It can be challenging and take a long time to become proficient at SEO, especially if you are just starting out. However, it is relatively easy to find the best SEO tools. Take a look at SEO tools to find out which one is more suitable for your business and how they compare with each other.

What it takes to use an SEO tool

It is important that the best SEO tools provide reports on how you stack up against your competitors and where your biggest windows of opportunity are. They help you measure search performance by country, region or language, saving you from the tedium of keyword research and data analysis. 

With these tools, you can see what’s working and which areas you can improve on. 

It is not uncommon for those who have multiple websites to end up putting large amounts of data into spreadsheets and analysing it manually. 

But this soon becomes overwhelming and raises the risk of inaccurate reporting. The SEO tool can help you instantly assess the performance of each website if you are managing more than one, saving hours of effort and generating accurate reports in a single click.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs has quickly become one of the most recommended SEO tools on the web since it was first released in 2011. It is second only to Google in terms of being the biggest website crawler. SEO experts can’t get enough of Ahrefs’ website audit feature. The tool highlights which parts of your website need improvement in order to rank better in search engines.

Ahrefs has the largest index of backlinks of any of the top SEO tools, and from the perspective of competitor analysis, you might use Ahrefs to identify your competitors’ backlinks as a launching pad for your own brand. Throw in an upgraded keyword explorer, tools to monitor competition, plus extensive user documentation, and Ahrefs may be the better tool you need to rank and increase traffic.

Ahrefs comes with all the tools you need, you can also use this SEO tool to find the most linked content in your niche, check and fix broken links on your site, and get an overview of your best performing pages.

At a price point roughly in line with similar products, this tool’s first-class link analysis, powerful research tools and user support make Ahrefs one of the best choices for understanding and improving your domain’s online presence.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is a perfect way for new webmasters to start learning about SEO. It is a free tool available to everyone who owns a website, allowing you to monitor and report on your website’s presence in the Google SERPs and how your website is performing. As an SEO checking tool, Search Console helps you to understand how Google and its users view your website and allows you to optimise for better performance in Google search results.

This tool gives you valuable information about your website at a glance: it can evaluate your site’s performance and watch for potential problems to solve (such as negative spam links), it helps you to ensure that your site is Google-friendly, and it monitors Google’s indexing of your site. In addition to this, you can also get help through the Webmaster Help Community, a place for webmasters to connect and share troubleshooting and performance tips.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is another website crawler. Their SEO spider tool crawls website pages and extracts all the data you need to improve your on-site SEO. It saves a lot of time for experts who like to perform a website audit by analysing your website super-fast with this tool.

You can use Screaming Frog to perform advanced site audits on small and mega sites. Find broken links that are hurting your optimisation, analyse your page titles and meta descriptions, and fix these to allow search engine spiders to crawl your site and navigate every page seamlessly. It is also always beneficial to discover (and update on the spot) temporary and permanent redirects, which can be done with Screaming Frog, which gives you insights faster than most SEO tools on the web and has the ability to find almost any potential problem with your site to improve analysis. It is important to improve the health of your website by identifying issues and resolving them before optimising other areas of your website.

And with Screaming Frog’s data, checking and analysing page titles, meta tags and headings to address potential authority issues is no longer difficult, and duplicate content is easier to find.

SEMRush

SEMrush is popular with fans in the SEO community and not for nothing. the SEO toolkit provides a comprehensive set of SEO tools. You can access detailed keyword analysis reports, as well as summaries of any domains you manage, allowing you to easily evaluate your rankings, as well as identify changes and new ranking opportunities. the SEO toolkit also enables you to compare the performance of your pages to see how you rank against the competition. For example, you can analyse backlinks from other websites to your site.

One of the most popular features of this SEO tool is the domain-to-domain analysis, which allows you to easily compare your website to your competitors. If you are looking for analytics reports to help you better understand your site’s search data, traffic and even your competitors, you will be able to compare keywords and domains. The Web Search Engine Optimiser checker tool allows you to easily monitor your rankings and find some suggestions on how to improve your site’s performance.

Traffic analysis helps to identify the main sources of web traffic to your competitors, such as top referral sites. This allows you to gain insight into the details of your and your competitors’ websites in terms of average session time and bounce rate. In addition, the “Traffic Source Comparison” allows you to see an overview of a bunch of your competitors’ digital marketing channels in one go.

SpyFu

SpyFu is a search analytics company that scrapes data from the internet to identify keywords that companies and websites are using to buy Google ads. SpyFu also matches search results to search terms so that companies can gain a deeper understanding of the types of searches and word strings that they appear for on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

SpyFu essentially allows you to ‘spy’ on your competitors and you can also do some research on your competitors to determine which keywords they are using. In addition, you can search your competitors, or your own website, and easily see how many organic keywords they have, how many clicks they get per month, who their paid and organic competitors are, what campaigns they are using Google Ads for, and much more.

Tips For You To Choose SEO Tools

An assessment of your SEO needs is essential. If you are just starting out, it may be better to choose a tool that is simple, easy to use and has a beginner-friendly tutorial. But if you’re an experienced digital marketer, then an advanced tool will serve you better.

Consider the size of your business. New website owners will have different needs from small to medium-sized businesses and large corporations. If you have a lot of people collaborating on SEO tools, then a tool with solid collaboration options will be ideal.

User interface and dashboard. If the data is not presented in an easy-to-understand way then you may miss out on key insights and lose time.

Finally, you need to consider your budget.