Can you really do an effective SEO without the help of Tools? If you say YES! I would love to be your student. Let’s face fact, search engine optimization is getting more and more complex than before.
To make sure you are on the right track with your seo ranking efforts or campaign, you must use some websites and softwares to make your job easier and effective. I have put together a list of some of the best seo software tools that will easily get you a better Search engine rankings if used properly.
| SEO Tools | Available Plans | Price Range / Year | Read More |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO Powersuite | Free, Professional, Enterprise | $0 – $699 | See Details Below |
| Raven Tools | Start, Grow, Thrive, Lead | $948 – $4788 | See Details Below |
| Screaming Frog | Free, Paid Version | $0 – $149 | See Details Below |
| SERPstat | Lite, Standard, Advanced, Enterprise | $662.40 – $4790.40 | See Details Below |
5 Main Features Of Efficient SEO Tools
Please bear with me as I would love to cover these points before we move to the list. Because, these features and capabilities are what make SEOs consider a tool as one of the best. NOW WAIT!!! Ask yourself these questions;
- Can I conduct a better keyword research?
- Can I audit my website to check if I am doing the right things?
- Can I track my website rankings?
- Can I spy on my top competitors to see what they are doing right?
- Can I get opportunities for building backlinks?
For any seo software or tool to be considered optimal for your search engine optimization campaigns, it must have the above features. If the software or tool can answer the questions above, you should definitely go for it. Let’s elaborate more on these features to better understand why the seo software tools on this list are the best.
Better Keyword Research Capabilities
I presume if the word keyword research comes up, you might first think of tools like Google Keyword Planner, Keyword Finder, KWfinder, Keyword Tool etc.
Bear in mind that tools like Google Keyword Planner are only best for ads campaigns and not for SEO purposes. This is because, you only get keyword suggestions, search volume, cost per click and competition (only for paid ads).
The best seo tools go beyond these common metrics shown by Google keyword Planner and other keyword research tools. You can see additional information like SEO difficulty, and your top ranking competitors.
Checking the seo difficulty is extremely important because you wouldn’t want to go for a keyword with a difficulty score higher than 65. Unless your site or you are very authoritative in your industry.
Website Audit
Like I mentioned in the keyword research section above, keyword tools can only give you keyword suggestions and a few metrics. An effective seo campaign does not end with keyword research.
You must conduct a thorough audit on your website to make sure your whole site is in proper seo conditions. When it comes to website audits, there are 2 key parts you should take a look into. They are Onpage and Offpage Audits. Let’s see what to take note of;
ONPAGE AUDIT
With a perfect seo tool, you can properly analyse your website to check if you have done the onpage optimization properly. Below are the things you can analyse for onpage seo with these ranking tools.
Your Title Tags:
Title Tags are very important when it comes to your onpage seo success. This is because it’s the first thing search engine crawlers look at. Your Title also appears on search engine results pages when users type in their queries and search.
A great SEO tool should be able to detect missing or too long titles. Most people are not familiar with best seo practices, oftentimes forget about their title tags. If you are one of them, seo ranking tools are your best friend.
If your page has a missing title, search engines will auto generate one for your page. The problem here is that this generated title might not be ideal to grab attention in order to get clicks on your result snippet.
The length of your titles should be no more than 65 characters. If it’s too long, search engines will slice it off from their search results. A perfect seo software should catch all the long titles and give you some good suggestions for improvements.
Meta Descriptions:
A meta description is the supporting text that appears under your title in the search results. Your meta description gives the user a sneak peek of what they should expect when they click on your display snippet.
If this is missing, again search engines will auto generate one for you. You should avoid this by all means. But if you are using a good seo tool, it is easier to find pages with missing meta descriptions.
Imagine trying to find this without seo software!! You will have to manually check the html code of all your web pages. This is something you should avoid at all cost unless you love doing that.
SEO website audit tools will even show you the pages with very long meta descriptions. Again you know what is the problem with this like we discussed under titles.
URL Structure:
The url structure of your web pages is another important signal for seo. If your website generates a lot of dynamic urls, it might affect your ranking score. Dynamic urls can cause a lot of problems to your website. Because it might create duplicates of your web pages which will definitely affect your rankings.
Another impact on your rankings is from the length of your urls. If your urls are too long, it might be considered as spammy. This is because longer urls are often associated with keyword stuffing and spams.
Luckily enough for you, the seo tools mentioned on this article can spot this issue. You will see how many dynamic and lengthier urls you have on your site. This way you can easily fix it or higher a professional to do so.
Heading Tags like H1, H2, H3, H4 …:
The H1 Tag is the main heading that the user can easily find on your page. This is the main topic of your page. To make your web pages more comprehensible, you should use the H2, H3, H4 and H5 tags. These are sub headings in your web pages broken down for your visitors to get a better understanding of your content.
SEO rank tracking tools will check your entire website and spot missing headings. These tools will also notify you if your headings are too long.
Content Audit:
These tools will check your entire site for the quality of the content. The indicators that these tools check are duplicate content and length of the contents. You will be notified if you have duplicate content as well as pages with thin content.
Without most of these tools, it would be very difficult for you to manually check these details.
Internal Linking Structure of your website:
Internal linking means how are your web pages talking to each other through links. Pages that expand more about a topic from one page should be linked together. This way search engine crawlers and better understand your content. This will in return reduce or eliminate DEAD END pages on your website.
If you have a very small site with just 3 or 4 pages, you can manage this manually. Else you will need to use any of these seo softwares to properly check your internal linkings.
Image Alt texts:
This is one part of onpage seo that most people still ignore till date. Image alt text is one of the most important onpage seo ranking factors. This is because search engines crawlers can only understand the images on your webpage through alt texts. Also alt texts help users who are visually impared to understand what your image is all about.
SEO software ranking tools can detect images with empty alt text. This way you can go through all of the images and add a brief description on all images. It is very difficult to manage image alt texts manually because it takes time to look it up.
Broken Links:
I am sure you would be disappointed if you click a link from a web page and you get “page cannot be found”. Both users and search engine crawlers dislike broken links as it is very bad for user experience.
These quality performance website ranking tools, will crawl your entire site and detect broken links. With the result, you can easily see the pages with broken links and easily fix them.
Other Onpage Audits:
There are quite a lot of other onpage audits that these seo ranking tools can do on your website. If we want to go through each and every one of them, I believe this article would be endless. The points above for onpage optimization are the most basic but very important.
Below is a list of other onpage audits these seo software ranking tools can audit on your website:
- Mobile Friendly of your web pages
- Speed of your website on Mobile and Desktop
- Page Status code
- Indexing restrictions
- Open Graph Markup
- Structured Data Markup
OFF-PAGE AUDIT
These are things like the quality of backlinks you have on your website, your social signals. Seo ranking tools check the overall performance of your website from other external sources.
Since it would be almost impossible to check this without a proper seo tool, having one of these tools will help you BIGLY.
Tracking Your Website Rankings
Tracking your website ranking performance is very important in your search engine optimization journey. Knowing your ranking position on major search engines is not possible without seo tools. If you know how your website is performing against your competitors, you can easily improve it. By improving your website, you can also track the success of your efforts.
Although Tools like Google Search Console is very good to check your performance, it is only limited to Google Search Engine. If you are on a tight budget, I would recommend using this Google Tool.
Good seo tools can track the performance of your website on multiple search engines all at once. You can check the performance of each keyword you are ranking for. Without seo softwares, this process becomes very technical and almost impossible to do manually.
Spy on Your Competitors:
To know what your top competitors are doing right without a seo software is practically impossible. If you are a programmer, you can build a web scraper that is capable of scrapping the entire internet. But I presume, you and I are not on that level of skill just yet.
So using effective seo ranking tools is the best route we can follow. These tools will show you all the backlinks sources of your competitors. You can also find out which online platforms your competitors are actively present.
This way you can easily analyse the structure of your competitors web page. After the analysis, you can improve the quality of your web page to outrank your competitors.
Seeing the backlink sources of your competitors, you can easily do an outreach to these sources and ask for a backlink. Now wait, I know you might be asking yourself if you will have to do the outreach manually. Don’t worry, seo ranking softwares can do this for you automatically. This is explained in the next characteristic.
Link Building
If you don’t know the kind of backlink you should be building, search engine optimization tools can really be of great assistance. Without these efficient ranking tools, you will need weeks if not months to do link reachout.
Now you can automate this process with most of the best seo tools. Once you find your competitors backlinks sources, you can find the contacts of the web masters. So of the tools here like SEO Powersuite Link Assistance software can send out your link outreach message from the software.
With these softwares, you can also see links potential reach from other high quality sources your competitors are not linking from.
Best Search Engine Optimization Tools List.
Sorry if this article has become very long. I just wanted to point out what you should always look for to know if you are choosing the best seo tools. Now lets see these tools and point out their unique features. The list is of no particular order because it all depends on your preference and budget.
I have indicated 6 main metrics of these softwares for you to make your choice depending on your preference. These 6 metrics are;
- Available Plans
- Functionality
- Standout Features
- Best use case
- Drawbacks
- Limits
Now let’s dive deep into exploring these seo tools with the 6 metrics I just mentioned above.
SEO PowerSuite
This a 4 in one seo software. You will have 4 specific softwares with their unique functionalities in one download. There is SEO Spy-Glass, Link Assistant, Website Auditor and Rank Tracker.
PLANS
FREE
PROFESSIONAL — $299 / YEAR
ENTERPRISE — $699 / YEAR
FREE
Functionality:
Onpage SEO, competitor Analysis, Keyword Research, Web Page Rank Tracker, and Backlinks Research.
Standout Features:
Although it’s free with some limits, it still provides small websites the opportunity to run an effective seo campaign. This is great to get your foot wet before going into the paid plans. The keyword research has no limit compared to other tools, you only have a certain number of keywords you can research.
Best Use Case:
This software is best for Small content creators, Bloggers, Copywriters, freelancers and those on a really tight budget
Drawbacks:
Since this is free, it also has some significant drawbacks. These are; You can only use the software on desktop, you can’t save projects as well as the reports you will generate will have the SEO Powersuite Logo.
Limits:
With the free plan, you can only conduct 1100 backlinks research, 500 URLs crawl and 1 competitor research.
PROFESSIONAL — $299 / YEAR
Functionality:
The functionality is the same as in the Free plan.
Standout Features:
This plan has no limit on website audit, keywords research, backlinks, link management and projects. The price is compared to other tools like Screaming Frog and Netpeak software. But the difference is that it handles more than the free plan and all aspects of seo.
Best Use Case:
This is suitable for business owners because the backlinks and keyword research are unlimited. The only limitation in this plan is if you are an agency who generates reports about backlinks for your clients. But if you are using it for your own company, this is perfect for you.
Drawbacks:
This plan only has 2 drawbacks which is the fact that you can only use it on your laptop or desktop and you can’t generate white label reports.
Limits:
You can only do 5 competitors rank tracking and backlinks research.
ENTERPRISE — $699 / YEAR
Functionality:
The functionality is the same as in the professional Plan.
Standout Features:
Same as the Professional plan
Best Use Case:
Best suited for Agencies who work with multiple clients. It is also ideal for freelancers who are handling large campaign volumes.
Drawbacks:
The only drawback is that you can’t use it on your mobile phone.
Limits:
Only 10 competitor rank tracking and 5 backlinks research which is more than enough to handle your projects.
RAVEN TOOLS
Raven Tools have the following marketing softwares; Site Auditor, Marketing Reports, Data Connectors, SEO Tools, Social Media Reports, Serp Rank Tracker.
PLANS
START — $948 / YEAR
GROW — $1668 / YEAR
THRIVE — $2988 / YEAR
LEAD — $4788 / YEAR
START — $948 / YEAR
Functionality:
Backlink research, Keyword research, Website Audit, Rank Tracking, On-page SEO, and Competition Analysis.
Standout Features:
It accesses different databases for features such as competitor research and link building. It also integrates with email software such as Mailchimp and campaign monitor. It also integrates with call tracking softwares.
Best Use Case:
This is best for small marketing agencies because of its unlimited reporting, keywords and competitor research.
Drawbacks:
Expensive
Limits:
The limit is that it can only be used by 4 people in the same software. In addition, you only get 20 projects, 15000 keywords to track, 400000 pages to crawl in a month, 50000 links monitored for link building, and 5 search engines to track your rankings
GROW — $1668 / YEAR
Functionality:
Same as in the Start Plan
Standout Features:
The features are the same as in the start plan.
Best Use Case:
This is suitable for marketing agencies because it combines analytical features of both Moz and Majestic. This allows users to have an overview of the status of their projects. There is an increased number of users and projects in this plan. This plan is also ideal for marketing specialists.
Drawbacks:
This plan is expensive
Limits:
The limit in this plan is 8 users, 80 projects, 20000 keywords to track and 2000000 pages to crawl a month. You can only monitor 75000 links for link building opportunities. There are only 5 search engines to check your rankings.
THRIVE — $2988 / YEAR
Functionality:
Same as in the Grow Plan
Standout Features:
The features are the same as in the Grow plan.
Best Use Case:
This plan is best for larger marketing agencies since it allows up to 20 users. Larger marketing agencies often have more seo specialists working together on different projects. This plan makes sense if you have a large marketing agency. In this plan there are over 100 projects you can handle if you are working with multiple clients. The limits of crawling and projects is higher than with tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs.
Drawbacks:
Higher price
Limits:
With this plan, there is space for up to 20 users, 160 projects, 25K keywords to track and 5M pages to crawl. You can also monitor 100K link opportunities for backlinks. There are only 5 search engines to conduct your research.
LEAD — $4788 / YEAR
Functionality:
Same as in the Thrive Plan
Standout Features:
The features are the same as in the Thrive plan.
Best Use Case:
This is the highest plan in Raven tools and it is suitable for Marketing agencies working with the largest client bases. If your agency is working with a large amount of projects and users, this plan is perfect for you.
Drawbacks:
Super Higher Price
Limits:
With Raven Tools’s highest plan, you get space for 40 users, 320 projects and 30K keywords you can track. You also have 7M pages you can crawl per month, 150K monitored link building opportunities. As usual, there are only 5 search engines you can use for research.
SCREAMING FROG
Screamingfrog is another desktop seo software that comes with quite a number of functionalities. From Search engine optimization to Conversion rate optimization. It is compatible with Windows, MacOS and Ubunto. So if you are using one of these operating systems, you can take advantage of this powerful software.
PLANS
FREE VERSION
PAID VERSION — $149 / YEAR
FREE VERSION
Functionality:
Website Audit
Standout Features:
The free version only lets users crawl their websites and find broken links. Users can also analyze crawl frequency as well as generate sitemaps for upto 500 URLS..
Best Use Case:
This version is suitable for bloggers and freelancers. Although this version is free, it comes with a handful drawbacks as seen below.
Drawbacks:
- This version is only limited website audit
- Users can only crawl a maximum of 500 URLS
- you can’t save crawled projects
- There is no integration with Google Analytics or Search Console
- No crawling of JavaScript
- Absence of free support
- only used on Desktops
PAID VERSION — $149 / YEAR
Functionality:
Same as with the Free version
Standout Features:
With the paid version, there is no limit on the actual urls to crawl. Although it has limited functionalities, it is the cheapest seo tool. The paid version can crawl javascript, integrate with Google search console and Google Analytics. Screaming Frog is best if you are only auditing websites.
Best Use Case:
This tool is suitable for SEOs and In-house marketers whose job is only limited to website audits
Drawbacks:
It is only limited to website audits and you can only use it on desktop.
SERPstat
SERPstat is an all-in-one SEO platform for professionals. It comes with 5 modules. These modules are; Link tracking, backlink analysis, website audits, keywords research and competitor research. With this seo tool, you can keep track of all your projects, history and analytic reports. SERPstat is not limited only to SEO. It is also used by PPC Specialists, Content Managers, and Digital Marketers as a whole.
PLANS: YEARLY
LITE – $662.40
STANDARD – $1430.40
ADVANCED – $2870.40
ENTERPRISE – $4790.40
LITE – $662.40
Functionality:
With this plan, users can conduct backlink research, keyword research, Website audit, on-page SEO and Track Rankings.
Standout Features:
This seo software has convenient extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Opera. It provides a wide range of metrics and data for each page you visit. It measures onpage data like Page speed, tags, keywords used, PPC information, competitors of the page and much more.
Best Use Case:
This SEO audit tool is best for Bloggers and freelancers, and SEO copywriters.
Drawbacks:
The drawbacks are With a price of $662.40 per year, users can’t Brand reports they generate. There is also the absence of white label reports.
Limits:
This plan is limited to 10 projects, 4K keyword queries per day and 15K keywords to track. Users can’t query more than 500 backlinks per day, 150K pages audit. With this plan, there are only 2 search engines available (Google and Yandex).
STANDARD – $1430.40
Functionality:
Same as in the Lite Plan
Standout Features:
The same standout features as the Lite plan.
Best Use Case:
This plan is best for Employees in a Marketing Agency. There are upto 50 projects users can handle at once.
Drawbacks:
Higher price but no white label reports.
Limits:
- only 50 projects
- users only have 5,000 keyword queries per day
- you can only track 60,000 keywords
- 1,000 backlink queries a day
- Only 400,000 pages to audit
- Only Google and Yandex is available for research
ADVANCED – $2870.40
Functionality:
Same as in the Standard Plan
Standout Features:
The same standout features as the Standard Plan.
Best Use Case:
Medium sized marketing agencies
Drawbacks:
Although users can generate Branded reports and white label reports, I still think it is expensive for small marketers
Limits:
you have up to 75 projects, 8K keywords to query per day, 150K keywords to track, and 1.5K backlinks to query per day. You can also crawl 1.25M pages per month and can only research on Google and Yandex
ENTERPRISE – $4790.40
Functionality:
Same as in the Advanced Plan
Standout Features:
The same standout features as the Advanced Plan.
Best Use Case:
Large marketing agencies with multiple large clients to work with. If your agency handles large campaign volumes, this plan is best for you.
Drawbacks:
The only drawback I can think of is the high price. But for large marketing agencies, price is not an issue.
Limits:
- Projects limite: 100
- Keyword queries per day: 12K
- Keywords to track: 300K
- 2K backlinks to query daily
- 2.5M pages to crawl per month
- Only Google and Yandex for research
Bottom-Line:
Before using any of these tools, you should make sure you knowsome basics of SEO. If you are a complete beginer, you can check out this blog of our top factors that influence seo rankings.
