Best SEO Tools — Essential Tools for Running a Powerful Website

Entrepreneurs can do many things on their own, relying solely on their wits and skills. However, search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t one of them. To do a good job and run a robust website with a good amount of traffic, you need the right SEO optimization tools. 

Naturally, this includes a broad scope of SEO software, so I wanted to tell you only about the best SEO tools, ones you can’t live without. There are alternatives to every SEO ranking tool on this list, and you’re free to consider them. However, I urge you to check out my recommendations first. Here’s the list before we go into more detail:

• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• Google Search Console
• Moz 
• Screaming Frog
• Google Analytics
• PageSpeed Insights
• Answer the Public

Why Should You Use SEO Tools?

Search engine optimization software helps your site rank better and become more visible on the web. 

SEO tools are a very broad category. Some solutions help with only one or a few specific SEO-related tasks, like ranking, auditing, keyword research, and backlinks. Others are all-encompassing tools that do almost anything related to search engine optimization. 

When we put it like that, it becomes clear that the best SEO tools are a necessity, but let’s quickly review the main reasons for using them:

• You get the option to track your SEO progress.
• You can find helpful keywords with a good SEO keyword tool. 
• You can optimize the content on your website. 
• You save money and time on manual audits.
• You get to examine your competitors’ SEO strategies.
• You can monitor backlinks and analyze them. 
• You can show clear results to supervisors or clients. 

How to Select the Best SEO Software?

Choosing the best SEO tool for you involves considering your business goals, budget, technical expertise, and the specific SEO capabilities you need, such as keyword research, link building, and on-page optimization. 

You should also consider what you need the tool for, especially if it’s specific, as some of the overall top-rated tools might not be what you need. If you want it to help you with your YouTube channel, you need to look for the best SEO tools for YouTube. On the other hand, if you’re running an online shop on Etsy, you should look for the best SEO tools for Etsy. 

Best SEO Tools in 2025 — Reviews, Pros, and Cons

You’ve seen my picks for the best SEO tools every website owner and marketer should have, and now is the time to give you some quick reviews of each one. 

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a powerful and top-rated tool most people have heard about, and with good reason. It’s an all-in-one SEO tool with several services, including Keyword Explorer, Content Explorer, Site Explorer, Site Audit, and more. 

This SEO ranking software has the most extensive backlink index, with a library of over 35 trillion backlinks and 329 billion indexed pages. Ahrefs’ crawler is the second most active on the web after Google’s.

Pros:

• Massive web link index
• Very accurate ranking data
• Quality competitor analysis tool
• Several free webmaster tools

Cons:

• Plans can be costly for some
• Limited number of SEO reporting tools

Semrush

Semrush is a great SEO tracking tool considered one of the best for small and mid-size business leaders. 

This feature-rich tool can fulfill many of your SEO needs, including in-depth website audits, PPC campaigns, SERP analysis, keyword research, backlink monitoring, and more. It offers countless insights into website performance and can scale easily as your business grows. Due to all of this, it’s one of the best SEO tools for WordPress. 

One of its highlights is a robust dashboard with widgets that can be customized to fit your needs. 

It’s also one of the best SEO tools for social media, as it offers a free toolkit to help you track and post content.

Pros:

• One of the most popular SEO analysis tools
• Great selection of keyword-tracking capabilities
• Customizable and feature-rich dashboard
• Lots of advanced features

Cons:

• Can be expensive for smaller businesses and entrepreneurs
• Unsuitable for beginners

Google Search Console

If you’re looking for the best SEO tools for beginners, you should start with Google’s Search Console. It’s a diagnostic and reporting SEO tool made primarily for beginner web admins. 

It’s one of the few SEO free tools on the web that can genuinely help you get all the crucial data and insights into your site’s performance.

It will help you analyze clicks, visits, impressions, CTR, and how well your URLs are performing for specific queries. This frequent mention in the top 10 best SEO tools lists will also allow you to track your site’s health and security and test sitemaps. 

Pros:

• Perfect for beginner website or blog owners
• Valuable insights straight from Google
• Completely free to use 
• URL-specific tests

Cons:

• No additional features
• Works only on your websites
• Relatively limited amount of information

Moz 

Moz is a comprehensive SEO tool used for link building, keyword research, rank tracking, and competitor analysis. It’s a bit cheaper than solutions like Ahrefs and offers many useful free tools. 

One of its best free tools is MozBar, a browser extension that shows the domain authority (DA) for all websites listed in the SERPs. 

Another great feature of this SEO tracking tool is Moz Local. It lets you manage listings, publish location data, and monitor reviews. 

Pros:

• Comprehensive database of links
• Wide range of tools
• 30-day free trial 
• Feature-packed free version

Cons:

• Steep learning curve
• Expensive for some users

Screaming Frog

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an SEO tool for site analysis and page crawling. It’s a technical SEO tool, as its auditing and site crawling abilities are highly advanced. You can perform extensive analysis and easily find problems like server errors, broken links, and redirect chains. 

The SEO Spider can also integrate with Google’s Search Console and Analytics tools. However, the standout feature of this SEO monitoring tool is its duplicate content detection. It can resolve almost any duplicate content problem and provide insights into pages with duplicate meta tags, missing title tags, and more. 

Pros:

• Very good at discovering duplicate content
• Quality crawling capabilities 
• Lets you create XML sitemaps

Cons:

• The free version is limited
• Must be downloaded

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great SEO tool for new businesses since it can be used to run simple tests quickly. It’s different from the Google Search Console as it tells you much more about your users and how they interact with your site, while the Console focuses on telling you how it performs in the search results. 

One of the best things that Google Analytics does is real-time reporting, which allows you to monitor what’s happening on your site while it’s happening. 

Pros:

• Monitors website in real-time
• Integrates with other products from Google
• Offers custom reports

Cons:

• Can be hard to master
• Pricing is by quote only 

PageSpeed Insights

One of the best SEO tools for Shopify, Google PageSpeed Insights lets you evaluate the performance of all of your pages. You only need to enter the URL, and you’ll get an easy-to-read report and assessment score. 

Google ranks page speed highly, which is why this tool is incredibly useful. It will tell you what issues are causing your page load time to be too long and make recommendations on how to optimize your website.

Pros:

• Completely free to use
• Shows exact page speed issues
• Provides recommendations on optimizing your website
• Delivers analysis for desktop and mobile 

Cons:

• Was not designed for WordPress websites 
• Can suggest experimental things from Google

Answer the Public

Answer the Public is another one of the best SEO tools for free, and it’s a handy piece of keyword research software. Even though people usually go for Google Keyword Planner, you’ll want to consider Answer the Public because it pulls questions real people ask on social media, blogs, and forums and creates keywords from them. 

The best thing about this SEO keywords tool is that it shows its results in the form of a visual map or diagram and puts them into specific categories like What, When, How, and Why. You can also export the results in CSV and other formats for convenience. 

Pros:

• Great for free keyword research
• Interesting visualization of results
• Pulls data from people’s questions online

Cons:

• Limited number of reports per day
• Detailed metrics only on the paid version

Bottom Line

So there you have it: some of the top SEO tools on the market, both free and paid, with various use cases. If you’re looking for the best SEO software, each of these tools will offer services that will prove very useful in running your website or helping your clients. 

Bear in mind that this is in no way a complete list of all SEO tools you’ll need because SEO optimization is a broad topic with lots of moving parts. However, I believe that most, if not all, of these solutions will prove more than helpful for many users. 

If you want to know more or need help with SEO or content marketing, feel free to contact us. 

FAQ

What is the most effective tool for SEO?

Some of the most effective SEO analysis tools are Ahrefs and Semrush. Both boast comprehensive toolkits that can handle many of your SEO needs, and you’re likely to eliminate the need for many other SEO tools by using any one of the two.

What is the best free SEO tool?

People talk about the best SEO tools on Reddit and other sites, but there’s no single best SEO tool. There are several of them, like Google’s SEO tools (Google Search Console most of all), Moz, Answer the Public, RankMath, and others. Bear in mind that most free tools are highly limited and will require subscriptions to unlock advanced features. 

Are SEO tools worth it?

Many are, and some aren’t, but it all depends on what you need them to do and how much you’re willing to invest. The best SEO tools out there, comprehensive ones like Semrush and Ahfres, cover many of your SEO needs and offer many benefits. Still, they can get expensive, especially for small companies and personal website owners. 

Why is SEO so expensive?

In short, SEO tools are expensive because they are very specialized and do things that require a lot of expertise. On top of that, many of the SEO-related services they perform are ongoing, so it’s not something you can pay for once and be done with it. Naturally, the benefits can easily outweigh the costs, as a well-optimized site can pay a lot.