Best SEO Tools for Bloggers
Blogs, whether personal or commercial, have come a long way since the moment they first started out on the Internet some 20+ years ago. From merely a place of self-expression or thought storage they have turned into a legit and often quite profitable way of making money, generating value and forming public opinion. That is why many blog owners are driving a very serious and practical approach towards their blog management today. An important part of that approach is SEO.
To keep your blog up with shifting trends and afloat the sea of hot discussion topics, you need to implement SEO best practices on a daily basis, creating backlinks, optimizing content for better searchability and access and engaging and expanding the audience. We have prepared a comprehensive list of tools that will help you in every aspect of your SEO management to make your blog into a commercial powerhouse.
Serpzilla
You aren’t surprised we’d place ourselves as number one, right? However, we can proudly say that we aren’t doing it for no reason. Serpzilla is an invaluable asset for bloggers, both professionals on a large scale, beginners, mainstream and niche blogs. Serpzilla has great outreach capacity and a proven pool of high-quality websites and blogs ready to promote you in a way that would be relevant, organic and profitable.
Brief Overview
Serpzilla is a full-features web-based SEO platform that offers a wide variety of analytic tools and services for your blog promotion and link-building with highly customizable, tailored for your specific needs user experience.
Key Features
Serpzilla boasts an up-to-date and extensive pool of blogs and websites, organized by niche, where you can buy and place your backlinks, guest posts and promote your blog locally or globally. It also offers instruments for link building and management and competitor analysis/
Pros and Cons
Serpzilla’s wide variety of features is free to use, you only pay for backlinks or guest post placement itself. It also offers excellent customization opportunities for your outreach. It has a huge database for your perusal and allows for excellent global reach, however, can be a little overwhelming for bloggers who only wish to promote their content locally.
Trial Period and Pricing
Serpzilla is free and there is no entry fee to start using it. It also accommodates all kinds of SEO budgets as it offers backlinks and guest posts in many pricing categories, and a backlink can cost as low as $0.01.
Tools for Keyword Research
Optimizing your content for the right keywords in your niche is still at the core of any SEO strategy. It is an intricate and extensive work that has to be done on a daily basis and requires the help of professional tools. Keyword Research Tools will help you stay on top of any changes in search requests your potential audience and customers use to locate businesses and blogs like you. Using this information, you can make your content more accessible to your readers and eventually rank higher with Google.
Google Keyword Planner
Brief Overview
While this tool is not devised specifically for blogging, its main features such as locating new keywords for specific niches, will help you find keywords that aren’t evident and are less direct than the obvious ones. This is especially relevant, if you are running a Google Ads campaign and want to optimize your budget, because the competition for popular keywords is high.
Key Features
Basically, it’s all about discovery of new keywords that can lead to you in Google searches. People craft most unusual search requests and Google takes into account anything. Ths tool will help you understand the search volume, synonymic paradigms, frequency of use and other important stats that will make your ad campaign more targeted and less expensive. It also provides estimated bids for the keywords you’re looking into.
Pros and Cons
One of the biggest advantages of the tool is that it’s free and it works with semantic paradigms, so it will also generate and display keywords that are interconnected with your query, like a thesaurus will show you all the synonyms for a particular word. However, it does have a downside, too. The analysis it provides is far from in-depth and some of the connections are illogical to the point of not being very reliable.
Pricing and Trial Period
The fully functional version is free of charge, but requires a Google Ads account to access.
SEMrush
Brief Overview
Keyword research is but one of many functions of SEMrus, which is an all-in-one SEO package. SEMrush is considered to be the stable professional SEO tool and offers 3 instruments for keyword research and management: Keyword Magic Tool, Keyword Gap, and Keyword Manager.
Key Features
The Keyword Magic Tool generates thousands of keyword combinations from one seed keyword and explores a keyword toolbox. The Keyword Gap helps to discover new directions for launching efficient SEO campaigns. The Keyword Manager saves time by automatically creating cluster lists of up to 2,000 keywords. Users can research the organic and advertising value of any keyword based on search volume, intent, keyword difficulty, number of results, CPC, competition level, SERP features, variations, and other metrics.
Pros and Cons
The obvious advantage of SEMrush is that it is a universally acclaimed tool that can be used to cover almost any SEO needs. It also offers the professional level of analysis and is great for working with data. However, it has a significant learning curve and is more of an enterprise level tool in terms of both features and pricing. It is on the expensive side and not many smaller businesses want to invest in it.
Pricing and Trial Period
Single user Pro plan starts at $119 per month and Business Pro Plan will cost you $449. However, you can sign up for a free trial period before you commit to a paid plan.
Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
Brief Overview
Ahrefs is another ‘go-to’ tool selection when you need all your SEO needs to be taken care of in a single software piece and another staple SEO instrument. Its keyword research, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer offers all the keyword study features that you would expect from an enterprise level boxed solution.
Key Features
It allows you to evaluate keywords based on all the typical keyword metrics such as search volume, intent, keyword difficulty, number of results, CPC, competition level, SERP features, variations, etc. One of the more outstanding features is, however, rather precise estimations on the possible number of clicks for this or that query.
Pros and Cons
The biggest and obvious advantage is similar to SEMrush. It is a great tool for in-depth analysis and whatever data you gather for your keywords adds up to a holistic and integrated analysis of your other SEO activities and metrics, giving you a very clear picture and an ability to make very probable predictions. On the downside, it is expensive, and some users also reported that the keyword tool sometimes suggest random words.
Pricing and Trial Period
Ahrefs offers a range of pricing plans, starting from $119 per month for the Lite plan, $179 per month for the Standard plan, $399 per month for the Advanced plan, and $999 per month for the Agency plan. It used to have an $7 trial period for 7 days, but that has been discontinued.
Tools for Traffic and Audience Analysis
It is common knowledge that once you reach a certain volume and presentation on the Internet as a blogger, you need analytics to improve. In fact, you probably need analytics before you even start, if you plan on monetizing your blog in any way or drawing an active growing following. Here are a few tools that will be most useful for gathering and processing various data for you to plan your strategy with your blog.
Google Analytics
Brief Overview
A universal and quite versatile tool that integrates with practically any blog platform or social media. It’s easy to use, doesn’t require a special skill set or a learning curve and is great when you’re starting out, when you’re a one-man team or when you do not need intricate in-depth performance analysis on a large scale.
Key Features
Google Analytics is a simple yet powerful tool for traffic analysis. It provides data on visitor demographics, device usage, and geographical location, and also other insights into user behavior, campaign performance, and website interactions. All-in-all, it’s an excellent tool to get to know your audience better and provide tailored, targeted content for them.
Pros and Cons
If free and feature-rich is not enough for you, it also has an outstanding capability for integration. You can integrate it with every other Google product as well as a large number of third-party devices and apps. It also offers a rather wide range of data collection. However, unlike many other Google tools, known for its simplicity of use, it has a steep learning curve, which can be an intimidating thing for beginner SEO masters. Some users also raised privacy concerns, as data acquisition is being done through cookies.
Pricing and Trial Period
The tool is completely free to use, all you need is a Google account.
Tools for Website Analysis and Optimization
Not only websites can be SEO-optimized for better performance in SERP, audience outreach and driving organic traffic. Blogs benefit from such activities as well, so taking care to improve your blog in this respect is a must. The tools listed below will help you to analyze your blog performance, identify any issues that need to be fixed and gaps that you need to fill.
Google Search Console
Brief Overview
Google Search Console is a handy free web-app tool from Google that allows you to monitor your blog’s performance in search results and search traffic, overall as well as for separate keywords.
Key Features
Google Search Console analyzes your URLs, titles, and descriptions in order to make them more searchable and enticing for Internet users. It also analyzes your top-performing pages and has some backlink analysis features and helps you to see how your backlinks are performing. Monitoring your blog’s visibility and keyword performance with Google Search Console, you can increase your organic search traffic.
Pros and Cons
Among the advantages of the tool we would name a great reporting functionality where it gathers a lot of various data and presents it in a comprehensible, concise way. It can help you gather valuable insights about your blog and separate posts performance and understand what content drives traffic. Oh, and it’s also free and easily accessible. On the downside, it definitely doesn’t cover all your SEO needs and it has some data limitations, for instance, restricted amounts of data you can analyze.
Pricing and Trial Period
Like many other Google tools, it’s completely free and only requires a Google account.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Brief Overview
This powerful website crawler can do a lot of good for your blog, especially if you want a professional level of analysis. It is a desktop application that provides extensive SEO data as well as technical analysis, making its audit multifaceted and comprehensive.
Key Features
Easily scales its work so it will be a great fit regardless of your blog’s size. It also has a good integration capacity and works specifically well with various Google Tools such as Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights APIs to obtain user and performance data for all URLs. It also offers customizable crawl settings which allows you to gather highly specific analytic data.
Pros and Cons
One of the biggest advantages of this tool is its detailed technical analysis done together with SEO performance analysis. It is also highly customizable and configurable, so you can tailor its work for your particular blog specifics. However, Limited usability and support ratings compared to Google Search Console. It is also a desktop app, so you’ll have to have a PC to work it.
Pricing and Trial Period
Screaming Frog SEO Spider offers a free version with a limit of 500 URLs, and a paid license to remove the limit and access advanced features. Fully paid plan starts from $199 a year.
Moz Pro
Brief Overview
Moz Pro is another behemoth in the world of SEO tools, offering an all-encompassing SEO toolkit which can easily be used on its own, so feature-rich it is. Its website optimization and analysis features are specifically handy for blog owners, as its data helps you to work on your ranking, increase your traffic and SERP performance.
Key Features
Moz Pro provides accurate keyword volume and difficulty metrics, allowing blog owners to strategically target keywords and create content accordingly. It also offers a rank tracking tool to help you see the changes in your rank and attribute them to shifts in your content making activity. It provides on-page optimization, audits for your blog and has a custom reporting tool, among other cool features.
Pros and Cons
One of the most prominent advantages for bloggers is the high accuracy of its metrics which allows you to fine tune your content and be aware of many influences that cause changes. It also provides a very extensive and thorough audit, making your SEO policy decisions for your blog very well based and educated. Its feature richness allows you to drop many other paid tools. However, as a high-end tool, it’s expensive, and it lacks depth when it comes to technical analysis.
Pricing and Trial Period
Moz Pro offers a 30-day free trial for new users, allowing them to experience the features of the Moz Pro Medium plan, which is worth $179, at no cost. As for paid tariffs, there are four pricing plans, starting at $99 per month for the Standard plan and going up to $599 per month for the Premium plan.
Backlink Analysis Tools
Building and maintaining a solid and healthy backlink profile is essential for bloggers. Blogging today is a highly competitive sphere, so whatever the niche you work in, chances are, there are other people who blog about the same thing and who will want a chunk of your audience. If you depend on Google rankings, getting rid of toxic backlinks in a timely manner and being linked to continuously from highly reputable sources helps you with your SERP. A good backlink profile also adds to your own reputation as a blogger and signifies that you have a good audience coverage and outreach. The tools below help you keep track of your backlinks and act quickly and effectively to keep your backlink profile in a good shape.
Ahrefs Backlink Checker
Brief Overview
Ahrefs Backlink Checker is a powerful tool that helps bloggers and website owners analyze their website’s backlink profile, discover new link opportunities, and improve their site’s search engine ranking. It is a part of Ahrefs larger suite and is also a staple tool on almost every SEO marketer working station.
Key Features
Ahrefs has one of the most extensive link indexes, containing information on around 400 billion pages, 3 trillion external backlinks, and 23 trillion internal links. It provides many details about quality and quantity of backlinks taking users to your blog, allowing you to identify potential link opportunities and areas for improvement in your backlink profile strategy.
Pros and Cons
The tool is excellent for competitor backlink analysis and keyword analysis, allowing you to make well-informed decisions about your link building. It also draws from a huge pool of links, so whatever data it provides, will have high levels of accuracy and relevance. However, it has a learning curve and takes time getting familiar with. It also is quite pricey for its very specifically focused functionality.
Pricing and Trial Period
Ahrefs Backlink Checker offers a free version with limited features, and paid plans starting at $99 per month for the Basic plan, which provides access to more advanced features and tools.
Majestic
Brief Overview
Majestic is a tool that is similar to Ahrefs in functionality, but there are significant differences. It claims to operate the largest link database in the world and offers many metrics for both your own and your competitor blog analysis.
Key Features
Majestic has an absolutely massive link database, containing information on around 400 billion pages, 3 trillion external backlinks, and 23 trillion internal links. It also offers data on quantitative and qualitative analysis of your and competitor backlinks and keywords.
Pros and Cons
Majestic operates important metrics many users find immensely powerful: Trust Flow and Citation flow. These metrics allow to estimate domain authority and trustworthiness of the backlink sources. While offering very similar functionality to Ahrefs, it is also cheaper. However, many users find it less user-friendly and counter-intuitive.
Pricing and Trial Period
Majestic offers a free version with limited features, and paid plans starting at $49.99 per month for the Lite plan, which gives you access to more advanced features and tools.
Competitor Analysis Tools
Knowing your competitor is almost as important as keeping up with your allies, and it is especially true for blogging, where a loyal following is key to driving value and monetization opportunities. And that audience can be easily drawn to a more active or enterprising competitor. That is why monitoring your competition and analyzing their successful moves and failures will help you to avoid mistakes they make and learn from their achievements. The tools below will help you do just that.
SEMrush
Brief Overview
SEMrush provides a suite of web marketing tools to help with SEO competitor research and analysis. It offers various features to uncover every aspect of competitors’ online presence, including traffic analytics, organic research, advertising research, and social media tracking.
Key Features
When comparing your performance with that of your competition, SEMrush allows you to Benchmark your blog traffic against other blogs of your specification and analyze top traffic sources, bounce rate, and time on page. It also helps you to discover search competitors and analyze their keywords, identifying new venues of competing against them for yourself.
Pros and Cons
SEMrush allows you not only to research your competitors’ SEO efforts, but also their ad campaigns. It is also one of the few SEO tools that has a social media tracker that helps you to analyze your competition’s presence and engagement in social media, their audience, coverage and social signals. However, it is a pricey tool that may be out of the financial scope for smaller blogs. Some features also have a steep learning curve if you are a SEO beginner.
Pricing and Trial Period
SEMrush offers a maximum of 14 days for a trial period and their license price starts at $119 per month for a regular license and goes up to $449 for a pro license a month.
SpyFu
Brief Overview
SpyFu is a SEO and PPC research and competitive analysis tool that helps users, including bloggers, identify the most profitable search terms in their competitors’ paid and organic search campaigns.
Key Features
With this tool, you can analyze other blogs’ backlink strategies, gather data about their ranking history and top posts. If they run Google Ads campaigns, you can discover their profitable keywords and ad strategies. You can also monitor keyword ranking of your blog and compare it against your competition.
Pros and Cons
An affordably priced tool which has a user-friendly interface and when you need competition analysis and keyword performance tracking combined with backlink research, you get a good value for your money. However, compared to all-in-one SEO suites, it offers limited functionality and compared to other backlink analysis tools, its analysis is only surface level.
Pricing and Trial Period
You can try it for free for a period of a month and paid options start at $39 a month if you don’t need an API access. Full premium costs $299 per month and allows team work, unlimited keywords tracking and working with their API.
Tools for Creating and Optimizing Content
If you say that writing engaging blog content is pure creativity and art, we would totally agree, but that doesn’t mean you cannot enhance and streamline it to make your life easier and to free your creative streak from some of the more menial content-writing tasks like SEO optimization, analysis and even basic spelling and readability checking. The tools below will ensure that content you create is not only high-quality but it also works for your blog performance, better stats and monetization.
Yoast SEO (for WordPress)
Brief Overview
Yoast SEO is a simple yet powerful WordPress plugin that helps websites blogs better in SERP by taking care of the technical aspects of SEO such as text structuring, tagging and keyword distribution.
Key Features
With this plug in, you can enhance your blog posts by improving their readability, keyword presence, density and distribution, meta descriptions and titles. All of this will boost up your posts performance without taking from its creativity.
Pros and Cons
It has good and easy-to-follow SEO templates that help you automate your SEO optimization processes for every blog post. Its functionality can offer something to both beginners and experts. It also boasts an active community which constantly creates great learning courses and how-tos. It has a good feature set in its trial version, however, you need to buy it to unlock its more advanced features.
Pricing and Trial Period
There’s no trial period per se, as they have a limited free version that still offers quite a bit of functionality, great if you’re just starting out. Their full package costs $99 per year.
Clearscope
Brief Overview
Clearscope is considered to be a high-end, best-in-class SEO content optimization tool that also offers additional competitor and keyword analysis features. It strives to help users create highly relevant and shareable content to improve search engine rankings and SERP performance.
Key Features
It offers a wide range of content optimization tools, such as grading your content according to relevant SEO standards, keyword usage analysis, readability and relevance. It also offers tools for in-depth keyword and competitor analysis.
Pros and Cons
Clearscope offers a cool feature that is keyword detection for future relevance. Among its advantages we can also name powerful content optimization, friendly user interface and excellent customer support. However, it is definitely a high-end tool with high prices and may not be affordable for smaller blogs and businesses.
Pricing and Trial Period
It offers a trial period that some say can be individually negotiated. Paid subscription starts at $170 per month.
Social Media Management Platforms
If you run a blog, social media is not just part of a suite for you, it is your weapon, means to spread the word for you, to leverage your followers and get the wheels of organic traffic rolling for you. But social media presence requires a lot of management, since it is a known fact that various platform audiences have their own highly specific differences and each requires a disparate approach. Managing several social media profiles usually requires tooled help. Here are some tools to aid you with this.
Hootsuite
Brief Overview
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that allows bloggers to manage and schedule posts across various social media platforms from a single dashboard. It offers such key features for social media management as post scheduling, content curation, analytics, and team collaboration.
Key Features
A powerful dashboard allows you to single-source all your social media content, but still make it different, considering particular social network quirks.It also offers a wide variety of analysis and reporting tools so that you are on top of your social media activities.
Pros and Cons
Some prominent advantages of the platform include team collaboration functionality, great content curation features and excellent integration with third-party apps and devices. However, some users find the learning curve and interface intimidating and the free version is feature-limited.
Pricing and Trial Period
Hootsuite offers a 30-day free trial for its Professional plan, which is priced at $99 per month when billed annually. The Team plan is priced at $249 per month, and the Enterprise plan has custom pricing. The platform also offers special pricing for nonprofit organizations.
Buffer
Brief Overview
Similar in functionality to Hootsuite, Buffer is specifically popular among smaller teams and individual bloggers because it is more user-friendly and is a lot more affordable.
Buffer offers every key functionality for social media management: post scheduling and monitoring of post engagement, analytics, reporting and team collaboration.
Key Features
Buffer allows you to manage, schedule and analyze all your social media posts from a single place. It also offers valuable insights about the best predicted time of publishing your content for better engagement and performance.
Pros and Cons
One of the cool perks of Buffer is that it’s available as a browser extension. It also has great customer support, offers a very feature-rich free version and has a user-friendly interface. Among its downsides we can name limited third-party app and device integration capacity and the lack of some more advanced features as compared to its competitors.
Pricing and Trial Period
Buffer offers a generous free plan with limited features, as well as Pro and Premium plans priced at $15 and $65 per month.
