September 29, 2025
You can’t get anywhere in 2026 as an entrepreneur without a well-optimized website. It doesn’t matter if you have a more traditional business model where you provide goods or services to your local community, an online store or are trying to build a successful blog—you need SEO in your life.
Luckily, there are plenty of tools that can help you bump up your site’s position in the SERPs, and they’re not just for marketers and agencies—any site owner can use them to ensure they are focusing on all the website SEO best practices. You don’t need much to get started, as long as you are willing to put in a bit of extra time to learn the basics and make gradual improvements.
Now, the main challenges your site will face on the way to the top of the SERPs are technical issues like slow loading speed and crawl errors, Google’s algorithm changes, and the fact that your competitors are also working hard to rank higher.
To address all these key points, I’ll go over the best SEO tools for website owners that cover everything from keyword and backlink research to the technical aspects and rank tracking. Just know that, while the list will be quite extensive, you won’t need all these different tools to get the job done—you just have to build the right SEO stack that fits your budget.
The first thing to look into are keywords with a high monthly search volume and not too many people competing to rank high for them.
Experts pretty much universally agree that this is the essential step toward a better-positioned website, but why is that? Well, for a start, it allows you to align your pages with the proper search intent.
That just means knowing if the users are using certain keywords to get some general information, find a certain site or page, research different products and services, or if they are sitting at their computer, credit card in hand, looking for a specific product they are ready to buy.
You can also avoid wasting your time writing content that doesn’t match what most people are searching for, and make it easier to build a content strategy that you can scale up as you get more traffic. With all that in mind, let’s look at some of the best available tools you can use.
I’ve narrowed it down to seven effective options for different team sizes, needs, experience levels, and budgets. Some of these are full-stack options that can also do a bunch more, so you will be seeing them again in other sections.
This newcomer to the SEO world offers accurate info on keyword volume and clicks, and provides a SERP overview. It’s best for finding good long-tail options and keyword clusters that can help come up with content ideas. The pricing is quite affordable, and it offers a lot of free resources, making it ideal for small businesses and bloggers.
A go-to option for agencies for years now, Ahrefs has lots of useful metrics like volume, clicks, ranking difficulty, and ranking potential. It’s the best option for in-depth competitive analysis, and while it is quite expensive, the price tag is worth it for professionals who need a highly accurate tool.
Another big brand with expensive monthly packages, but the immense keyword database more than makes up for it if you have the budget. It excels at grouping keywords into themes, allowing you to quickly come up with content ideas, and is quite useful for agencies with clients in multiple industries.
A very useful and completely free option that comes straight from Google. However, it aggregates data, so it’s not the most precise. It’s a good choice for beginners or people who are already running a PPC campaign.
One of the more affordable offerings, and highly beginner-friendly. You get data on keyword difficulty and volume, though not as precise as the big competitors. It works quite well for small site owners looking for basic functionality.
A more visual approach to generating keyword ideas, with questions and comparisons, but with a limited scope. It’s best for finding “People Also Ask” style queries when developing a content plan.
This tool gives you access to useful long-tail suggestions, which may not have a high volume but come with laser-focused intent. It’s great for niche site owners.
Important note: Choose 1 pro tool (Rankioz or SEMrush) + 1 free tool (Google Keyword Planner) to get the best balance of cost and value.
The next step is to look at the content on your pages and iron out any issues with the structure and add the proper keywords.
Your titles and headers are still considered strong ranking signals, while meta descriptions directly affect click-through rates and user engagement.
You want to make it easy for search engines to determine the topic and hierarchy of each page, as this will improve visibility. The best part is that it doesn’t take much work to get things perfectly aligned, as long as you have a good tool to help you identify all the issues.
There are essentially six options that offer the best cost-to-value ratio and will help you learn how to use SEO for your website.
Rankioz
A beginner-friendly option with a very intuitive design and a quite detailed page analysis, Rankioz tells you exactly how to fix each issue it detects, and it’s all presented in a very clear and easy-to-understand way. It also has a free domain authority checker as an added bonus.
If you have a WordPress site, this plugin is easy to set up, and it will help with content readability and SEO checks, providing a detailed checklist. It’s a bit limited, though, and best for beginners.
A more advanced tool than Yoast, with plenty of advanced features like automation for schema markup and page redirects. It also allows you to optimize for multiple keywords and provides AI content assistance.
This is essentially a capable content editor, with some SERP analysis capabilities. It can show you a list of semantic terms with targets for keyword density, images, and subheadings, and a simplified scoring system.
If you want to write content that ranks well for competitive queries, this is the way to go. The tool is widely used by big publishers and features an AI content editor and real-time SEO score.
A Chrome extension for quick and easy on-page audits that also checks for broken links. It’s all about convenience, though you don’t get advanced features.
Important note: Plugins like Yoast or Rank Math are helpful—but don’t blindly chase green lights. Use these tools as guides, not rules set in stone.
Once you have the fundamentals down, it’s time to take a look under the hood of your website and see if there is anything holding it back that you can fix.
You need the very structure that all your other SEO efforts are built on to be solid. For example, technical aspects like site speed and Core Web Vitals can make or break a website. There can also be lots of issues with crawlability and indexing that are keeping some pages invisible in searches. That’s why you need to make sure everything is working smoothly.
There are a bunch of options to choose from, but the following ones are more than enough to set your website up for success.
GSC is not only free and handy—it’s an essential tool for tracking index status and fixing major errors that are limiting your visibility and tanking your rank in searches.
Essentially just a desktop web crawler that you can use to find broken links and duplicate content. It has some integrations with other tools that cover other aspects of SEO where Screaming Frog is lacking.
Designed for visual site audits, Sitebulb gives you access to detailed reports, making it easy to explain your decisions to clients or stakeholders.
Meant primarily for crawling large websites and meeting the needs of enterprises. It provides a highly detailed technical site audit.
Perfect for insights into various performance metrics and your Core Web Vitals. Page experience is a crucial ranking factor, so it’s quite important to optimize everything to make it easier for users to get around your site.
A good way to improve site speed is through a CDN, which stores cached content like images on servers closest to each visitor’s geographical area, making pages load much faster. That’s precisely what this tool does, along with boosting overall security and website performance.
After building a solid base, optimizing your content with keywords and publishing some blog posts, other sites will start to notice you and may link to you as a source of information. However, you have to monitor these links closely and find opportunities for more links from reputable sites.
Having another big and well-ranked website link to your pages is a huge trust signal for Google. However, not all links are made equal, and those from spammy or shady websites can be harmful. That’s why you need to focus on quality over quantity.
If you want to monitor your backlinks and identify good linking opportunities, then these are the tools you need in your arsenal.
Another excellent feature from one of the top tools on the market, with the best backlink index in the game. It also helps with competitor gap analysis, though, as mentioned, it does come at a steep price.
The reasonably large database and unique metrics like Trust Flow and Citation Flow will help you quickly identify good sources for backlinks vs toxic ones.
You not only get an overview of your own backlink profile, but this tool lets you closely examine your competitors’ links to determine their quality and anchor text distribution.
This is a capable outreach CRM for link building, where you can enter a keyword and get a list of prospects with DA and social media stats. You can also quickly discover contact info, making it easier to reach out to the top influencers in your niche.
With a large database of bloggers and websites, and several filters, this tool automates large-scale link outreach. It’s perfect for anyone looking to seriously boost their backlink profile.
An option mainly focused on finding emails for link requests, with handy features that allow you to find all emails linked to a company or an individual email based on a name and verify whether they are legitimate and still active.
Important note: Outreach tools save time — but spammy outreach burns bridges. Always personalize your emails.
So, you’ve used the tools from the previous sections, done everything by the book, and want to know if your efforts are bearing any fruit? Well, you are going to need an effective way to track your rank in the SERPS.
SEO is like a game of chess—the moves you make initially set up your long-term strategy, but it takes a while for everything to unfold. That’s why you need to identify all your wins and drops as early as possible, so that you can readjust and keep improving.
Here is a quick look at some of the top tools and the main characteristics that make them stand out from the rest of the pack.
The fastest and most accurate tracker out there that also monitors SERP features, e.g., featured snippets, and has great data visualizations to make everything easier to understand.
A highly accurate and fully automated option, with daily updates that give you the ability to create unlimited, fully customizable reports. It’s also fairly affordable.
Get access to keyword position flow and estimated visits in a regularly updated list, all in a beginner-friendly package. You can also set up email alerts and organize your keywords using tags.
Keep an eye on your position on different search engines, on both desktop and mobile platforms, and hone in on a specific location. Get all the information you need in streamlined visual reports.
Both tools have built-in trackers that let you keep an eye on your position in the SERP for various keywords and monitor your competition. You can also look at featured snippets and Google Map Packs.
Finding the right keywords allows you to come up with new content and optimize it, but it can be hard work, and you will need some help. From checklists to AI features, there are tons of ways these tools can show you how to get the best SEO for your website.
Yes, you need fresh topics, unique spins, and an engaging writing style to keep people glued to the screen and get them to trust your brand. However, you also need to increase the visibility of your pages and blog posts to get more eyes on them in the first place. That’s where content optimization comes in, and you’ll definitely want some assistance.
Let’s look at a few different options that can make the biggest impact on your content.
An easy-to-use tool that provides plenty of keywords and related phrases based on the best-ranking pages, and gives you a simple scoring system. The NLP-driven optimization can work really well, but don’t just focus on spamming lots of keywords to get a higher score.
Similar to the previous tool, only this one helps speed up the content writing process by generating AI briefs and Q&A sections that match your topic and chosen keyword.
Another tool that uses AI to provide topic suggestions and outlines, with custom content scoring to help you fine-tune each page and ensure website SEO best practices. It can help you deliver deep topical authority.
A great tool for those who need AI assistance to produce engaging and properly optimized content. It has templates for different formats, from blog posts to service pages, and you can integrate it with SurferSEO.
Once you have your content ready, these tools will help you polish it up. Grammarly fixes any basic mistakes and gives you stylistic suggestions, while Hemingway tells you what to modify so that the text is easier to read.
If your website is there only to promote your physical store, or you offer services in a particular area, then you need to focus on tactics that will boost your position in local searches.
Real customers have a very specific goal in mind, and they are singularly focused on it—to find a trustworthy local company that can provide the products or services they need, right now. They look at maps, reviews by previous customers, and citations on other platforms. The following tools will help you focus on these key points and get a lot more qualified traffic.
This is a highly specialized area, so there are not too many options to worry about. These are all you need to get a head start.
Tailored to provide local search audits and manage reviews, with additional tips on optimizing your GBP. You also get access to white label reports and visualizations of keyword rankings with the Local Search Grid.
An excellent tool for local citation building, complete with a rank tracker, review monitoring, and a Reputation Builder feature that lets you handle reviews from various platforms all in one place.
As you would expect from this SEO veteran brand, you get synced business data from multiple sources in real time, options for scheduling social media content, and local listing management. It also provides a visibility score and detailed analytics.
You don’t need to pay a single cent for this one, but it is also critical for local SEO. You can set up your GBP with all the basic information about your company, add photos and videos, and even provide a list of services or a full menu for restaurants and coffee shops.
To track your progress and see which changes are bumping your site up in search results, and which don’t do much or even set you back, you need detailed analytics. The ability to make customized reports is also important if you need to show the stakeholders that your strategy is getting them tangible results.
The more data you have, and the more precise it is, the easier it will be to notice trends and get a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Tools with clean interfaces and good visualizations help you quickly assess your current situation and allow you to make better decisions.
Once again, I’ve gone through all the most effective options and landed on the following five as the best in terms of accuracy and overall value.
A great way to get an overview of the user journey based on data Google collects from various websites and apps. It gives you a precise insight into your traffic and conversions, and can be integrated with Google Ads.
With a very user-friendly interface that allows you to drag and drop elements to create custom dashboards, this tool really makes it easy to track your progress. It features interactive charts and gives you access to 800+ data sources.
A more privacy-focused analytics tool that gives you tons of useful information on visitor behaviour, campaign tracking, with unlimited data and custom reports.
Gather data from multiple sources into a single sheet, and allows you to add custom fields, tailor your dashboards to suit your needs, and save time with automated reporting.
Gives you an easy way to kill two birds with one stone by combining tracking and reporting, with automated and customizable white label reports, perfect for agencies.
Despite what people say, sometimes good things really do come for free. If you’re doing SEO for websites, tips like “get as much use out of all the free tools” are super important to remember, as you can get so many useful features. I’ve laid out the essential selection that everyone should have in their toolbox.
All these can be incredibly useful, but I’d say that GSC and PageSpeed Insights are indispensable, even if you can afford one of the more expensive full-stack SEO solutions.
Ok, I admit, there are a whole bunch of tools listed above, which can make it a bit difficult to land on just a few useful ones. Don’t worry, you don’t need a dozen different options, as long as you know what it takes to build a functional stack. Here’s a bit of advice on how to determine what you actually need.
The first thing you need to do is get yourself a big cup of coffee, or tea if you’re into that sort of thing—hey, I don’t judge—and have an important conversation with yourself. You’ll need to define your goals and see what you need to prioritize. It’s usually a toss-up between growth, technical health, and content.
Some people just need to get more bodies through the doors of their physical shop, which means more traffic is the way to go. For others, it may be their in-depth content explaining the intricacies of their niche and how their services help that gets visitors to schedule a consultation. Those running a web store may want to get their pages to load quicker, solve any crawling issues, and deal with broken links.
Of course, you may need a combination of these things, but you will have a clear priority.
I find that it’s best to look at some practical examples, just to get a general idea of which tools complement each other and how many specialized options you’ll need at different stages of your journey. Here are a few simple stacks of the best SEO tools for website owners that will cover all of your needs, without breaking the bank.
As you can see, you can get started for free, and it’s easy to add another tool or two to your stack as your needs evolve. Of course, you can always swap out some options based on your budget, e.g., using the more affordable Rankioz instead of SEMrush for your keyword research and on-page SEO.
In the end, I have to be clear about one thing: none of these tools is a magic bullet that will instantly solve all your problems. There’s a reason why I’ve covered 50+ options—they all excel at a particular aspect of SEO and can be used together to great effect.
However, nothing can make up for a poor strategy, so you will need to set clear goals and focus on improving the metrics that will help you succeed. The tools are a cherry on top that makes your life a bit easier. I recommend that you start with the free versions or take advantage of free trials just to get a feel for how everything works before committing to anything.
SEO may seem a bit confusing and difficult when you first start, but it’s not as scary as you think. You should start building your stack today and jump right into it. It will take you a few weeks to get the hang of things, but you’ll quickly start making improvements once you master the basics.
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