14 Most Essential SEO Tools (For 2019)
This article was originally posted here.
More and more new websites come into existence every day. There are over 1.2 Billion websites worldwide.
And, driving a decent amount of traffic to your site is a real challenge.
Also, the Search Engines’ Algorithm changes constantly.
So, to keep up with the latest developments in SEO, you need to be well equipped with some of the good tools.
And, to work with SEO smartly, having the right tools in your arsenal is indispensable.
You cannot do SEO manually. Nobody can!
It’s crucial to have the right tool for a specific task.
In this article, we’ll be discussing the 14 most essential SEO tools which can help you in your SEO work to drive more traffic and rank higher in results pages.
And, the best part?
Most of the tools are free and easy to use.
#1. KWFinder:
An amazing tool for keyword search.
This tool can bring you perfect keyword ideas and is very easy to use.
It not only shows you information on the keyword that you were searching for but also gives you suggestions for related terms.
And those terms compare in terms of volume, CPC, difficulty, etc. to the term you originally looked at.
Official Website:
#2. SEMRush:
This tool is one of the favorite tools among SEO communities.
It’s an all-in-one SEO tool. You can easily compare your website to your competitors, find the exact keywords your competitors rank for, analyze your backlinks from other websites to your site and more.
Official Website:
#3. Long Tail Pro:
Earlier, this tool was a downloadable application. But now it is cloud-based i.e., you can use it in your browser.
You don’t need to be an expert to use this tool. Once you start using it, you will get used to it very quickly.
No matter what kind of website you are building, one of its features “Rank Value” could be very profitable for your website. You can find hundreds of low competition keywords.
Official Website:
#4. SEO Quake:
This is a free Chrome extension.
SEO Quake is an all-in-one SEO tool available. This tool can help you conduct SEO audit, examine internal and external links, compare domains and URLs and export all data into a file. You can easily download and share the data with your team.
Official Website:
https://www.seoquake.com/index.html
#5. Ahrefs:
Ahrefs is the most favorite tool among the SEO community. It’s the best backlink and SEO analysis tool.
Using this tool, you can learn why your competitors rank higher and what exactly to do get an edge over them.
Four of its main tools are:
a) Site Explorer: With this tool, you can search for traffic and backlink profile of your competitors.
Also, you can learn whether your competitors are doing paid search.
b) Keywords Explorer: Just enter up to 10 “seed” keywords into Keywords Explorer and you get thousands of keyword suggestions. Using this tool you can also check the “keyword difficulty” score as it helps you to determine how hard it would be to rank in the top 10 search results.
c) Content Explorer: This tool helps you find the most popular content for any topic or keywords. You can learn about the high-performing web pages for specific keywords.
d) Rank Tracker: Using this tool you can monitor your site’s Google ranking over time on desktop and mobile. This helps you chart your performance against your competitors.
Just input or import a list of keywords, add multiple countries per keyword and tell us your competitors’ URLs. Ahrefs will start tracking data and send you updates.
Official Website:
#6. Google Search Console:
It’s the best tool to monitor the performance of your website in Google search results. It helps to measure your site’s search traffic and fix issues if any.
All you need to do is submit your sitemaps and individual URLs for crawling. And your content is on the Google search results.
Why is this tool so important for an online marketer?
You can optimize your content by analyzing your site’s impressions, clicks, and position on Google Search.
Using one of its features “Mobile usability”, you can test and improve your site’s mobile usability.
More data, More power!
This tool is indispensable as far as SEO is concerned.
Official Website:
https://search.google.com/search-console/about
#7. Google Analytics:
According to Neil Patel, “Google Analytics is to the online marketer like air is to the human being. You can’t live without it”.
If you are into online marketing, you simply can’t ignore Google Analytics.
It gives you all the data you need to analyze for your business in one place.
You get to understand how people interact with your site. Thus, you know your customers deeply, so you will take proper actions to improve your content.
Official Website:
https://www.google.com/analytics/
#8. Google Ads Keyword Planner:
This tool gives you a number of keyword ideas to build your campaigns.
How to find Keyword Planner?
Just log in to AdWords → Tools → Keyword Planner
How it works:
Official Website:
https://ads.google.com/intl/en_in/home/tools/keyword-planner/
#9. Screaming Frog:
This tool is one of the most essential SEO auditing tools. You can crawl, analyze and perform site audits.
It saves time if you want to analyze the structure of a site. You can use this tool to crawl both small as well as large websites where checking manually every page would be literally impossible.
How to use the Screaming Frog SEO spider?
Just check out this video,
Free as well as paid versions are available. But with the free version, there are some limitations. With the free version, only 500 URLs can be crawled and you won’t have access to the configuration, saving of crawls, Google Analytics, Search Console and Link metrics integration.
Official Website:
#10. Majestic:
Majestic claims to be the planet’s largest Link Index database.
This tool is for almost all the online marketers, be it SEO professionals, Media Analysts, Entrepreneurs or Developers.
You can explore a domain or URL in a detailed manner using its Site Explorer tool.
Backlink history tool will give you the number of backlinks for specific domains, subdomains or URLs. This could be very helpful for SEO campaigns.
And, you can use its Search Explorer tool to generate a quick list of topical URLs matching your keyword.
Official Website:
#11. Buzzsumo:
This tool helps you analyze the content.
Just enter a topic or URL and it allows you to analyze the content that performs best for that topic or URL.
This tool could be of great help in your SEO campaign, content marketing, and social media marketing.
Content is the king.
And Buzzsumo helps you to develop smarter content strategies and find the key influencers to promote your content.
Official Website:
#12. Ubersuggest:
This is a free keyword tracking tool. Just enter the keyword and you have hundreds of suggestions.
Ubersuggest gives you almost all the relevant data on a specific keyword. It shows the volume, seasonality, CPC.
And, the best part?
Negative keywords are also there which may help you find the right keywords.
Official Website:
https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/
#13. GTmetrix:
This tool gives you a complete insight into how well your site loads.
And, it also gives you recommendations on what actions to take to optimize your site.
This is the best tool around to analyze your site’s speed and make it faster.
Official Website:
#14. Responsive Design Checker:
Just enter a URL and this tool shows you how it looks on mobile, tablet and desktop.
As Google has made it mandatory for a site to be mobile-friendly, it is very important for your site to be responsive.
This tool even shows you how your site looks on most of the popular mobile devices (for example, iPhone X, Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel, etc.) and various desktop resolutions.
If your website is responsive, Google improves the rankings in search results.
Official Website:
