High-quality and helpful content is at the heart of an effective digital marketing strategy. Through good content, you can establish yourself as a trustworthy expert in your industry. In fact, content creation is considered the top priority for 80 percent of digital marketers.
If you are serious about content creation, having the right content marketing tools is essential.
To help guide you in making the right decisions, reduce the amount of time spent analyzing digital marketing tools, and prevent you from becoming overwhelmed with data, we’ll cover 55 of the top content marketing tools and software platforms that we think every content marketer should use (in no particular order).
These content marketing tools cover the full spectrum of digital marketing needs — from keyword research and SEO, to design and analytics tools.
What is common about all the content marketing tools and software platforms on this list is that they can help you get a lot more mileage from your content marketing program. When used well, expect more website traffic, engagement, and conversion from your content.
We will explore each tool in-depth and offer content creation tips, but let’s start by answering some frequently asked questions about content marketing in 2024.
What’s Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy that uses valuable information to retain current and attract potential customers.
It is a type of inbound marketing strategy that delivers value to a business’s audience through entertaining, educational, or informative content.
Content marketing comes in four basic forms — written, video, audio, and image. Most businesses use several forms of content marketing to engage with their audiences across platforms like social media, websites, blogs, and emails.
This form of digital marketing puts the customer at the heart of a brand’s messaging. Rather than spamming clients with advertising-laden messaging, content marketing offers them with valuable content and engages them throughout the customer journey.
It goes beyond pushing a product to a current and potential client, instead putting the relevant and useful information out there and following the customer from the awareness phase to the decision phase. Content marketing includes presenting content like how-to guides or story-based ads that offer a real benefit to the client.
When done right, content marketing conveys expertise and shows that a business values its customers. Creating consistent, high-quality content establishes and nurtures relationships. When your customers think of you as a business that is genuinely interested in them, they are more likely to choose you over competitors.
Here are a few stats on content marketing that gives it a competitive advantage:
- Businesses that create their own blogs get 67 percent more leads
- 47 percent of buyers view at least 3 to 5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative
- Businesses that use content marketing see 30 percent higher growth than those who don’t use it
Why is content marketing important?
Content marketing helps businesses overcome the noise of advertisements by subtly promoting their offerings through helpful, high-quality content.
Below are other benefits of content marketing:
- Improve authority. Authority is crucial to becoming an industry leader and increasing sales. Build trust by creating relevant and useful content that positions your business as a thought leader in your field.
- Increase conversions. Content marketing works because it allows businesses show that they care about and understand customer needs, which can translate into higher conversion rates.
- Demonstrate how your product or service solves a pain point. With a solid content marketing strategy, you can create valuable and relevant content tailored to each customer’s pain points. Blog posts, demo videos, and customer testimonials make it easier for businesses to provide in-depth explanations of how their products or services help customers.
- Educate leads and prospects about your product and services. Content marketing helps businesses to promote themselves while offering tangible value to a target audience, which can increase brand awareness and engagement. At the same time, businesses can subtly promote their products or services, educating more people about their offerings.
- Build relationships with customers. Few people are ready to purchase something when they first learn about your business. Content marketing makes it possible to build relationships and deepen trust with your target audience, which can encourage them to eventually convert.
- Increase visibility. Content marketing connects businesses like yours with more potential customers while making your business more renowned in your industry. Businesses can get the word out about their brand by regularly sharing helpful, high-quality content that generates more traffic from search engines.
- Foster loyalty. Creating consistent, high-quality content makes it possible for businesses to deepen relationships with customers. Over time, this can ultimately boost the loyalty these customers feel toward their brands.
Content marketing is not new, and it is not slowing down. The pandemic increased content usage by 207%, and that trend will likely continue to increase in 2024. Indeed, 55% of marketers plan to post content more frequently, and 53% plan to boost the quality of their content in 2024.
Need of Content Marketing Tools
Content marketing tools and software platforms can help you save time and money by improving the quality of the content you create and streamlining your overall content marketing strategy. They can offer you new topics to write about, help you reach your buyer personas, get visitors to engage with your website content and even help them to make a buying decision. Your mastery over these content marketing tools will go a long way to determine your success as a digital marketer.
The 55 Best Content Marketing Tools for 2024
- WordPress
- Yoast SEO Plugin
- HubSpot
- Airtable
- AI Video Marketing Automator
- AI Social Content Generator
- AI Writing Assistant
- ContentShake AI
- Instant Video Creator
- Video Marketing Platform
- AdCreative.ai
- Buffer
- SEO Writing Assistant (SWA)
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
- QuestionDB
- BuzzSumo
- Mixkit
- TopicRanker
- SimilarWeb
- ShareThis
- Canva
- Followerwonk
- WP Rocket
- Trello
- Google Docs
- Aweber
- Mailchimp
- Hemingway Editor
- SocialBlade
- Venngage
- Wordable
- TubeBuddy
- SquadCast
- Hotjar
- Loomly
- Kraken
- Screaming Frog SEO
- MonsterInsights
- Google Search Console (GSC)
- Grammarly
- KWFinder
- Ubersuggest
- MozBar
- Clearscope
- MarketMuse
- SmashBalloon
- Google Analytics
- Hunter.io
- Google Trends
- ShortPixel
- Schema.org
- Seobility
- SEOquake
- Seolyzer
Let’s get started…
- WordPress
WordPress leads the market when it comes to content management systems. It provides digital marketers all the tools they need to create a blog or a website as well as an easy-to-use publishing platform. It also offers visitor tracking and a number of plugins to optimize your content marketing process.
Best for: Publishing content, blogging, and creating websites.
Pricing:
Personal: $4 per month (billed annually)
Premium: $8 per month (billed annually)
Business: $25 per month (billed annually)
ECommerce: $45 per month (billed annually)
- Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast SEO is a widely used, all-purpose SEO plugin for WordPress.
If your website runs on WordPress, you need to install Yoast SEO plugin.
It is one of the best content marketing tools for writing SEO optimized content.
It provides real-time analysis and optimization suggestions as users create content, ensuring that blog posts and pages are well-optimized for search engines.
Yoast SEO plugin covers crucial SEO elements, including content readability, title tag and meta description length, as well as keyword optimization.
The best part? It is 100% free.
But you will need to upgrade to Yoast’s Paid SEO plugin to get recommendations on how to use your focus keyphrase to optimize your content for SEO.
But this is a comprehensive SEO plugin with a strong track record. Its features make it a powerful tool for bloggers, website owners, and content creators seeking to maximize their website’s SEO performance within the WordPress ecosystem.
Yoast SEO Plugin Features:
- Schema markup for rich snippets
- Semrush integration to find related keywords
Best for: Writing SEO content
Pricing:
Premium Plan: Starts at $99 per year.
- HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and CRM suite that offer businesses with all the tools required to create valuable content, optimize it, and help it reach an interested audience. It is also considered the most powerful marketing automation platform in the industry. HubSpot offers many features of which most are free to try. These include a powerful form builder, popup tools, live chat and chatbots, and an all-in-one WordPress plugin for marketing. In addition to these features, HubSpot also provides a world-class CMS that allows brands to centralize everything within a free CRM.
Best for: Consolidating multiple content marketing tools in a centralized location.
Pricing:
Starter: $45 per month (billed annually)
Professional: $800 per month (billed annually)
Enterprise: $3,200 per month (billed annually)
- Airtable
Airtable is best used for storing huge amounts of data in one place and sorting them with customized filters. It is widely used as a project management tool but it serves a number of content marketing purposes – influencer management, marketing campaign tracking, etc.
Best for: Managing tasks and databases.
Pricing:
Free: $0
Plus: $10 per month (billed annually)
Pro: $20 per month (billed annually)
- AI Video Marketing Automator
AI Video Marketing Automator app is a powerful tool for creating high-quality video content using artificial intelligence.
You can generate videos from existing articles, using a custom prompt, or from scratch.
With the from-scratch option, you need to input all the content blocks such as headings, text, images, video clips, calls-to-action, etc. You can add your own images or pick from the stock library provided by the tool.
The AI Video Marketing Automator app then ties all these content blocks together, adding voice overs and background music to create a cohesive video.
Once your video is ready, you can share it with your audience on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).
Here are some other Al features worth highlighting:
- Comes with a built-in content calendar. So you can schedule and post content to your social media platforms directly from the app itself.
- Offers a large collection of royalty-free images and clips to add to your videos
- Provides customization options to tailor the look and feel of your videos to align with your brand’s visual identity
Pricing: You can generate one video for free. Premium plans start at $39 per month.
- AI Social Content Generator
The standard for content quality on social media has been growing just like what we are seeing in SEO content.
AI Social Content Generator is an excellent tool that uses AI to generate social media posts for businesses like yours in just a few clicks.
Simply pick from one of the available choices (“Text to post,” “Business to Post,” etc.), input a text prompt or fill in the necessary details, and let the AI Social Content Generator do the rest.
When your post is done, you can edit it, download it to add to your social media platforms.
Below are some of AI Social Content Generator’s other features:
- Comes with a wide range of customizable templates to create new posts quickly and easily
- Offers insights about your competitors’ activities (like their content themes and hashtags they use).
- Allows you to save your brand’s logo, fonts, colors, and other details to maintain consistency across all your posts.
Pricing: A free trial is available. Pricing starts at $35 per month.
- AI Writing Assistant
AI Writing Assistant has brought scale to the writing steps that might have slowed you down. Ideas, consistency in voice and tone, plagiarism, or just writing help throughout the process. Compared to Jasper and other popular AI writing apps, this one is excellent for SEO content in particular.
- ContentShake AI
ContentShake AI is a powerful tool for quickly generating SEO-optimized articles.
Once you enter the topic you want to write about, ContentShake AI will automatically generate a sample draft with a title, introduction, subtopics, relevant images, and a conclusion.
If you are looking to leverage AI tools for content marketing, ContentShake AI can be a great solution.
ContentShake AI also:
- Provides an extremely easy-to-use interface
- Integrates with WordPress. So you can publish content directly to your website or blog.
- Recommends additional, relevant keywords to include in your blog posts. So you can potentially rank for more keywords.
- Offers suggestions to improve your content’s readability
Pricing: ContentShake AI has a free trial available. After that, subscription pricing starts at $60 per month.
- Instant Video Creator
YouTube is likely the best platform for you as a content creator that you don’t own. In other words, once you have grown your blog on your own website, the next best focus areas is YouTube.
If you already have high quality content and you want to repurpose it, you will save a ton of time if you can do so automatically.
Instant Video Creator converts blog posts into videos. Then it helps you edit and translate them.
- Video Marketing Platform
This tool is an all-in-one tool for making and editing video content for your business.
If you are someone who finds most professional video-editing software too complex, this user-friendly tool is a powerful solution that simplifies video creation.
To get started, choose a video format from the available options and then record a video yourself or use royalty-free clips from the library.
You can also add other elements like animations, text overlays, and background music. And finally, edit all these components together to create a polished, engaging video.
Here are some main features of Video Marketing Platform:
- Lets you create eye-catching thumbnails
- Allows you to host live streams to engage with your audience in real-time on multiple platforms, including YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.
- Records high-quality videos directly from your browser—no need to install any software
- Comes with a built-in library of images, templates, royalty-free music, and clips to help you create engaging videos
- Generates captions for your videos automatically
Pricing: A free trial is available. After that, pricing starts at $27 per month.
- AdCreative.ai
Semrush’s AdCreative.ai emerges as a powerful tool for marketers.
AdCreative.ai is a game-changer for creating high-converting visual and text content across various platforms.
By streamlining your entire content creation process in one app, this tool frees you up to focus on what really matters—getting results.
Pricing: Starting from $24 per month
Here are some AdCreative.ai features:
- Adding facts, stats, or images in ContentShake AI
- Auto-generated AI voice-over in Instant Video Creator
- Text-to-video in the AI Social Content Generator
- Target keywords for SEO writing in the AI Writing Assistant
- Generating eye-catching visuals and attention-grabbing headlines in AdCreative.ai
- Buffer
Buffer is the best way to make sure your social media posts go out when your audience is actually around to see them.
Pricing: Starts at $15-$199 per month
- SEO Writing Assistant (SWA)
The tool helps you write content that’s search-optimized. So you have the best chance of appearing high up in search engine results pages.
As you write content, SEO Writing Assistant checks its readability, originality, SEO optimization level, and tone of voice.
And offers suggestions to improve.
Here are some features of SEO Writing Assistant:
- Integrates with WordPress, Google Docs, and Microsoft Word so you can access optimization insights directly where you already enjoy doing your content writing
- Provides a bunch of AI capabilities like composing new sections automatically or rephrasing sentences to improve clarity
- Scans for duplicate content by checking your content against what’s already online. To ensure the content you create is unique.
- Offers suggestions for adding other related keywords for better search engine visibility
Pricing: A free version with limited functionality is available. To take full advantage of SEO Writing Assistant, sign up for a Guru account. Starting at $249.95 per month.
- Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool designed to help businesses and website owners in optimizing their online presence.
With features like keyword research, backlink analysis, and site audit capabilities, Ahrefs offers valuable insights into competitors’ strategies and assists users improve their search engine rankings.
Its user-friendly interface and detailed reports make it a go-to platform for digital marketers, bloggers and SEO professionals seeking to enhance their websites’ performance.
Ahrefs Features:
- keyword research tool
- Technical SEO website audit
- Backlinks analysis
- Position tracking
- Content Explorer
Best for: Keyword research
Pricing:
- Lite: $99 per month
- Standard: $179 per month
- Advanced: $399 per month
- Agency: $999 per month
- Semrush
Semrush is a well-known, all-in-one tool for all things content marketing that offers a wide range of features to help businesses enhance their online visibility. From keyword research and competitor analysis to site audit and backlink tracking, Semrush offers actionable insights to improve SEO and content marketing strategies.
It is similar to Ahrefs, and both are highly rated and mostly used by digital marketers and bloggers looking to stay ahead in the competitive digital landscape.
Both Ahrefs and Semrush will show you the keyword difficulty and search volume for a term. And you can use either Ahrefs or Semrush to find long-tail keywords, low-volume search terms that can help you win website traffic that converts.
Semrush Features:
- Website audit tool
- Position tracking tool
- Listing management tool
- Semrush copilot ai
- SEO writing assistant
- On-page seo checker
- Social media toolkit
- Keyword overview tool
- Domain overview too
- SEO content templates
Semrush Pricing
Starts at $119.95-$449.95 per month
- QuestionDB
It’sa simple tool that helps you quickly come up with new blog post and YouTube video topic ideas. If your website focuses on question-based keywords, the $10 per month plan is totally worth it.
- BuzzSumo
From topic research to brand monitoring, BuzzSumo is an all-in-one content marketing toolkit for professionals
It’s more than the features geared toward professional SEOs and content marketers.
If you are serious about SEO and content marketing, we highly recommend giving BuzzSumo a try.
Pricing: $79-$499 per month
- Mixkit
Want an awesome clip to feature in your YouTube or Facebook video?
Thanks to Mixkit, you can get access to about 100 HD videos for free.
The best part? According to Mixkit, they are adding about 10 new videos to the website every week.
Pricing: Free
- TopicRanker
How do you climb up the search engine result pages (SERPs) quickly, without spending a ton of time in keyword research and link building?
TopicRanker takes away the guesswork from keyword research by offering an in-depth list of easier-to-rank search terms, sorted by things like:
- Title tag mismatch
- Thin or outdated content
- Poor readability scores
It analyzes your site’s topical relevance, scans thousands of SERPs, and uses proprietary variables to determine ranking difficulty. This can save you hours of manual research and help you find low-hanging fruit for quicker SEO wins.
- SimilarWeb
Want to know how much traffic your competitors get every month? Or the keywords that they rank for in search engines like Google?
Then you will love SimilarWeb.
SimilarWeb gives you insider data on your competitor’s top ranking pages, keywords and traffic sources.
Pricing: Free or Enterprise pricing
- ShareThis
ShareThis has sharp-looking social buttons that you can easily customize to match the look and feel of your website.
If you want an easy way to get social sharing buttons next to your website content, look no further than ShareThis.
Pricing: Free
- Canva
You probably already know that visual content is growing fast.
This matters because visual content can be more effective than written content at communicating certain types of information. And people like to share it on social media platforms.
That’s good news. The bad news is that creating visual content is TOUGH.
You either need to work with a professional graphic designer. Or learn how to use fancy image editing tools.
Well, Canva makes the process of creating visual content much more accessible. It helps you make stunning designs quickly and easily. And without the need for any graphic design skills.
You can use Canva to create images for blog posts, thumbnails for videos, social media graphics, and more. And Canva’s intuitive drag and drop interface makes it surprisingly easy to get the look and feel that you want.
Check out some of Canva’s other features:
- Provides a collection of free design elements, images, and templates to use in your designs
- Comes with AI capabilities to generate designs with text prompts
- Allows businesses to collaborate with their team members in real-time to get their feedback or approval
- Let’s you save your brand’s logos, colors, and fonts to maintain consistency across all your designs
Pricing: Canva offers a free plan with some limits. Paid plans start at $ 14.99 per month for one person.
- Followerwonk
Followerwonk makes it easy to find influencers on X (Twitter).
Just search for the type of influencer you want to connect with, and this tool will generate a list of highly-connected people in that space.
Pricing: $29-$79 per month
- WP Rocket
Did you know that optimizing your site speed is a form of On Page SEO?
Search engines like Google reward good user experience and penalize poor user experience. So, website loading time is a ranking factor.
You can use a website caching plugin like WP Rocket to speed up your website in minutes.
Anyone who cares about boosting their website traffic and conversions should make sure their website is loading as fast as possible.
WP Rocket Features:
- Minifies and combines CSS and JavaScript files
- Browser caching, page caching, and pre-loading
- File compression plus lazy loading of images
WP Rocket Pricing
Starts at $59/year
- Trello
This is a popular project management tool designed to facilitate team collaboration and improve productivity.
It helps businesses manage content marketing tasks, publishing calendars, and other workflows all in one place.
Below are some of Trello’s features that are worth highlighting:
- Integrates with external apps and platforms like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Semrush to enhance functionality
- Allows easy file attachment and commenting for seamless collaboration
- Let’s you create custom dashboards to get perspective on your content projects
- Helps you create triggers that automate actions without having to use any code
Pricing: Trello has a free plan with certain limits. Paid plans offer more storage and functionality—and they start at $5 per month per user.
- Google Docs
Google Docs is one of the most popular tools for content marketing that helps you create briefs, articles, and other types of content. And edit them within the same document.
Below are some helpful features Google Docs offers:
- Supports a variety of add-ons that can enhance functionality
- Shows your content’s structure on the left-hand side. Making it easier to navigate within the document.
- Maintains a detailed version history of your document. So you can view and revert to previous versions if needed.
- Offers a voice typing feature that uses speech recognition to write copy based on what you dictate. Saving time and effort.
Pricing: Google Docs is free, but most businesses subscribe to a dedicated Google Workspace account to get more storage. Pricing starts at $6 per month per user.
- Aweber
Aweber is one of the fully-automated email service providers.
If you want more features and advanced segmentation, you are probably better off with something like ConvertKit.
But for a simple email newsletter or content marketing campaigns, Aweber is great.
Pricing: Starts at $19-$149 per month (up to 25k subscribers)
- Mailchimp
Mailchimp is another email marketing service that lets you create, send, and analyze campaigns.
Over 12+ million customers use the platform and make $1.7K in revenue per campaign, on average.It’s known best for its flagship email marketing tool, which pioneered the forever free plan for users with less than 2,000 contacts.
The platform offers a standard-setting drag-and-drop editor and email templates designed to meet a variety of business goals for publishers, coaches, service providers, e-commerce businesses, and more. Mailchimp’s modern design makes it easy to use, from creation to analytics.
Along with email marketing, this offers a suite of products to help you build and market your business online, all in one platform, including a free website builder, online stores, domains, landing pages, social media ads, appointment scheduling and even a full mailing service for postcards.
Below are some of Mailchimp’s main features:
- Comes with a drag-and-drop editor and templates for creating emails quickly and easily
- Allows you to set up automated workflows and triggered emails based on subscriber behavior to nurture them more effectively
- Offers valuable insights about your emails, such as open rates, click-through rates, and subscriber engagement. This can help you optimize your email campaigns for better results.
- Lets you organize your email subscribers into segments. So you can send targeted emails that are likely to have higher engagement and conversion rates.
Pricing: Mailchimp has a free plan that allows you to manage up to 500 contacts. Premium plans that allow for more contacts and features start at $13 per month.
- Hemingway Editor
This tool helps you improve your content’s readability. To ensure it is clear and engaging.
When you paste your content into the Hemingway Editor, it identifies sentences that are hard to read, overuse of passive voice, too many adverbs, and other elements that can complicate your writing.
It then provides suggestions to make your language simpler and tighten your prose. To make your message more direct and compelling.
Hemingway Editor also offers a readability score. So you adjust your writing to your target audience’s level.
Here are some of Hemingway Editor’s key features:
- Works offline (via desktop app) and online (via browser) to offer flexibility in how and where you use it
- Integrates with Medium and WordPress to publish content directly from the editor
- Provides separate writing and editing modes. So you can focus on one task at a time.
Pricing: Hemingway Editor is free to use. Premium plans offer more features and start at $19.99 per month.
- SocialBlade
SocialBlade is a simple tool for figuring out which channels in your industry are growing (or tanking). That way, you can model what’s working right now.
Pricing: Free
- Venngage
Venngage is a well-known tool for creating visual content such as infographics, presentations, reports, and other types of visuals.
To use Venngage, select from one of the available templates, edit the existing content, and apply any finishing touches.
Once you have created a design you are happy with, download and share it on your social media platforms. Or, use it within your blog articles.
Below are some of Venngage’s main features:
- Comes with a drag-and-drop editor that simplifies making designs for your business
- Includes real-time collaboration tools so you can edit designs with your team
- Has a library of templates, icons, stock photos, and illustrations to use in your designs
Pricing: Venngage has a limited free version. Premium plans start at $10 per month per user
- Wordable
Do you write your blog posts in Google Docs?
If so, then you know that copying and pasting content into content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress is a giant pain
Wordable is designed to help you automatically export your written content from Google Docs to your content management systems (CMSs).
During the automatic transfer, Wordable preserves all the original formatting like headings, links, bold, italics, etc. So you don’t have to look out for formatting errors.
This means you can focus more on creating valuable and relevant content and less on the technicalities of publishing.
Here are other useful features that Wordable offers:
- Works with other content management systems (CMSs) and platforms besides WordPress. Like HubSpot and Medium.
- Has a built-in image compression tool to reduce file sizes. So your blog posts can load quickly.
- Includes a bulk export option to transfer multiple Google Docs to your CMS at once
Pricing: Wordable has three plans. Pricing starts at $19 per month
- TubeBuddy
TubeBuddy is designed to help you grow your YouTube channel.
That said, TubeBuddy’s focus is definitely video SEO.
In fact, most of its main features focus on things like tags and rank tracking.
Pricing: $9-$49 per month
- SquadCast
It’s an audio and video recording tool that helps you create podcasts for your business.
You can record professional-grade podcasts with guests or co-hosts from anywhere in the world.
Here are a few of SquadCast’s main features:
- Includes a built-in scheduler for planning and coordinating recordings
- Integrates with an editing tool to polish recordings before publishing
- Uses a simple browser-based interface
- Saves all audio and video content automatically
Pricing: SquadCast has a free plan available with limitations. Paid plans start at $12 per month per user and offer more features.
- Hotjar
Hotjar is an optimization tool that is good for tracking how visitors engage with your website content.
Its heatmaps (which show you exactly where users are clicking, scrolling, and spending time on your site) are particularly helpful in measuring content performance.
For example, looking at the heatmaps report to see exactly where users are clicking, scrolling, and spending time on your website can give you ideas for how to improve your conversion rates.
You can then use different placements or formats based on what you learn.
Here are a few of Hotjar’s other features:
- Allows you to observe real user behavior with the help of session recordings
- Enables conducting one-on-one interviews with users to gain deeper insights
- Allows you to create custom surveys to directly ask users for their feedback
- Helps you identify user flows (how users navigate through your site) and dropoff points (where they abandon or exit it)
Pricing: Hotjar has a free plan with limitation. Paid plans start at $32 per month
- Loomly
It is super simple editorial calendar software. Even though you can use Loomly to plan any type of content, its focus is definitely on social media posts.
Pricing: $20-228 per month
- Kraken
Kraken is an easy and effective way to reduce the file size of your images to improve website loading speed.
Pricing: $5-$79 per month
- Screaming Frog SEO
Screaming Frog SEO is a website audit tool for intermediate-level or advanced webmasters and do-it-yourselfers. It is a website crawler that analyzes your website’s URLs and gives you a list of issues. It provides an in-depth analysis of every issue that could affect user experience or ranking.
Screaming Frog SEO provides dozens of metrics including:
- A complete list of internal and external links on your website
- Duplicate content, including in title tags or meta descriptions
- Identification of broken links and security issues
This SEO tool integrates with Google Analytics, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Google Search Console to deliver in-depth analysis of page-level performance issues.
Website designers, professional marketers and bloggers use Screaming Frog SEO to analyze website structure. And it is often used by website project managers when migrating a website to a new platform.
Screaming Frog Features:
- Integration with Majestic, Moz and Ahrefs
- Hreflang attribute auditing
- Website architecture visualization
- Structured data validation
Screaming Frog Pricing: Starts at free.
- MonsterInsights
This SEO plugin takes the guesswork out of analysis by showing you how your SEO actions are impacting your website results.
MonsterInsights SEO plugin connects to Google Analytics and provides simple displays of your website’s most important data, including:
- Which pages, forms, or pop-ups are converting the most people
- Revenue trends
- Average order value and top-selling products
It is a good complementary tool for WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast. Once you know what is working, you can do more of it.
MonsterInsights Features:
- Simple user interface
- Ecommerce tracking
- Track popularity of website content, tags, categories and authors
- Integrates with top plugins like EasyDigitalDownloads, WPForms, and WooCommerce
MonsterInsights Pricing
There is a free plan available. Premium plan starts at $99.50 per year.
- Google Search Console (GSC)
Google Search Console is a free online tool that supports your SEO strategies.
When launching a new website, one of the first actions you will take is to submit your sitemap to Google. And this is where you do that. The only requirement is that you must first verify your site.
Sitemap submission helps Google’s crawlers know when you publish new site content or modify existing website content.
You can also inspect any URL on your website. Add it to the field at the top of GSC to see if the web page is indexed. You can click a button to request indexing.
More importantly, GSC shows you how your website content is been performing in search results. Specifically, the Search Console Insights page provides
- Your most popular blog posts
- Total clicks for the month
- Which web pages grew the most in traffic
Search Console Insights also shows which search queries are responsible for the most click-through rates to your website.
So, who is GSC for? Every website owner should have a Google Search Console account. It is indispensable for sitemap submission and website monitoring.
Google Search Console Features:
- Click and search term metrics
- Alerts for sitemap errors or manual penalties
- Insights into content performance
Google Search Console Pricing: Free
- Grammarly
Grammarly is a browser plugin that corrects spelling and grammar mistakes and makes suggestions on how you can improve the writing in your content.
Once installed, you can leave it running in the background.
Or, you can click on the extension and open up Grammarly by clicking on ‘Grammarly for Chrome’ so that you can paste the text into the tool.
When you do, Grammarly asks you what your goals are for the piece of content.
The tool gives you suggestions on how to improve your content. Plus, it gives the content an overall score and ratings for correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery.
This helps you create engaging content that is error-free which provides a much better experience for your audiences.
Here are a few of Grammarly’s key features:
- Integrates with various platforms, including Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and even your web browser. Allowing you to write confidently anywhere on the web.
- Provides a built-in synonym finder to help you diversify your vocabulary and make it more readable
- Comes with AI writing capabilities that can speed up your writing process
- Provides a plagiarism detector that checks your content against what is already published online. Ensuring your content is unique and original.
- Offers explanations for all the suggested corrections. Helping you learn and avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future.
Pricing: A free plan is available. Premium plans provide more features at a starting price of $12 per month.
- KWFinder
If you merely need to conduct keyword research, you may not always require a feature-rich SEO tool. It is a powerful tool that bridges the gap between copywriting and technical SEO work is KWFinder.
You can pick keywords that are not too challenging to rank for but could nonetheless be traffic generators.
The best part of KWFinder is how darn easy it is to use.
But do not let this fool you into thinking KWFinder is not powerful. It is a legit keyword tool that lots of pros use.
The ability of KWFinder to switch between languages and geographical areas smoothly enables you to reach your readers anywhere in the world.
- Ubersuggest
Get keyword suggestions and competition data.
Ubersuggest has a lot of features that are usually only found in premium SEO tools.
But it is 100% free.
To use it, type in a keyword that you want to rank for or a competing website that you want to rank above.
And Ubersuggest will give you detailed data on keyword difficulty, monthly search volume, and more.
Plus, you get a list of suggested keywords that are based on the keyword you typed in.
- MozBar
MozBar is a killer browser extension that saves you time by allowing you to see the domain authority (DA) of websites right in the SERPs.
But why is this helpful?
Let’s say you want to target a keyword to rank for.
With MozBar, you can search for the term in Google and see the DA and page authority (PA) score for the ranking websites without having to leave the SERP. This allows for a quick evaluation of the competition and potential opportunities.
The free plan also allows you to examine search results from alternative search engines and on-page elements such as:
- Page title
- Heading tags
- Meta description
Plus, you can also highlight different types of links present on a page such as Dofollow and Nofollow internal and external links.
If you need to quickly check the ”canonical tag” on the page, you can do that too, as well as see how long the page takes to load.
- Clearscope
Clearscope helps you plan and create high quality content that gets more website traffic.
You start by adding a target keyword to Clearscope, which runs a report on it.
Using your keyword, Clearscope sifts through real-time Google data to provide clues to searcher intent. This is how the Clearscope report helps you create high quality content that is better organized, more helpful, and more comprehensive than your competitors’.
We think this tool is a good fit for small business, professional marketers and bloggers that need to scale.
Clearscope Features:
- Reveals themes present in top-ranking content on a given topic
- Displays searcher questions related to a keyword
- Content grading (up to “A++”)
Clearscope Pricing
Starts at $170/month
- MarketMuse
MarketMuse is AI-based software for planning and creating high quality content that ranks. It is also powerful for building topical authority.
Add a keyword to MarketMuse and it will pull data from related search results into a report that you can use to guide content creation.
MarketMuse is a good fit for content teams that need to scale. However, solopreneurs and bloggers can benefit from the free plan.
MarketMuse Features:
- Keyword difficulty score based on your existing website content
- Competitive content analysis
- Keyword research that supports topical authority strategies
- ChatGPT integration
MarketMuse Pricing
Starts at $149/month for 1 user.
Free plan supports 1 user, 10 queries per month, and limited page-level insights.
- SmashBalloon
This is a beginner-friendly plugin that adds social media feeds to your website on WordPress, the right way. The problem with social media feeds is they usually bog your website down.
SmashBalloon stands out because it optimizes all those ultra-high-definition images in your feeds so they load fast. It also minimizes external requests and that speeds things up too.
SmashBalloon is fast and easy to use.
SmashBalloon Features:
- Boost SEO and CTR with embedded social content
- Display multiple feeds
- Increase conversions with social media testimonials
SmashBalloon Pricing
Starts at $49/year per month.
- Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful web analytics service offered by Google that allows website owners to track and analyze their website’s traffic. By providing detailed statistics and reports, Google Analytics helps users understand whether or not their SEO marketing efforts are paying off.
We’re talking about data like:
- Organic traffic
- Time on website
- Page speed
- Bounce rate
- Traffic sources
With customizable dashboards and real-time data, you can make informed decisions to optimize your website and improve the overall user experience.
Google Analytics is super powerful on its own.
But when you combine it with the GSC?
It’s even MORE powerful.
Linking your Google Search Console account with GA hooks you up with helpful info, like the keywords people use to find your website, your organic click-through rates (CTR), and more cool stuff.
Pricing: Google Analytics is a free tool.
- Hunter.io
Hunter.io is a great tool to find email addresses that you can use in your link-building strategies.
Instead of manually finding them yourself, using Hunter.io means you can just enter a domain name and instantly find the email addresses associated with it.
You can save the email addresses you are looking for as leads.
Plus, you can filter the results by type and department so that you only see the email addresses you need for your campaign.
Hunter.io can speed up your link-building outreach effort.
- Google Trends
Google Trends is a free keyword research tool that gives you real-time information about trending topics.
You can take a look at the search interest trends for different keywords and see if they are increasing or decreasing over time.
You can also break down results by geographic region, find related searches, and search trending topics related to a keyword.
This can be useful for planning your content calendar around events or seasons when your audience is more engaged.
Google Trends is great to use when doing niche research as well.
Here are some other features to know about Google Trends:
- Lets you compare search trends across different regions or countries. Enabling you to tailor your content to specific locales.
- Helps you uncover popular related queries that users are searching for alongside your main topics. Giving you additional content ideas.
- Offers intuitive visualizations, such as line graphs and maps. Making it easier to interpret trend data.
- Provides customizable date ranges and filters for more granular analysis
- Allows you to compare the relative popularity of two or more keywords to help you decide which one is worth going after
Pricing: Google Trends is free.
- ShortPixel
If your website images have large file sizes then they are probably slowing down your page load speeds. This can be super frustrating for users and can lead to high bounce rates you definitely do not want.
ShortPixel is a powerful tool that allows you to compress and resize your images allowing for faster page load times.
ShortPixel gives you the option to upload JPG, GIF, and PNG files that are up to 10 MB in size. To remove this size restriction, you just need to sign up for a free account.
All you need to do is choose your SmartCompress level and then upload your files.
ShortPixel then automatically compresses and optimizes the images without sacrificing quality.
ShortPixel also allows you to input your URL so it can analyze your website and optimize the images it finds. This helps to improve your website’s performance.
- Schema.org
Schema markup is incredibly important for your website.
It offers structured data that helps search engines like Google understand the content and context of your page.
If you have not implemented schema markup on your pages, then you are REALLY missing out.
One of the best methods is to use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper as it guides you through the process.
All you need to do is fill in your information, copy the code and insert it directly into your web pages.
When implemented correctly, it can enhance the appearance of your page in the search engine results pages (SERPs) by displaying rich snippets alongside your title tag and meta description.
This could potentially increase your CTRs by enticing users to click on your link.
- Seobility
It’s a free SEO-checker tool. You can use it to determine whether your website complies with the most recent SEO best practices. By entering your website’s URL, you may inspect it and receive suggestions about search engine optimization issues like:
- Sitemap problems
- Technical SEO issues
- Slow loading pages
- Blocked pages
You usually only get this type of stuff from premium SEO tools. So it is really nice that Seobility gives you this data for free.
- SEOquake
An add-on for Google Chrome called SEOquake is another free SEO browser extension.
It helps you to analyze lots of different search engine metrics in real-time such as:
- Semrush ranking
- Bing index
- Pinterest pin count
- Auditing internal and external links
- On-page SEO audits
- Comparing URLs and domains in real-time
- Google index updates
- Facebook likes
- Web archive page
SEOquake can be a little tricky to get used to at first, especially for beginners.
But, once you have got the hang of SEOquake it becomes a really valuable tool in your SEO marketing.
Once installed, the SEObar will appear underneath the URL for each website you visit.
This means you can immediately analyze the data without having to do anything.
You can use the tabs to change the metrics so that you can see the exact data you need.
- Seolyzer
Use the free website crawling, log analysis, and SEO tool Seolyzer to see how search engines view your website. Seolyzer collects information that the crawling bots record in your server’s log files to locate and construct your SEO KPIs when they visit your website. The program also displays redirection, issue codes, and page speed results.