(Or SEO Tools I Love and Would Marry)
Martin Clinton
SEO and content can’t be done without paid tools, whether big all-in-one suites and platforms or smaller specialized ones. I’m the first to admit I love new, shiny things (in true ADD fashion): clicking on the license, discovering all the features, seeing how much they boost productivity and the quality of my work, the cool colors, cute favicons, and so on.
This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list or an in-depth guide to everything out there. There are so many that it would be overwhelming to list them all, so I’m limiting this to my favorite paid SEO tools, and the features I use the most.
I find these absolutely indispensable and have been using them for years. Some I love so much that I’d go as far as saying I’d marry them (if one could have software as a significant other).
These are the basic categories and areas I use these premium tools for :
- Crawling
- Audits (all types)
- Keyword Research and Rank Tracking
- The QA Process
- On-Page SEO & Content Optimization
- Content Strategy
- Competitor & Market Research
- Link Building
1. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog has been around for years and is my go-to for running crawls, whether of entire sites or more surgical crawls of lists of URLs. It starts at around $260 a year and I use it in site audits, and the QA process like checking internal linking, title tags, and meta descriptions, verifying site migrations, and competitive research.
They’re continually updating and adding new capabilities and reports so it’s always getting better. Just about anything can be pulled from a Screaming Frog crawl, such as image sizes, schema data, and page depth. Plus, it has all kinds of cool reports built-in.
The Frog is run locally, so it’s more suited for sites below enterprise size, though it can be configured and hosted in the cloud, such as AWS, which I’ve done before. I’ve run it this way on sites with millions of URLs when there hasn’t been a budget for the big cloud-based crawlers.
Another feature that makes Screaming Frog especially useful is its API connectivity. It can connect with the big tool suites (AHREFS, Majestic, Moz) and Google Analytics, GA4, Google Search Console, and my favorite, Pagespeed Insights. That is super useful when doing speed optimization. You can combine the crawl with Google and link data into a “Super Crawl” to get a near 360’ view of a site.
Perhaps its coolest feature is the ability to visualize sites using force-directed diagrams and tree graphs. It’s incredibly useful in getting a literal picture of a site’s architecture, and a huge plus for visual learners like me. You can zoom in and move around to really see how a site is put together because it shows different nodes representing areas like category and subcategory pages.
This used to be cumbersome to do with third-party tools and software. Plus, it’s very useful in explaining to executives and clients how their sites are built and where the bottlenecks are.
2. AHREFS
AHREFS was originally a backlink data provider (when I first used it) and has evolved into a full suite of tools for SEO and content. It now handles keyword research, rank tracking, technical SEO, and content research in addition to being the best in class for its original mission. It starts at $99 a month.
Keyword Research and Rank Tracking
I start my keyword research and do rank tracking here as well, and I like that results are available by country and language. Similar to SEMRush, searches and results are sortable by intent, exact, and broad match, and you can build lists.
What really makes AHREFS keyword data indispensable is their estimation of clicks each keyword gets, something no other tool I’ve found does. Evaluating keywords based on potential clicks is the way to go and is superior to going by volume alone, and is particularly useful in this zero-click age.
Quality Ratings
The people at AHREFS have devised their own quality metrics for the page level (URL rating) and full domain (Domain Rating). I prefer these metrics to those of any other platform.
Content Research
The Content Explorer is a search engine for content and topic discovery, with about 11 billion pages crawled. You can search for topics, niches, and performance, and results tie in nicely with their referring domain data. This makes it a perfect tool for link building as well as planning potential content, and it shows estimated traffic, ranking keywords, domains, and social shares over time.
It also incorporates search operators, (a great nerdy bonus for me) for really targeted searches.
Linkbuilding
Keeping with its original purpose, AHREFS Site Explorer is still the best link-building tool out there. You can drill into a site’s referring domains and links to see exactly what types of content earned links and from where.
It also makes finding broken links and link reclamation super easy, along with finding unlinked brand mentions. Those two features alone have often yielded enough reclaimed links in a few days to pay for my monthly subscription.
3. SEMRush
SEMRush is a suite of tools for all areas of digital marketing, but I use its SEO and content daily. I’m not going to do a comprehensive review or guide to everything the platform does, since there’s plenty out there. This is about my favorite uses and features, and plans start at $120 a month.
Keyword Research & Rank Tracking
The Keyword Magic tool is one of my starting-off points for keyword research and leads down some productive rabbit holes. You can search by exact match, broad match, related terms, and questions, and save them in lists for monitoring or export. Plus, they classify each keyword by user intent: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. Keyword data is available for multiple countries and languages, which is a big plus when doing international SEO and localization.
Along with AHREFS, I use SEMRush for rank-checking tracking, and they have a robust API that allows for exporting to Google Data Studio dashboards.
Competitor Traffic Estimates
Finding an estimate of a competitor’s traffic – even a rough one – is crucial for all kinds of content and SEO tasks. While many different platforms provide third-party traffic estimates, SEMRush was found to be the most accurate. It’s the next best thing to having actual analytics access.
On-Page SEO
SEMRush has a very cool On-Page SEO Checker that gives really nice snapshots of a page’s optimization. I especially like the semantic keyword ideas, how it shows content length compared to the top-ranking pieces on a topic, readability, and an assessment of a page’s technical content optimization.
Content Research
I particularly like the Topic Research tool, which is where I start when qualifying and researching potential topics. You can save results into “cards”, which can then be exported for further analysis and sorting. This pairs well nicely with AHREFS’ Content Explorer.
Content Writing
SEMRush’s Writing Assistant is a gem that has definitely helped improve the content I write and work on. It’s available as a Google Docs Chrome extension and WordPress plugin. It evaluates your writing in real-time, indicating progress in four areas: readability, optimization, originality, and tone of voice. Progress and results are shown in a cool spider chart.
4. ContentKing
With real-time auditing, change detection, and alerts, ContentKing is essentially an alarm system for your website. There’s no more waiting to find out that things are broken.
ContentKing constantly monitors your site, sending alerts for when things break or change, such as robots.txt, page status, indexability, metadata, on-page changes, canonicals, and more. I particularly like how it monitors javascript rendering and lets you drill into pages to compare the DOM vs source code so you’ll know that your content is being shown to users.
There’s a dashboard for tracking and reviewing status and issues, and it shows progress and changes over time, and assigns scores for the overall health of your site.
ContentKing has been a huge boost to my technical SEO efficiency and has saved me wasted traffic and money when things have broken by letting me know right away.
5. Rank Math
When I first heard about Rank Math, I kept seeing it described as the best possible SEO WordPress plugin. As soon as I started using it, I saw this wasn’t hyperbole. It blows away Yoast, the main competition.
I’ve used Rank Math on the WordPress portion of sites I’ve worked on, as well as this one. It really makes SEO fun, almost gamified (at least to me, because I’m a nerd like this).
Rank Math works at the page and site level, where you get real-time optimization progress as you’re writing pages. Enter a page’s main keyword, and the tool tells you if it’s in the meta info, page title, and body content and also scores readability. Rank Math prompts you to make changes and tweaks until your score goes into the green.
At the site level, Rank Math offers global settings for things like redirects, sitemaps, and schema data. You can even validate schema code from within the plugin!
It also integrates with Google Analytics and Search Console to give you a nice SEO overview from within WordPress. It now integrates with GA4, which is really cool.
Their tagline is “the Swiss Army knife of SEO”, and it’s definitely not the spoon.
Wrapping Up
There’s no shortage of my favorite paid SEO tools, and while this is a short list, and I’ll be adding more of my favorite toys.
I’d love to hear what others have as their indispensable tools for their daily work – drop any into the comments or get in touch with me.
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