webmaster needs a fast user experience on their site. Most webmasters have come across Cloudflare or used it at some point. Still, others may not have heard about Cloudflare. What is a Cloudflare? Cloudflare offers security and performance to site owners through its intelligent global network.

For web traffic, Cloudflare simply acts as a reverse proxy. It offers support for all sites’ protocols like QUIC, HTTP/2, and SPDY, as well as supporting HTTP/2 Server Push. Cloudflare provides distributed denial of service mitigation that protects most of its customers from attacks by distributed denial of service.

With Cloudflare, you will be able to ensure that anything you connect to the internet is fast, private, secure, and reliable. It ensures that your websites, internet applications, and APIs are secured. Cloudflare also protects employees, devices, and corporate networks. It also deploys and writes codes that operate on the network edge.

With the public internet now taking over and becoming the new corporate network, there is a high demand for reimagining connectivity and network security. Cloudflare will fill this gap by performing connectivity and network security jobs. All your APIs, applications, and websites will be protected as most people are shifting to online. For your site to be secure, make sure you have access to this tool.

GTMetrix

GTMetrix is a tool that offers the most accurate report on page speed. Compared to Google’s Page Speed Insights, GTMetrix is more detailed as it can dive deep and pinpoint some issues in the JavaScript, CSS files, and page requests that are the reason for very slow page speed.

This tool will provide you with different performance metrics that are connected to website speed that you can simply analyze and use to optimize the performance of your site. GTMetrix has different options that you can use to test the speed of your site at varied network speeds, in multiple locations, and also in different browsers.

GTMetrix results are very easy to understand and can help new users make improvements. It consists of a scoring system that is used to display a GTMetrix grade, performance, and structure scores. It is mostly used to have reports of Page Speed and YSlow reports that have already been replaced by the scoring system of the Lighthouse.

By using the GTMetrix grade, it gives you an idea of how your site is performing in terms of visual stability, loading time, and interactivity. This is just a combination of your site’s performance experience and the fronted structure by an actual user.

Chrome DevTools

Chrome DevTools is a set of tools for web development built directly into the Google Chrome browser. These tools can help you edit pages on the fly as well as diagnose problems quickly, allowing you to create a better website faster.

With the Chrome DevTools, you will be able to inspect the network activity and the rendered HTML of your pages. You can use these tools to also troubleshoot any issues with the ad serving.

By using the Chrome DevTools, you can view, manipulate, and change the Document Object Model (DOM), change the style of the page in a preview environment, as well as work with JavaScript by ensuring you allow you to debug, run JavaScript code in a console, and view messages.

There are different ways you can access Chrome DevTools. One of these methods is by left clicking on a certain element on your page and selecting “inspect”. This gives you an opportunity to inspect any given element and all its attributes on that page. With this, you will have immediate access to the styles and elements of the page.

Chrome DevTools is a very helpful tool that is used in web app development. It gives you a chance to directly work in the browser as well as see real-time results.

Multi & Other Tools

You will be surprised to learn that some SEO tools that started as link, analytics, or even local SEO tools have transformed into something else. Today, some of the tools in this section are renowned not just for one thing but multiple functions.

Unlike some of the tools in different sections above, most of the tools in this section are good in doing keyword research, tracking your site’s ranking, build high-end links, check your site’s standings in the SERPs, domain authority, and spy on your competitor’s backlink profile among other important things.

On this list, you will find some of the best tools the industry has ever produced (those referred to as crème de la crème). The unfortunate part of this is most of the tools in this section are paid. Although that isn’t a problem to established webpreneurs and companies, the message is you may need to cough out some money for you to use most of these tools.

With that snippet, let’s now turn our attention to the multi tools:

Moz

The first of these multi SEO tools is Moz. To some people, especially those that own online business, this is one of the tools that are deemed important. However, you may still wonder what Moz is.

Like many other premium tools today, Moz started as a freemium SEO tool. Over the years, the tool has improved to become an all-round SEO tool that is designed to improve your site’s ranking, search engine visibility, do keyword research, and spy on your competitor.

With Moz or Moz Pro, you can carry out many things on your website. Here are some of the things Moz can help you achieve:

Audience Analysis – This tool will help you have a better understanding of your audience. In other words, with the help of this tool, you are able to know how many visitors came to your site, what device they used, how many seconds/minutes they spent, and the pages they liked most.

Besides, the tool shows you the keywords people used to get to your website. The result is you are able to optimize more for the keywords that convert and remove those that do not bring visitors to your site.

Site Auditing/Crawling – Moz Pro has its own site crawler. Thanks to the crawler, you are able to do thorough site audit to find and fix some of the issues that might jeopardize your site performance. 

During crawling, Moz Pro allows you to find errors that are preventing your readers from accessing your site. Besides, the tool offers features such as page optimization as well as ink opportunities, which aid in you staying on top of the game.

Site Rankings – One of the main reasons you are using an SEO tool is to ensure you monitor your site rankings. However, a good tool does not only help you monitor your site rankings but also aid in achieving the high ranks.

Thankfully, Moz Pro tools help you do proper site ranking analysis to see the positions of your pages, posts and keywords. In addition, the tool helps you track how you rank for specific keywords and comparing it with your competitors.

The other interesting thing about Moz is you can track for local, national, and international searches. With the overall view of how your site is ranking locally, nationally, and internationally, you are able to direct your efforts to the right place. 

You will also compare your competitor’s ranks on all these locations.

SEMrush

If you want to discover diverse marketing opportunities and improve your site’s online visibility, then SEMrush is the right tool for you. SEMrush’s premium tools and features are able to help you track and monitor essential things such as SMM, PPC, SEO, keyword research, content marketing, PR, competitive research, campaign management, and marketing insights among others.

You can use SEMrush free but that would limit you to very basic functions. Otherwise, to be on the save side and enjoy SEMrush’s powerful features, you may need to migrate to its premium plans.

SEMrush has three premium plans namely Pro, Guru, and Business, with each of these setting its price based on the features it offers. 

The good thing with SEMrush is the company gives you a trial plan.

With this initial plan, you are able to do the following things among many:

• Research keywords;
• Conduct link building;
• Track up to 500 keywords;
• Manage your social campaigns;
• Create three projects;
• Get and create on-page insights such as SEO ideas;
• Create up to 10 keyword content templates;
• Spy and analyze your competitor’s SEO, backlink, and ads strategy and;
• Create technical SEO insights including the crawling and auditing of up to 10k pages.

SEMrush’s Guru Plan will help you do even more. The plan is ideal for large companies and enterprises that have a robust website, multiple websites or years of online presence.

With SEMrush Guru trial, you can do the following:

• Access your site’s historical data that stretches back many years;
• Track up to 1,500+ keywords;
• Audit and crawl and upward of 300k web pages;
• Track and monitor keyword cannibalization;
• Do 15 projects;
• Carry out numerous content marketing procedures such as topic research, content audit, brand reputation probe, and on the go content optimization and;
• Generate branded PDF reports that are easy to read.

The other good thing you will love about SEMrush is how easily the tool integrates with Google products and other tools. 

Some of the Google products that you can connect with SEMrush include:

• Google Search Console;
• Google Analytics;
• Google Ads;
• Google Disavow Tool;
• Google My Business;
• Google Docs;
• Gmail;
• Google Data Studio;
• Google Tag Manager;
• Google Calendar and;
• Google Search.

Besides, you can connect your SEMrush account with social media handles such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. 

SEMrush SEO tool also works magic with WordPress, Majestic, Trello, monday.com, and Zapier.

You do not need to be a tech person to connect your SEMrush account with these various properties. Unlinking is also simple. With a click of a button, you can delink your SEMrush account with any third party properties.

Ahrefs

The name Ahrefs is so far one of the common names in the online docket. The tool was launched in 2011 as software for analyzing backlinks. Overtime, the tool has grown to accommodate a variety of other features.

In short, Ahrefs is an all-in one SEO suite, which contains essential tools that assist in keyword research, link building, rank tracking, competitor analysis, and other site auditing exercises.

Majority of the tools inside Ahrefs are made to benefit site owners. However, some are designed to help marketing professionals to do their job well. Generally, Ahrefs is a tool to analyze your site’s link profile, monitor keyword rankings, and do proper SEO audit.

With Ahrefs, you can carry out your keyword research for a majority of the search engines including Google, Amazon, and YouTube.

From humble beginnings in 2011, Ahrefs has grown to become a big SEO tool that it is today. Features and properties within the tool have also advanced tremendously. 

Here is a table to help you understand Ahrefs’ four elaborate plans:

SEOquake

SEOquake is a browser plugin. The tool comes with dozens of beneficial SEO metrics that every site owner wants. For quicker access to useful data, professionals recommend to embed this tool to your browser.

Do not be surprised to learn that although unknown to many people, SEOquake is among the most powerful SEO tools. The tool is capable of doing several things. 

Apart from performing SEO audits, the tool is exceptional in comparing domains, exporting various useful data, and carrying out basic and advanced page audits.

When properly configured, SEOquake allows you to see keyword density, internal, external links, keyword difficulty, compare domains, and urls, display advertising campaigns, and show your backlink profile among other things.

Woorank’s SEO & Website Analysis Tool

WooRank is known to be one of the fastest, easiest and superior SEO tools for site auditing and planning marketing campaigns.

With this tool, it is easy to track everything that may affect your site either positively or negatively. Experts say that WooRank has the unique ability of discovering some of the issues you might not discover using any other SEO tool.

You can easily integrate WooRank with other powerful tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search as well as major social media handles including Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Some of the tool’s key features include:

• Marketing score and checklist;
• SEO tool;
• Site crawl tool;
• Keyword research tool;
• Writing assistant and;
• Competitor’s probe feature among others. 

The company gives new clients a 14-day free WooRank trial. After that, if you like the tool, you can choose any of these three pricing plans:

• Pro – retailing at $79.99 per month but $53.25 when billed annually;
• Premium – going for $199.99 each month but $133.25 if billed yearly and;
• Enterprise – you contact the team to negotiate and agree on a suitable fee.

BROWSEO

In the medical world, doctors may recommend a patient carry out several tests in a bid to know what is troubling the patient. Some of these probes include CT scan and X-ray. When seen by a qualified professional, these investigations tell with certainty what the patient is suffering from, something that makes it easy for doctors to advise the patient.

Back to site building. The search engine looks at your site differently. You may think that you’ve done everything you can on your site but without the right tools to show you how the search engine looks at your site, you would be lying to yourself.

That is where BROWSEO comes in. The tool is like an x-ray, giving you access to full diagnosis of what is happening on your site. In fact, this tool shows you the other side that you wouldn’t see otherwise – how the search engine sees your site.

SERP Preview is BROWSEO’s best feature. Thanks to this feature, you are able to see how your pages appear in the search engine. By doing the probe, you will be able to identify among other things, if your titles and meta descriptions are either too long or too short, thus fix them.

Final Thoughts

There is no doubt that the market offers plenty of free and paid SEO tools for various functions. The good thing is these tools save a lot of time and although some have set premium prices, the budget is not out of this world.  

If one tool is not giving you the results you want, go to another and another until you are satisfied. However, one thing is for sure, if you settle on premium multi tools such as Ahrefs, you will not look any further.

For now, be assured that this list has everything you need in terms of free and paid SEO tools that can ultimately change how you run your online business to give you the best results you’ve ever dreamt of.