Simply by just doing a quick Google search, you can find a lot of great ‘Best SEO Tools’ lists from a variety of influencers in the SEO industry.
We all know the main set of tools that we should all have: The free Google SEO tools (Analytics, Keyword Planner), Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Moz OSE etc.
However, there’s a bunch of free and paid new SEO tools, which can really improve efficiency and SEO strategy, that no one knows about!
Here are our favourite secret SEO tools that we use in the office on a daily basis and couldn’t live without…
BEST FREE SEO TOOLS 2020
Whether you’re looking for the best SEO tools for small business or a set of tools that can help a big organisation, some of the free tools still pack a big SEO punch!
Here are the top free SEO tools in 2016 that you should be utilising straight away:
(in no particular order)
LinkMiner
LinkMiner was created by Jon Cooper from PointBlankSEO and is one of my personal favourite SEO tools! Get it for free from the Chrome Web Store and with just one click the tool highlights all links on a page and also the ones which are broken.
Perfect for broken link building, this handy tool even shows you how many links the broken link has pointing to it. Sweet!
Website: pointblankseo.com/linkminer
Übersuggest
This neat little website allows you to get more keyword ideas. Ideal for PPC, SEO and other content marketing pieces – they reckon you can find keywords which are not available Google Keyword Planner – our advice would be: give it a go.
Website: ubersuggest.org
Twitter: twitter.com/ubersuggest
HARO
This website gives journalists a database of courses for upcoming stories and it also gives the opportunities for sources to gain media coverage for their stories. Worth, signing up to.
Website: helpareporter.com
Twitter: twitter.com/helpareporter
Keys4Up
Keys4Up is another keyword research tool which allows the webmaster to find related keywords for many topics enabling the user to write more relevant content and therefore hope to increase page rankings on Google Search. Check it out!
Website:keys4up.com
Twitter: twitter.com/keys4up
SEO Tools for Excel
SeoTools is an add-in for Excel which has a number of SEO tools for aiding on-page SEO, off-page seo among other tools and as it’s directly located in Excel, it speed everything up. It’s free to download, so hey, why not take a look.
Website: seotoolsforexcel.com
Twitter: twitter.com/seotools4excel
rmoov
Rmoov helps identify and remove bad backlinks from websites. Webmasters are able to use these tools to manager link removal requests. Great little tool for cleaning and cleansing your SEO backlink portfolio.
Website: rmoov.com/index.php
Seedkeywords
This tool by Red Evolution is very simple and it which helps you discover what people are really searching for in particular situations. You give it your scenario and it provides you with seed keywords to get your keyword research started.
Website: seedkeywords.com
Twitter: twitter.com/RedEvo
Wayback Machine
This neat little tool allows you to view a website at any point in it’s history. Whether you want to look at changes to a website that may have resulted in traffic fluctuations or find old links that may have disappeared this free tool is the one!
Website: archive.org/web/
Twitter: twitter.com/internetarchive
Xenu’s Link Sleuth
Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a super free tool which allows you to check that there are no broken links on your website. The great thing is that it searches the whole domain and saves you time and money!
Website: xenus-link-sleuth.en.softonic.com
META SEO Inspector
Created by Andrea Doimo, Meta Seo Inspector is a Google Chrome extension which allows the user to inspect the metadata inside websites. This metadata is not usually visible while browsing.
Metadata that it picks up include XFN tags, various microformats, no-follow links as well as canonical attribute. Examples of these can be found here.
Website: omiod.com/meta-inspector.php
GTmetrix
This handy tool is used to analyse your website’s speed and how to make it faster. It allows you to see an insight into how well the site loads and provides recommendations to act upon to optimise it.
Website: gtmetrix.com
Twitter: twitter.com/gtmetrix
IMN Google Sitemap Generator
Created by Ninjas Marketing, this tool allows the user to find broken links, redirects and to generate a Google Sitemap. This allows webmasters to check the status of internal and external links on a website in its entirety.
Website: internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/google-sitemap-generator
Twitter: twitter.com/NinjasMarketing
Copyscape
This one is a paid tool and it’s very effective. Copyscape Premium is the web’s most powerful plagiarism search. This is used by site owners to track down plagiarism of their site’s content. This is extremely useful when trying to protect and preserve your unique online identity.
Website: copyscape.com
Twitter: twitter.com/Copyscape
Siege Media
Siege Media has developed an embed code generator which allows a webmaster to embed a video onto their website. YouTube provides the embed url, but this tool is useful for any video not on YouTube.
Website: siegemedia.com/embed-code-generator
Twitter: twitter.com/siegemedia
The hreflang Tags Generator Tool
Aleyda Solís shows off this great tool on her blog. The hreflang Tags Generator Tool is perfect for a website with many languages or for anyone diving into international SEO. It simply generates the hreflang tag patterns which can be used in the different languages versions of your pages. The correct values and syntax is in line with Google’s specifications.
Website: aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator
Twitter: twitter.com/aleyda
Seobility
Seobility is a piece of software to better optimise your website. Quite simply it is a super way to achieve better ranking and therefore increase traffic to your website. Its tools include a website crawler which is checking internal and external links, it has an intelligent error detector to discover content and structural errors. And finally, it’s constantly crawling your website and you’ll be notified as soon as an error is spotted.
Website: seobility.net/en
Twitter: twitter.com/Seobility_net
Website Penalty Indicator
FE International have a great little tool which indicators website penalties. This maps out the peaks and troughs that websites experience in relation to when Google releases a new Algorithm. This tool uses SEMrush organic traffic data.
Website: feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator
Twitter: twitter.com/FEIntl
SpyFu
This tool allows the webmaster to download a list of your competitor’s most profitable keywords which can be used for SEO & PPC campaigns.
Website: spyfu.com
Twitter: twitter.com/spyfu
BEST PAID SEO TOOLS 2020
Respona
One of the newest tools on this list, Respona is an all-in-one PR and link building tool that combines personalisation with productivity. What we particularly love about Respona is the clean and modern dashboard which really makes working in it a lot easier than some other outreach tools that can often look cluttered and confusing. Whether it’s importing data from other sources, prospecting contacts or designing beautiful reports, Respona has all the complex features whilst also being super user friendly.
Website: respona.com
Twitter: twitter.com/ResponaApp
Asana
We absolutely love Asana. This amazing tool is for teams to track their work. Each employee has their own account and they are assigned tasks. These tasks can be arranged into projects and into clients. For one client, there may be many tasks and each can be assigned to different employees whilst being overseen by the creator of the project. When the task is complete, press the tick!
Website: asana.com
Twitter: twitter.com/asana
Pitchbox
Need to outreach to many people from many different websites but don’t have the time nor their email addresses? Pitchbox is the answer. Create a list of websites and write your message and Pitchbox will do the rest! It searches the sites for email addresses and contact names for them and sends your email out in bulk – perfect!
Website: pitchbox.com
Twitter: twitter.com/pitchboxapp
Ahrefs
Thank God for Ahrefs. This wonderful tool tracks backlinks, keywords, brand mentions and allows you to see what your competitors are doing. <3
Website: ahrefs.com
Twitter: twitter.com/ahrefs
Raven Tools
Raven is a SEO Analysis & Online Marketing tool. The SEO analysis helps you discover which issues are affecting your website rankings and the online marketing tool has a set of tools to save time and money when it comes to SEO, PPC and Social campaigns.
Website: raventools.com
Twitter: twitter.com/raventools
Advanced Web Ranking
Advanced Web Ranking is a piece of web based SEO software which tracks rankings daily or weekly and basically whenever you want to see whats happening. It packages all the data into a wonderful report for analysis.
Website: advancedwebranking.com
Twitter: twitter.com/awebranking
Cognitive SEO
This SEO tool is there to help increase your traffic. They provide the webmaster with digital marketing strategy analysis and insights for the business. Among many features, Cognitive SEO tracks your site and competitors giving analysis on why your site isn’t ranking as highly as your competitors and how they are reaping all the search benefits.
Website: cognitiveseo.com
Twitter: twitter.com/@cognitiveSEO
Muck Rack
Muck Rack is a way to improve your PR campaigns which is specially designed for digital. It helps you identify and contact journalists, bloggers and freelancers all around the world. It also helps you to keep your eye on any relevant news and build reports based on your own PR campaigns.
Website: muckrack.com
Twitter: twitter.com/muckrack
SEO Monitor
SEO Monitor helps Digital Marketing Agencies make the most out of the available data when pitching to potential clients. Their tools accurately measures and tries to predict SEO traffic growth. Some of the data they can provide allows webmasters to see how much traffic is non-branded organic traffic which is related to the website’s SEO performance.
Website: seomonitor.com
Twitter: twitter.com/seomonitor
White Spark
White Spark is a tool to get more local customers. They try to improve your rankings, drive business and fast-track your success in local search with their SEO tools and managed services. Their tools include Local Citation Finder (which find key citations yours competition have), their Reputation Builder is a tool which aids the gathering on reviews, feedback and testimonials easily and finally, their Local Rank Tracker accurately tracks the website’s rankings.
Website: whitespark.ca
Twitter: twitter.com/whitespark
Secockpit
This tool helps you find thousands of profitable Google Keywords very quickly. It supports all countries and languages as well as unrestricted keyword analysis data. Brian Dean says that it’s ‘probably the most advanced keyword research tool on the market”. So if he likes it, you should probably try it.
Website: secockpit.com
Twitter: twitter.com/SwissMadeMrkt
Amz Tracker
This software was designed to help boost your Amazon sales. Features include simple keyword rank tracking, being able to spy on competitors sales, tools to improve rankings and much more.
Website: amztracker.com
Twitter: twitter.com/AMZtracker
Authority Labs
Authority Labs is a daily SEO tracking tool which provides accurate and reliable search engine ranking data and keyword insights. You’re able to track results by country, city or post code and create a report from all of the data provided.
Website: authoritylabs.com
Twitter: twitter.com/authoritylabs
UpCity
UpCity is a Digital Marketing Agency who have developed a local inbound marketing solution. Their tool generates a report card with useful analysis of how your site is ranking against competitors.
Website: upcity.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/upcityinc
YoRocket
YoRocket’s tool aims to be the fastest way to get more search engine traffic to your WordPress Site. This tool helps improve your meta to increase ranking of your webpages. Brian Dean says he uses this tool to optimise his titles on his website Backlinko.
Website: yorocket.com
Hunter
Used by 2,000,000+ professionals leading companies, Hunter is the leading solution to find and verify professional email addresses in seconds. Their neat Chrome extension makes it super-easy to grab contact information - a real favourite in our office with the Digital PR team!
Website: hunter.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmailHunter