Best SEO Tools

If you are looking for the best SEO tools to save time, improve decision-making and support better SEO execution, this list will help you choose the right stack.

Best SEO Tools at a Glance

Tools by Google

Google Search Console (Free)

Google Search Console (GSC) is the most important free SEO tool for any website owner. Unlike third-party estimates, Search Console gives you first-party data directly from Google Search, which makes it invaluable for measuring actual visibility and diagnosing issues.

You can use Search Console to:

• View clicks, impressions, average position and CTR for your pages and queries.
• Inspect URLs to understand indexing status and request reindexing where needed.
• Review crawl stats and identify crawl inefficiencies.
• Monitor coverage, enhancement and structured data issues.
• Review backlink and internal linking data at a surface level.

Best for: every site owner, SEO consultant, in-house SEO and technical SEO.

Google Analytics 4 (Free)

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is essential if you want to connect SEO performance to actual business outcomes. Search Console tells you how users find you in Google. GA4 helps you understand what those users do once they land on your site.

• Measure conversions, revenue, engagement and events from organic traffic.
• Analyse landing page performance beyond clicks and rankings.
• Compare SEO traffic quality against other channels.
• Understand where SEO is contributing to leads, sales or assisted conversions.

Best for: anyone who wants to prove the business impact of SEO rather than just report on rankings and clicks.

Organic Trends – a focused GSC workflow tool

One of the biggest blind spots in Google Search Console is separating branded from non-branded traffic properly over time. Total clicks can look healthy while discovery stagnates. I built Organic Trends to solve that specific problem. It connects directly to Search Console and automatically segments your traffic into brand and non-brand buckets so you can measure true organic growth instead of just brand demand.

You can analyse brand dependency, track non-brand trajectory, review CTR by position, and export classified query data without relying on spreadsheets, BigQuery exports or manual regex filtering.

Google Trends (Free)

Google Trends visualises the relative search popularity of a keyword over time. It is especially useful for seasonality, brand comparison, breakout trends and spotting whether a topic is gaining or losing momentum.

Google Lighthouse / PageSpeed Insights (Free)

The old standalone Mobile-Friendly Test is no longer available, so if you want to review mobile experience, rendering and performance, I would now use Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights instead.

The PageSpeed Insights tools let you test the web page performance of any given page, including checking Core Web Vitals such as LCP, CLS and INP. The PageSpeed insights also integrate the Lighthouse lab data of a given page. If you want to easily compare the performance metrics of your pages against each other or your competitors using Google PageSpeed Insights, check out PageSpeed Compare.

Bing Webmaster Tools (Free)

Bing Webmaster Tools is worth using alongside Google Search Console. It can provide additional crawl data, indexing visibility and keyword insights, and it is often underused by SEOs who focus only on Google.

All-in-One SEO Tools

Ahrefs / Semrush (Paid)

Google Search Console is very useful if you want to analyse your own site in depth. If you are looking for a tool to analyse your competition and adapt their best practices, Ahrefs and Semrush are still the two most established all-in-one SEO platforms.

These tools can help you:

• Get estimates of how much traffic your competitor sites are driving.
• See the keywords and rankings your website ranks for, their search volumes, keyword difficulty scores, etc., for today’s date or a historical date.
• Use built-in keyword research tools to find new keyword opportunities.
• Track keyword rankings with regular updates and benchmark competitors.
• Spy on competitors to see which pages are getting the most traffic, which keywords drive that traffic, and where their links come from.
• Find Featured Snippet opportunities.
• Run site audits to identify technical and on-page SEO issues.
• View backlinks and referring domains for any website.

My view: if you only pay for one major SEO platform, Ahrefs or Semrush will usually cover most needs for keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink analysis and rank tracking.

General rule of thumb: Ahrefs is often the stronger choice for backlink analysis and competitor content discovery, while Semrush tends to be broader across keyword research, site auditing and adjacent marketing workflows.

SEO Website Crawling, Log Analysis and Auditing Tools

Screaming Frog (Free / Paid)

Screaming Frog is THE SEO audit tool for analysing your website and finding technical SEO issues.

I use Screaming Frog on almost every technical SEO audit. It is one of the fastest ways to identify metadata issues, duplicate content, broken links, redirect chains, indexability problems and other common technical issues.

You can use Screaming Frog to run site audits, to find all sorts of technical SEO issues such as issues with metadata, content, broken links, non-200 status code pages, indexation checks, duplicate content issues, page size, messed up redirects and more. Screaming Frog also provides a separate LOG Analyser tool that provides invaluable SEO insights on Googlebot-crawled URLs.

It is also increasingly useful as a connector tool, especially when you want to combine crawl data with APIs such as Search Console and URL Inspection.

Botify / Lumar / Oncrawl / Sitebulb Enterprise Crawlers (Paid)

Screaming Frog is an industry-leading website crawler for technical SEO site audits. This should be enough if you are managing small to medium websites. If you are managing large enterprise websites, you would need an enterprise site audit solution such as Botify / Lumar / Sitebulb / OnCrawl to perform in-depth technical SEO analysis and site audits.

These tools are better suited to larger sites where crawl depth, log analysis, segmentation and ongoing monitoring matter more than just one-off audits.

SEO Rank Trackers

SEOmonitor / STAT / Rank Ranger Rank Tracking (Paid)

Ahrefs and Semrush can handle rank tracking for many websites, but when you need more robust rank monitoring, forecasting or deeper SERP analytics, specialist platforms are often a better fit.

My recommendation is to go for Pi Datametrics / SEOmonitor / STAT / Rank Ranger. These tools allow you to monitor, analyse and improve your SEO rankings across devices and locations. SEOmonitor is a great tool for tracking your rankings and forecasting.

Backlink Analysis Tools

Majestic / LinkResearchTools (Paid)

If you need more specialised link intelligence beyond what Ahrefs or Semrush provides, tools such as Majestic and LinkResearchTools can still be useful.

These are more niche than they used to be, but they can help with backlink audits, toxic link investigations, historical link analysis and deeper trust or authority-based link profiling.

SEO Chrome Extensions

Robots Exclusion Checker Chrome Extension (Free)

Robots Exclusion Checker is a free Google Chrome extension that alerts you to indexation or crawl restrictions of the page opened in your browser.

Ayima Redirect Path (Free)

Ayima Redirect Path is a free Google Chrome Extension that returns the page status code and path to the URL. Great to help identify bad status code pages and redirect chains.

View Rendered Source (Free)

View Rendered Source is a Chrome extension that allows you to compare the pre- and post-rendered versions of pages.

Web Vitals / Lighthouse Extensions (Free)

Rather than using too many overlapping performance extensions, I would keep this simple and use a Web Vitals or Lighthouse-based browser workflow to quickly review page experience issues while browsing.

International SEO Tools

MobileMoxie SERPerator (Free)

The SERPs change dramatically depending on your location. MobileMoxie’s SERPerator tool helps you check the SERPs across different locations and devices. A great tool to quickly check your International SEO Google rankings on mobile.

I Search From (Free)

I Search From is similar to SERPerator. I have been using this tool for years to view the SERPs from my client locations. A handy tool to validate your international SEO rankings.

Search Laboratory Regional SERP Selector (Free Chrome Extension)

The Search Laboratory Regional SERP Selector Chrome extension allows you to see what the Google SERPs look like for a chosen location or language. This is a great way to see if the correct version of your website is shown within the correct SERPs.

SEO Tools for Generating Content Ideas

AnswerThePublic (Free / Paid)

Most keyword research tools use Google Keyword Planner as their primary data source. AnswerThePublic is different and not your typical keyword research tool. The tool focuses on questions that people ask on forums, Quora, Reddit, blogs, social media, etc., and turns these questions into a list of keywords. A great tool when it comes to helping you with structuring your site content to answer search intent.

AlsoAsked (Free / Paid)

AlsoAsked is an AnswerThePublic alternative to discover the questions people are asking.

Outranking (Free / Paid)

Outranking is another useful option for finding People Also Ask questions and related questions.

Soovle (Free)

Soovle provides search suggestions and completions from the top providers on the internet for a given query.

AI SEO Tools

ChatGPT / Claude / Gemini / Perplexity

In 2026, AI tools will no longer be just “content writing tools”. They are now part of everyday SEO workflows.

I use AI tools for things like:

• Keyword clustering and search intent classification
• Rewriting copy for clarity or formatting content for extractability
• Summarising SERPs, content gaps or crawl outputs
• Brainstorming FAQs, title variants and briefing structures

AI Prompt Generator

AI Prompt Generator is a tool I built to help SEOs generate realistic prompts to track visibility across AI search platforms. Instead of guessing what prompts to monitor, it uses your page content to generate relevant prompt ideas that can be fed into AI visibility tracking workflows.

It is especially useful if you want to understand how your content might surface across tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, or if you are building a more structured AI visibility tracking process.

n8n

n8n is useful when you want to automate repetitive SEO workflows using AI and APIs. For example, it can be used to connect tools, enrich data, trigger alerts, classify keywords, generate briefs or automate reporting workflows without needing everything to be done manually.

Ocula

Ocula is more relevant for teams using AI to support content generation workflows at scale. It is useful in cases where businesses want to generate or optimise large volumes of product description content, although output quality, prompt design and human QA still matter heavily.

Speed Optimisation Tools

Site speed and page experience still matter, and any modern speed workflow should now explicitly consider INP (Interaction to Next Paint) alongside LCP and CLS.

PageSpeed Insights (Free)

PageSpeed Insights is the go-to tool for quickly checking Core Web Vitals and page performance data for a given URL.

GTmetrix (Free / Paid)

GTmetrix is useful for waterfall analysis and spotting page load bottlenecks.

WebPageTest (Free)

WebPageTest is one of the best tools for deeper performance testing, advanced waterfalls and rendering analysis.

Reddico SERP Speed Tool (Free)

Reddico offers a useful speed-testing workflow for comparing page performance.

Fast or Slow (Free)

Fast or Slow is particularly useful if you serve international users and want to test performance from multiple global locations.

Use a combination of these tools to identify major performance bottlenecks. In most cases, the waterfall view, render timings, and asset mix will help you understand whether images, JavaScript, third-party scripts or server response are the real issue.

Other SEO Tools

MOZ Domain Analysis (Free)

The MOZ Domain Analysis tool can be used to get a quick overview of a website’s authority. While Domain Authority should never be treated as a Google metric, it is still a useful comparative shorthand when sizing up websites at a glance.

Recommended Tool Stack by Use Case

SEO Tools I haven’t tested yet…

I have been recommended so many SEO tools over the years I have worked in SEO, but I just have not had the time to give them a proper try. I thought it would be worth listing them here to hear about your experience with using these tools.

SE Ranking is a good option if you want broader SEO functionality at a lower price point than Ahrefs or Semrush. It is especially useful for freelancers, smaller agencies and businesses that want rank tracking, site audits and keyword research in one place without the cost of an enterprise suite.

Frase (Paid)

Frase is useful if you want a more end-to-end AI-supported content workflow covering research, outlining, drafting and optimisation.

Surfer SEO (Paid)

Surfer SEO is one of the better-known tools for real-time content optimisation. It is most useful when you already know your target keyword and want live guidance on topical coverage, structure and optimisation while writing.

MarketMuse / SEOBoost (Paid)

If you want stronger content planning and topic depth analysis, tools like MarketMuse or SEOBoost are worth exploring, especially for teams producing content at scale.

Seolyzer.io: Crawler and log analysis for SEO.

Nozzle: Large-scale ranking data and dashboarding.

ContentKing: Real-time SEO auditing and monitoring platform.

Log Analysis and Monitoring Tools: Loggly / Logz.io / Logflare.

FAQs

What is the best free SEO tool in 2026?

Google Search Console is still the best free SEO tool overall because it gives you first-party performance and indexing data directly from Google.

Do I need paid SEO tools if I already use Google Search Console?

Not always. Search Console is enough for many smaller sites. Paid tools become more useful when you need competitor analysis, large-scale keyword research, backlink analysis, advanced crawling or rank tracking.

Which is better: Ahrefs or Semrush?

Neither is universally better. Ahrefs is often preferred for backlink analysis and competitor content discovery, while Semrush is broader across keyword research, site audits and adjacent marketing features.

What SEO tools do I use most often?

My core stack is Google Search Console, GA4, Organic Trends, Ahrefs, Botify, Screaming Frog and Pi Datametrics.

Have I missed your favourite SEO tool? Leave a comment and share your stack.