11 Best SEO Tools for 2024 [Reviews, Pricing, and Buyers Guide]

Surfer SEO

Get keyword ideas, analyze your content, audit your websites and build content for your SEO campaigns knowing what to include.

Semrush

Semrush is the swiss army knife of SEO tools with everything under one roof including competitive analysis, keyword tracking and rankings, and topical authority maps along with a whole lot more. 

Every business wants to be at the top and ranking for their most prized keywords so they can get more traffic, leads, and sales. 

The key with SEO is it's a grand opportunity for branding as well as there is a certain level of trust and authority conveyed when you rank # 1 in Google.   

Inside this guide, we'll review the top software that will help you with your search engine rankings. 

Without wasting any time, let's dig in. 

The # 1 Spot - Semrush

Semrush is a must have tool for anyone looking to run a digital business with SEO. 

Affiliate and local service marketers will find it has a large array of tools that give you data like nothing else.

Pros

  • Easily track your current rankings so you can go after quick wins and deep dive into further keywords taking over topics. 
  • Gives you the foundation for competitive analysis and building keywords to target with keyword difficulty
  • Analyze backlinks so you can see what you need to do to "outdo" your competitors and identify which "aged" domains may be toxic
  • The SEO Content Template tells you what to create your content around making it a breeze to build out content that ranks
  • Using the Topic Research function, you can build out topical authority maps with ease.  It's very easy and takes a complicated subject and gives you a fool-proof plan of attack.
  • Test it out with a trial offer before you invest

Cons

  • This is not the cheapest option by no means however the data and all the tools are well worth the investment
  • It's a lot to unpack and the interface can be a bit overwhelming due to all the features, however they have an excellent on-boarding process with their follow up emails to make sure you know where to start. 

# 2 AI SEO System

I admit it. 

I'm a little partial to this coming in at # 2. 

The reason? 

This is my very own SEO tool for building out long form content in bulk. 

And if you want to see a short on how we use these to build out localized SEO service pages then watch this one here

This has been one of my favorite creations (and there's been a lot of products over the years). 

The reason is it's so simple. 

Literally, you paste in keywords that you want to create content around and it prompts ChatGPT for long form article that ranges in 1,000 - 3,000 words of content. 

# 3 Surfer SEO

If you're looking to take your SEO to the next level with your content creation and skip all the guesswork, then Surfer SEO is for you

This tool is like giving you a pair of x-ray goggles to see what's currently working in your market and what modifications to make with your SEO. 

Once inside, you'll see missing content and how to optimize your content for the Search Engines. 

Features:

  • Content Planner allows you to do a deep dive into "clustering" your content to take over your niche.
  • The Content Editor gives you the exact framework of your content and what to include that current pages are ranking for on the first page of Google.  
  • The audit feature allows you to get a bird's eye view at how your site looks versus your competitors.

What's It Used For?

This an be used for affiliate marketers, content creators, as well as SEO professionals that are looking to get their on page content optimized like a well-oiled machine.   (Here you can see the full Surfer SEO review.)

This software has all the technical analysis under one dashboard that allows you to easily see modifications to make with your current content as well as with your new content creation pieces. 

Disadvantages:

  • When auditing your site for your keyword, you'll need to modify the site selections to ensure you are competing with similar sites and not competing with a large authority site. 
  • Word count can be slightly off due to the fact it's analyzing all of the content on the page (for example - comments, bio's, sidebars, etc) and the averages can be higher due to one or two competitors having large pages. 

Pricing Details

Surfer SEO has 3 different pricing plans as you see above.  These prices reflected are based on an annual plan with a 17% savings.  

The pricing depends on how many credits you may need in your business. 

Regardless of where your business is at the moment, Surfer SEO is a tool that is unlike anything else to hit the market with unbelievable data allowing you to quickly analyze along with creating SEO friendly content.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs started off as a being known as the best backlink analyzer tool on the planet, yet has blossomed into so much more.   It's a must have tool for any SEO professional full of added tools and features. 

Features

  • Uncover backlinks from your competitors and domains you're looking to purchase.
  • Rank tracking so you can see where you're currently positioned in the serps (great for looking for quick wins).
  • Deep competitor analysis for creating a content creation plan.
  •  Ahrefs has more data and uncovers more links than any other tool.

What's It Used For?

Ahrefs is used primarily by SEO professionals and affiliate marketers. 

It's become a go-to tool because their data is some of the best in the business. 

Disadvantages

  • Their domain authority ranking fluctuates based on if the link is "no follow"
  • No indicator of Topical authority
  • Their pricing will force many users to look for other solutions.
  •  The credit-based system (that's all I'll say) 

Pricing Details

Ahrefs starts out at $99 per month with a 7 Day trial that you can find here

Rank Math SEO Plugin

Rankmath is the primary competitor to Yoast SEO for converting your WordPress installation into an SEO powerhouse allowing you to make your WordPress site SEO friendly. 

Features

  • Control your SEO meta data on per page, per post basis
  • Insert tokens for current year or month to capture longer tail phrases
  • Step by step installation making it the easiest SEO plugin on the planet
  • Easy import tool for Yoast SEO users
  • Built in sitemaps

What's It Used For?

This is a WordPress plugin used to configure your settings for SEO and how to configure the meta data for your websites to get you more traffic. 

It makes it super simple to setup and configure giving you complete control over your SEO settings inside the WordPress platform.  

Many of the free features you see with RankMath, other plugins charge a premium for. 

Disadvantages

  • Can be overwhelming with all of the SEO options to customize. 

Pricing Details

Rank Math is a freemium plugin with the premium version offering more features that include more schema data, tracking, Google News and Google Video sitemaps, along with Google trends integration. 

The premium version starts at $59 per year but it's not necessary. 

Click Here to Download

Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast SEO is a plugin for the popular blogging platform WordPress allowing you to create search engine friendly sites. 

Features

  • Allows you to customize your SEO titles and descriptions on per page, per post basis
  • Allows you to customize and optimize your site's SEO settings
  • Built in sitemaps
  • Allows you to easily No Index content for content you want to be kept hidden from the search engines.
  •  See a preview of how your site will look in the search results with page snippets.
  • Love the FAQ Schema built into the Gutenburg editor.

What's It Used For?

Using Yoast gives your WordPress website the needed tweaks to be able to rank in the search engines with complete customizations available. 

Disadvantages

  • Learning curve for those that aren't familiar with SEO
  • Not a fan of their content grading scores

Pricing Details

There are 2 versions of the plugin - Free and Premium.  The premium is $89 per year and gives you a few more features. 

The Free Version is good enough to get started and we will explain how to set it up in the future. 

ExpiredDomains.net

Expired Domains (.net) is a free web based software that allows you to see all the expired and auction domains. 

If you're looking for a domain for a new project, you can fire open this software to find domains that have existing authority and trust in the eyes of Google. 

Features

  • Search for thousands of domains from multiple domain providers
  • Find expired domains
  • Search for auction domains
  • Quickly scan through Way Back Machine
  • Sort based on Moz and Majestic scores
  • Advanced filtering to get the domains you want

Disadvantages

  • Lot of domains to choose from so it can be overwhelming
  • Not the best interface in the world but the site is 100% free

Pricing Details

The best part about using ExpiredDomains.net is it's 100% free. 

Click here for access. 

Keyword Surfer

Keyword Surfer is one of the best research tools that's put out by SurferSEO allowing you to get keyword ideas as well as a content creation tool that's 100% free.  

You can see the full write up and tutorial we did by going here - https://thinktanklab.com/keyword-surfer/

Features

  • Identify additional keywords
  • Easily see word count for the top 10 for your selected keyword
  • Generate an article based on Artificial Intelligene with an outline

Benefits:

Quickly get new keyword ideas along with search volume estimates. 

The great thing I love about this software is the Similarity gauge that lets you know how many of the keywords appear on the same page vs a different page. 

The similarity rating tells you when to compartmentalize all of the content on a single page instead of breaking it up into multiple post. 

If you're on a shoestring budget and looking to get involved with SEO, then Surfer's Keyword Surfer extension is a great way to get started. 

Pricing Details

Keyword Surfer is a Google Chrome Extension that you can add to your browser for free. 

Click here to access

Majestic

Majestic provides backlinking intelligence to your domains as well as your competitor websites. 

It's one of the most trusted metrics in the SEO space with their Trust Flow metrics and Topical Trust Flow. 

Features

  • Investigate backlink profiles of domains to see relevance and power
  • Investigates competitor links so you can build a backlinking campaign to outmaneuver your competition.
  • Topical Trust flow displays the relevancy of a web page.

What's Good?

The big advantage Majestic SEO has in the marketplace is their Topical Trust Flow metric. 

Since relevancy is a big part of SEO these days, this metric is one of more trusted metrics from SEO professionals. 

Disadvantages

  • While I love the Trust Flow and Topical Trust Flow metrics, it appears they don't find as many links as Ahrefs

Pricing Details

Majestic pricing starts out at $49 per month. 

Click Here for Access

Answer The Public

Answer the public is a free tool with a premium membership that allows you to gain insights into popular search terms and questions for the keywords and niches you're targeting

Features

  • Provides in depth data of popular searches and questions surrounding your keywords
  • Get insights into what your customers are looking for so you can craft better content
  • Graphical data makes it easier to read and conceptualize your cluster of content.

What's It Used For?

Answer the Public is used by bloggers, content creators, and SEO professionals primarily for coming up with content creation ideas and organizing content into clusters to provide full, in-depth articles for better search results.

Disadvantages

  • The pro versions are rather pricey.

Pricing Details

Free with a premium subscription that starts at $99 per month. 

Click For Access

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a software that allows you to quickly do audits for your sites. 

  • Quickly detect duplicate urls
  • Easily analyze SEO meta data from a 30,000 foot view
  • Finds broken links (this can be used to find expired domains or to monitor your own external links)

Cons

  • It's a downloadable software
  • Must throttle the crawls or you can crash your site. 

Pricing Details

You can do up to 500 Crawls for free or $149 per year for unlimited crawls. 

Click for Access

Beginners Guide to Choose SEO Tools For Your Budget

One of the things you must know is how you expect to use the software? 

Long gone are the days of clicking a button that cranks out millions of links to see your site skyrocket to the top. 

Now, there's more of a synergistic emphasis on the onpage aspects, relevancy, internal linking, and links. 

One factor is most SEO professionals and business owners look for is utilizing the WordPress platform. 

Even though WordPress is a blogging platform, when you install a theme, you can make it look however you want.  It can be a local site, a consulting site, a review site, or even a plain sales page. 

But by starting with the platform of choice, you're starting off on the right foot. 

It's super easy to create new content, change the look and feel, and add plugins (we mentioned a few in this review) that make the site into whatever you want it to be. 

The SEO can be broken down into the following: 

  • Keyword research and niche selection
  • Domain purchase
  • Website Creation (with an SEO framework in mind)
  • Internal linking
  • On Page SEO
  • Off Page SEO (backlinking)

As you can see there are many moving parts to the entire process and if you decide to hire someone to handle it for you, these are the pieces they're going to be looking at on an ongoing basis. 

SEO can be summed up by outdoing your competitors in all aspects - link building, on page, and having a higher domain authority. 

These all are taken into consideration when you're planning your attack. 

How Much Can I Expect to Pay for SEO Tools and Software?

It depends on the scope of work you're doing. 

For example, SEM Rush and Ahrefs are comparable which will provide you with backlinking data, keyword research, competitor analysis for markets to go after. 

Each of these start at $99 per month. 

When using tools like Surfer or Jasper, these are more geared toward helping you with the content creation aspects, however if you're on a shoestring budget, consider using the Keyword Surfer tool which is free until you get the ball rolling with your SEO business. 

Free tools like Rank Math and Yoast SEO are plugins that are available to install with WordPress and are part of the open source community within WordPress. 

Most sites are built using the WordPress platform. 

These tools are essential to any website you may build.

Final Conclusion

Currently, there's never been a better time for SEO professionals because of all of the tools we have at our disposal. 

When I began promoting affiliate products and dabbling in SEO, there was a lot of guessing, however with the keyword tools, backlinking checkers, and competitive analysis, SEO is now very data driven and predictable. 

If you're just starting out wondering where to turn, then I'd first take a spin with Surfer SEO's free tool called Keyword Surfer.

It's a chrome extension for keyword research and competitive analysis which gives you more than enough to get started with. 

Next, I'd give my AI SEO System a go because you can build out some pretty solid SEO articles in mass in no time without having to know any complex code.

All you need is to paste your keywords into one of our Google sheets. 

These solve the biggest bottleknecks in the SEO space - creating quality content that gets ranked. 

Next, I'd setup my WordPress site using Thrive Suite or Generatepress themes with either Yoast or Rank Math either one for customizing the SEO meta data. 

Then build out your marketing stack as outlined in my Automated Links System - it's a way to create, automate, and be everywhere while building links on autopilot from your branded profiles. 

Once you get the ball rolling with these tools, track where your site's current positioning is showing up in the Google Search console.

Continue to add content, links, while making modifications using regular audits with Semrush tracking your results along the way. 

Rinse and repeat. 

At the end of the day, there's no way to be able to do some of the things we do manually. 

SEO software is a must, and hopefully this guide has given you the resources to help your business grow in the search engines. 

About the Author: Derek Pierce

I'm a digital marketer that specializes in affiliate marketing, SEO, and coaching others to build online businesses. On this site, you'll find strategies, tools, and reviews to help you grow and scale your digital business.

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