There's nothing quite like a sudden Google algorithm update to leave marketers feeling equal parts confused and concerned. It seems as though search engines like Google wait for you to get all of your ducks in a row and then unleash an update that makes your efforts instantly obsolete. Plus, there's still some secrecy behind how Google evaluates websites and determines which sites appear — and how they appear — on the search engine results page (SERPs) for different queries. The good news is that there are a number of search engine optimization (SEO) tools out there — some free, some paid — that can help you view your website the way search engines like Google see it — this way, you can improve your ranking and relevance for your target keywords. In this blog article, we’ll review 11 free SEO tools and 14 paid SEO tools. (Note: Some of the free tools below also offer paid plans while some of the paid tools also offer free plans — so, we recommend you check out the pricing pages for the tools you’re most interested in to determine which plan is ideal for your needs and goals.) Marketers work to generate traffic and qualified leads via their company’s website. That’s why it’s important for marketers to understand exactly what they can do to improve the impact and SEO of that website. With HubSpot’s Website Grader, simply enter the URL of your website and you’ll automatically receive a Report Card with actionable insights about your SEO efforts. From there, you can sign up for the HubSpot Academy Website Optimization course that teaches you how to improve your website's SEO, user experience (UX), and more based on the type of feedback you received on your Report Card. With the HubSpot Website Grader, you can: Google Search Central (formerly known as Google Webmasters) has a number of tools meant to help you appear in the SERPs for the search terms and phrases your target audience is looking for. If you’re a business person or marketer, Search Central guides you to use Google Search Console to help with your SEO and website analysis. Google Search Console monitors, debugs, and optimizes your website — and there's no coding knowledge necessary. Here are some examples of website elements Google Search Console will teach you about and help you optimize. Although Google Analytics has a paid version, the free version of the product can help you manage your website’s SEO — this is especially true if you pair Google Analytics with Google Search Console. In doing so, all of your website’s SEO data will be centrally located and compiled, and you can use queries to identify areas for improvement with the keywords and phrases that you want your website and web pages to rank for. Other ways that you can use the free version of Google Analytics to understand and improve your SEO are: The Free SEO Report Card by UpCity lets you analyze your website to determine how it stacks up against the competition. In exchange for a bit of your contact information, SEO Report Card will serve up a report that covers the following: Internet Marketing Ninjas is an SEO-focused company with a variety of free tools you can use to compare your website against the competition, optimize web pages for certain keywords, generate meta tags, and increase organic traffic to your website. Here are some examples of the free Internet Marketing Ninja SEO tools you can take advantage of: Microsoft Bing Webmaster gives you access to a number of tools that offer insight into your your website such as reporting, diagnostic, and SEO tools. The SEO tools that you can use for free have the power to help you analyze your website, manage backlinks, and review keywords to ensure your site is well-optimized for organic search. Here are some of the other things you can do with Bing Webmaster's SEO tools: Seolyzer is a free site crawling, log analysis, and SEO tool that helps you determine how search engines like Google view your website. Seolyzer pulls information that crawling bots leave in your server’s log files while browsing your site to identify and create your SEO KPIs. The tool also identifies error codes, redirects, and page speed and performance. Additionally, Seolyzer can help you: Quickly identify, and continually monitor, SEO issues on your website such as poor response time, error messages, and crawl volume so you can resolve them before serious damage is done. Manage and analyze your unique KPIs with Seolyzer such as page performance, crawl volume, HTTP status codes, active and new pages, and desktop versus mobile responsiveness. Segment your web pages to determine what your most crawled pages are. Compare your web pages that Google deems as the most important to the ones that you deem as the most important (e.g. revenue-focused pages). Measure the impact of your SEO efforts on a page-by-page basis or by the category of the page. SEOquake is a Google Chrome extension that automatically checks a web page’s SEO parameters quickly and for free. This includes on-page SEO audits, internal and external link review, real-time URL and domain comparison, and data file export. Other things you can use SEOquake for are: Seoability is a free SEO-checker tool. With it, you can test your website’s level of compliance with today’s SEO guidelines. By simply entering your URL, your site will be analyzed and you’ll receive tips on how you can better optimize your website. In addition to a detailed SEO audit of your website, you’ll gain access to 1,000 subpage audits, email reporting and alerts, and keyword monitoring. Here are some more advantages of using Seoability: Check My Links is a Google Chrome extension that you can use to ensure your links on both internal or external web pages work. For instance, if you were to search a term on Wikipedia, Check My Links would be able to tell you how many links that Wikipedia page has in total and how many of those links are broken. This is helpful because you can make corrections to broken links immediately (or hopefully, before a page goes live). Check My Links is ideal for developers, content editors, and web designers according to its creators. Here are some more examples of what Check My Links can do: BROWSEO is an SEO browser that allows you to review your webpage in a stripped-down format so you can analyze it's UX and content as well as gain insight into its SEO. Once you input the URL, the output will hone in on your HTML so you're able to understand the page's structure, optimized search terms, and other SEO-related factors. Examples of what you can do with BROWSEO are: Next, let’s look at some paid SEO tools. (Note that some of these tools have free trial periods. Some also offer entirely free plans but with restrictions in terms of flexibility and customization.) Price: Seven-day trial for $7, $99/ mo for Lite, $179/ mo for Standard, $399/ mo for Advanced, $999/ mo for Agency Ahrefs is an advanced SEO resource that examines your website property and produces keyword, link, and ranking profiles to help you make better decisions on your content. Some of its main features are: When using the Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs also produces the "parent topic" of the keyword you looked up. A keyword's parent topic is a broader keyword with higher search volume than your intended keyword, but likely has the same audience and ranking potential. This gives you more a valuable SEO opportunity. Price: $119.95/ mo for Pro, $229.95/ mo for Guru, or $449.95/ mo for Business SEMrush is an elaborate dashboard that reports on the performance of domains as a whole and their specific pages. SEMrush offers numerous resources, one of which is the SEO Toolkit. Toolkit allows you to track a website’s visibility improvement over time as well as identify which keywords it's ranking for, what the page's rank is for a keyword, the keyword's monthly search volume, and more. SEMrush also allows you to: Price: Free five-day trial, $29/ mo GrowthBar is a Chrome extension that can help you perform keyword research, competitive analysis, and track SEO rankings. With the GrowthBar, access data points about any website directly from the search engine results pages. This allows you to assess your competitors' performance and view the growth channels, keywords, backlinks, and ads that are working for them. Here are some more key features of GrowthBar: Price: Free 14-day trial, $59.00/ mo for Pro, $179.00/ mo for Premium, or contact for Enterprise quote Woorank's in-depth site analysis helps marketers reveal opportunities for optimization and improvement. This analysis takes into account the performance of existing SEO initiatives, social media, usability, and more. Each report is divided into eight sections to help you easily analyze your site and identify targets for optimization — here are the sections: Price: Free 30-day trial, $24/ mo for Starter, $99/ mo for Group, $299/ mo for Professional, $999+ for Custom Although backlinks to your website are critical to ranking well on Google, the outreach you do while link building can feel a lot like cold calling. BuzzStream makes it easy to research the appropriate people, come up with effective email messages, and track who's accepted each link request. BuzzStream also helps you: Price: Free 30-day trial, $99/ mo for Standard, $149/ mo for Medium, $249/ mo for Large, $599/ mo for Premium The Moz Pro subscription serves as an all-in-one tool for increasing your business' search ranking. Moz's collection of research tools provides subscribers with the resources they need to identify SEO opportunities, track growth, build reports, and optimize their efforts. Moz Pro also includes: Price: $14.50/ mo for Webmaster, $24.90/ mo for Advanced, $49.90/ mo for Pro, 99.90/ mo for Agency, and $153.90 /mo for Agency XL The best way to understand the performance of your off-page SEO is by having a good overview of your backlinks. Linkody allows you to discover, track, analyze, and disavow backlinks all from an easy-to-use interface. Aside from that, the tool checks your links 24/7 and informs you of any changes so you can take immediate action in case a link is lost or broken. Other Linkody features include: Price: Free or €99/ year Designed specifically for the SEO-minded, this program crawls the websites you specify, examining the URLs for common SEO issues. This program simplifies and expedites an otherwise time-consuming process — especially for larger websites. (It could take hours or days to manually evaluate the same URLs.) Other notable features are: Price: $249 one-time payment for Life-Time plan, $99/ mo for Subscription (one website), or $899/ mo for Agency (10+ websites) Artificial or unnatural links have the potential to seriously hurt your search ranking. Remove'em helps get rid of those links. The tool has the ability to: Price: $99/ mo for Monthly plan, $79/ mo for Annual plan, $399/ mo for Enterprise plan AnswerThePublic is a search listening and keyword tool that listens to autocomplete data from Google and other search engines, and then provides you with a list of phrases and questions that people are searching for around your keyword. This allows you to craft your website and content to your audience to increase traffic and conversions. With AnswerThePublic, you can also: Price: 14-day trial for any plan, Free for Little Hero, $9/ mo for Big Hero, $49/ mo for Giant Hero, and $149/ mo for Ultimate Hero Keyword Hero pairs your visitor's sessions with the keywords they used to land on your page, all within your Google Analytics account. In other words, this tool gives you an understanding of the search intent of your organic traffic. Here are some more actions you can take with Keyword Hero: Price: $39/ mo for Basic, $79/ mo for Professional, $299/ mo for Team SpyFu is a competitor keyword research for Google Ads. In addition to keyword research, it helps with PPC competitive research, SEO competitive research, and the creation of custom lists and domains. The tool helps you drive traffic to your Google Ads campaigns and website, monitor both paid and organic rankings on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and obtain reliable and accurate contact information for leads. With SpyFu, you can also: Price: Pay as You Go (starting at $5), $19/ mo for Small Business, $49/ mo for Professional, $179/ mo for Unlimited Seomater is an SEO auditing and website crawling tool. It assists with technical SEO analysis and SEO on-page optimization testing. Once the tool crawls your site, you'll receive an SEO report that explains your website's various SEO-related elements including internal and external links, backlinks, page quality and speed, social media, organic presence, and more. Your analysis will also come with tips on how you can improve each of these SEO elements. In addition, you can: Price: $139/ mo for Basic, $219/ mo for Standard, $319/ mo for Premium, or contact a rep for an Enterprise quote ContentKing is real-time SEO auditing and content tracking tool — it tracks your website 24/7 so any issues related to SEO don't go unnoticed for too long. The tool is cloud-based, meaning there's no installation required and your data and reports are available whenever you need them. You can also: Now that you've learned about 25 free and paid SEO tools, determine which option will help you achieve your SEO goals and get started auditing, optimizing, and monitoring your website, individual web pages, and content. Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.Best SEO Tools
11 Free SEO Tools
1. HubSpot Website Grader
2. Google Search Central: Google Search Console
3. Google Analytics
4. UpCity Free SEO Report Card
5. Internet Marketing Ninjas
6. Bing Webmaster
7. Seolyzer
8. SEOquake
9. Seoability
10. Check My Links
11. BROWSEO
14 SEO Tools
1. Ahrefs
2. SEMrush
3. GrowthBar
Use the Top Keywords and Backlinks feature to see which paid and organic keywords are driving the most traffic for your website and get a list of the most authoritative backlinks pointing to your site.
Get your Keyword Difficulty Score to quickly assess how hard it would be to rank for a particular keyword based on the strength of the domain authorities of the URLs ranking on page one.
Use Word Count to view the word count of any page directly from the SERP.
Run Facebook Ads and get a visual of what they look like from a search engine's perspective.
Use the Keyword Suggestions tool to get a list of related keywords you might want to rank for along with their Search volume & CPCs.
4. Woorank
5. BuzzStream
6. Moz Pro Tools
7. Linkody
8. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
9. Remove'em
10. AnswerThePublic
11. Keyword Hero
12. SpyFu
13. Seomater
14. ContentKing
Originally published Feb 10, 2021 7:00:00 AM, updated February 11 2021