Updated August 2018

In the world of online business, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must-have technique. SEO helps businesses target an audience that might be interested in their services and products. With the right SEO practices, businesses can skillfully draw in an audience through awesome web content that leads to interest, and ultimately sales, of its products.

It’s not always easy to navigate the world of SEO on your own. Fortunately, there are backlink plenty of excellent SEO tools that improve strategy, leaving the guesswork and intricacies of SEO to the experts as businesses reap the rewards

What are the best SEO tools? Our list of best SEO tools can take a business to a different level through keyword research, backlink tracking, and position monitoring to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Best Free SEO Tools

Some SEO tools are completely free, giving you the opportunity to jump-start your business without additional costs. These top SEO tools are best for start-ups, small businesses, and beginners.

Google Webmaster Tools

What better way to find out how your site ranks in Google than from Google itself? Google Webmaster Tools is one of the best tools for SEO, because it encompasses several helpful tools that show you what you’re doing well and where there’s still room to improve.

Search Console is one of the most helpful tools from the suite, as it monitors your site’s performance and displays how it shows up in a Google search results page. Based on your results, you can tweak your content, like your site’s title and meta description, to become more aesthetically-pleasing in search results. From your dashboard, you can also see what search terms are increasing your site’s rankability, so you know exactly what to target in the future.

Google Page Speed

Another important part of good SEO practices to consider is page speed. If you come across two websites with the same information, are you more likely to stay on the one that takes five seconds to load or one that takes 30 seconds or more to load? Internet users want their information fast, and you may be turning away visitors and potential customers by having a slow page.

Mobile speed may be even more important than your regular website speed because more and more internet users browse the web from their mobile devices. Google Page Speed is a simple, but effective, tool to use to check your site’s mobile speed.

Plug in your website URL and give the tool a few seconds to test your website using a standard connection on a 3G network. Google Page Speed will tell you your loading time along with a grade, like Fair or Excellent. It even gives you an estimated visitor loss percentage based on how long most visitors stick around. And it offers suggestions for improving your speed, like optimizing images or removing JavaScript.    

Majestic Backlink Analyzer

If you want to know more about what sites are referring visitors to your site, you can do that with the Majestic Backlink Analyzer. This tool is an add-on for your Chrome or Firefox browser that shows you important information, like the number of links pointing to your page and domain, the strength and trustworthiness of the links, and graphs to show your backlink improvement over time.

One benefit of this tool over similar tools is that it even shows you some backlinks that Google ignores. This gives you a better picture of your site and what type of sites are linking to you, even if Google doesn’t recognize them.

Majestic also has a large index of backlinks in your history, so you can see how they’ve changed over time. Helpful graphs let you compare your website to competitors and a map shows you where the majority of your referrers live, which can help you to better target campaigns in the future.

Majestic Million

Majestic also has a tool called Majestic Million that can help you analyze other sites, like your top competition in your industry. This tool provides webmasters with a full list of the top million websites based on backlinks. You can search the list for specific competitors or download it to look through some of the top websites on the internet to learn what they’re doing right.

This is an especially helpful tool for understanding your competition and how to become better with your own SEO practices. Majestic Million is a good tool to use in conjunction with the Majestic Backlink Analyzer. They help you compare your backlinks and backlink history with your competitors’ number of backlinks and where they get most of their referrals from.

Majestic Million provides an export function so you can save the data as a spreadsheet to further analyze, share with your team, or refer to when you begin a new marketing campaign. You can even compare up to ten websites at a time. The database updates daily so you can always stay on top of your competition.

Majestic Site Explorer & Free Reports

Another tool from Majestic that can get you one step further toward winning the SEO game is the Majestic Site Explorer. This tool provides a free report of your site’s SEO. Majestic Site Explorer gives you a simple run-down of what you’re doing well and what needs improvement in terms of your SEO practices.

For example, the tool will give you a brief glimpse of how many backlinks you have and how many referring domains. You’ll also receive a Trust Score and Citation Flow Score based on the trust and citation flow of your referring sites. The tool then breaks down your backlinks to show you how many come from text links, images, redirects, and frames.

Finally, you’ll see what anchor text is bringing people to your site, which is a huge part of your overall SEO practices. This section will show you if your targeted keywords are working and if there are other keywords you should target. The free report from Majestic Site Explorer paints an overall picture of your site’s SEO without having to sign up for an account, but you can sign up for a full, in-depth report.  

Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer

The SEO Analyzer by marketing guru Neil Patel is one of the handiest, easiest-to-use, and comprehensive tools for SEO management. By plugging your web URL into the tool, you’ll get a full report that analyzes your site’s optimization, speed, mobile performance, headlines, and more. And, you can compare up to three websites at a time to see how your site competes with that of your competitors.

The SEO Analyzer gives you recommendations for your site to improve your overall SEO. For example, it may suggest creating more long-form content to rank for more keywords and keep visitors engaged or increasing your backlinks with an email outreach program.

SEOquake Toolbar

SEOquake is a toolbar for web browsers that can perform an analysis of any website’s SEO practices through your browser, without downloading any additional programs or tools. The one-click operation makes it simple to learn about your own website or those of your competitors when you need to.

An incredibly helpful feature of this tool is the real-time SEO audit, which helps you optimize your SEO practices based on the algorithms of different search engines. And, you can compare more than one URL at the time to check your site against others in your industry. For added convenience, the tool lets you download your data into a file to save and use it when you need it.   

Yoast SEO

If you use WordPress for your website, the Yoast SEO plugin is a must. This handy tool will work in your WordPress dashboard and give you a real-time SEO optimization analysis and tips for improvement as you write content, including a readability score and SEO score. The readability score will help you improve the wording you use to maximize the number of people who can benefit from your content.

Additionally, Yoast SEO makes it simple to plan keywords and use them properly throughout your content. You’ll receive tips, like increasing keyword density for each post, and you can target five focus keywords per page with a premium account.  

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a go-to tool for many webmasters because of its ability to give you a complete view of your website in terms of traffic and audience demographics. Google Analytics is a good tool to use during your audience targeting research, as it provides information about where your traffic comes from and what type of people visit your website.

This tool is completely customizable, so you can always see the information that’s most important to you, like monthly unique visitors or bounce rate. And, you can even check on your ad campaigns to see which ones are working and which ones you may need to consider dropping.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Check Google PageSpeed Insights to give you a quick, complete look into how your website’s speed fares against other websites. Simply enter your URL – or that of a competitor – and in a few seconds, the tool will display an overall score for mobile and desktop speed and provide helpful tips for improving your speed.

For example, the tool may suggest to optimize images by resizing them and will even outline the exact images that are causing slow speeds. You may also remove plugins and streamline your JavaScript and CSS to create a faster loading speed.

übersuggest

Übersuggest is another keyword research tool to tuck in your back pocket to generate keyword ideas for optimized content. Plug in a topic that you’d like to tackle on your website and the tool will suggest related long-tail keywords that may provide less competition and help you rank in search engines with stand-out content.

The results are alphabetized for easy reference and the tool provides numerous suggestions to work with.  

QuickSprout Website Analyzer

QuickSprout Website Analyzer is a handy tool to find out, in just a few seconds, how your website can be improved in relation to SEO practices. The analyzer looks at your website as a whole, including the title, description, headings, and images, and offers suggestions for improvement.

For example, the tool may point out that some of your content headings should have different heading tags for proper optimization in search engines. It will also let you know if your images should include a better description to optimize traffic.

SERPs Keyword Rank Checker (and Long Tail Pro Rank Tracker, if you have an LTP account)

SERPs Keyword Rank Checker is helpful for those who want to analyze a keyword to find its volume data, cost-per-click (CPC) data, and top 250 website pages that rank for that keyword. This tool is especially helpful to those who are completing research on their top competitors for keywords they want to rank for.

Alternatively, the LongTailPro Rank Tracker can provide this helpful information or more for free with your LongTailPro account.  

SEO Site Checkup

SEO Site Checkup is another quick tool to use to get an overall picture of your site’s SEO health. For a free tool, SEO Site Checkup offers a lot of helpful information for beginners and experts alike to learn what’s necessary to optimize their current website.

Some of the information this tool provides includes optimization of meta tags with keywords, the most common keywords your site uses, and the status of your content’s headings. You’ll also see if any of your images can be further optimized with alt tags and whether there were any broken links found on your site.

Internet Marketing Ninjas

The Find Broken Links, Redirects, & Site Crawl Tool by Internet Marketing Ninjas can check up to 1,000 pages of your website at a time to search for broken redirects and links that can hurt your SEO. The tool will bring up a database of your pages, along with the number of internal links, external links, and their broken or redirected status.

Broken links and redirects hurt SEO because bots that crawl your site pick them up. Dead links don’t look great for your site and could hurt how a search engine ranks it, so this tool can help you fix the problems and avoid a lower ranking in the future.

Copyscape

Copyscape is a great tool to use in order to find out if content you had written for your site was plagiarised from another source or if someone stole your content and placed it on their site. Either way, copied content can hurt the way your site ranks in search engines.

The free version of Copyscape lets you check your URLs for stolen content. Plug in a page URL and the tool will search among similar pages already on the internet to determine possible plagiarism. To analyze your written content from documents before you place it on your site, you’ll have to sign up for a Premium account.

Sitechecker

Sitechecker is a comprehensive solution for SEO website audit with the search for opportunities to increase organic search traffic. The best tool for automatic monitoring of key metrics, timely detection of errors, search for growth points. With this platform, the site is under control 24/7.

As part of a single platform, it is possible to track the quality of the site, its positions in search networks for keywords, and backlinks. Thanks to a user-friendly design, both professional SEO specialists and business owners who have basic knowledge of optimization can work with the results. The service provides instructions and step-by-step checklists for correcting mistakes and achieving growth. Regular reports and notifications make it possible to keep abreast and be confident in the full performance of the site.

What is the Best SEO Tool? LongTailPro!

LongTailPro is the #1 choice for best SEO tool. From tracking your content performance against competitors to calculating the profitability of your keywords, LongTailPro is an incredible SEO suite that essentially automates the optimization process to leave the guesswork out of getting results. Like other best SEO tools, LongTailPro requires a subscription, but you can test it out for free for a week before purchasing.

One of the things LongTailPro is best for is finding the perfect keywords for your niche. If you’re looking to stand out ahead of your competition in Google, LongTailPro may be able to help. You can use the tool to search for keywords that offer low competition and high profitability so you have a better chance to earn with those keywords. All you need to do is give the tool your seed keyword and LongTailPro will generate related keywords for you. This will help you target your content to draw more traffic and help raise your Google AdSense revenue.

The tool also lets you sort, filter, refine, and export any results you need. You can find exactly what you’re looking for and share it with your team with ease. And you’ll even get a complete analysis of your competition based on data, like:

•         Page links
•         Page authority
•         Domain authority
•         Page rank
•         URL

So, you’ll always know where your keywords and content stand according to Google and other popular search engines, like Bing. LongTailPro is easy enough for beginners to tackle. But, it also provides in-depth metrics for advanced SEO users who need a detailed analysis of their own site or their competition.

Conclusion: Top SEO Tools in 2017

Whether you need a basic, free SEO tool or a more advanced, comprehensive analysis tool, one of the above options is sure to help you drive traffic and earn revenue. Excellent SEO practices aren’t easy techniques to learn, so a comprehensive tool can provide analyses and offer suggestions for improvement without much work on your end.

LongTailPro is especially helpful for SEO automation, leaving the intricacies of Search Engine Optimization to the pros and algorithms behind the tool. The tool helps you streamline your SEO practices to get you on the road to a bigger, better business with engaging and highly-targeted content.

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