Your website, social media pages, and other digital real estate act as the front door for your business in the modern Internet-centric economy, much as the lobby for your brick-and-mortar offices. In order to attract and convert leads, potential customers need to be able to find your brand through Internet searches and queries. That’s where the role of search engine optimization (SEO) has grown over the years, as SEO has become a crucial marketing strategy for helping search engines to find, crawl, and index websites appropriately.
With the increasing importance of SEO, we wanted to help our readers be able to evaluate and select the right SEO software for their business by providing a baseline for the top SEO platforms on the market today.
Why Do You Need SEO Software?
Marketing software helps businesses collect, analyze, correlate, and act upon the data streams generated by your brand’s digital assets across the web. In terms of SEO software, many marketing tasks are often supported by SEO tools.
Automate Your SEO Audit Process
Manually sorting through your digital assets can be a time-consuming, complex, and expensive undertaking without the right tools. Using SEO software, you can quickly and efficiently prune orphaned pages and broken links, correct page title issues, fix page loading speeds, and do other common tasks that can improve your SEO performance.
Improve Your Keyword and Content Marketing
Identifying and embedding the right keywords throughout the content of your website can be difficult for users inexperienced with Google Analytics and other keyword tracking tools. SEO tools can help fine-tune your keyword marketing strategies by helping find the right mix of search volume and high converting keywords versus value and competitiveness.
Track, Visualize, and Communicate KPI Data
The utility of modern SEO software tools can be measured by their ability to effectively gather and present data in a meaningful way. An effective software helps you track the key performance indicators (KPIs) important to your business, and if you’re working in an agency capacity managing sites for clients, you’ll want tools that can package that data in easy to understand presentations for clients to understand the impact your services are having on their digital assets. This translates also to competitor research, in that you can use the same tools to see what other businesses in your industry are doing online and how to outperform their digital strategies.
Hear From Industry Experts
Read the latest tips, research, best practices, and insights from our community of expert B2B service providers.
Now that we understand why SEO software is necessary, we will break down:
- What Are the Different Types of SEO Software?
- When Should You Purchase SEO Software?
- Tips for Choosing the Best SEO Software
- 10 Recommended SEO Software Providers
What Are the Different Types of SEO Software?
As our technologies advance and search engines evolve, the sheer breadth of software solutions available to help businesses improve and enhance their search engine result page rankings can be staggering and confusing to those who don’t work in the marketing industry. In broad strokes, SEO solutions can be broken down into roughly four distinct categories: On-Page SEO, Technical SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Local SEO.
On-Page SEO Solutions
The entire goal of search engine optimization is to improve the visibility of your website and drive traffic towards it through increased visibility in search results. The primary method of improving your site’s on-page elements involve not only optimizing the content through improved keywords, but it’s also necessary to assess and improve various structural elements of your page, such as using the right title tags in the coding, properly structuring your headers, and ensuring that the internal links on your page provide the reader with meaningful connections to useful content and prevents the user from leaving your page.
Off-Page SEO Tools
Strategies and activities that take place away from your website’s content and coding encompass tactics and strategies employed across related and industry websites, directory services, social media, and other platforms. This category of SEO tactics is fairly broad and largely indirect, as they are often focused on activities that improve your brand recognition. Tactics include link-building, public relations management, social media advertising and content management, guest blogging, review management, and other methods of building, improving, and maintaining positive brand perception.
Technical SEO Tactics
Whether your site was built using a content management system such as WordPress or from the code up by a website development team, there are technical design specifications in the code that must be taken into account to help your site perform better in search engine results:
- Register your website’s existence with the most popular search engine platforms, such as Google’s Search Console, by submitting an XML sitemap to the services.
- Add navigational guidance and structure to the user experience with structured data markup in the code, which helps identify the type of data on your page, and search engine crawlers better extract the proper information to meet a query’s needs.
- Google and other search engines have started to require secure socket layer (SSL) security certificates to be properly searched and ranked, so make sure your site has the proper SSL in place.
- Sites that are mobile-device friendly and adaptive to the screen size upon which they are being viewed will be ranked higher in modern search engines than those that aren’t.
- There are technical methods of improving and increasing the loading speed of your website that your team should incorporate or you should consider paying for if you use a web-builder and hosting service for your site, so as not to be penalized in search results for slow load times.
- Gone are the days where you could manipulate rankings and impact search results by including duplicate content with slightly different keywords in the metadata and on-page SEO. All pages should be unique, informative, and direct users to primary pages rather than variants of content from other websites or multiple versions of the same content with slightly different structures within your site; this can especially be troublesome for eCommerce sites selling or reselling products.
Tools that Leverage the Power of Local SEO
A growing tactic in SEO management, Local SEO optimization employs tactics from across the other three categories to help users find businesses near them offering the services and products they need. Local SEO tactics are an outgrowth of the growing trend across search engines for users using “near me” and similar search query signifiers. Tactics to ensure you’ve covered all of your bases with Local SEO include:
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Creating and managing a business account on search engine platforms.
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Ensuring you have a robust review management strategy in place.
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Making sure on-page content is optimized with locally focused keywords and focused on topics meaningful to locals. This includes folding in local news and events into your marketing efforts on- and off-page.
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Incorporating localized information in company profiles on directory pages and in the “About Us” section of your website.
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Optimizing content on your webpage for voice search, as is the method often used for local searches.
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A robust backlink strategy.
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Locally optimized landing pages for services and products.
When Should You Purchase SEO Software?
As we explore signs that it is time to invest in an SEO software solution, it’s important to make it clear that search engine algorithms are constantly evolving and adapting to user behaviors and changing how pages are ranked regardless of the steps or efforts you take to optimize your site’s SEO. With that in mind, here are some specific indicators that it’s time to up your SEO game and bring in a software tool to enhance your SEO effectiveness.
- Your marketing budget is limited and you need to ensure you maximize your advertising and lead conversion through increased traffic to your site.
- You’re not receiving the right leads or traffic is bouncing from your site before converting.
- Reviews show a lack of trust or a diminishing opinion of your brand in reviews and feedback.
- Testing search queries shows that targeted searches don’t result in your business appearing in results.
- Your business is new and you’re focused on building your brand recognition.
- You’re at the stage of building recognition where you need tools to improve and increase your link-building efforts.
- Your business is trying to increase brand visibility through content that positions your organization as an industry expert.
- You need the right tools to understand and properly leverage the data generated across your digital real estate.
- Your business doesn’t have the bandwidth to fully manage your SEO needs and you need an automated solution that improves your team’s efficiency.
Tips for Choosing the Best SEO Software
There are some very important factors an organization should consider before choosing to incorporate a new software tool into its existing technology stack.
As with any serious investment, ensure that you’ve reviewed your budget and that the initial investment and any future costs are within your planned marketing spend.
Before choosing software, decide where your SEO efforts need the most support. SEO tools can be focused on certain tasks, such as link building, or one of the four subsets of SEO tools. If you find that you’re lacking on all four fronts, there are also end-to-end solutions on the market that provide tools to support your efforts on- and off-page, the technical specifications of your site, and even the Local SEO elements of your strategy.
Remember that SEO software isn’t a guaranteed solution for improving your rankings. Many factors impact your positioning in search engine results and SEO software can only help to alleviate some of the pain points holding you back, but software tools can’t guarantee first-page results in every instance. You must be actively investing in growth and improvements before these tools are necessary.
Top 12 SEO Software Tools
Now that we’ve covered the field of SEO in a broad sense, it’s time to take a look at some tools that are considered among the best in the industry for many different use cases. In this article, we’ve divided our list into broad-scale SEO platforms and smaller-scale individual SEO solutions built to address specific challenges
End-to-End SEO Software Platforms
The following tools are considered broad-scale SEO solutions that meet a number of different marketing needs. We’ve arranged them roughly in terms of cost to give an idea of the investment you should plan on depending on your business’s needs.
The Ahrefs search engine tool began as a backlinking tool created by Dmitry Gerasimenko in 2010. This tool later became the basis for the first version of Ahref’s site explorer tool. Disrupting the entire field of SEO backlink analysis tools, Ahref has since evolved into a premier, top-performing multifunctional SEO tool. Ahrefs’ wide range of applications includes a site explorer, keywords explorer, site audit interface, a ranking tracker, and a content exploration tool. Together, these different components support marketers in strengthening and enhancing the SEO of their digital assets.
Ahrefs makes this list due to the full, end-to-end solution it provides, and its prominence on multiple ranked lists of SEO tools. One of its strongest features and what it’s best known for is the ability to get detailed traffic information and a backlink profile of any website, useful in researching effective SEO tactics employed by competitors.
Pricing: Monthly prices are listed below; users have the option of paying on an annual basis to get two months for free. Pricing tiers are delineated by access to a greater number of features and activities.
- Lite priced at $99/mo
- Standard priced at $179/mo
- Advanced for Enterprise-level operations start at $399/mo
Trial: The Lite and Standard plans can be explored over the course of a seven-day free trial.
The SE Ranking tool was founded in 2013 by Valery Kurilov with little outside investment. Through his work and guidance, the platform now offers more than 35 individual SEO tools and online marketing tools to clients around the world. The platform is built to cater to entrepreneurs, SMBs, agencies, and large enterprises alike.
At the higher tiers, SE Ranking focuses on B2B features for agencies to support clients and provide them with actionable and detailed reporting that can be accessed via API to allow developers to utilize the information as needed. Combined with SEO and PPC research tools as well as a robust backlink tracking functionality, SE Ranking helps ensure success in search engine result rankings. With this insight, the tool also provides users with social media scheduling and posting tools that boost the impact of SEO across other channels.
Pricing: Perhaps one of the most complicated pricing models on the list, SE Ranking offers discounts based on the number of rankings checks being performed per week and the length of the subscription period. For simplicity’s sake, we’re providing the pricing for a monthly subscription for users checking their rankings on a daily basis. Pricing tiers are delineated by the number of keyword rankings tracked and other factors such as the number of pages audited and backlinks checked.
- Essential tier starts at $39/mo
- Pro tier starts at $89/mo
- Business tier starts at $189/mo
- Enterprise and custom services require consultation with the sales team
Trial: SE Ranking lists a 14-day free trial, which gives access to the Essential plan and adds white label functionality as well.
Majestic is the core brand for the publicly traded Majestic-12 Ltd. company, which is based in England. Founded by Alex Chudnovsky as Majestic SEO, the platform started as a distributed search engine in 2004. In 2014, they began to diversify and rebranded as Majestic, expanding its scope to include SEO tools and trademarks on Citation Flow, Flow Metric, and Trust Flow.
It’s important to know how your organization’s website stacks up against those of your competitors, and the Majestic site explorer tool provides insight into the very important backlinking and link quality of websites entered into its search function. You can discover opportunities and gain control over backlinking to your site, find out what sites are pointing to your competitors, and establish a strategy for closing the gap and developing higher quality links that will raise your own site’s link quality.
Pricing: There are three primary pricing tiers for the services Majestic offers, depending on the level of access you need to have to the sites you’re testing and if your developers need direct access to Majestic’s data
- Lite tier costs $49.99/mo, $41.67/mo paid at an annual rate
- Pro tier costs $99.99/mo, $83.33/mo paid at an annual rate
- Full API access via Majestic costs $399.99/mo, $333.33/mo paid at an annual rate
Trial: No free trial is offered, but you can test the various functionality with a limited feature search to understand the type of data the full services open up to subscribers.
The Semrush platform was founded in Russia by CEO Oleg Shchegolev in 2008. It evolved from a tool designed to equalize online competitive marketing to an online visibility management and content marketing platform over its history. Integrated with data streams to measure and improve results, the workflow and content management tools in Semrush provide users with an end-to-end SEO tool designed for helping to improve SERP ranking performance relative to competitors.
Semrush is an important benchmark for other SEO software platforms to strive towards, as it balances data analytics with strategic planning tools. It is less a singular tool and more of a combination of SEO tools that together give Semrush more versatility and value than you might achieve attempting to integrate each type of SEO tool individually into your software stack. So sure that they have one of the most robust and versatile tools on the market, the CEO has a standing tongue-in-cheek challenge with users that if they can find a tool with as much functionality offered by Semrush, he’ll eat his hat.
Pricing: Three pricing tiers targeted at businesses with varying SEO needs and business scopes. Users can save 17% off of the prices below by paying on an annual basis.
- Pro tier costs $119.95/mo and is designed for inexperienced newcomers or small businesses
- Guru tier costs $229.95/mo for agencies, consultants, and SMEs
- Business tier costs $449.95/mo for large agencies and enterprises
Trial: There is an unlisted “Free Account” tier that is outlined on a special “Upgrade” landing page. The page also gives an outline as to the usage thresholds for Pro and Guru users can take advantage of during 7-day trials.
The Moz family of products entered the marketing landscape in 2004 when founders Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig released SEOmoz for public use. Initially an online blog and community of like-minded marketing professionals, the Moz brand grew and expanded its range of products and services over time. Eventually, the company leveraged its Beginner’s Guide to SEO and Search Ranking Factors study and other resources to establish itself as an authoritative consulting firm. The firm eventually shifted focus to creating SEO-focused software and rebranded as Moz in 2013. The company again pivoted in 2016 away from inbound marketing strategies back to search-based SEO tools. Moz Pro is one of four of the organization’s paid services, supported by several free tools that users can fold into their software stack.
Even the most successful brands seek out leading sources of marketing knowledge when they need to gain an edge over their competition, and a few cornerstone marketing brands come to mind as resources. Moz is amongst the brands the elite turn to for both information and insight as well as powerful SEO software tools. The Moz Pro service includes an end-to-end SEO solution supporting keyword research, page rank tracking and optimization, site-crawls and link research, and custom reporting.
Pricing: There are four service tiers for the Moz Pro platform, each increasing the number of campaigns and activities users can execute across the platform’s SEO tools. The costs listed below can be reduced by 20% if paid annually.
- Standard tier costs $99/mo
- Medium tier costs $179/mo
- Large tier costs $249/mo
- Premium costs $599/mo
Trial: There is a Moz Pro 30-day trial.
Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform for professionals. Whether you are a business owner, SEO professional, or an agency, Serpstat has all the tools you need to improve your SEO, which will increase the amount of organic traffic coming to your website.
The great thing about Serpstat is that it helps you to automate your entire search engine optimization process, saving you hours of time each month.
Service is growing at an incredible rate, with more than 200,000 active users to date, and is loved and trusted by big brands such as Shopify, Yves Rocher, and Lenovo.
Within Serpstat, there are five different modules for you to work on:
- Rank Tracking metrics
- Backlink Analysis (great for building backlink data for link-building campaigns)
- Keyword Research
- Site Audit tool
- Competitor Research and Competitor Analysis
So you can keep track of everything you need, all in one place. You can view history and search analytics reports for each module, so you can see how your SEO is improving, and keep track of your progress so that you can see how efficient your marketing is.
You can also use Serpstat’s tools to research and find out more about your competitors, so you can see what’s working for them, and where the opportunities are for you to get ahead of them.
Pricing: Pricing starts at $69/mo for their Lite plan which allows you to make up to 4,000 queries a day. You can upgrade to Standard for $149/mo, Advanced for $299/mo, or Enterprise for $499/mo to increase your limits.
Trial: Serpstat offers a 7-day free trial, which gives access to all tools.
Targeted SEO Tools
While full-scale SEO tools are useful for teams or agencies with a need to cover every angle from a marketing point of view, there are instances where a team might just need a tool that is limited in scope and function to address a specific challenge. We’ve included several examples of such targeted yet highly effective SEO tools below.
SEOquake is associated with another tool in this list, Semrush. At the time of writing, SEOquake is on version 3.9.6, its eleventh version on Mozilla’s add-ons marketplace. The software is a free browser plugin that helps gather competitor page information on search rankings, analytics for landing pages and domains, likes and social media activity, and other crucial SEO data.
While it’s a subproduct of Semrush, SEOquake is a powerful stand-alone tool that made it to this list for how quickly and easily a user can gather actionable data on competitors’ digital assets as well as your own. The tool can be used to quickly perform an in-depth audit of your company website.
Pricing: The plugin software is free to use.
Trial: No trial necessary
Created by the founders and developers of Copyscape, Siteliner checks your site to ensure your content is original and free of duplicate material within the site. It uses a web crawler to navigate internal links on your page, creating a live report of your onsite content to ensure you haven’t repeated content across landing pages or product descriptions.
While its companion software Copyscape scours the entire web for duplicate content to provide the peace of mind that your content hasn’t been copied from other sources, Siteliner is more concerned with preventing your site from being penalized in SERP rankings due to internally repetitive content. This can occur across multiple, related landing pages, product listings, or local listings for multi-location businesses with similar service listings.
Pricing: Siteliner has an interesting pricing model for its Premium paid service tier. While the Free model allows you to scan sites with up to 250 pages once every 30 days, the Premium model allows users to scan up to 25,000 pages at a time as often as necessary, with the ability to save and review the results. Premium results cost users a penny per page scanned within your website.
Trial: The free model takes the place of a trial period and is a robust solution for users to take advantage of those who don’t need the extra scope of the paid tier.
Founded in 2006 by Mike Roberts, SpyFu helped to change how marketers approached competitor research in planning and executing SEO and PPC strategies. SpyFu combines keyword research tools, SEO competitor research tools, and PPC competitor research tools to provide a complete overview of the competition’s marketing tactics.
SpyFu was included in this list of resources to provide our readers the standard in SEO software for researching and analyzing competitor SEO and PPC activity. The combination of competitor-focused tools is designed to help identify and leverage opportunities for creating a competitive advantage in your marketing strategy, crucial for increasing efficiency and maximizing profitability.
Pricing: There are three tiers of service offered by SpyFu, each providing access to more projects and the ability to track more keywords.
- Basic tier costs $39/mo, $33/mo if paid annually
- Professional tier costs $69/mo, $48/mo if paid annually
- Unlimited tier costs $129/mo, $68/mo if paid annually
Trial: There is no free trial, but you can test out the functionality of the tool through the site as long as you provide contact information.
This fast and simple to use SEO tool was launched in 2010 by a group of marketing experts in Europe. Over the next 11 years, the organization would scale to more than a million registered users. WooRank was acquired by Bridgeline Digital in 2021, and remains privately held. The web-based SEO tool can audit websites and translate the findings into actionable insight into the effectiveness of the site’s SEO and PPC strategies.
Perhaps the most powerful strategy in SEO is adopting methods and tools that help to constantly improve your digital assets. Rather than focusing externally, WooRank uses that external data to provide insight on how to improve your SEO and PPC tactics as well as the content and information on your site. Through these tactical website audits, keyword research, and website reviews, WooRank establishes itself as a powerful tool in your SEO arsenal.
Pricing: There are three pricing tiers for WooRank, each of which can be secured for 33% off if paid on an annual basis.
- Pro tier costs $79.99/mo
- Premium costs $199.99/mo
- Enterprise costs require a consultation with the sales team to establish a tailored service.
Trial: WooRank can be used for free for 14-days, giving the user access to all of the features.
Founded as a consulting firm by Dan Sharp, Graeme Radford, and Jason Lock in 2010, Screaming Frog launched its flagship software SEO Spider later that year as a tool for SEO professionals. It brought so much value to the community that it was shared heavily throughout the community as an impactful and influential tool that quickly reached over 100,000 users.
SEO Spider provides tools that combine some of the most needed visualization and auditing functions into a single platform. By crawling websites, creating sitemaps, and connecting directly to the APIs of services such as Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights, users get a true insight into how their website pages are performing and how to improve them.
Pricing: Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider tool is free to use to crawl and scan 500 pages at a time. To lift the page volume restriction, users can pay £149 per year, with a discount for multiple licenses offered to allow multiple team members to work on the platform. The Premium also opens up the functionality and features of SEO Spider.
Trial: There is no need for a trial version with the scope of the free service tier.
Marketing Miner was originally called Podstavec Tools, which worked as a simple set of APIs. Filip started sharing the tool for free with his friends and colleagues in the SEO agency to work more effectively. The Podstavec Tools gradually spread to the consciousness of consultants worldwide.
With the heavy load on servers running APIs, Filip saw the need to develop the first version of Marketing Miner in 2015. The main difference from other SEO tools is that Marketing Miner can process data in bulk (up to 100,000 keywords, domains or URLs at once).
Marketing Miner has 3 main sections:
- Profilers – allow you to gain valuable SEO insights and data overview of keywords and websites.
- Reports – are the perfect choice for analyzing data in bulk for your competitor analysis, technical SEO audit, or keyword research.
- Projects – allow you to track and manage all aspects of your online visibility, including brand mentions and rank tracking.
Pricing: Monthly prices are listed below; users have the option of paying on an annual basis to get two months for free. Pricing tiers are delineated by access to a greater number of features and activities.
- Minee – freemium
- Miner priced at $29/mo
- Digger priced at $59/mo
- Machine priced at $99/mo
- Custom plan start at $13/mo
Trial: Marketing Miner has a freemium model (so you can try free plan Minee for unlimited time)
SEO for Everybody
Search engine optimization is a broad and complicated landscape to navigate without the assistance of modern software applications and digital tools. In this article, we’ve only scraped the surface of SEO marketing tools and strategies. To learn more about SEO, discover B2B partners, and improve your strategic marketing performance across your digital assets, visit the UpCity SEO hub.