Are you investing a lot of time in improving your website’s SEO ranking? If not, you are definitely losing leads by not doing SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is considered to be the king of today’s digital marketing world. In general sense, SEO is a method used to improve a website’s ranking in search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
With proper SEO tools and strategies, you can check and improve over 200+ on-page and off-page SEO factors. As an SEO Expert, I use several SEO tools to track an optimize our client’s website for higher rankings on Google.
In this blog, I will highlight the best paid and free SEO tools you can use to skyrocket your website’s SEO ranking. These SEO tools will allow you identify and fix issues, and help you increase traffic to your websites. Thus, resulting in more business conversions.
At the end of this post, I’ll also reveal all the SEO tools that we are using to deliver SEO services to our clients.
They are essential for all businesses that seek to improve their customers and build optimized websites. With these SEO tools, you’ll not only be able to get insights on your website’s performance but also your competitor’s SEO efforts.
Top 5 Paid SEO Tools
If you are willing to spend a part of your marketing budget in your website’s SEO, I highly recommend you to try out some or one of these paid SEO tools. Using the right SEO tools will not only help you save time but will also ensure you get the desired results.
Here are the top 5 paid SEO tools that I personally recommend:
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most loved SEO tools used by digital marketers and of course myself too. Primary users of this tool are content writes, content marketers, SEO specialists, etc. This tool is super easy to use and provides up-to-date data and information. With paid version of Ahrefs, you can get access to features like Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Rank Tracker, Site Audit and many more.
With the in-built Site Audit feature, Ahrefs helps you identify on-page SEO issues, warnings and notices that might be blocking your website from ranking on top of the result pages.
In addition, you can also use the functions in the Ahrefs tools in order to identify competitor backlinks. Competitor backlinks data will give you link building opportunities for your own website.
The monthly cost for Ahrefs Premium Plan is $99 for Lite, $179 for Standard, $399 for Advanced and $999 for Agency.
Ubersuggest Premium
Initially introduced as a keyword research tool, Ubersuggest premium today acts as an “all-in-one” freemium SEO tool that helps businesses in their content marketing strategies. The USP of this tool is the lowest cost as compared to its competitors’. Plus, the value that you get with your investment on this tool is incredible.
This tool allows you to find the right keywords that have higher chances to rank higher in Google. The Ubersuggest Keyword Ideas feature shows a list of results that already ranks at the top of Google SERP for individual keywords. Apart from keyword search, you can also get access to features like domain overview, top SEO pages of your competitors and Check backlinks.
There are three paid plans: Individual, Business and Enterprise/Agency. The individual plan starts at $12 a month. Business plan costs $20 a month. And the Enterprise/Agency plan comes at $40/month. It also offers users to switch to life-time plan for only $120 for Individual plan, $200 for Business plan and $400 for Enterprise/Agency plan.
Yoast SEO Premium
The Yoast SEO plugin is a tool for WordPress that allows you to optimize your website within your WordPress dashboard so that it can meet the highest technical SEO standards.
In order to get started with Yoast SEO premium, firstly you’ll need to install the SEO Yoast Plugin to your website. Yoast SEO premium also make suggestions to increases the readability of your website’s content.
Yoast SEO’s readability features are well-researched analyses that give you feedback on how to optimize your writing. The plugin helps you improve your content SEO by helping you set a key phrase and telling you exactly how you can optimize your content to rank with this key phrase.
Yoast SEO Premium costs $89 excluding VAT per year.
Moz Pro
Unlike Yoast SEO Premium, Moz Pro is a platform of SEO tools. This tool helps business increase traffic, rankings, and visibility across search engine results of their websites. The keyword research tool in this SEO tool helps you determine the right keywords and the keyword combinations that may be the best for targeting. It also includes a backlink analysis tool that mixes a combination of metrics including anchor text in links as well as estimated domain authority.
Similarly, the audit tools available in Moz Pro allows you to audit your own site using the Moz Pro spider. This tool highlights potential issues and also recommends actionable insights. There’s also the ability to track your site rankings over hundreds or even thousands of keywords per website.
The Standard Plan for the Moz Pro starts at $99/month. This plan covers basic tools. Then comes the Medium Plan which costs $149 per month. You can enjoy 20% discount if you choose to pay annually.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler and a software you can install on your PC (Windows or iOS) that helps you improve your onsite SEO. This tool obtains this by extracting data & auditing for common SEO issues. Known as a fast and advanced SEO site audit tool, this tool can be used to crawl both small and large websites.
Some of the key features of Screaming Frog are Find Broken Links, Errors & Redirects, Analyse Page Titles & Meta Data, Crawl Configuration, Near Duplicate Content, Spelling & Grammar Checks, Custom Source Code Search and many more.
The cost of subscribing Screaming Frog SEO Spider premium version is £149 per year.
Top 5 Free SEO Tools
Google My Business
Google My Business is one of the most popular free SEO tools by Google itself. With Google My Business, businesses can manage online presence across Google, including Search and Maps and user Reviews. When your business is listed on Google My Business listing, it will include your contact information, business hours, and other required details. You can post updates to inform the customers regarding your expanded services, whether it is temporarily closed or fully reopened.
This is an especially useful feature during emergency situations like COVID-19. This tool also improve your local SEO so that your business ranks on the first page of Google when the customer search for it.
PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a tool that analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page load faster. In order to analyze your page, all you need to do is enter a URL and hit the “Analyze” button. This will quickly get you a detailed report which includes the factors causing the slowdown of your page based on two parameters and recommendations on fixing it.
Page speed insights is important to users because faster pages are considered to be more efficient and provide a much better on-page user experience. It is also said that, if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, over a quarter of users will click away.
Yoast SEO (Free Version)
Although there’s a premium version of this plugin, the free version is identically helpful in taking care of the overall On-page SEO of your website.
You can compare the Free and Paid Versions of Yoast SEO plugin here.
On our experience with our SEO projects, the free version of this plugin gets our job done.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a tool by Google that is used to track website activity such as session duration, pages per session, bounce rate etc. of individuals using the site, along with the information on the source of the traffic. Google Analytics is called a “freemium” service as small businesses can use the service without paying a monthly charge, but if you want more advanced features or the ability to do more with the service, there is a recurring fee.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a free platform by Google for anyone with a website. This tool helps you monitor how Google views your website and optimize its organic presence. This includes viewing your mobile site performance, referring domains, rich search results, and highest-traffic queries on Pages.
Concluding Words
There are tons of SEO tools out there; some good, some bad. Choosing the best one can help you to achieve your ranking goals. As one of the best SEO Service providers of Nepal, we use:
- Standard plan of Ahrefs for competition research, keyword research, content research, content planning, finding link building opportunities, tracking websites’ keyword ranking, tracking organic keywords and traffic, website audit (on-page SEO checks), and more…
- Yoast SEO (Free Version) to quickly check on-page SEO factors on a blog post or a page based on an input “focus keyword”.
- Google Analytics to keep track of the bounce rate, click through rate (CTR), stay time, traffic sources, traffic behavior. We also use this tool to create goals to measure client’s ROI from our SEO efforts.
- Google Search Console to submit sitemap for faster indexing of new webpages, keep track of any coverage issues, keyword rankings, remove 404 pages from Google index, and keep track of overall performance of any website.
- Google page speed insights to check loading speed of each and every page on mobile and desktop version.
- Moz Free chrome extension to quickly check on the on-page elements like Title tag, header tags, meta description and more. We also use it to check the behavior of the link (do-follow or no-follow) present in any webpage.
- Google My Business for local SEO and listing on Google Maps.
I hope you find this article helpful.
