In this article we will discuss the most useful SEO tools that will surely help both beginners and pros.
For convenience, we divided them into several groups according to their features and goals.
Our rating includes the most popular and not-so-much known, but none the less useful services.
Don’t hesitate to save some to your bookmarks if you find them useful.
Webmaster consoles and tools
Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tool (free)
Answering a typical question of newbies what tools to use in order to analyze a website, experienced specialists will first of all point to these tools — Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tool.
They are available to every website owner absolutely free of charge and allow you to monitor the status of your project.
In particular, they allow you to find out:
If there any errors that interfere with page indexation;
which keywords bring users to your pages;
which domains link to you and other useful information.
To simplify, these services allow you to interact with the search robots of each of the search engines (Google or Bing).
SEMrush (paid)
The largest multifunctional service contains useful tools for SEO audit and competitor analysis, ranking monitoring, multifunctional keyword analysis (by region, by language).
SEMrush is available by paid subscription.
Ahrefs (paid)
Another multi-functional panel for webmasters, a great service for deep backlink analysis, as well as for working with keywords, checking site rankings, and much more.
Before you start, you can test the tools for 7 days for $7.
Serpstat (freemium)
One of the most well-known platforms for SEO analysis and research.
Like the above-mentioned services for SEO analytics, Serpstat has many tools that allow you to perform a full website analysis, including analysis of backlink profiles and competitors, keyword research for different regions and countries.
You can use Serpstat for free, but with daily limits, or subscribe to a suitable plan to work comfortably without restrictions.
SE Ranking (paid)
This toolkit is a set of useful features for the complex data analysis of your website.
This platform has tools for tracking keyword rankings, checking backlinks, defining the search volume of keywords, and much more.
SE Ranking is available by paid subscription, choose the right rate depending on your workload or use a prepaid option for your account and pay for each check.
A free trial period (14 days) is also available.
Tools for website traffic analysis
Google Analytics (free)
In this part, we will also start with free tools provided by the search engines.
Google Analytics is a web service for gathering website statistics, using it you can learn about the sources of traffic sources, analyze the actions of users and their path on your website.
The service provides a huge amount of information, which you can customize for your project.
Similarweb (freemium)
When considering useful tools for SEO specialists, it is impossible not to mention Similarweb.
This rather popular service is excellent for quick analysis of competitors, also thanks to the browser extension.
With its help, you can get data on the amount and source of traffic, bounce rate, the ratio of paid and free traffic, and its geography.
You can use the service for free; a paid subscription expands the user's capabilities and allows more in-depth analysis.
Alexa (freemium)
Popular among webmasters in the USA and European countries, a service for assessing search traffic and its properties from Amazon.
With its help you can analyze competitors, their sources of traffic, investigate keywords visitors are using to come to the website, study backlinks and much more.
Some metrics are available for free as browser extensions. Advanced features are available with a paid subscription.
Don't want to go that deep into all the details? Order SEO site analysis from our experts, get a detailed report on your website and recommendations for improvement.
Technical crawlers and parsers
Screaming Frog SEO Spider (freemium)
The most popular scanner for technical audits.
This software is suitable for analyzing internal site linking, analyzing meta tags, headers, search for broken links and duplicates in the content.
The program is desktop, there is a free version with a limit of 500 pages to scan. The paid version has more advanced functionality.
Netpeak Spider (freemium)
Speaking of the best crawlers, it is impossible not to mention Netpeak Spider - a tool for fast analysis with a Russian-language interface and support.
It allows you to monitor the state of your resource on a daily basis and identify broken URLs, duplicates, unnecessary redirects and other technical problems.
This program for gathering website statistics is paid, but there is a free version with basic functionality.
Netpeak Checker (freemium)
Another fairly popular desktop program for mass analysis of technical parameters on a daily basis.
It can be used to quickly gather data from various services (Moz, Serpstat, Majestic, SEMRush and others).
The free version has limited features, but it can be used by beginners or small agencies. In the paid version, more tools are available for work.
JetOctopus (paid)
Very useful online software for a SEO specialist who works with big websites.
The program allows you to analyze log files, find technical problems (pages with code 4xx and redirects to them, long loading speed, etc.), and, in general, comprehensively assess the state of your site and understand how it is seen by search bots.
The tool can be tested for free. A paid subscription provides access to the full functionality.
SEOlyzer (freemium)
And another interesting tool for internal analysis. You can use it for free, but with some limitations. A paid subscription expands the possibilities.
А-parser (paid)
This is a paid parser with a huge number of useful tools. With its help, you can analyze your site according to dozens of different indicators (load speed, check rankings in various search engines, check keywords and backlinks, and much more).
Tools for monitoring key indicators of a website
Sitechecker (freemium)
This is a service for a complete analysis of the website on various parameters.
As a result, you will get a detailed report on the entire domain performance and its individual pages.
Sitechecker is available for free, but its functionality is limited in this version. Use the paid plan to get the most out of the tool.
For Search engine optimization to be effective, there are many peculiarities to consider. If you are not sure how to optimize your website by yourself, you can make things worse, and it is better to use the services of professionals. The team of Idea Digital Agency knows exactly how to increase the visibility of the website on the web.
UptimeRobot (freemium)
This is definitely your choice for website analysis software if you want to monitor your server uptime.
UptimeRobot will send you notifications if your website goes down or something happens with your SSL certificate or services.
There are plenty of useful features available, you can get free checks when you register for the first time.
LinkChecker (paid)
A tool for monitoring backlinks.
You will be able to receive alerts about lost backlinks in Telegram or by e-mail in order to solve the problem in time, monitor redirects, choose appropriate pages for placement, not blocked from indexing and not blocked in robots.txt.
You can choose a suitable plan from Lite, Standard, or Pro.
Google Pagespeed Insights (free)
Evaluate the loading speed of your site for free. Find out exactly what prevents you from improving speed in desktop and mobile versions.
WebPageTest (free)
Free performance check of your website.
Check the loading speed of the site from different browsers and regions.
You can also test several pages simultaneously (useful when you want to compare how different pages load).
GTmetrix (freemium)
Another useful tool for evaluating page load speed.
With its help you can check how your website is loaded in different regions, on mobile devices, and monitor the performance of the website for a specified period of time.
Like many other free SEO software, GTmetrix allows you to test its functionality, but for further use, you must buy a subscription.
Tools for working with keywords and content
Google Keyword Planner (free)
This service, developed by Google, provides free information about users' search queries.
You can use it to find out how often people typed a particular keyword or phrase into the search bar and find similar queries.
Keyword Tool (freemium)
A simple but handy keyword planner.
With its help, you can both select the appropriate queries, as well as to analyze competitors.
Works with many search engines, including Youtube and Twitter.
There is a free analysis available, but the details (number of queries, their PPC cost, etc.) are only available for paid subscription.
Ubersuggest (freemium)
Interesting tool for keyword research, competitor analysis and selection of ideas and topics for content.
Allows you to collect keywords for different countries.
Use the trial version to see if Ubersuggest is right for your needs.
AnswerThePublic (freemium)
With this tool, you can find new ideas for content.
It finds, analyzes, and visualizes all queries based on the keyword entered.
You can select a country and language to customize your search.
PRO mode opens more possibilities and provides access to more information.
Copywritely (paid)
Allows you to check texts for uniqueness. In addition, the service has very wide functionality, including:
grammar check;
overspam analysis;
readability check;
word count, etc.
You can choose the plan that covers your needs.
Conclusion
As you can see, there is a lot to choose from!
Of course, free tools for website optimization do not always have the right set of features, but they are the best way to start.
Paid tools allow you to do in-depth analysis and are definitely useful for professionals who want to get even more data.
Stay tuned if you want to learn even more interesting things about the world of SEO!
