SEO is the holy grail of digital marketing.
There are 40,000 Google searches per second — so getting your website to the top of the Google search engine results page (SERP) is extremely valuable.
And, if you don’t want to shell out thousands of dollars a month for an SEO agency, you’ll need to do the work yourself. That’s where an SEO tool comes in.
To win with SEO, you need to do two things:
- Make great content.
- Distribute that content to get backlinks.
So you should be looking for tool(s) to help you do exactly that.
In my 10+ year career in digital marketing, I’ve come across hundreds of SEO tools. And I promise, they’re not all created equal. Great SEO tools enable you to:
- Audit your domain
- Do market research and gather competitive intelligence
- Find areas of search arbitrage by choosing the right keywords
- Get backlinks
- Track your personal Google rankings
- And the best tools do all of this in easy-to-use, functional dashboards
I’ve put together a list that includes 20 of the best SEO tools (plus three tools that are 100% free) that will help you improve your website’s Google search optimization. We’re talking about tools beyond Google Analytics — tools that are guaranteed to help you get in front of Googlers and crush it with SEO!
What are the Best SEO Tools for 2022?
There are many SEO tools out there. We have 10 that are worth trying first.
#1: Ahrefs
Used for: Research and Analysis
Pricing: Freemium
Out of all the SEO tools out there, thousands of online marketers, small business owners, and SEO’s prefer to use Ahrefs to help them improve their search rankings.
Their Site Explorer is the best among backlink analysis tools.
They also have the Content Explorer, which searches the web for the most popular content for any topic or keyword.
Ahrefs has one more awesome tool: the Keyword Explorer 2.0.
This gives you a keyword’s search volume (global or country), SERP overview and position history, related keyword ideas, and the difficulty level.
The pricing starts at $99 per month with annual options. But you’re allowed to have a free account with limitations.
They also offer free trials for all plans.
#2: SEM Rush
Used for: Keyword + Competitor Research
Pricing: Freemium
SEM Rush really made a name for themselves over the past couple years. They basically took competitor research to a whole other level.
The best part about SEM Rush is there are more than 20 ways to research your competition.
You can find their best backlinks, their best keywords, their best content, and more. It’s even great for paid traffic and PPC.
It’s definitely a must-have.
#3: Serpstat
Used for: Content Marketing, SEO & PPC
Pricing: Paid
Serpstat is an all-in-one digital growth hacking tool to help you optimize your SEO, PPC and content marketing campaigns.
This SEO tool has the following key features:
- Collect keywords for SEO and PPC campaigns
- Determine the value of keywords
- Find keyword variations and search suggestions to expand your semantic core
- Get long-tail keywords
- Discover international data
- Check your webpages’ relevance
- Analyze keyword trends
- Find out what pages are showing up in search results for a keyword
Serpstat has 4 plans listed A through D, with prices starting at $19/mo through $299/mo.
#4: Advanced Web Ranking
Used for: Rank Tracking, Competitor Research
Pricing: Paid, Free Trial
Advanced Web Ranking is the rank tracked with the longest tradition on the market (since 2002), known especially for its accuracy and the large volume of keywords it can accomodate. This makes it ideal for agencies and inhouse SEOs, but it can also be used by small businesses and freelancers, likewise.
With Advanced Web Ranking you can:
- track local results at country and city level on both desktop and mobile devices
- retrieve rankings on particular search engines such as Baidu, Yandex, Amazon, Youtube, etc.
- send whitelabel reports with your own logo and that can even be hosted on your website
- analyze competitors (market share, estimated visits, discover new competing websites and more)
- integrate your data into 3rd party apps using the developer API
Prices start at about $49 per month and a 10% discount applies for yearly subscriptions.
#5 Sitechecker
Used for: Site Audit, Website Monitoring, Backlink Checker, Rank Tracker
Pricing: Paid, Free Trial
Sitechecker is a simple platform that will help you get your website in shape and achieve better results in organic search without special skills or expertise in the SEO field.
You will get the possibility to check your site for all kinds of SEO important technical issues, but also get the completed guides on how to fix it.
Sitechecker Key Features
- All site and On-page Audit. You can check your site against over 100 metrics that will show the real state of your site. For the landing page, you can use the free website SEO checker.
- Integration with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. This will help you quickly collect data and get it in one place.
- Rank tracker for your TOP keywords. Be aware of changes in your key queries and track the dynamics of growth.
- Monitoring of your website’s changes 24/7. The sooner you become aware of the problem, the lower your costs will be.
- Extension for Chrome. Get your time safe and check any page for technical issues right in the browser in just a few secs.
Pricing starts at $29 for the Basic Plan. With it, you can add 3 sites and check 1500 URLs per account, 150 keywords per account, 3000 backlinks per account. There are also plans for Startup for $49 and Growing for $99 per month.
Choose the plan that suits you best and use all the features to the fullest!
#6: seobility
Used for: SEO Audit
Pricing: Free/Paid
Seobility is all about showing you how good or bad your website’s overall SEO optimization is.
They have 4 major tools/features:
- SEO Check – which will test your website and give you tips for better search engine optimization.
- Keyword Check – which will show how well your page is optimized for your target keyword(s).
- SEO Compare – which compares 2 pages for a keyword term.
- Ranking Check – which checks your page’s rankings for any keyword.
Their free plan offers a crawling of 1.000 pages per project, analysis of up to 10 keywords and a comparison of 3 competitors. But it only allows usage for one domain.
Premium plans start at $40 per month with a 30-day free trial.
Extended functionality allows a comprehensive SEO analysis, including backlinks, more projects and a lot more keywords.
Sign up for the free SEO Basic plan and have a look into the great features of the tool.
#7: Morningscore
Used for: SEO Audit, Rank Tracking, Backlinks, Keyword/Competitor Research
Pricing: Paid, Free Trial
Morningscore is a new and unique all-in-one SEO tool. Besides all standard features, it also brings completely new functionality compared to any other SEO tool. The platform uses gamification combined with smart SEO suggestions/guidance to help you prioritize the most important tasks for your/your clients’ SEO. In other words, here you will experience a whole new workflow which combined with the user-friendly interface saves you a ton of time.
They also stand out with their fast releases. Either new tools or improvement to existing ones are released every month which is why the platform is growing so fast. At the time of this writing, they are developing v2.5 Keyword Boos (keyword research tool) & v2.6 Galactic Report (customizable white-label PDF reports).
The platform is really focused on connecting SEO and business – which is essentially great both for agencies and digital companies. Surely, it’s not a platform for everyone but those who use it share very positive experience.
Some of their main features:
- SEO for businesses – fast analysis where you get a quick estimate of a business/client
- Full Backlink Profile – their partnership with Ahrefs’ brings you the best backlink data
- Manual Backlink Checker – enter the URL of your newly built backlinks and get them crawled – great for client reporting
- SEO Audit – which gives you only the most important metrics without the “extra bloat”
- SEO Missions – The “Trello of SEO” where you can manage your campaigns straight in the platform
#8: Long Tail Pro
Used for: Keyword Research
Pricing: Paid
And you know what that means? The new ownership team is hungry for success. They saw potential in Long Tail Pro and are determined to make the product even bigger.
Since their change, LTP has moved from being a downloaded application to being cloud-based (meaning you can now use it in your browser.)
Before going cloud, LTP was already one of the most popular keyword research tools in the SEO field. This will only make it 10x faster and 10x easier.
Watch how it works here:
#9: Mangools
Used for: SEO
Pricing: Free trial/paid
Mangools is known as the best value for money when it comes to SEO packages. They took a brand new approach to how SEO tools should look like and made an easy to use tools with great design. They are not complicated and do not have tons of features you would probably never use.
They recently launched competitor analysis in their most popular tool called KWFinder that made its name thanks to very accurate keyword difficulty metric.
Mangools tools let you see the keywords of your competitors, their backlinks, you can do rank tracking, analyze SERPs and get deep SEO insights on your competitors. They also have a handy browser extension that basically uses the most important data from all their tools so you can do a lot of stuff while browsing the internet.
#10: Pitchbox
Used for: Outreach
Pricing: Paid
Pitchbox isn’t exactly an SEO tool. But when you are link building, there’s usually a lot of outreach involved. A lot.
Pitchbox makes your overall outreach efforts 10x easier than it would manually. Their email sequence feature lets you set up follow-up emails automatically.
Here’s a little example of what they can do:
First, I entered a few keywords related to my blog (ex: blogging tips).
Pitchbox, then rounded up some of the best sites for me to reach out to and connect with. Prospects.
After just 2 minutes, Pitchbox gave me 316 potential connections.
They even have a couple SEO features, such as link monitoring.
Their plans allow multiple users. So if you’re working with a team, this will come in handy.
Plans start at $195 per month, with a 15-day free trial so you can get your feet wet.