What Are the Best SEO Tools?
There are hundreds of SEO tools available for individuals and companies to help optimize their websites.
The tools and apps that each SEO company uses can vary significantly. We provide a review highlighting the pros and cons of some of SEO tools that we routinely utilize for our clients' benefit.
SEMrush
SEMrush is an all-in-one SEO tool that helps us conduct keyword research using data from competitors' campaigns. SEMrush features apps that monitor pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns providing lists of keywords that competitors are bidding on as well as bid prices for these campaigns.
Pros
- Free account allows you to see partial data for most functions
- Easy to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for
- You can find all your competitors from one seed URL
- Provides a variety of PPC keyword recommendations
Cons
- Keyword difficulty score is known to be unreliable
- Doesn’t register all the backlinks for each URL
- Requires a subscription payment plan, therefore needs to be used consistently to be worthwhile (which is no problem for us as this is one of our favourite SEO tools and we use it daily!)
Moz
Moz is possibly the best-known SEO company on this list, thanks to Rand Fishkin, who co-founded the company in 2004. Moz offers a large number of SEO tools with their flagship "paid" product, Moz Pro.
Pros
- Have received outside funding to continue developing new tools
- Their new keyword tool is powerful
- You can set up tools that continually audit your chosen websites with routine email notifications when results are available
- Tips are offered throughout the various reports that provide insight on next steps for fixing issues
Cons
- A lack of focus for a couple of years put them behind some of their competitors but they began to refocus on SEO only in 2016, and the results are very encouraging
- Their database of web pages visited isn’t quite as extensive as some of their competitors
InSpyder
InSpyder InSite offers seven individual tools that help improve your SEO. The InSite Crawler is there most well known and checks your site for spelling mistakes, verifying incoming links, broken links, link redirects, and keyword density.
Pros
- Free trial offered for most tools
- You can buy each tool separately with a one-time fee (or purchase as a bundle)
- Broken link checker finds broken links that other crawlers miss
Cons
- Many of the tools are also available in all-in-one packages like SEMrush
- The tools only work on Windows Computers (which we don't mind since we use both Windows and Mac machines)
Xenu
Xenu is a free broken link checker that produces a detailed report of broken links on images, maps, scripts, text, style sheets and Java applets found on your site.
Pros
- Free
- The downloadable report breaks down the broken link into detail including why
- Processes entire websites very quickly
Cons
- Has not been updated since 2010
- Works on limited browsers
- The website minimalist style doesn’t instill confidence
- There is a learning curve on how to read the reports well
Copyscape
Copyscape is used to detect duplicate content. If you source a piece of content from a webpage you can check it has not plagiarized and/or you can check if any parts of your website have been copied elsewhere on the web.
Pros
- It takes a few minutes, or less, to check if a piece of content can be found elsewhere on the web
- Free tool allows you to check if your content has been copied (one URL per search)
Cons
- Costs add up if you have a lot of content coming in each day (5 cents each time)
Siteliner
Siteliner is a web-based tool with four goals when scanning your website. Siteliner checks for duplicate content and broken links, measures the strongest pages on your site based on internal linking, and produces a report with all of this information.
Pros
- Free for websites with fewer than 250 pages
- Extremely fast
- Web-based
Cons
- If you have a larger website, you will need to purchase credits to audit your website (but we think it's a very worthwhile investment)
- Some of Siteliner's features are found in all-in-one tools
URL Profiler
URL Profiler collects SEO data from various sources and compiles it all into a single report to help you perform content audits, back-link analysis, and research your competition.
Pros
- You can test drive this tool with a 14-day free trial
- This tool compiles a lot of data very quickly, and you can export the results very easily to CSV files
Cons
- Need to have paid subscriptions to some of the tools to get maximum data
- While URL Profiler allows you to integrate data from other tools, you typically need to be using a paid version of these tools for URL Profiler to be effective
Raven Tools
Raven Tools is a website analyzer that allows business owners to improve their website’s ranking on the search engine results page.
Pros
- Nice clean interface
- Site Auditor feature allows you to see strong and weak parts of a website
- Two pricing plans
Cons
- Pulls data from other sources to complete their reports
- Slow to generate reports given they use API of other tools
Majestic
Majestic is often compared to Moz and SEMRush, but that does a disservice to what Majestic specializes; that being a backlinks monitoring tool that draws from one of the largest databases available.
Pros
- The (self-proclaimed) largest backlink database in the market
- Provides reports in various styles for easy digestion
- They have both a live and historical index of backlinks
Cons
- Could utilise the amount of information they have to provide other useful tools in their product
- When you’ve got all the backlinks, you’ll usually want to dig deeper into keyword research which means you need another tool
- Integrates with Google's Search Console, but not Google Analytics
Search Engine News
Search Engine News is a members-only SEO publication has been training the industry since 1997. Learn Search Engine Optimization, Online Marketing, and Web Design tactics from our experts. Memberships start at $12.
Search Engine News is an SEO publication exclusive to viewing members. Non-members can view the start of articles, but the articles from various experts are hidden by a paywall.
Pros
- Access to a forum of members when you subscribe
- Products are consistently updated
- SEN provides the latest SEO news and recommendations in a very easy-to-digest format
Cons
- The basic news plan feels expensive as content is usually free to read on the Internet (if you have the time to search for it)
- Not much information about the membership is available on other sites
That finishes the peek into some of our favourite SEO tools. Did you notice that a lot of the tools have functions that overlap? We're OK with that because each tool finds issues in different ways. More often than not, tools searching for the same issue find the same issues. But sometimes they find different and unique issues. And in our humble opinion, having more than one source to find these various SEO issues is a good thing.
That’s why the tool that different SEO'ers use vary so much. Not everyone needs everything so the best thing you can do is try out various tools for yourself and choose to use those which will beneift you and your unique needs.
Everyone in the SEO industry has their favourites for a variety of reasons. If you’ve got any thoughts on SEO tools at all, do leave a comment below.
By Roy McClean