When managing a website, SEO is probably one of the most important factors you must consider spending time on.
At the end of the day, having a website with strong SEO allows you to position yourself better than your competitors in google and gain more customers.
But doing SEO isn´t easy, you have to search for valuable keywords and structure your articles in a very detailed way (internal/external links, keywords on titles, on every paragraph…)
These laborious processes end up taking too much time and are inefficient. But don’t worry, there are plenty of tools that help you with the most time consuming aspects of SEO.
In this article we´ll take a look at what are the best value SEO tools and why you need them in the first place.
Should I use SEO tools?
At first you might think that buying SEO tools could be a total waste of money, but you´re wrong. These tools help you save time with keyword research and data analytics which is the most laborious (and boring) aspects of SEO.
These tools give you valuable information about which keywords are working at the moment, what your competitors are using and allow you to measure performance in different countries, regions and languages.
The information these tools provide allows you to modify your SEO strategy, compare it to your competitors and produce more valuable content instead of shooting in the dark.
Which are the top SEO tools?
There are a lot of SEO tools to chose from, some cheap, some expensive and a few free. Here are the ones we think are best and why:
· Semrush
Semrush is a very popular SEO marketing tool. It has a lot of distinctive features which makes it one of the best SEO tools out there:
- Allows you to compare different page performance so you can see how you´re doing compared to your competitors
- With Traffic analytics, you can identify your competition´s traffic numbers as well as your own.
- Domain Overview allows you to check out rival SEO strategies by allowing you to see what keywords they target.
Semrush is a great tool, matter of fact it´s the SEO tool we use for our blog. It still has a few downsides though:
The site uses very technical language so for a beginner it maybe a little difficult to understand the functions or read the information the tool gives you. Another downside is the price. Although they usually give a seven day free trial, a subscription costs around 100€ so if you´re just starting it can be a little bit too much.
· Ahrefs
Ahrefs has been one of the best SEO tools and has the largest backlink index with more than 16 trillion backlinks.
It has a very good keyword explorer to monitor the competition and a huge amount of user documentation.
It also has the Site Audit feature which highlights what you have to improve from your website to rank better. Ahrefs is also very good to determine competitor´s backlinks to start optimizing your site.
· Majestic
Majestic is a very well renowned SEO tool, especially great when searching for backlinks.
You can search for backlinks on the fresh index which is updated every day, and the popular Historic Index which is praised for its speed. Another popular feature is the Majestic Million which shows the top million websites, very cool if you want to see if your site made the cut.
If you don’t want to pay the 94$ subscription price, there´s a 46$ option that include helpful features like the bulk backlink checker as well as site explorer to see if your site is outdated.
· Spyfu
This tool is very helpful to identify the keywords that companies purchase on Google AdWords.It also matches search words with search terms so you can have a better idea of what words appear on Google´s Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
It´s a very good tool to spy on your competitors and see what keywords they buy for advertising, selecting those that get more traffic, helping you be one step ahead of your competitors.
SpyFu is a great value for money tool. The basic plan is only 39$ a month, which is below most of its competitors. It has all the SEO and keyword search tools any big company would need and is very easy to use and customizable.
Free SEO tools
Although buying tool suscriptions is very helpful, they are usually very expensive. So if you want to improve your site´s positioning on a budget, here are some options you should consider:
· Answer the public
Answer the public is a very useful site if you want to start your site´s SEO. The site gives you a list of topics you can use for your blog just by typing a keyword related with your website. For example, here´s the results I got when typing web hosting as the keyword:
This can be very handy if you don´t know what content to write when given a particular niche. This tool can be extremely useful if you´re a freelancer and don´t need the expensive tools or just a SEO beginner with a tight budget.
· Google search console
This tool is free for everyone with a website and is maybe the most important SEO tool.
With Google search console, you can monitor your site´s presence in SERP by just verifying your website. With it, you can see how users see your site and allow you to optimize. It also gives you valuable information about impressions, clicks and different stats that help you comprehend on a deeper level how your site is doing.
· SEOQuake
This is a popular toolbar extension that allows you to view several SEO parameters and compare them with your results.
The tool gives details of number of visitors, country and even a graph with the traffic that site gets. It can also show a site´s index update, Semrush ranking, backlinks, web archive age… The only downside is that the tool shows a lot of information so begginers may find it challenging to understand all the information given.
Our recommendation
It´s hard to choose only one tool for your SEO and our advice is that you should diversify your SEO tool catalogue a bit. Think of it as an ordinary tool box, every tool specializes in a different task. Some SEO tools are better at finding backlinks or keywords while others just have specific and very useful features that you may need.
If you´re a just starting, just try out every free trial you can get and use the free tools we showed you. Once you get started you may feel the need to buy a subscription because at the end of the day you get the better tool once you pay the subscription, and our experienced has showed us that it is well worth it.
If you want to read more about tech and web hosting, be sure to check out the rest of the Obambu Guide
