If you want to increase organic search traffic to your site…
You need to arm yourself with the best SEO tools for the job.
The world of SEO is fiercely competitive…
…and it’s nearly impossible to compete without the right tools.
So I am going to show you all of the SEO tools we use to annihilate the competition.
What Will I Learn?
While I use a wide range of SEO tools depending on the task at hand…
…these are the 11 SEO tools that I use most frequently (and so should you!).
The backlink blacklist database allows you to quickly check a list of backlinks to make sure they aren’t hurting you.
The database is made up of 60,000+ known guest post farms, public blog networks, links sold on marketplaces like Fiverr & cold outreach.
What makes this tool even better is the fact you can see precisely why a domain is on the blacklist along with an actual screenshot to back it up.
Oh and did I mention that it is 100% free to use?
Learn how to increase your search traffic in just 28 days with this free challenge.
Just download the included resources and follow the steps to start making improvements to your sites technical, content and links.
The 28 Day SEO Challenge is a complete SEO strategy that includes everything you need to increase the search traffic of any site.
Surfer SEO is one of the best SEO platforms out there at the minute.
Surfer SEO helps you find optimisation opportunities to boost your search rankings.
You can analyze any website or URL and once the analysis is done, you’ll get a list of actions to implement immediately.
But that’s not all! Our writing staff uses the Content Editor to produce perfectly optimised data-driven content every single time.
Bonus: Take a look at my Surfer SEO review to see how I won the number 1 position by deleting 26,083 words of content.
Rank Math is a free SEO plugin for WordPress that helps you to optimise your site in a few clicks. Personally, I think it’s the best SEO plugin for WordPress you can find out there.
It also includes a lot of features that you would otherwise only find in premium plugins.
We use RankMath to power all of our sites and to generate all of our structured data automatically including review and organization based schema.
It is 100% free for anyone to use and you can learn more in my RankMath review.
AccuRanker is the world’s leading rank tracker for a reason.
It has a ton of features:
… and outstanding customer support. Plus, it’s one of the best mobile rank tracking tools of the planet!
We find ourselves in the AccuRanker dashboard multiple times per day for a reason!
Bonus: AccuRanker has two free tools that you can use without a subscription.
The first one is Google Grump. It tracks changes in Google’s algorithm. It is important because a Google update can severely impact your SEO.
The second one is called SERP Checker. It shows you where and how you appear in google search – instantly.
To learn more about these free tools, read my free seo tools list.
URLProfiler is a powerful tool that you can use for:
And much more!
It integrates with a range of tools like Majestic, Moz, Ahrefs, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Copyscape, SEMRush & uClassify.
It might not look all that powerful on the surface, but all of those little tick boxes mean it can be configured to accomplish a range of tasks.
It’s super handy for looking up huge volumes of data for thousands of URL’s in just 1 click.
Have a read of my full URL Profiler review to learn more.
The IPVanish VPN service isn’t strictly an SEO tool as it secures your connection & encrypts all of your browsing.
But it does make it easy to spoof your location from nearly anywhere in the world with a swift click of the mouse-
That means you can check search results from other countries reliably or accurately test geo-targeting while improving security at the same time.
It works on Windows, Macs, iOS, Android, Chromebooks, Windows Phone, Ubuntu & one account can be used on as many devices as you want! Take a look at my full IPVanish review to learn more.
SpamZilla allows you to buy powerful expired domains with excellent backlink profiles within a few clicks.
We build all of our new sites out on aged domains that already have established backlink profiles.
SpamZilla automatically:
So you will only get clean and trusty domains that save yourself time and money.
SpamZilla has a user-friendly interface so you can review data quickly and easily. It has more than 80 filters – including backlink, language, spam and authority based filters.
Learn more about expired domains or read my full SpamZilla Review.
It’s one of the easiest ways to get a head start with new sites!
Link building is important if you want to rank, but many people struggle to build high-quality links that get results because it isn’t easy and takes a lot of time to get right.
However, there are services like LinksThatRank that can help you.
It is easy to use. The only thing you have to do is enter the URL and target keyword you want to rank for and the LinksThatRank team will do the rest!
They are different from their competitors because they offer outstanding quality control that makes all the difference.
This is what you get:
Once it’s done you’ll get a complete report. Buying backlinks doesn’t get much easier than that.
Ahrefs is one of the best SEO platforms in the market, if not the best SEO platform.
Ahrefs started life as a simple backlink database many years ago, which absolutely dominated my best backlink checker case study.
But over the years it has grown to become a dominant force in keyword research, content research and provides tools for site audits and rank tracking.
Whether you want to get a better look at your own site or see what your pesky competitors are up to – there’s no better tool to do it with than Ahrefs and we use it multiple times per day.
Take a look at my Ahrefs review to learn about all of the cool things you can do with it.
Looking for an alternative? Check out my Serpstat review.
Pitchbox is the very best outreach tool that money can buy.
I am not joking, this tool is absolutely insane and is essential if you want to build links at scale.
It can help you to:
It is also recommended by a lot of big names of the industry and is our outreach tool of choice internally. There isn’t even a close second.
Read my full Pitchbox review to learn more.
NitroPack is the best optimisation plugin you can find on the market right now.
The plugin can help you:
Overall, NitroPack makes it easy to achieve perfect Google Pagespeed scores whilst also delivering excellent performance across all Core Web Vitals metrics.
It takes a few minutes to set up but instantly speeds up your site by delivering perfectly optimized device-specific experiences.
To show you how well the NitroPack plugin works, I conducted a bunch of tests. You can check out the results in my full NitroPack review.
The quick win SEO strategy builder is an exclusive tool that I released earlier this year.
We run it every 90 days on every site to make sure we are always making the most of current SEO opportunities.
The free tool also includes a video series that teaches you the why, the what and the how of the process step by step.
We teach this process to all of our new junior SEO’s because it’s easy to learn, simple to execute and delivers results quickly!
(If you want to learn more about SEO, I suggest you read one of these SEO books).
Before Ahrefs, there was Semrush – who were one of the pioneers of keyword research tools for SEO in my opinion.
They include a bunch of tools to help increase your search traffic including a comprehensive backlink, keyword and PPC ads database.
They also have a couple of unique features that you can’t find anywhere else.
Plus if you are on a budget, the Semrush team is giving my readers an exclusive 14 day free trial for you to get access to world class data without the expensive fee.
Take a look at my full Semrush review to learn more or check out my Ahrefs vs Semrush blog to see which tool performs the best overall.
Seobility is an affordable all-in-one SEO software for webmasters.
This software allows you to:
…and much more!
Overall, it’s a great tool to optimize your site without wasting much time and money.
Its interface is pretty simple and you can complete all your SEO tasks quickly and easily.
It offers 3 plans: a free (but limited) plan, a premium plan for professional websites and a special agency plan.
No wonder it’s one of the top-rated SEO software products out there!
Website speed is one of the most important factors to take into account.
Why?
WP Rocket is a Wordpress plugin that helps you speed up your website quickly & easily so you can focus on generating traffic and sales!
It offers you all the tools you need to increase website load time in one package and has some great features like:
Read my full WP Rocket review to learn more.
ShortPixel is an easy-to-use, lightweight image optimization plugin.
This plugin allows you to:
In other words, it improves website performance by reducing image size while conserving its quality.
And those savings were gained after the images had already been optimised with the free version of WPSmush.
You can also use it to create WebP images AND you can use the same ShortPixel account across as many websites as you want!
SEO Powersuite holds a special place in my heart because I’ve used it for a decade.
And even till this day, it’s still one of the most budget friendly tools on the market. You get an awful lot of value for your money!
Even with just the free download, you’re able to access these SEO applications:
Just about anyone can execute a solid SEO strategy with this suite of tools that won’t break the bank. Read my full SEO Powersuite review or my SEO Powersuite vs Semrush to learn more!
I’ve been using BuyProxies since 2012.
More specifically I’ve been using their cheaper semi-dedicated proxies, mostly for Google based operations.
They offer both private and shared proxies from a number of locations around the world and provide near-instant setup. Not only that but they are also my go-to proxies when I need SEO proxies and residential proxies.
If you plan on using the shared proxies (half the price!) for Google/SEO related tasks make sure you tell them that when you sign up.
The DripRevolution dashboard makes it easy to build social signals to any page you want.
And given I like dogs and algorithms, I need all the help I can get with all things social.
Signing up for the free plan gives you 100 free social signals, just add your URLs to a project and voila!
You can access your reports and manage your campaign through the dashboard easily.
If you contact DripRevolution support and give them my name, they’ll also give you an extra 50 social signals free of charge.
LinkWhisper is a Wordpress plugin that helps you overcome the various challenges of deploying an effective internal link building strategy.
It makes automatic and intelligent internal link suggestions that are easy to manage.
And it automatically detects content that could be associated with the article/post you’re currently writing, so you get a high-quality internal link.
Plus also finds old posts that need more internal links to help drive traffic and rankings to them in a couple of clicks.
Perfmatters is a Wordpress plugin that helps you to take control of your sites javascript and CSS.
You might not know it but most WordPress plugins add Javascript and CSS to every page on your site, even if you don’t use that plugin on that page.
For example, if you use a contact form plugin like Contact Form 7, it adds Javascript and CSS to every page on your site even though you only use the form on your contact page.
Perfmatters allows you to take control of that on a page by page basis really easily.
They make frequent updates and release new features to constantly improve the plugin and your site’s performance.
If your site is built on WordPress, I assure you that you need this plugin.
FindThatLead can help you find all of the people and email addresses that exist for a specific domain.
So if you want to reach out to someone at any company, just enter their domain to find all of the relevant contact details.
It also has a basic email outreach tool that automates and customizes your email campaigns.
We mostly use it for finding email addresses for outreach but you can also use it to reach decision-makers and find new talent.
Struggling to find an email address? Follow my email address lookup guide!
Last year I released the free FAQ schema generator tool.
If you don’t know why you should be adding this code, watch this video:
The tool is really easy to use.
All you have to do is fill out the first question & answer and then, click on “+Add another question” to add more. You can add as many as you want.
Once you have inserted all your questions/answers, you have to deploy the code.
Just follow the tutorial on this page to do that.
Screaming Frog is the king of real time technical SEO audits.
Whether your running annual maintenance or trying to diagnose a search problem, there isn’t a better tool for the job.
It spiders entire websites looking for SEO problems and can also be used to find duplicate content, structured data issues, visualize your sitemap and much much more.
You can also use it to pull down data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Ahrefs and a bunch of other tools for a comprehensive SEO audit.
Batch Speed is a great tool for anyone who wants to get a snapshot of site speed across their entire site.
Just enter your home page, a site map or a list of URL’s and it will run Google Page Speed tests in bulk:
You can see everything from First Content Paint (FCP) time all the way through how much CSS or Javascript is loading.
This is especially important with Google’s recent Core Web Vitals announcement.
Click here to see how to improve Core Web Vitals.
Batch Speed allows you to test up to 500 URLs for free and you can export all the results to a CSV for further diagnosis.
Think your search traffic might have been affected by a Google Update?
Well, there is an easy way to find out!
The Panguin tool overlays known algorithm updates over your organic search traffic-
If you see a dramatic drop off after a major update…
…it gives you the thread you need to start pulling on to find what the problem is and how you can get back into Google’s good graces.
The Instant Indexing Plugin is developed by the Rank Math team to help get your new or updated content indexed almost instantly.
Unlike other indexing plugins, this is the FIRST Wordpress plugin to use the Google Indexing API directly.
The plugin will do the dirty work for you by automatically submitting indexing requests in the background for new and updated content.
Unfortunately though, you can only use it to index content on domains you own.
The new Keyword Surfer chrome extension brings search volumes to your search results!
And not just search volume data, but you will also be able to see-
Not only that but it’s available in most languages in over 70 countries which is absolutely insane for free.
WebPageTest is a great tool to test your website performance for free.
It’s the tool I rely on most when trying to get real world test data and it’s simple to use!
Once the test is finished it makes it easy to figure out what is slowing your site down so you can fix it.
It’s surprising what you find at times but you can run as many tests as you want for free!
No one knows more about your site from an SEO perspective than Google themselves, so why not take advantage of their free Google Search Console?
It gives you a complete overview of your site and will notify you of any errors-
Buried inside you can find a host of useful data including backlinks to your site, analytics of your performance if you have any manual penalties & a bunch more things.
They are always adding new features as well like the Core Web Vitals report so make sure your plugged in.
Google Analytics is a must have tool.
The data here is so comprehensive, and once you’re past the vanity metrics, there’s a tonne of actionable data for you to work with.
Every campaign, every link building effort and every change you make to a site is reflected in Google Analytics. Making marketing without it a hard task nowadays.
Don’t trust Google? Check out my list of Google Analytics alternatives!
Most people ignore Bing because they are focused on Google.
But if you haven’t seen the updates they have made to Bing Webmaster Tools in 2020 then you need to take another look.
Now they give you (for free)-
And much much more!
The Bing Team is typically quite open to working with the SEO community so I’m not surprised to see a toolset like this. Learn more about Bing SEO.
Want to track your Bing rankings? Check out my list of the best Bing rank tracker tools.
MarketGoo PRO helps you detecting your SEO issues and guiding you to resolve them – step by step.
No need for you to be a tech genius to optimize your website with this tool.
Indeed, all you have to do is looking at your site’s SEO report generated by MarketGoo to get an overview of your SEO performance and issues that need to be taken care of.
Once you got your report, you need to take action and follow your SEO plan. Usually, this includes a bunch of tasks for fixing your site’s specific issues.
With PRO, you get step-by-step instructions for each task.
But it’s not all.
You can also generate monthly reports on your SEO improvement to keep track of your progress and contact their support team whenever you need help.
So if you’re website is having performance issues, you should definitely get MarketGoo.
So there you have it!
This is a complete list of the best SEO tools we use every single day, along with a complete list of the other SEOtools we use to get the job done.
Note: To measure the success of my SEO campaigns, I use SEO visibility scores.
Are there any essential SEO tools that I missed?
I love playing with new tools to see if we can use them to improve current processes so please let me know in the comments!
And don’t forget, if you are on a budget there are tons of free SEO tools to choose from. Or, you can partner with a white label SEO agency so you won’t have to get any tool at all!
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Gsa ser does not work any more?
Yes, it still works – It’s just not on my list because I don’t use it as much & because I wanted to introduce you to new tools. 🙂
Yoast Premium or Rank Math Matt?
Rank Math! and this is why: https://searchlogistics.com/seo/reviews/rank-math/
You just made my day Matt. I had to keep your e-mail unread for days before i finally had the opportunity to read it. Thank you and am implementing what i have learned.
No problem, Samuel!
Hi MatthewGreat article!Which do you prefer between Spamzilla and Domain Hunter Gatherer?Thanks
Wow, tough question… I use both! Both offer great features, even though Spamzilla might be a little easier to use!
Hey Matthew, awesome content as always. I prefer Ahrefs and Rankmath. Can’t go wrong with these combinations.
Yep, great tools with some nice features – I use them pretty much every day! Never disappointed.
Thanks a lot, Matthew.
I just love your awesome content. You’re super amazing guy. Thanks a lot.Just wanted to ask, do exact match domains still work for SEO?Again, love you!
Yes, absolutely! Have a look at this article: https://searchlogistics.com/seo/google-ranking-factors/ Hope it helps.
funny thing I met you in a video using seo powersuite https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UApZaTjUAFk&t=1safter 10 years , now you do not use it or just forgot to add it :p
HAHA, I still use it but just didn’t find it relevant for this article 😉
Nice article thanks a lot.
No worries Tonnia
If you would like to obtain a great deal from this article then you have to apply such techniques to your won blog.
You certainly should
Hi Mattew Woodward, This is such an great SEO tools list you have shared with us.SEMRush and Ahrefs are my favorite SEO tools. I also have a guide about SEO tools.https://www.kamilwebsolutions.ae/20-professional-seo-tools-in-2019/
Thanks for sharing Kamil.
Its superb as your other content :D, regards for posting.
Glad you found it so useful!
Hi there, You’ve done an incredible job. I’ll definitely digg it and in my opinion suggest to my friends.I am sure they’ll be benefited from this web site.
Thanks very much! Which tools did you try out?
Hi this Ajmal, I just read your article this one is simply amazing and a quality post in this category of blogs is in world. I read today many of articles related to this topic this content is very helpful to grow my blog.
Glad you thought so – which tools are you gonna try out?
Hi, I’m Roy. I wanted to ask do you accept sponsored articles or a link placement in the existing articles on your website? If you do, what are your rates? Kind regards,Roy
Hi Roy, send over any of your questions here – https://searchlogistics.com/contact-me/
Love this list Matthew!Thanks for compiling this and sharing.I see you mentioned LongTailPro for keyword research. I’ve seen that before but I use Market Samurai – this might be one worth mentioning on your list.Also, I used to use Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, but recently dropped it across all of my sites. One reason for this was the debacle they had a few months ago with their broken update that hurt most of their clients site rankings. Now using SEOpress.org and absolutely loving it.
Hey Steve, hope you are well. I have Market Samurai included here – https://searchlogistics.com/seo/tools/free/ but good shout so thank you. Glad to hear you are getting on well with SEOpress.org.
Hi Matthew,Great resource of tools with to the point summaries. Some I have not heard of and will check out.Not sure if you noticed, but when you click on the LinkMiner link, it redirects to Backlinko’s website from PointBlankSEO.com. 8-OHere is the correct url for LinkMiner:https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/linkminer/ogdhdnpiclkaeicicamopfohidjokoom?hl=en
Awesome shout thanks Patrick. I have updated the link!
Helpful guidelines about technical SEO for launching new website. SEO Audits can be more than technical – they can seriously improve the user experience, leading to more conversions as well…
Yes very true
Hi Matthew, I happiness to check your tools section casually, but am impress es with the massage list of tools you have created with small description of using them. There are many familiar names like ahref, mix, amrish, streaming grih etc, but I found some new tools to test like SEO monitor, SERPed which I will try on my digital marketing blog. Thanks.
Hi Abhishek, glad you found some new tools to try out
This is a good collections of seo tools
Thanks Johnpaul
Thanks Matthew for this analysis and list, found your site recently and its helping me tremendously in getting to understand SEO.
No problem Haas!
Great list! I used Serped.net and Ahrefs a and thinking of dropping Serped. Other than a link indexer, I’m trying decide why I really need it. BTW Panguin doesn’t tell you anything unless you pay…
Why are you thinking of that?
Very informative content I found here for SEO. For Off page or On page SEO it works well.
No problem Khan
Matthew your site is a treasure trove.You have inspired me to take up arms, after a back injury.I’ve got myself a ecom website and with all of your advice,tip and tricks im going to Matthew Woodward the hell out of it.Thank you so bloody much.
Hahahahah, work hard, stay consistent and you will make it Alan!
Thank you for another great article, the write up on SEM rush (linked from here I think) is very detailed, I will use it to prompt me what to do. I have just got a SEO job for a site and this will help no end. Cheers mate.
No problem Barry!
You can use DeepCrawl
Well, you’re right. Duplicate pages detection is not a tool’s main feature, it finds full page dupes and also duplicates of h1, titles, descriptions.But I mainly use the tool to find other common mistakes like broken links, images without alt, etc. Also, there are some new cool features as calculation of internal PageRank which helps in improving site linking structure.And what tool do use to find duplicate content?
Thank you very much. it is very useful post.
No worrys Mohel
Great article. I’m finding your site a great resource as I’m attempting some SEO on my Tree Surgeon business
Well SEO is kinda like tree surgery so you’ll do well 🙂
Yeah it’s an awesome tool!
I have tried various tools, I agree that ahrefs is the best for backlink checking which I think is the most important role when attempting SEOI did try SEMrush and didnt get on with it, the backlink checker is poor compared to ahrefs but the traffic cost feature is unique and demonstrates value of not just quantity of traffice
Yeah the SEMRush backlink database is no way near as big as the Ahrefs one
Just curious, but do you have an article on Yoast SEO Premium? I’ve been toying around with the idea of using it, but I have never seen a post of anyone actually explaining how they use it for their website. I think it would be a neat addition, if you do not have this already. It seems pretty common sense, but I kind of like seeing how people do things. 🙂
I don’t have an article for it sorry but I do use it myself
I would also recommend Openlinkprofiler.org and majestic.com This are great tools also.
Please read https://searchlogistics.com/seo/tools/ahrefs-vs-majestic/
Semrush in one of the best tool. I Love it! i have Semrush membership 🙂
Yeah it’s an awesome tool!
thanks fore sharing, was very nice and interesting
No problem 🙂
I use some of those tools. I didn’t know about Xenu Link Sleuth or URL Profiler but they look very useful.
Yeah they are great tools!
Very nice! Thanks for article with this tools.
No worrys 🙂
This information is very useful to me. Thank you so much for sharing. I would go back again to see more information.
No worrys 🙂
Hey Matthew,Thanks for this list. I agree that nowadays it’s almost impossible for an SEO to work without some tools, they really save lots of time, so you can work more effective and pay attention to more important tasks.I’ve never had a chance to try SEO Monitor, will definitely give it a look.And for doing site audits, I use Netpeak Spider, a handy tool, it spots main SEO issues and presents this data in a special panel. This can also be a mini SEO report 🙂
Yes that is very true!I have tried Netpeak Spider but I didn’t find the duplicate content detection to be very good, pages had to be 100% exact to be flagged as dupes which isn’t always the case
you should have meetedgar on the list too. A new promising tool, although more social media than seo related, but still. Worth checking out
That is on the social tools list
Thanks Matthew so many links and tips here, I’m going to need another keyboard !!
Hahaha get an extra monitor as well 🙂
Thank a lot for this amazing information!!! Awesome
No problem 🙂
During past few years I have used almost all of those tools that you have listed. I must say that I find Yoast really interesting as it speeds up writing articles.On the other hand, for SEO Audit and tracking my progress I`m most comfortable with tools from Link-Assistant that you have not listed here :-)Thank you for sharing your little secrets with all of us and yes, good stats 😀
No problem Emil, honestly I am surprised that the Yoast SEO plugin is free – it’s super powerful!
Always cranking out great content Matthew. Thanks again! I find the moz bar acting crazy lately. Not sure if it’s actually getting updated and it constantly logs me out.
Hey Jeff, what browser are you running it on?
This amazing and very useful list of seo tools for internet marketers. Thank you Methewwood.
No problem Asif!
This is an amazing list. Most of what is listed, I had no idea about. I think I will have to test a few to see what fits for my level of knowledge of SEO. I still consider myself a rookie with a little bit of knowledge. Thanks for all the tips. Your blog is amazing. I need this kind of powerful content on my blog.
Well I hope you put it to good use 🙂
Learnt alot.Thanks
I hope you put that knowledge to good list 🙂
I am very happy to be able to visit your site, hopefully I can learn better amin
I hope so too!
Hello Mathew,What a great list of SEO tools. As soon as someone starts to blog, one need to have one SEO tools to become successful. And you have it all here. MozBar became my favourite….Thanks for the share dude and have a nice day.Ugyen
No problem Ugyen, but before SEO tools – your blog needs great content 🙂
Thanks Matthew so much information on here. No more reading photo mags for me in my down time
Haha what kind of photo mags?
hi matt, your wikki grabber link is not working..if i am not wrong this is the link- http://www.webpagefx.com/seo-tools/wikigrabber/Thanks for this resource.
Ooops updated thanks 🙂