20 SEO Tools Every Smart Marketers Must Have

Today’s digital marketers manage a bunch of different projects, wear more than one hat and can be in charge of many marketing campaigns run simultaneously , in particular, search engine optimization, content marketing, social media management, email marketing, etc. Luckily there are a lot of tools available to easy up the marketer’s life. Here is a review of some of the SEO tools every marketer should consider.

In order to find new capabilities, track the overall SEO progress and save time you need to have right tools at your disposal. I’ve compiled a list of must-have SEO tools that I used in my career to manage my daily responsibilities. Some of them are new and some ones are familiar to everybody, but I hope you will find them useful to advance with your marketing efforts.

1. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is a great all-in-one tool that monitors how your keywords are ranking in search, checks competitors’ rankings and backlinks, group thousands of keywords with search volume, analyzes sites on hundreds of SEO related parameters, shows a list of short-tail and long-tail keywords and helps you to do SEO independently in percentage equivalent. The tool has a wonderful visual layout of the dashboard that I think is one of the best in the industry.

Key Features:

• Positions tracking, including mobile and Google maps rankings
• White Label with professional SEO reports
• Backlink monitoring
• Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools integration
• Keyword suggestion and grouping
• Comprehensive website audit
• Social media management
• Online marketing plan

Cost:

• Personal: starts at $4.20/month
• Optimum: $39/month
• Plus: $89/month
• Enterprise: $189/month

2. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free web service tool to keep track of websites’ performance and understand what search engines think of your website. With the help of this tool, you can see any alerts, bugs and indexing issues. You can also make adjustments to review website links, keyword data, submit sitemaps and robots.txt files, and much more. To get the more detailed analysis of your keyword data you can associate your account with Google Analytics.

Key Features:

• The ability to add and verify your site
• Add and check a robots.txt file
• Find out website errors and bugs
• Add and check a sitemap
• Increase your website appearance
• Get detailed reports about search traffic (keyword impressions, top pages, and links)
• Review website status in search
• Learn about security issues on your website

3. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a simple research and monitoring tool that helps to find the most shared content in social channels and related influencers, do a competitor analysis on content and receive alerts based on domain, links brand name and keywords. The tool has a user-friendly interface that works well to get the most shared content in the niche. It’s a perfect tool for content marketers.

Key Features:

• Find the most shared and interesting content
• Build a list of influencers to reach out
• Make a list of alerts for trending articles
• Set-up real-time monitoring
• Get a content analysis report
• Review competitors’ content

Cost:

• Pro: $99/month
• Agency: $299/month
• Enterprise: $699/month

4. Piktochart

Piktochart provides a quick and easy way to create and share design-worthy infographics. You don’t need to be a designer to create a masterpiece, as the tool has a pretty user-friendly interface. All infographics are stored in your account and you can edit them at any time. The tool includes categorized icons, interactive maps to use, design-driven charts and resizable canvas. One of the benefits is the ability to view how your versatile infographics are for different projects whether for a website, social media or office and provide you a pro tip how to use them effectively.

Key Features:

• Themes and templates of high design quality
• Embed videos from Youtube and Vimeo in your design
• The ability to edit anything and everything with ease
• High-quality PDF exports
• Image upload limit increased to 400mb
• Large database of designed icons and images

Cost:

• Lite: $15/month
• Pro: $29/month

5. WorkExaminer

WorkExaminer is an employee-monitoring software that gives you the ability to monitor all the important internet activities of your employees in silent or transparent mode. Although, there are lots of buzz about online activities monitoring, but if you are a large company and you want to improve your work productivity, it can be important to keep them track on daily tasks. Make sure if you want to monitor in stealth mode, it won’t be easy to install this program.

Key Features:

• Ability to block certain content
• Internet tracking
• Monitor internet activities in real time
• Keylogging
• Instant Messaging
• Screenshots capture in real-time and recorded playback mode

Cost:

• Standard :$60/lifetime
• Professional: $60/lifetime

6. Trello

Trello is a good visual collaboration tool for effective project management, issue tracking, budgeting, task management, notifications, reporting, and much more. You can easily make boards for each project, create lists to record your progress on a certain project and create cards that define each task. The tool provides a free subscription and professional package with the privacy and administrative settings on the request of large companies. It is easy to use and learn.

Key Features:

• Easy organization with tags, labels and categories
• Drag-drop functionality
• Integration with Mailchimp, Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, etc.
• Data filtering
• Easy collaboration in real-time
• Email notifications and activity log
• Unlimited card creation
• Attach photos, drawings, sketches, and mockups

Cost:

• Business Class: $9.99/month/per user
• Enterprise: $21/month/per user

7. Dropbox

Dropbox is one of the best online data backup services that allows you to access files in the cloud wherever you are and your team can view or edit your files. This software is really useful if you have many offices in different locations. Moreover, you can easily integrate your account in Dropbox with 100 000 3rd party apps. The backup speed and the restore speed is quite fast in comparison with other tools.

Key Features:

• Fast backup speed
• 2-16GB free storage
• File syncing and sharing
• Unlimited third-party integrations
• User controls and permissions
• Password-protected links
• Deleted file recovery

Cost:

• Pro: $8.25/month
• Business: $12.50/month
• Enterprise: contact for pricing

8. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a great crawling tool that helps you to index the overall website and find out broken links, bad tags, and much more. The program is easily installed on any desktop: for PC or Mac. You can use the tool for free with 500 URL restriction per crawl, or you can get it with the full version at £149 per license per year.

Key Features:

• Find duplicate content
• Track the Meta Robots tag
• Measure file size
• Track Page Depth level
• Track the Follow and NoFollow status of all links
• Custom Source Code Search
• XML site
• Custom filter and search HTML source code via a website

9. Mention

Mention is a real-time media monitoring tool that shows when and where your brand is mentioned online. It is very useful to know who is talking about you on the web and social media, and find out when your competitors are mentioned. It has a clean, intuitive interface without any credit card required.

Key Features:

• Real-time monitoring on the web and social media
• Export data in PDF or CSV
• Find out influencers talking about your brand or keyword
• Collaboration with your team
• Track and analyze performance
• Monitor from any device

Cost:

• Solo: $29/month
• Starter: $99/month
• Company: contact for pricing

10. Google Disavow Tool

Google introduced its free Disavow tool in late 2013, and it was a good way to tell the search engine directly what links are not yours in order to count for SEO of your site. It seems like you add artificially nofollow links leading to your site in order to be stronger in the search.

11. Ahrefs’ Site Explorer

Ahrefs’ Site Explorer is an essential tool for specialists that are serious about marketing. It provides tons of insight and data about your backlinks, websites, pages and competitors. Their database seems to be a fairly good and gives the ability to slice and dice this data to get better marketing decisions within the web interface. With this tool you can view interesting stats like new and lost links, the total number of links, referring IPs, unique domains, types of links, anchors, top referring content, organic keywords, and much more.

Key Features:

• Keep an eye on competitors
• Find new content ideas
• Build up quality links and increase shares
• View top pages on their backlinks and social metrics

Cost:

• Lite: $99/month
• Standard: $179/month
• Advanced: $399/month
• Agency: $999/month

12. Copyscape

Copyscape is a quality plagiarism protection service with the focuses on user cost and quality. It becomes one of the most popular tools to check duplicate content around the world. Unlike other plagiarism detection tools, it doesn’t check files for plagiarism, only content on the web. You just need to enter a URL or text and you will find out where else that content exists online.

Cost:

Required minimum $5 purchase for 100 credits

13. Grammarly

Grammarly is an awesome grammar checker for proofreading articles and blog posts. It helps you to identify possible grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes and give useful solutions and explanations for your mistake. It is a good tool if you don’t write articles and posts often and English is your second language. It supports different document types and appears as a line of defense to make sure your writing copy looks accurate and easy-to-read.

Key Features:

• Awesome online grammar knowledge base
• Detect possible grammar, spelling and punctuation errors
• Provide suggestions and explanations if required
• Use free Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions
• Plagiarism checker

Cost:

• Grammar Free: free
• Grammar Premium: $29.95/month

14. Google Calendar

Google Calendar is a free web organization tool that lets you organize and schedule events with clients and workers. It is easy to manage personal and professional schedules, but you should have a Google account to access Google Calendar.

Key Features:

• Keep track of video shoots, calls, meetings and reminders
• Share the calendar with your clients and team
• Use the calendar for different purposes (business, family, etc.)
• Integration with other services

15. Google Drive

Google Drive provides a free complete set of office tools in the cloud. It is easy to share files, create and update spreadsheets. The tool can use the unlimited number of users and has a huge storage limit – 15GB. You can get the most out of everything, including a presentation builder, word processor and spreadsheet. It is easy to upload and share a document with your team in the Drive, but you should have your Gmail account.

16. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a good heat mapping tool that allows you see where, when and how users interact and behave on your website. Most of businesses produce better conversions using the heat mapping strategy to target and engage your website users. The tool offers 4 multiple ways (heatmap view, scroll, confetti and overlay) to see what visitors do on your site and get the overall picture of user behavior.

Key Features:

• Get detailed insights into ROI changes
• Show what parts of your website are most reading and completely ignored
• Tell you how to position important elements and where to focus on your optimization
• In-page analytics and design testing

Cost:

• Basic: $9/month
• Standard: $19/month
• Plus: $49/month
• Pro: $99/month

17. Soovle

Soovle is a free online tool to find the most typed keyword in major search engines based on your search query you enter in the field. It appears like a good brainstormer that shows a list of search suggestions to get more relevant and precise search results. The interface is very easy to use: just enter a keyword in the search box and view the results.

Key Features:

• Search for keywords from major search engines like Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Bing, YouTube, Yahoo, Answers, etc.
• Free and instant keyword research with double click to see results
• All search terms are stored during your browser session

18. MyBlogU

MyBlogU is one of the most exceptional tools to create and share epic content, connect with smart bloggers, build up quality links for driving traffic and improving SEO. It is a free tool, and once you join the community, you can use it in several ways: brainstorming, interview, articles and media features. It is a great forum to meet new members and help others to generate unique content.

Key Features:

• Gather interviews and ideas from other members
• Help in organizing and running Twitter chats
• Give your insights into relevant topics and gain good links in the process
• Build good relationships with bloggers and SEO experts
• Get extra social media share
• Find fresh ideas and improve your content

Cost:

• Pro plan: $10/month

19. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that provides you top pages, top sources, visit page views, top locations and visitors on the website. All data can be exported to Excel, CSV, PDF and email files. The tool is easy to use and setup. It does a good job satisfying your analytics requirements.

Key Features:

• The ability to track different websites and social networking activity
• Measure activities like downloads, video views and mobile ad clicks
• Monitor mobile phone users
• Understand your customers by knowing what they need on your website
• Identify visitor paths via your website
• Analyze page load times through your sight

Cost:

• Premium: $150/year

20. Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Xenu’s Link Sleuth has one of the ugliest interface, but it’s a good tool to detect broken links on your websites, inclusively Gopher, FTP and email links. You download the tool for free and run it on all versions of Windows, but not on Macs. It’s very easy to generate a simple report of all issues on the site.

Key Features:

• Detect broken links
• Find your duplicate content issues
• Identify largest pages and images regarding your page load time
• Find pages with most outlinks
• Detect images with the lack of Alt text

Are there other SEO tools you want to add? Do you like web tools or browser plugins? I’d love to hear your thoughts so please share them in the comments below.

Read more:

• Smart SEO Tools to Monitor Backlinks
• Best SEO Software: Top SEO tools for keyword research linkbuilding and competitor analysis