As an experienced SEO Specialist and business owner, I am not the most tech savvy person, but I do understand how powerful and useful these tools can be. So, I’ve decided to create a list of my favorite most useful seo tools for my own reference and give back to the business community.
Here are the top management tools out there!
Answer The Public: Free SEO Tools
Free SEO tools like Answer The Public allow you to easily find topics to write about for your blog. I’ve used this tool in the past to create content around specific keywords to better rank online. Say you’re in the ‘fitness’ niche. You can use this free SEO tool to create content around keywords like fitness, yoga, running, Crossfit, exercise and cover the entire spectrum. It’s great for finding featured snippet opportunities. Say you hire a freelancer to create content for you, all you need to do is download this list and send it over to them. And it would only take you five minutes, making it one of the most efficient ways to come up with SEO topics for new websites.
Matt Jackson, Head of Content at Wild Shark, loves free SEO tools like AnswerThePublic. He shares, “One of my favorite tools when compiling SEO content for a site is AnswerThePublic.com. The best feature of the tool is that it presents a list of the questions that web users are asking about a particular keyword. If I’m running out of genuinely useful content ideas, or if I’m compiling an FAQ page, it provides invaluable guidance as to what, exactly, people are searching for. It is not only useful for SEO content, it means that our clients can answer questions on their site, minimizing the number of customer service calls they receive and giving greater authority to a page and the overall business. And here’s a quick tip: prevent neckache by hitting the Data button, rather than straining to read the question wheel.”
SpyFu: Free SEO Tools
While SpyFu has an amazing premium version, many of our experts raved about its free features. If you’re just starting out, you can easily grow into the paid features as you start succeeding. You can easily view the number of times a keyword gets searched each month while easily determining the ranking difficulty for that keyword. You can also do some research on your competitors to determine which keywords they use. Additionally, you can search your competitor’s, or your own, website to easily see how many organic keywords they have, how many monthly clicks they get, who their paid and organic competitors are, the campaigns they’re running with Google Ads, and more. It’s one of the most detailed SEO analysis tools on the market.
Adele Stewart, Senior Project Manager at Sparq Designs, can’t get enough of SEO software SpyFu. She shares, “I have used SEMrush and Agency Analytics in the past, but SpyFu has the one-up on my client’s competitors. All of SpyFu’s features are great, but my absolute favorite is the SEO Research feature. You’re able to plug in a competitor’s domain and pull up information on their own SEO strategy. You can see what keywords they pay for vs. their organic standings, review their core keywords, and even assess their keyword groups. Using SpyFu has been integral to my client’s SEO successes. There’s so much more to track and report on, plus I don’t have to put in as much effort in research as I did with other SEO software. SpyFu pulls the information I need and organizes reports in a way that is presentable and understandable to my clients. I’ve already seen increases in indexing and rank for keywords that we didn’t even think of.”
GrowthBar.
GrowthBar is one of the easiest to use SEO tools on the market. They enable users to see millions of keyword results, your competition’s backlinks, Google Ads data and generate blog content in one click.
GrowthBar is a tool that is built using Open AI — the most sophisticated language model ever made. That means the results and recommendations are as good as it gets. It’s slick, sleek, and 100% intuitive.
Because of the simple user interface and robust data sets, it’s becoming a favorite choice for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and freelancers. But GrowthBar counts bigger companies like Minted, MagicJack, Square, Spekit, and Teepublic among its customers as well.
GrowthBar also has a free Chrome Extension so you can get SEO insights while you surf the web.
KEY FEATURES:
- Organic Research — See millions of keyword suggestions along with their competitiveness score.
- Competitiveness Metrics — See your competitors’ top organic keywords, top backlinks, and export any of the metrics into an Excel-friendly CSV.
- Content Generation — Generate blog post outlines with proper keywords, headlines, word count, links, tone, and more — all with one click of a button.
PRICING:
You can test out GrowthBar for 5 days for free, before upgrading to a paid subscription. It’s an all-in-one super powerful SEO tool for $29/mo — which makes GrowthBar significantly cheaper than most other quality tools out there.
USED FOR:
- Content generation for bloggers.
- Competitive research: understand your competition’s top organic keyword, Google Ads keywords, backlinks, and Facebook Ads.
- Get word counts, difficulty scores, keyword suggestions, backlinks, and much more to build your content strategy.
CONS:
- Lacks technical SEO metrics
- Lacks historical tracking data
- Lacks SEO audit feature
For the best new SEO tool, get started with a 5-day free trial of GrowthBar.
SEMrush.
SEMrush is a leading competitor analysis tool that helps users evaluate their competitors as well as their own content. It provides robust metrics and allows users to get top-performing pages, content, and keywords.
SEMrush has been successfully helping many website owners and ecommerce entrepreneurs to understand the SEO strategies of their competitors. This makes it one of the most popular SEO tools among small and medium-sized enterprises.
The SEO tool offers the best help for SEO, PPC, ad campaigns, backlinks, keyword research, SERP, and much more.
KEY FEATURES:
- Organic Research – This feature allows the users to see the top keywords used by their competitors, and comp the changes of domains.
- Advertising Research – It helps you run better ad campaigns by analyzing the ad budgets of the competitors. You can also localize your ad campaigns.
- Product Listing Ads – SEMrush allows the users to see competitors’ Product Listing Ads and product feeds.
- Traffic Analytics – SEMrush accurately tells about the online performance and traffic of a website. It also helps you understand the behavior and media consumption of potential customers.
PRICING:
SEMrush offers three paid plans. The Pro plan is $99.95, the Guru plan is $199.95, and the Business plan is $399.95. There is also a quote-based Enterprise plan that you can customize according to the specific needs of the entrepreneurs.
USED FOR:
- Creating guest blogging strategies
- Analyzing the strategies of the competitors
- Tracking past and current website ranking
- Performing technical SEO audits and gauge user experience
- Finding good advertising opportunities for CPC
- Doing robust keyword research to make your content rank higher
CONS:
- Newbies might find it a bit complicated
- You have to pay a hefty tag for more advanced features
- Instances of inaccurate data regarding advertisements and backlinks
Get started with SEMrush today.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Does page speed matter, when it comes to SEO and search engine rankings?
In the early days of search engine optimization, the answer was no. Today, however, this has all changed. Google has made it clear that site speed is used in web search ranking.
Use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, to ensure that your website isn’t falling behind in this area.
After entering your URL, the results page spits out a variety of information:
- Speed
- User Experience
- Things to Consider Fixing
The speed results look like this:
You want your score to be as close to 100 as possible. If you find that it’s anything less than that, don’t hesitate to follow the guidelines under the “consider fixing” headline.
Pro tip: don’t forget to check the speed for both mobile and desktop devices. You want to score high for both of these.
SimilarWeb
Do you want to see how your website is performing across a variety of metrics? Are you interested in getting an inside view of your competition?
SimilarWeb is not only a free tool for doing both these things, but it’s one of the easiest to use. And, the data is presented in an easy-to-read format.
A search for NeilPatel.com provides information on a variety of traffic-related data.
There’s a lot of information to soak up, so don’t rush through the results page. Review each section in great detail, making note of any data relevant to your SEO campaign that you can use to improve your search engine optimization and marketing plan in the future.
For example, I urge you to go over the “search” data with a fine tooth comb. It’s here that you’ll learn how much of a site’s traffic comes from search, top keywords, keyword phrases, paid keywords and more.
It’s not likely that you’ll use SimilarWeb on a daily basis. But, it’s definitely one of the best ways to keep an eye on the health of your website, while also tracking your top competitors.
Conclusion
These days there are a lot of SEO software and online tools to help you with SEO. Some great, some good and some pure scams. These tools will make it easier for you to optimize your website and write better content.