42 Essential SEO Tools to Put in Your SEO Toolbox in 2020

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  • Date Published
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Are you not getting the SEO results you envision or require? Here are some tools you should add to your SEO toolbox to improve your SEO strategy!

Free and Freemium SEO Tools to Help You Get Found Online

Did you know that the average business website has SEO problems that can result in loss of business? Common SEO problems can range from technical issues like broken links, content errors such as duplicate titles and descriptions, and page load time. And finding them on your own can be difficult. By using at least some of these essential SEO tools, business owners can fix most of these shortcomings.

By not finding and fixing these problems, businesses and product brands can create the wrong impression, raise questions in the minds of potential customers, and miss opportunities resulting in loss of business.

Many business owners are not even aware of existing problems. Especially small businesses lack the resources to hire an SEO firm, which leaves them stuck with potentially lousy SEO. To help, we have come up with a list of resources in our list of essential SEO tools for 2020.

Free SEO Tools

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the best free SEO tool, simply because the data comes from Google.

It has a wealth of insights related to your website’s search metrics, including any issues relating to indexing, keyword performance, mobile usability, and much more. GSC helps anyone with a website optimize their organic performance.

Pricing: Free

Google Trends

Google Trends analyzes the popularity of a search term in Google. It’s most useful for helping marketers track seasonality or to understand how a topic is trending over time. Google Trends also tracks related queries and demographics related to a specific search.

Pricing: Free

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is Google’s keyword research tool. Its primary purpose is to help you determine the volume, cost, and competition of any keyword, and to understand your topic’s popularity, competitive value and suggested bid. However, you can also use it to help you determine your SEO strategy.

Pricing: Free

Google PageSpeed Insights

We all know that page speed is more important than ever in the world of SEO. Fortunately, Google makes it easy for you to understand your website’s page load performance and where there are areas for improvement – if needed.

Pricing: Free

Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Is your website mobile-friendly? There’s no better way to find out than letting Google tell you itself. Simply enter your site, and Google will run a free analysis for you.

Pricing: Free

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the performance, quality, and correctness of your web apps.

Pricing: Free

Bing Webmaster Tools

Similar to Google, Bing has its spider that crawls sites and provides recommendations to get indexed on Bing. It’s easy to implement and manage with a simple tracking code and a dashboard to understand site performance.

Pricing: Free

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free SEO tool. It adds versatility to Google Analytics while allowing you to manage and implement tags (tracking code or snippets of code) on your website or mobile app.

Tag Manager works for a variety of functions. You can use it for generating heat maps, scroll tracking, conducting surveys, monitoring form submissions, remarketing, or tracking how people arrive at your site. It can also track activities like downloads and shopping cart abandonment.

Pricing: Free

SEOquake

SEOquake performs a complete SEO audit of any site from within your browser. This tool allows you to examine internal and external links to your website and keyword data. It also provides a real-time diagnosis on optimization issues impacting your site’s SEO.

Pricing: Free

SimilarWeb

Receive market intelligence on almost any company, including overall site ranking, traffic sources, and market strategies. The free version provides a clear snapshot of any website or app. The paid version is much more powerful.

Pricing: The free version provides five results per metric, one month of mobile app data, and three months of web traffic data. Of course, the enterprise-level solution is much more comprehensive.

Wheregoes

As the name describes, Wheregoes takes a URL and shows the entire path of re-directs leading to the final destination. This allows you to diagnose complex link problems and see who’s tracking to a given URL.

Pricing: Free

Wayback Machine

While it may not seem like an SEO tool on the surface, Wayback Machine can be used to determine if a specific URL existed at a certain point. This knowledge can help provide context to 404 errors found after site migrations.

Pricing: Free

Paid SEO Tools (Includes Freemium Versions)

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most popular analytics tool on the market. Over time Google has strayed from tracking keyword rankings as part of its native platform (these are now live in Search Console). However, businesses can still analyze their performance across channels and understand which sources bring the most traffic to the website.

Pricing: Freemium (Google Analytics offers a free option and one premium suite, Analytics 360).

Moz Keyword Explorer

Getting outside the world of Google, Moz offers the ability to analyze keywords, links, SERP, or on-site page optimization. Moz allows you to enter your page on their website for limited SEO recommendations, or you can use its extension – MozBar.

As far as free SEO tools are concerned, the basic version of Keyword Explorer is sufficient and just gets better every year. The pro version offers a more comprehensive analysis and SEO insights that are well worth the investment.

Price: Freemium (With the free version of Link Explorer, you can research just ten queries with 50 rows of data. For conducting comprehensive research with unlimited queries, you need the Premium version starting at US$99 a month).

SEMrush

SEMrush is one of the best SEO tools available on the market. It helps you perform keyword research, audit backlinks, and understand your site’s domain authority. The site also enables you to find out the keywords of your competitors rank.

Pricing: Freemium (The free version lets you conduct ten searches per day. If you need more than that, you will have to subscribe to the Premium version starting at US$99.95 per month).

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is the top competitor to SEMrush, with an emphasis on link-building. This tool helps you perform backlink analysis to understand good and bad links coming to your site. Marketers can also use Ahrefs for competitive analysis to audit which websites to target for potential guest posts.

Pricing: Freemium (To discover more links pointing to any domain, to increase your number of campaigns and keywords, then you need to subscribe to the premium version for US$99 a month).

Woorank

Woorank is a website review tool and SEO checker that analyses on-page and off-page SEO to rank better for search. It provides an actionable checklist that gives your team the insights it needs to fix performance issues and increase search rankings.

Pricing: Freemium

Answer the Public

Answer the Public is one of my personal favorites. This tool creates a list of visualized search questions based on a single query. Answer the Public is ideal for creating long-tail keyword and ranking for the featured snippet. Not sure if you’re creating the right blog content? Answer the Public can help validate or re-direct your SEO efforts.

Pricing: Freemium (Throttled use — the free account has limited access and daily limits).

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a convenient tool you can install on Google Chrome or Firefox. It shows monthly search volume and cost-per-click on a specific keyword search in Google. It also includes metrics for the “People Also Search For” and “Related” searches in Google.

Pricing: Until recently, Keywords Everywhere was a free tool. It is now available at a cost per 100,000 credits (keywords) basis. Packages start at US$10 and go as high as US$1,000.

GTmetrix

GTmetrix is a speed and performance audit tool that provides insights into root causes behind performance failures and generates various benchmark scores. GTmetrix then offers actionable recommendations on improving your site speed.

Pricing: Freemium (Up to three monitored URLs, 20 API credits per day, and three reports per day).

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is an SEO spider application that evaluates on-site SEO issues. It can find broken links, server errors, blocked URLs, and duplicate pages. It also crawls your site to analyze technical and on-site SEO.

Pricing: Freemium (With the free version, the tool has a crawl limit of 500 URLs. If you need to analyze more than 500 URLs, you need to subscribe to the premium version priced at US$195 per year).

Majestic

Majestic SEO provides link intelligence data to help your company improve performance. It contains features such as “The Majestic Million,” which allows you to see the ranking of the top million websites by referring subnets. Similar to Ahrefs and SEMrush, Majestic also enables you to check backlinks, benchmark keyword data, and perform competitive analysis.

Pricing: Freemium (Free account has limited access and daily limits).

Some Additional Essential SEO Tools (Free and Freemium)

Getting Started With These Essential SEO Tools

Now that you have a toolbox full of essential SEO tools, you can take the next steps. If you already have an existing SEO strategy for your business, simply use a few of the tools we listed and see where you are

Maybe you simply need to fix a few broken links or upload a new robots.txt file. On the other hand, if any of these essential SEO tools revealed more serious problems and errors, you may need to bring in some outside help.

If you need some more help to get your small business SEO to the next level, check out these posts on our blog:

Do You Need Help Getting Your Business Found Online?

Here at PixoLabo, we offer a full range of search engine optimization services to help businesses and product brands to improve their search rankings and increase conversions. Contact us and find out how our team can help you implement and get the most out of these essential SEO tools.

What Are Your Favorite Essential SEO Tools?

Are there any essential SEO tools we missed? Do you have any essential SEO tools to add to our SEO toolbox? Is there an SEO tool you just can’t live without? Or do you have a tool that worked exceptionally well for you? Please leave your comments below so our audience can benefit as well, and grab our feed, so you don’t miss our next post!

And help your audience with their small business SEO by sharing our essential SEO tools with them.

Thank you! We appreciate your help to end bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By Gregor Schmidt
Co-Founder
@gregorinsendai

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