A List Of SEO Tools (2020)

There are a huge number of great paid tools on the market, from suites that try and do everything like SEMrush, to the highly specialised ones that focus on a single task such as Copyscape. I’ve collected a few here that are worth investigating for junior search engine optimisation professionals.

• Keyword Research
• Browser Extensions
• Wordpress Plugins
• Conversion Rate Optimisation
• Email Tools
• Rank Trackers
• Automation
• Link Analysis Tools / Backlink Checkers
• Crawlers
• Backlink Monitoring Tools
• Content Analysis Tools
• Productivity & Project Management Tools
• OSINT & Research Tools
• Citation Resources & Services
• Proxy Providers
• Content Delivery Networks
• Search Engine Provided Tools & Services
• Search Engine Tools / Hacks
• Quick & Dirty Tools
• Python Libraries

Keyword Research

The most important aspect of search engine optimisation. Without the correct targets, how can you have the correct goals. Keyword research should lead the site architecture and give you an in-depth insight into how to group your content. It will also indicate how best to interlink that content and uncover the most profitable keywords and phrases.

Keyword volume is one of the key metrics you’ll be using to priortise or rank your keywords but care should be taken. Many of the keyword research tools below just pull the data straight from Google’s Keyword Planner, this data is not reliable particularly when looking at keywords with low volume. Ahrefs is slightly more reliable as they have an internal process that references data from Alexa/Clickstream. But the important takeaway is that keyword volume is guideline and not a reliable metric of the traffic you can expect to see.

• Keyword Sheeter

Originally under a slightly different spelling, this great tool *sheets* out keywords from a variety of sources and is a great resource when doing the time intensive process of keyword research.

You will need to filter and prioritise these results as the amount of keywords you’ll get back can be intimidating.

• SECockPit

Swiss Made Marketing came out with this expensive tool in 2014/2015 and simplified the arduous task of completing comprehensive keyword research. Whilst I don’t use it so much anymore, it’s still worth a look.

Browser Extensions

Depending on what task you are doing the will be a number of add-ons or extensions that will give you more insight. So probably the most important extension is your extension manager, which will allow you to active and deactivate these plugins as needed. This is not an exhaustive list but more a place to get started.

• SEO Quake

A long time staple of search engine optimisation folks, the browser plugin provides a wealth of information at the page and domain level. There are literally too many features to list. It can be used to tighten up content for on page SEO, is a handy way to pull the top 100 SERP results into a CSV file, plugs into many backlink checkers and many more.

• Detailed — SEO Extension

Not quite a replacement for SEO Quake but a much more streamlined plugin with many of the same features. Things like the robots.txt, schema and the archive.org are only a click a way.

• Detailed — Remove Bredcrumbs

Another one from Viperchill’s big boy pants company. This removes the breadcrumbs that obscure the url path in Google’s SERPS.

• Browseo V3

This is not a browser extension but a customised browser that allows you to maintain multiple personas each with an individualized proxy attached. There are a large number of reasons why this can come in handy and whilst this is a great tool, the recurring fee makes it a little too expensive unless you have a particular use-case. And there are other options.

• What Runs Where

What Runs Where gives a basic overview of the web technologies used to build a site or web-app. If you are checking the competence of your competition, this is a good place to start.

• Builtwith

Built With Site Profiler provides a huge amount of useful data including connected websites that are using the same tags, redirected domains, a much more in-depth look at the technologies being used on the site and meta information.

• Mangools SEO Extension

A like for like replacement for SEO Quake, you may prefer the interface. It’s not as feature rich with things like a like to domain whois and archive.org missing.

• Disable Javascript

There will be multiple occasions when you’ll need to see how a page is rendered before javascript gets involved. This is a handy little switch that gives you an immediate view of the vanilla HTML and CSS.

• SEERobots

I highly recommend this extension as checking the X-Robots tags is needed on an ongoing basis, whether you need to check if a link is on an no-indexed page, or you have correctly switched a transferred domain back to the live version.

• MagicCSS

A handy little extension that allows you to edit the CSS on a live page.

• Grammarly

Poor spelling and grammar is something that can be easily avoided. There are privacy concerns with this tool due to their rumoured deal with ClickStream but it does one thing very well.

• Ghosterly

Whilst marketed as a way to block tracking scripts around the web, it’s also very useful for checking that your own Facebook pixel / Google Ads / Remarketing cookies have been installed correctly.

Wordpress Plugins

There is a sea of Wordpress plugins that have value, but ideally we should all be avoiding using plugins as much as possible due to their inherent security risk. One increasing trend is the use of plugins as a backdoor to place links on your site, so take care and do some research before installing something.

• RankMath

After Yoast has proved themselves completely unreliable in recent years with bug after bug that negatively effected rankings, a better alternative is RankMath who are adding functionality to their core plugin rather than reducing features.

• Redirection

Includes a host of useful features including 404 error log files from within WP, which allows anybody to find and fix misconfigured inbound links, and lost link juice.

• WP Tag Manager

There are a number of ways to integrate Google’s Tag Manager into a WP site, the best option is to include the code in a child theme but this is plugin is useful if that’s not an option.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Conversion rate optimisation or what HR like to advertise as “post click analysis” when done right, can have a huge impact on your ROI per visitor.

• VWO

Feature rich and at a great price point, VWO allows A/B testing segmentation, mutually exclusive groups all based on an intuitive platform. Highly recommended for sites that have the needed traffic to gain useful insights. Customer support is also excellent.

• Effective Experiments

Not very familiar with this platform yet but a number of people have recommended it. It’s on my to do list.

• Hotjar

Handy platform particularly the heat mapping function allows you to pinpoint any CRO errors on specific pages. It has a generous free tier and should be implemented on any landing pages.

Email Tools

Email is the bread and butter of any digital marketer and is probably one of the biggest time-sinks there is, if not done right. Here are a couple of tools that are useful at reducing the amount of time you’ll spend on email.

• Hunter.io

There are a lot of tools that provide a similar service with more being brought to market all the time. Hunter.io has a pretty reliable database of domain and email addresses and has a handy little tool baked in for deducing the email structure of a company.

• GMass

One of the first mass emailing services I tried that allows you to use GMail’s email servers. When I used it, it wasn’t a mature product and lacked a number of important features, the most important being error checks. It was possible to send several hundred email(or thousand) by mistake, and not have a fallback for the first name. I’m sure it’s been improved since I looked at it.

• StreakCRM

Streak CRM allows for open and click tracking, automation of leads through the sales process, integrates with Google Sheets and is pretty intuitive to use.

Despite the advertised limitations of the free plan, there is no limit on the number of open trackers per month, or at least there wasn’t in April of 2019 when I last tested.

• Mailshake

Send email using Google’s trusted email servers allowing for a higher level of deliverability. It has integrated automated email follow-up and helpful functions that stop you emailing the same person multiple times.

Rank Trackers

Rank Trackers are pretty boring, generally you need them to do one thing and one thing well. There has been some innovation in this space, but not a whole lot.

• SERPWoo

Is a not really a rank tracker, at least not in the conventional sense. It tracks the SERP and not just your position within it. This allows for detailed analysis on changes after updates, and investigation of competitors who are making gains.

• Ahrefs

When you are tracking keywords for a large project conventional rank trackers can get prohibitively expensive. Ahrefs can give you a top down view of your site with delayed results. It does have an integrated “Project Tracker”, but like the more conventional trackers out there, this can get very expensive.

• SEMrush

SEMrush tries to do it all and in some areas fails, the rank tracking part of their set up is quite robust and feature rich though.

• SERPRobot

The best bang for your buck rank tracker out there. A no frills service that does one thing really well.

Automation

• UBot Studio

Ubot studio is not cheap and to be honest is pretty buggy. It does give you the ability to automate almost any task quickly from building a twitter bot to manipulating RSS feeds. Over the years, I find I use it less and less and many things can be done with a rudimentary understanding of Python.

• Scrapebox

Scrapebox has a bad reputation due to its overuse by comment spammers but it has a 101 small features that always come in handy including the quick url dedupe feature.

• GSA SER

Not particularly relevant anymore but like Scrapebox, can still have its uses.

• GSA Email Finder

Due to changes in EU legislation, scraping information of any kind is now illegal. A quick look at any server logs will show that this is not adhered to by many and enforcing the new law appears to be impossible, but the fact remains that tools such as GSA’s are now illegal.

Link Analysis Tools / Backlink Checkers

Backlink profile analysis is one of the fundamental aspects of SEO and a true understanding of why some sites rank and others tank often comes down to careful investigation of the a domain’s link profile. Whilst proprietary metrics such as Moz’s DR and Ahrefs DA give an indication as to a site’s authority, the devil is in the detail and you have to look at the links on tier 1 and tier 2 to really understand what is happening.

• Ahrefs

Considered by many to be the best tool in the game. Whilst Ahrefs don’t have the biggest link index, they seem to be able to filter the low quality links better than the competition. New links appear sooner than the competition and the company have steadily improved the feature set over the years. Plus the interface allows you to drill down to get at useful information without exporting the data to a spreadsheet.

• Moz Open Site Explorer

The industry standard for many years, Moz’s metrics were too easily manipulated and they really stopped trying in 2015/2016 allowing others to move ahead. They have an impressive link index but for everyday use, just don’t seem to find new links for months and bad data makes for bad decisions.

• SEMRush

Have recently boasted of the largest link index in the industry, but again like Moz, new links just don’t appear in their system quickly enough to be relied upon. SEMrush may be a good option for small shop digital marketing firms with a wide range of tools, but link analysis and understanding a domain’s link profile, I personally find it difficult to work with.

• Majestic

Majestic’s two proprietary metrics, TrustFlow and CitationFlow were modelled closely after one of Google’s original patents and give a useful view of the power and trust of a link or domain. It’s still open to manipulation but is more useful than many other proprietary metrics. Majestic’s link index is comprehensive and their crawler surfaces links quicker than many of the competition, even turning up links that Ahrefs fails to.

• Search Console

Google’s search console contains a selection of links that Google’s crawler has come across but like most data Google provides is purposefully incomplete.

• Linkody

Linkody is a meta type service that allows you to combine backlink sources such as MOZ and Ahrefs.

• Link Research Tools

I haven’t used LRT’s platform as it’s always been outside of my budget. They do pull data from a number of sources and deduplicate the results. They have an excellent reputation with many and a great blog.

• Netpeak Checker

Very useful tool, you plug in your API keys for the services such as Ahrefs, Majestic, etc and pull only the specific data you need.

Crawlers

Technical SEO is an essential part of any search optimisation role and it usually begins with a crawl.

• Screaming Frog

The long time industry standard continues to add features as technical SEO evolves with recent integration of page speed tests, schema mark up and an update to its server log file analysis. Some argue that the UI could do with an update but why change when everyone is used to it as it is?

• SiteBulb

SiteBulb has a similar feature set to Screaming Frog but gives you that information in a way that is easier to act upon. It’s also more beginner friendly, in that issues are categorised and ranked in “perceived importance”.

• Xenu Link Sleuth

A bit of a throwback, this Win32 crawler is free and could still be useful to some.

• Deepcrawl

Deepcrawl is an enterprise level SASS targeting sites with a footprint of larger than 500,000 pages. I have worked on sites of a max 380,000 pages and never had the need to employ Deepcrawl. It has a good reputation though.

Backlink Monitoring Tools

When you’ve worked hard to earn your links, you don’t want to give them up without a fight, or at least an email. Like all things nowadays, the trend is toward recurring fee SASS applications. This of course, is far from ideal and whilst applications benefit from a SASS type set up, this is unnecessary for backlink monitoring.

• Inspyder Backlink Monitor

A great little tool that can be run when needed that checks backlinks and notifies you when you loose a link. You can set it up for tiered links too.

Content Analysis Tools

The term ‘Scientific SEO’ has been thrown around in recent years but it’s really just a sales pitch for an industry that has to juggle so many ranking factors. That’s not to say that content analysis tools aren’t important.

Content analysis allow you to statistically investigate the factors that correlate with a high position for a given search term. Peeling back some aspects of your page that you may have overlooked, that need improvement. More tools are coming to market all the time offering these features, but here are the most popular.

• SurferSEO

Reasonably priced, SurferSEO has the most streamlined user interface that allows you to focus improving the content. It’s easy for writers to understand and make the most of and you still have the data when you need to look under the hood.

• CoraSEO

CoraSEO the greatest amount of raw data. The developer has gone to some lengths recently to present that data in an easily digestible way. But you are still working with a Spreadsheet. And whilst you can gain the most insight from this tool, it’s not something you can hand off to a writer or junior SEO. The data has to be interpreted and the SERP has to be analysed in context.

• Page Optimiser Pro

I was an early adopter of Pop after seeing the results Kyle Roof got with his now infamous local lorem ipsum test. The UI passed through several iterations as features were added and after trying SurferSEO, I made the switch.

• Siteliner

This is a great tool to help quickly diagnose the amount of duplicate content on your site. You won’t need a paid account to quickly get an estimate of how serious an issue you have. Remember the more unique your page, the higher the chance that Google will index it and keep it indexed.

• Copyscape

One of the first checks you perform on any content you receive from writers is a plagiarism check. Whilst there are several new services out in the last number of years, many of them use Copyscape’s API, so you might as well get the service from the source and save in the process.

Productivity & Project Management Tools

• OmniFocus

One of the first checks you perform on any content you recevie from writers is a plagiarism check. Whilst there are several new services out in the last number of years, many of them use Copyscape’s API, so you might as well get the service from the source and save in the process.

• OmniPlan

One of the first checks you perform on any content you recevie from writers is a plagiarism check. Whilst there are several new services out in the last number of years, many of them use Copyscape’s API, so you might as well get the service from the source and save in the process.

• Asana

One of the first checks you perform on any content you recevie from writers is a plagiarism check. Whilst there are several new services out in the last number of years, many of them use Copyscape’s API, so you might as well get the service from the source and save in the process.

OSINT & Research Tools

Open source intelligence tools may seem like overkill but are important if you need to find a competitor’s PBN or want to map a business’s various web properties to understand the full breadth of their business.

• TinyEye

Excellent reverse image look up service. Numerous applications.

• DomainIQ

Serves some data on domains, not very reliable, the data should be verfied using other services.

• ipfingerprints

Standard reverse IP lookup service

• DomainTools Whois

Comprehensive whois service with paid historical data.

Citation Resources & Services

You may think that citations aren’t relevant for international SEO, but have a variety of uses. There are some countries, where you need a minimum number of links from local ccTLDs. They can also be used as pillowing links to dilute your backlink profile.

• Brightlocal

Managed service based in the UK with a nice portal for keeping an eye on progress and indexation. Worth the money if you prefer a more hands off approach.

• WhiteSpark

Similar to bright spark but with a greater database of niche specific directory sites. Won’t suite every time of business but things like dentists and lawyers are covered.

Proxy Providers

There are a variety of situations where you may need proxies. Describing the different types of proxies and their uses is outside the scope of this article.

• Infatica

Residential and mobile proxies with a global network. Pricing is per GB and of course, not cheap.

• BuyProxies

Haven’t used them in a number of years, they were the go to provider for a long time. Unaware of the proxy quality or reliability in recent years.

Content Delivery Networks

• CloudFlare

Free service with an integrated WAF to protect against DDOS attacks. CloudFlare greatly simplifies the process of updating or switching servers with immediate DNS record updates.

They provide a free SSL cert but the increasing number of sites that use CloudFlare and the way the free SSL cert is implemented mean you are trusting them with your data.

• Amazon Web Services / CloudFront

Enterprise level content delivery network that can greatly reduce a server’s time to first byte. Integrates with S3 and the Amazon WAF meaning faster and more secure sites, at a price though.

• Incapsula / Imperva

I have yet to use this Incapsula / Imperva but I’ve heard good things and would like to take a closer look when the opportunity presents itself.

E-Commerce Tools & Resources

Out of the box, most e-commerce platforms are horribly optimised for SEO. The worst offender being WooCommerce.

• CartFlows

Cartflows doesn’t solve all of WooCommerce issues, but it does remedy a couple of the major shortfalls of the default cart.

Search Engine Provided Tools & Services

The various search engines provide some useful tools that can be used in various ways for digital marketing. Everything from a customised search engine to notify you of when your brand is mentioned, to help identifying global trends can be found.

There is one caveat though and that is that the data should be taken as an indication rather than the cold hard truth. Google’s keyword volume is the prime suspect here. Google has no responsibility to provide accurate data and nor would it be in their best interests to provide anything more than an approximation.

• Google Trends

A good way to identify seasonal trends for a topic or product. It’s always best to compare your target with a topic or product that you have hard data on so that you can infer the general levels of interest.

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool

The source data for most keyword volume tools, but is wildly inaccurate. Keyword groupings can provide some insight.

• Google Alerts

There are a number of SASS based projects that sell Google Alerts for ridiculous prices with a nice front end. Google Alerts allows you to set up notifications for keywords. When Google’s crawler encounters your keyword, you get an alert. Very handy tool to keep an eye on your brand name and competitors.

• Google Analytics

Industry standard analytics program, very powerful but with a couple of missing features, or features that require a deep dive into the config panels.

• Google Custom Search Engine

Google allows you to “create” your own search engine and only include your competitors. This helps to identify new posts or major changes within your niche.

• Google Search Console

Allows for mining a plethora of information on your progress in organic search. It often turns up keywords that you’ll miss via traditional keyword research.

• Bing Webmaster Tools

With less than 3% of the population using Bing, it’s ignored by most SEOs and digital marketers as the results are too easily manipulated. The webmaster tools used to turn up a number of inbound links that did not appear in Google’s offering and this data can come n handy when you are disavowing links and want the largest dataset to work with.

• Searx

Not useful for SEO particularly but it’s a really interesting project. It’s meta-search engine that you self host. They have numerous engines that allow for a range of customisations plus integration of proxy support.

Search Engine Tools / Hacks

• USearchFrom.Com

The dynamic nature SERP results mean that the Google results you are seeing, is not always the same as what your clients or competitors are seeing. Whilst there are ways around this, one quick hack to see the results in a different country is usearchfrom.com. The creator built it out of frustration with a similar site who failed to implement some basic but essential upgrades.

• Penguin Analysis Tool

A handy little tool for identifying the nature of a penalty. Less useful in the last number of years with the rolling core releases.

Quick & Dirty Tools

• Text Mechanic

Whilst many of the features of this web app can be found in a good text editor, the ease of use of text mechanic makes it a big winner. Started as a small weekend project years ago, the creator checked his analytics one day to the shock that if was seeing high traffic and that SEOs and web masters had come to rely on it. He has since monetised it and the restrictions are a bit of an annoyance but hey, still a great tool in a pinch.

• Mergewords

Handy tool when doing Adwords or keyword research.

• Httpstatus.io

When performing a 301, installing an SSL cert or a million other small tasks, you may need to check that all versions of a URL have been correctly configured. This little tool comes in handy.

• Wordcounter.io

Another quick single use tool if you need to check word count on the fly.

Python Libraries

Python is a great language and one I ’m still learning.

• CloudFail

Python script to find ip addresses hidden behind CloudFlare name servers.

• Beautiful Soup

Worth taking a look at but not worth spending much time on. A pretty limited framework for scraping data.

• Scrapy

Far more robust and feature rich library capable of querying APIs.

You can find Murrough Foley on Twitter and Linkedin or at his personal blog mfoley.ie