The Best SEO Tools in 2024 

When scaling a business, SEO is crucial. The reason is simple – when done correctly, your organic traffic will snowball, providing a steady stream of visitors genuinely interested in what you offer. The best part? This traffic will keep flowing to your site around the clock, even while you sleep.

However, generating massive amounts of organic traffic is impossible without the right tools. Luckily, there’s no shortage of SEO tools available.

Whether you’re hunting for top software, the best tools for local SEO, or a comprehensive solution within a tight marketing budget, these are the platforms I depend on for gold-standard optimization results:

The top SEO tools

• Similarweb
• SE Ranking
• Screaming Frog
• Majestic SEO
• Mobile Action (ASO)
• Similarweb Extension
• Google Search Console
• Google Keyword Planner
• Google Trends
• Redirect Path Extension
• Yoast SEO plugin

1. Similarweb

Best for: All-round comprehensive SEO analysis

Based on large data sets, Similarweb is a great all-in-one SEO tool that allows you to perform comprehensive competitive analysis, keyword research, rank tracking, and backlink analysis.

Competitive analysis

Competitive analysis is a fundamental part of any SEO strategy, as it gives you insight into the SEO landscape as a whole. And since SEO is competitive by its very nature, you can’t succeed without knowing who and what you’re competing against.

Similarweb provides you with all the data and insights you need to uncover your competitors’ search strategies, including:

• Website performance and engagement
• Organic keywords and keyword phrases
• Top-performing organic landing pages
• Traffic trends

Here’s an example analyzing four websites:

You can also use it to see which pages get the most traffic as well as understand user behavior with metrics like:

• Visit Duration
• Pages Per Visit
• Bounce Rate

If you’re looking to dive deeper into granular insights – including the breakdown of organic versus paid traffic – you can make the most of the ‘Breakdown by’ filter. With this wealth of up-to-date competitive intelligence, Similarweb maintains its reputation as one of the premier SEO tools for comprehensive SEO competitive analysis.

Keyword research

Similarweb’s fresh keyword data allows you to find all the keywords you need to build out a solid content strategy or optimize any existing site.

The Keyword Generator gives you related and trending keywords, plus phrase matches and question queries. You can review these through a number of unique filters, including:

• User Intent: which shows the intent behind a keyword (informational vs. transactional)
• Zero Clicks: reveals the percentage of clicks that did not lead to a site visit
• SERP Features: allows you to analyze SERP features that appear on any target keyword’s SERP, allowing you to optimize your content accordingly

You can also analyze your competitors’ keywords and landing pages, allowing you to see what’s working for them so that you can build out a winning content strategy.

Rank tracking

The Similarweb Rank Tracker will help you keep track of your keywords across locations. It will also help you spot opportunities and quick wins, as well as understand your competitive landscape.

Use the rank tracker to:

• Track all of your keywords
• Monitor your landing pages
• Segment your keywords by topic
• See detailed SERP feature data
• See your SEO competitors

Site auditing

The Similarweb Site Audit tool will help you find and fix issues that are impacting your site’s rankings. Get a full picture of your site’s health and performance with data integrations across your tech stack.

With the Similarweb Site Audit tool, you can:

• Perform a comprehensive site audit, as well as segmented site audits
• Schedule and automate website crawls
• Set alerts for metrics that matter to your SEO
• Get a full picture of your site’s health and performance

Backlink analysis

Build out a comprehensive backlink strategy with Similarweb backlink analysis tool. You can use it to analyze your site or take a deep dive into your competitors’ backlink metrics. This will help you to understand your backlink competitive landscape and build out a plan to increase your search market share.

Use the backlink analysis tool to:

• See backlinks and referring domains
• Analyze new vs. lost links
• Filter backlinks by target URL, new, and lost links

2. SE Ranking

Best for: Rank tracking, keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink analysis

SE Ranking is a comprehensive platform to perfect your SEO, offering accurate data processed with AI-based algorithms.

Use SE Ranking to:

• Track your traffic and identify the SERP feature opportunities by seeing website rankings for any keyword across any location and major search engine
• Find relevant keyword suggestions along with essential metrics like difficulty, search volume, intent, etc
• Uncover keywords and content gaps compared to your competitors
• Analyze any website’s organic and paid traffic and performance, as well as compare several websites
• Manage multiple agency clients and projects with automated reporting, a White Label feature, Lead Generator, unlimited client projects, and support for up to 10 client seats
• Build and improve your off-page SEO strategy with comprehensive backlink profile analysis and features that help you find link-building gaps and monitor success
• Perform on-page optimization and content creation with valuable tips to enhance your content and an AI Writer option to generate text efficiently
• Identify and fix technical SEO issues that are preventing you from improving your rankings in search results

SE Ranking also offers a drag-and-drop Report Builder and includes unlimited manual and 5-50 automated reports in its subscriptions.

3. Screaming Frog

Best for: Website crawls to uncover technical issues and content gaps 

One of the best SEO audit tools around, Screaming Frog is the crème de la crème of website crawlers. Acting like Google’s crawlers/spiders, it accurately hunts down any issues impacting the quality of your site — content or technical:

Use Screaming Frog to:

• Spot and prioritize a wide variety of errors and opportunities
• Analyze and improve your site structure
• Improve your internal linking
• Identify broken links, redirect chains, duplicate content, and canonicalization issues
• See a precise analysis of your meta tags (page titles and descriptions).

It also allows you to connect APIs (Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights) so you can easily see site speed issues and sitemaps.

Bonus fact: Screaming Frog’s name origin story is guaranteed to bring a smile. It was inspired by a frog in the founder’s yard that stood its ground defiantly when cornered by cats; the tool offers you a similar level of confidence with robust data to back up your SEO efforts.

4. Majestic SEO

Best for: Deep backlink analysis

This tool does one thing, and it does it well. Majestic specializes in backlinks by comparing the backlinks on your website and those of your competitors to the backlinks in its index. Based on this analysis it builds an in-depth view of your backlink profile, including insights into your link authority. Seeing your backlink profile this way enables you to monitor your performance, enhance your authority, and ultimately improve your search engine ranking.

Use Majestic SEO to understand:

• The quality of the links on your site with the Trust Flow metric
• The quality of the links on your site with the Citation Flow metric
• The history of a domain with the Site Explorer tool
• Which websites are similar to yours, and analyze the traffic flowing through their backlinks

Also, you can build a targeted list of link prospects by analyzing the sites linking to your competitors as well as analyze multiple backlinks in bulk.

5. ASO tool: MobileAction

Best for: App keyword tracking, keyword research, and competitor analysis

If your business has an app in any of the two major app stores (Apple’s App Store or Google Play), MobileAction is the gold standard for ASO (app store optimization).

Along with impressive keyword data, MobileAction has an SDK (Software Development Kit) analyzer that you can use for competitive analysis.

Use MobileAction to:

• Track and research the best keywords to target
• Analyze your competitors’ rankings
• See how often your competitors are updating their app

By combining keyword research data and competitor analysis, MobileAction enables you to create and refine a strategy that helps you rank higher in app store searches and drive more organic downloads.

The Best Free SEO Tools

1. Similarweb Extension

Best for: Instant and easy-to-digest key metrics for any website, including site rank, traffic sources, and visits over time

As one of the best free SEO options, our Similarweb extension makes things brilliantly simple. Pop it into your browser and instantly see key metrics for any site you visit.

Here’s a basic example using innocent.co.uk:

The extension will help you identify opportunities by delivering key SEO metrics and website analysis in seconds, including data on which channels traffic is coming through and which countries most of your traffic is visiting from.

With the Similarweb Extension, you can:

• See a basic overview of your site’s SEO and traffic metrics
• Analyze your competitors
• Understand which markets to focus on

The extension will help you identify opportunities by delivering key traffic sources, top keywords, and visit metrics directly within your browser.

Use it for a quick overview of the traffic patterns on your site as well as your competitors’, including insights into which channels are driving the most traffic and which countries account for the majority of your visitors.

2. Google Search Console

Best for: Easy monitoring of organic traffic and site performance

A classic for a reason, Google Search Console is one of the best free SEO tools to monitor your overall website health.

Use it to:

• See an overview of crucial Google metrics on both site performance and user experience
• Monitor and request indexing of updated pages
• Analyze organic traffic and search term clicks
• Spot errors, including indexing pages/videos, core web vitals, and mobile usability

3. Google Keyword Planner

Best for: Deep keyword research 

Another top free SEO tool, Google Keyword Planner, is technically a PPC solution, but you can use it to find keywords and more. In fact, it’s one of the best keyword research tools for beginner marketers.

You can use it:

• In conjunction with other tools to further identify popular keywords and search volume metrics to tighten your search strategy
• For local SEO as it enables easy filtering based on specific states or cities rather than just countries, ensuring your efforts are precisely targeted toward the desired markets

4. Google Trends

Best for: Analyzing search behavior and patterns in search queries

Google Trends is especially useful when you want to monitor the lifecycle of keywords (and if you’re an SEO, you always want to do that).

You can use Google Trends to:

• Find trending terms to create content that people are likely to interact with
• Find related topics and related queries to broaden out your content strategy
• Compare keyword data to understand keyword trends
• Filter your keyword trends by category
• Sharpen your content strategy by monitoring the lifecycle of keywords and determining patterns in search behavior for specific keywords or topics over time
• Compare the popularity of different search terms to refresh your content ideation and optimization

5. Redirect Path

Best for: Flagging redirect path issues 

Redirect Path (or the HTTP Header & Redirect Checker for SEO, if you fancy something that rolls off the tongue less) is a lesser-known plugin in the world of giant SEO software options.

Small but mighty, it flags redirects and errors, including client-side redirects like Meta and Javascript redirects, exposing potential issues you may not have yet seen.

6. Yoast SEO Plugin

Best for WordPress site optimization and back-end feature management

Our final free tool, Yoast, is a vital plugin if you use WordPress. It’s not an all-in-one solution, but what it does do, it does brilliantly, making it one of the best SEO software tools around.

Yoast SEO offers you:

• Keyword optimization tools that ensure your content ranks
• Meta tag optimization
• Schema integrations
• An easy way to submit sitemaps
• A thriving online forum plus a Premium version offering additional features

Wrap-up: Why the right SEO tool is so essential

Data is the one thing an SEO can’t do without; without it, you are flying blind. Your SEO tools will give you the insights you need to get your content in front of your target market and will help you create content that will make them come back again and again.

Since we rely on tools, it’s key to find tools with the best quality data.

From brainstorming and creating dedicated content to polishing up your entire SEO strategy, Similarweb helps minimize legwork or risky guesswork.

It helps you:

• Track your SEO progress
• Develop your keyword and content strategy
• Analyze your competitors and reveal content gaps

Hungry for more of the best-in-class tools? Here’s a quick reading list for you:

• The 8 Best Competitive Analysis Tools in 2023
• The 10 Best PPC Tools in 2023
• The Best Affiliate Marketing Tools Across the Board in 2023

FAQs

What is the best SEO tool?

Similarweb offers the most comprehensive, up-to-date data on the planet to improve your SEO strategy and ROI. Instead of subscribing to various tools, it offers an array of SEO features to simplify your toolkit.

What is the best free SEO tool?

Google Search Console is an effective tool to supplement your SEO strategy. It’s also one of the best SEO tools for beginner marketers to cut their teeth on.

Is Similarweb worth it?

Yes. Similarweb data is incredibly accurate, so you can skip to the fun part by uncovering unmatched, fresh insights.

What are the top ASO tools? 

Both Data.ai and Mobile Action are top tools for polishing your ASO strategy and maximizing your ROI.