The Best SEO Tools to use in 2023 to Supercharge your SEO

Best SEO Tools

Mastering the art of SEO is no easy feat. In fact, it can be a laborious process. But don’t worry! In this article, you will find 12 of the best SEO tools to use in 2023 and beyond.

Please note that as an SEO professional I have tried and tested every tool on this list. Some of these SEO tools are premium and some are completely free of charge.

The SEO industry is full of fabulous tools and resources. Yet, if you have little experience with SEO, it’s likely you may feel overwhelmed about which tools to use.

Below I have broken down my recommended best SEO tools into two categories. These are:

• Premium SEO Tools
• Free SEO Tools

I’ve been in the SEO industry for many years and have tried and tested a lot of different tools and software. In fact, I actually run my own SEO agency. So I like to think I know what are the best SEO tools and which ones aren’t so good.

I hope you find this list helpful.

Premium SEO Tools

If you’re looking to take your SEO game to the next level in 2022 and beyond, then you’ll love these premium SEO tools.

Whether you’re a personal blogger or an agency owner like me, I can empathise with your time and money challenges.

When I first started out in SEO I was reluctant to spend money and would always opt for free tools. But, SEO is a forever-changing anomaly so it’s important to have a range of tools at your disposal to stay ahead of the competition.

Unfortunately, this does mean you’ll have to spend some of your hard-earned dosh to find the best SEO tools available, but trust me…it’s worth it.

Ahrefs

Starting with my favourite and one of the best SEO tools on the market, we have Ahrefs.

If you have some experience in SEO and marketing already you may have heard of Ahrefs.

As an SEO agency owner, I would be completely screwed if I didn’t have access to this wonderful tool. It provides a ton of essential features and gives you access to data that is invaluable.

Here are a few things Ahrefs can do:

• Site Explorer – Get an in-depth look at the organic search traffic and backlink profile of any website or URL.
• Keywords Explorer – Discover thousands of great keyword ideas, analyze their ranking difficulty and calculate their traffic potential.
• Site Audit – See under the hood of your website’s on-page SEO performance. Stop guessing and find out exactly what’s holding your website back from ranking.
• Rank Tracker – Track your rankings over time and chart your performance against your competitors.
• Content Explorer – Discover and analyze top-performing content in your niche.

These are some of the great things that Ahrefs can do and for $99 a month, you can access all above. There are also other pricing plans that provide even more features and you may need to upgrade to these.

But the basic plan is more than enough to get you going.

You may be thinking that $99 a month is far too expensive for one SEO tool.

But let me tell you why I disagree…

Aside from a few tools, Ahrefs offers pretty much everything you will ever need.

In fact, a simple calculation of 4-5 of the best SEO tools will tell you that Ahrefs offers incredible value for money

For $99 a month Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool and in my experience, the greatest.

WP Rocket

How important is website speed and performance in 2022? Let’s look at some stats.

• A 0.1-second improvement in your website’s speed on mobile devices can improve conversions by 8.4%.

• 44% of customers will share the story of a long loading time with their friends and family which can reduce direct visits to your website.

• Yahoo improved its website speed by 400% and saw a 9% increase in its traffic.

• Etsy added 160kb to their mobile website and saw a 12% increase in their bounce rate.

• Half of all customers (46%) will never visit a website again if they’ve experienced poor loading times in the past.

• A one-second delay in loading can impact customer satisfaction by 16%.

• 14% of customers will start shopping on a new website if they have to wait too long for a page to load.

As you can see, site speed is an important factor in the success of your website and business.

When I take on new clients one of the first things I do is make sure their website speed is as fast as possible. And one of the ways I do this is by using WP Rocket.

WP Rocket is the most powerful caching plugin on the market and has been recommended by WordPress experts for years.

However, it’s actually much more than this, let’s take a look at the benefits:

• Improves page speed almost instantly – If you’re using WordPress you can install WP Rocket and within seconds, the website loading time will improve.

• Less configuration – Once activated, your site speed will improve. There is nothing in the way of configuration, unlike most other plugins.

• Advanced options – The default features are great, but the advanced features take your website to new heights.

• All-in-one plugin – WP Rocket includes all the best optimisation options you would get with 3-5 plugins.

• Helps you pass Core Web Vitals – This is a report from Google that is based on certain metrics you must pass if you want your website to perform well. If your website speed and performance is bad you’ll fail this report which can hurt your SEO rankings. Google actually considers this as a ranking signal so by using WP Rocket you can improve your SEO.

Although you do have to pay for WP Rocket, the price is actually quite reasonable. For $49 a year you can get access to all the features and support for use on one website.

If you own or operate several websites, you can buy the infinite plan which lets you use WP Rocket on unlimited sites.

And to prove to you how great WP Rocket is. Take a look at my very own website speed below, before and after using WP Rocket.

Now I should mention that my website speed and performance are already excellent.

This is likely down to the fact that my hosting provider is Siteground and my WordPress theme is Kadence – both leaders in their respective fields.

Rank Math Pro

Over the last few years, there has been a battle between two rather popular on-page SEO plugins. Of course I’m talking about Yoast and Rank Math. Both are great options and actually, for a long time I was a Yoast fan. But in more recent times I’ve switched over the Rank Math and there’s a good reason.

Let me introduce you to Rank Math Pro. For just $59 per year, you can get your hands on a plugin that some experts are calling ‘the best SEO plugin on the market’.

Highly respected SEO Experts such as Matt Diggity and Ian Howells and many others have been raving about this wonderful plugin for a number of years and it seems people are starting to take notice, including myself. I have been using Rank Math Pro for the best part of two years on both my client’s websites and my own and have achieved some amazing results.

So why is Rank Math Pro so good?

• Advanced Google Analytics 4 Integration – You may have heard times are changing with Google Analytics. Google has recently switched over to what we professionals call GA4 which is a new and supposedly improved style of tracking (although this is open for debate).
• Keyword Rank Tracker – You can easily track all of your most important keywords to see how they perform in SERPs (search engine results page).
• Free Content AI Credits – This tool helps you optimise your content by suggesting which keyword variations to use in your headings, paragraphs, meta titles and descriptions.
• The Most Advanced Schema Generator – Using this feature your content will be more likely to appear in rich snippets on Google, which can dramatically improve organic search traffic.
• Redirections – Fix broken links by redirecting them to improve reader experience and SEO.

Other Benefits

• Exclusive Facebook Club
• Fastest SEO Plugin
• SEO & Schema on Automation
• Advanced Technical SEO
• One-Click Automatic Updates
• Enterprise-Level Features​
• Affordable For Everyone
• Detailed Video Tutorials
• Dedicated Premium Support

If this hasn’t persuaded you to try Rank Math Pro yet they also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. Additionally, they also offer a free version which is also excellent.

Page Optimizer Pro

If you’re looking for an SEO tool that will take your content to the next level then Page Optimizer Pro might be a perfect choice. It’s a staple in both my SEO business for my clients and my own website.

It’s incredibly useful for content writers, copywriting professionals and bloggers who want a streamlined, detailed and organised way to plan their content whilst also making sure it is optimised for SEO.

POP is recommended and used by a number of major brands such as Hubspot, Freshbooks and SurveyMonkey.

Here are some of the cool features you get with the basic plan:

• Exact keywords recommendations – Find out where you should be using your targeted keyword and how many times.
• Variation words – Find out which types of words are important to include in your content and how many times to use them.
• LSI terms – Latent semantic indexing keywords are related words that you should use in your content to give search engines a deeper understanding.
• Schema optimisation recommendations – See what type of schema your competitors are using.
• Focus competitors – See what kind of content your competitors have so you can improve your own and rank above them.

POP also offers a 7-day free trial which I highly recommend. Give it a try today.

Free SEO Tools

So now we’ve got the premium SEO tools out the way, it’s time for the moment you’ve been waiting for, the free ones. You can still get great results without having to spend a penny, isn’t that great?

Check out my Free SEO tools below. I’ll start with my favourite.

Screaming Frog

If you’re in the SEO industry chances are you’ve heard of this fabulous tool. If you’re new to this, you’re probably staring at your computer screen with a weird look on your face. Screaming Frog…what could it possibly be?

Put simply, Screaming Frog is a fast and advanced SEO site audit tool. A huge factor in SEO is making sure your website works as it should, along with making sure basic SEO tasks are completed such as ensuring each page has an H1 tag, meta, image alt tags and much more.

With the free version of Screaming Frog, you can crawl 500 URLs which will analyse your website and help you identify areas for improvement such as broken links and duplicate content.

Screaming Frog is an essential and highly popular SEO tool for most professionals and you’ll find that a lot of agencies and big brands use it as part of their SEO strategy, including the likes of Google, Apple, Disney and Amazon.

Here is a basic outline of what Screaming Frog can do for you:

• Find Broken Links, Errors & Redirects
• Analyse Page Titles & Meta Data
• Review Meta Robots & Directives
• Discover Exact Duplicate Pages
• Generate XML Sitemaps
• Site Visualisations

If you want to take it up a notch you could opt for the paid version as you’ll get many more features and you will be able to crawl an unlimited amount of URLs. Otherwise, I think the free version is just fine.

Siteliner

Siteliner is another great SEO tool for either professionals or bloggers. Here are some of the great features:

• Find all indexed pages easily
• Find duplicate content – Siteliner will also give you a unique content percentage which is very handy
• Number of words per page – This is the average word count per page
• Internal and External links per page – Handy for optimising your linking strategy
• Broken links

Imagify

Imagify is a WordPress plugin for image compression and optimisation. You can download the plugin for free from the WordPress dashboard and optimise all of your images with just one click. Benefits of using Imagify:

• Consume less bandwidth and storage space
• Reduces page size
• Faster loading times
• Boost SEO because of the fast-loading pages
• Saves mobile data plan for you and your visitors

Another reason I recommend Imagify is that it works seamlessly with WP Rocket. Both plugins work like a dream together to improve your website speed and performance.

GT Metrix

GT Metrix is a fantastic tool to test your website’s speed and performance. GTmetrix offers a free version of its speed testing tool, which allows you to test your URL with several options.

By signing up for an account for free, you can also select the location in which you want to see how fast your website loads and choose which browsers you would like to test with (Chrome and Firefox).

Mobile versions are available only in the premium plans..but fear not, there’s a great free mobile testing tool below.

Page Speed Insights

This is a fantastic free tool to test your website’s speed on mobile. As you can see from the image below it reports a number of very important metrics about your site that can work on improving if you need to.

This tool also provides ways in which you can improve your site’s speed and tells you which areas you specifically need to focus on.

Mobile speed is more critical than ever in 2022 and beyond, so it’s important you improve yours if you need to.

Take a look at mine:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is by far one of the best SEO tools on the list in my professional opinion. Originally launched in 2005, Google Analytics is an analytics software used to track and report on website data.

Back in early 2022, Google announced they would be rolling out a major update to analytics on the 1st of July 2022 – also my birthday (remember the date).

What was the update?

Let me introduce you to GA4. Unlike the previous version of analytics, GA4 (Google Analytics 4) has been designed to allow for easier tracking and measurement in the form of ‘events’.

This allows website and app owners alike a greater insight into what actions visitors are taking, therefore providing a much clearer understanding of the areas they need to improve on. Some of the events you can track include:

• Page Views
• Scrolls
• Outbound Clicks
• Site Search
• Video Engagement
• File Download
• First Visit

I actually track these same kinds of events for most of my SEO clients and include the results in my reports – it can be very helpful.

GA4 also works seamlessly with Google Tag Manager, so if you need to track additional events such as specific buttons on your website, you can easily do this.

If you’re currently using Google Analytics but haven’t made the switch to the new GA4, I strongly advise you do this as soon as possible.

Likewise, if you are completely new to this but want to get set up, I highly recommend you watch the Loves Data Youtube channel, it’s incredibly helpful and easy to understand.

Grammarly

If you haven’t heard of Grammarly before then you’re welcome, because I’m about to make your life so much better.

Grammarly is a cloud-based typing assistant that reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity and a whole lot more. I use the Grammarly for Chrome extension, which checks my spelling and grammar when I’m writing emails, blog posts, posting on social media and doing work for my SEO clients.

It’s probably one of the most useful and efficient tools I’ve ever used and guess what? It’s completely free!

Hemingway Editor

Conclusion

Hopefully, this guide has inspired you to try out some SEO tools that you hadn’t yet considered. But don’t take my word for it—give them a try and see how they work for you. If you experiment with a variety of SEO tools, as opposed to sticking with one, your overall SEO strategy will be stronger.

Whether you are a self-proclaimed SEO nut like myself or just looking to improve your online presence, the next few years will be a fun place to watch.

Will my list of the best SEO tools still be as good in the future? Or will there be bigger, better, and more beneficial tools? Who knows…but I will make sure that this blog is updated so that it continues its usefulness.