While site traffic can come from any number of different sources, like social media or your email newsletter, search engine optimization will continue to play a big role for just about any website.
The obvious elephant in the room here is on Google, so it will come as no surprise that the vast majority of search engine analysis tools will understandably focus on the search engine giant.
If you want to attract more customers, readers and visitors from around the web, it will always be in your best interest to work on your site’s SEO.
And to do that, you need to arm yourself with the right tools.
Here are seven of the best that every blogger should have in his arsenal.
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SEO Analyzer
Offered by world-renowned Internet marketer and serial entrepreneur Neil Patel, SEO Analyzer can provide you with a free report, comparing up to three pages at a time.
This works for your homepage, as well as for any individual page you have on your site.
In fact, SEO Analyzer actually produces three reports for free: website analyzer, content marketing, and competitor analysis.
You can view these on the site itself — the reports generate right away — or you can download the PDF reports for later review.
Accompanying the page level SEO score, for instance, you’ll get a number of SEO recommendations.
A big plus here is that the report is free.
However, you will need to sift through and address your SEO problem areas manually.
That can prove strenuous and time-consuming.
LinkResearchTools
When you sign up with LinkResearchTools, you don’t get just one SEO tool.
You get access to up to 21 SEO tools, depending on the tier that you choose.
Pricing starts at $169/month, which might sound on the pricier side (the most popular plan is $599/month), but you get a 360-degree perspective on the backlink profile of your website.
For instance, maybe you were hit with a Google penalty and you’re not entirely sure why.
Using these tools, you can “regain your lost visibility and organic traffic quick and easy.”
They’ll even expedite the crawl so you can get back to the top as soon as possible.
Another unique feature is that LinkResearchTools pulls in data from some 24 link data sources.
This results in a more complete perspective, both for your on-site links and for inbound links, as well as for monitoring your competitors.
Serpstat
Like so many other SEO tools, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with just how much data Serpstat is able to provide.
In fact, there are more than 16 sections to the web-based interface, including how to identify your search competitors and how to discover the most efficient keywords that your competitor is paying for.
Even when you generate the free report from the homepage, you are hit with a wealth of data.
Do you know what keywords your website is already ranking for organically?
Serpstat does.
And it’ll do it across multiple regions too. Curious how you rank in Google UK vs. Google Canada?
You can do that.
There’s URL analysis, keyword analysis, a rank tracker and more.
Monthly personal plans start at $19 a month with discounts provided when you pay one year or three years at a time.
The smallest paid plan limits you to 300 queries a day, but you can give the tool a try using the smaller free plan which offers 10 results per report and up to 30 daily queries.
SE Ranking
How deep do you want to go with your keyword analysis?
With SE Ranking, you can not only see how your site is ranking in Google, Yahoo and Bing, but you can track your progress down on the country, region and even the city level at any time.
Want to know how you’re stacking up against other sites in your niche?
You can compare your ranking directly against up to five competitors, monitoring their positions relative to yours over time.
And the white label solution makes SE Ranking a good option for agencies too.
The dashboard is simultaneously robust and simple, making it more easily accessible for all users.
The personal plan is $92 for a year, tracking up to 50 keywords and monitoring up to five websites.
Plans go up from there for more keywords, more sites, more pages and more features.
SEMrush
There’s a reason why SEMrush is one of the biggest and best-known solutions in this space.
It’s trusted by over a million digital marketing professionals for their keyword and domain tracking needs.
What’s important here is that you not only get to spy on your competitor’s best keywords and discover new keywords that you should target, but you can also peer into their strategies for display advertising and paid search too.
Naturally, deep link analyses are also available.
Compare domains, audit sites and track your social media performance.
All this functionality comes at a price.
The most popular Guru plan is $149.95 per month or $1,499.40 per year, which is no small sum of money.
For that, you can generate up to 5,000 reports a day, running up to 50 projects and tracking up to 1,500 keywords.
Ahrefs
Many of the SEO analysis tools listed here perform very similar functions.
Ahrefs naturally falls into that camp too.
Use it to track your keywords and see how they’re ranking in the search engines over time, as well as monitor your competitors so you can leverage their experience to your advantage.
When you sign up with Ahrefs, you gain access to multiple tools, including a site explorer, positions explorer, content explorer and crawl report, among others.
You’ll be able to see a detailed backlink profile for any given URL, whether it’s your site or not.
See where the links are coming from, what anchor text is being used, and more.
You can also learn what content is getting the most shares and backlinks within your vertical.
The Lite and Standard plans come with a no-risk free trial if you want to see if Ahrefs is right for you.
Pricing starts at $99/month with a 20% discount if you opt for annual billing.
Bing SEO Analyzer
As one of the major search engines in the world, it only makes sense for Bing to provide their audience with an SEO analyzer tool to help sites rank better in their search results.
Using 15 different SEO best practices and methods, the Bing SEO Analyzer will scan through your site and let you know what improvements need to be made.
Just like many of the tools mentioned in this guide, it’s also free to use.
