The Best SEO Tools

There are countless SEO tools you can interact with; all those listed here are among the best, and they can all be used together alongside others even if they serve the same particular SEO function. Nevertheless, if you do not have the budget, the most complete will likely be Semrush or SE Ranking for smaller budgets.

General SEO Tools:

SE Ranking

Freemium

SE Ranking is the competitor to Semrush. Very comprehensive and very visual, it is also more accessible for smaller budgets.

Ahrefs

Freemium

Ahrefs is ideal for analysing backlinks; today it is much more than that. It is one of the best SEO tools.

Focused on Backlink Analysis:

Babbar

Paid

Babbar should be at the heart of every link building process, natural or otherwise. Try it and you will be hooked.

Majestic

Freemium

Majestic is generally the preferred tool for judging the quality of a website’s links using its TF and CF metrics. Among other things.

Semantic SEO Tools:

Cocon.Se

Paid

Cocon.se is ideal for optimising your content with metamots, co-occurrences, and more. As well as getting page ideas with Eureka and the ability to create a semantic cocon.

SEOQuantum

Paid

SEOQuantum is the ideal and comprehensive tool for the semantic optimisation of a website as well as for page-by-page semantic optimisation.

Inlinks

Freemium

InLinks is the most comprehensive semantic SEO-focused tool. I can only recommend this tool to you.

SEO Writing Tools:

YourTextGuru

Paid

YourTextGuru is the best tool for optimising content for natural search engine optimisation.

Semantics / content writing / content optimisation

Semji

Paid

Semji is an ideal tool for an SEO writing team. It improves productivity and team management. It also features an AI.

1.fr

Paid

1.fr is a good tool for beginners to improve the SEO of their content.

If you want to know more about the tools available on the web for SEO content writing, for text optimisation, and more specifically for automatically SEO-optimised texts using AI, discover the 5 best text generation tools right here.

SEO Crawl Tools:

ScreamingFrog

Freemium

ScreamingFrog is the essential tool for any SEO professional. It is the crawl tool to always have at hand.

OnCrawl

Paid

OnCrawl is one of the best log analysis and crawl tools. And much more.

Botify

Paid

Botify is one of the big names in technical SEO tools for crawling and log analysis.

Or consult our guide on the 5 best crawl analysis tools and their comparisons.

WordPress SEO Tools:

RankMath

Freemium

RankMath is in my opinion better than Yoast SEO for many reasons. It will also save you from spending money on other SEO tools.

WP Rocket

Paid

WP Rocket is the essential tool for improving the speed of your site and your Core Web Vitals without having to get your hands dirty.

Perfmatters

Freemium

Perfmatters allows you to easily disable plugins or certain plugin code. This significantly increases speed and CWV.

SEO Tools for Core Web Vitals:

Chrome DevTools

Free

Chrome DevTools is the best tool for improving Core Web Vitals, Google’s SEO criterion (page experience).

PageSpeed Insights

Free

Google PageSpeed Insights is a simpler tool than Chrome DevTools, ideal for beginners looking to improve their Core Web Vitals.

Or consult our guide on the 5 best tools for analysing site speed and their comparisons.

Position Tracking:

Monitorank

Freemium

Monitorank is SEO professionals’ favourite tool for tracking keyword positions with an excellent dashboard.

How to Choose an SEO Tool?

Many tools exist for optimising the SEO of a website or web page. Some services specialise in specific SEO levers, like Majestic for backlink analysis; others offer multiple features to consolidate all the needs related to search engine optimisation, as Semrush does.

The best approach is probably to try their free versions and see for yourself whether a particular tool could help you. Alternatively, I also recommend diving into reading about each tool presented here to clearly understand what you could do with it.

Don’t Trust SEO Tools Blindly

A tool provides data, sometimes more or less reliable, but the human behind it must absolutely understand what it means. It should not dictate what you must do.

The simplest case to understand is the Yoast SEO plugin. Spending hours trying to get a green light will change nothing. Except that you will have wasted hours for nothing.

Another case: Semrush. The tool is really good but backlink toxicity should not make you panic and spend time disavowing your backlinks.

Some SEO professionals bothered to have a good CF (Citation Flow), a metric provided by Majestic, when no concrete correlation is shown that a domain with a good CF is a site where it is good to obtain a backlink. Moreover, the majority of sites that sell links spend their time manipulating this metric.

One last example: many tools suggest creating internal links between your pages; some tools even simply call these “internal linking assistance tools”. This means that if you do not think it makes sense to link one page with another, do not do it blindly.

Optimise SEO by Improving Content

SEO content optimisation is one of Google’s most significant ranking factors. There are SEO writing assistance tools for web writers, such as Semji or SEOQuantum. These tools help analyse search intent in order to create texts that match users’ needs, generate heading tag structures, suggest words to use, and much more.

And to go beyond SEO writing assistance tools, tools exist for improving already existing content. One could mention tools like 1.fr, very easy to use; YourTextGuru, more powerful but more complex; and finally Cocon.se, to be used alongside YTG but reserved for intermediate to advanced SEO professionals. These tools suggest the expressions to prioritise when creating content: co-occurrences, metamots, synonym lists, semantic field, words to avoid, and many other things to better rank on Google.

Accelerate Loading Speed to Gain Positions on Google

Loading speed is an important SEO criterion for Google and more specifically through improving Core Web Vitals. Indeed, Core Web Vitals is a ranking criterion forming part of the overall page experience criterion. Pure loading speed allows for improved crawl budget, better page indexation, and improved user experience.

Using the tools mentioned, they can help you carry out an audit to find areas for improvement and gain positions. Google’s Mountain View firm makes tools like PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse available. Simply enter the URL of your web page to find out its web performance: time needed to display the largest visible element (LCP), delay between a user’s interaction and the browser’s action (FID), number of shifts during loading (CLS), etc.

The ideal approach: analyse your site with Google’s tools and other specialised services like webpagetest.org or Chrome Dev Tools to obtain more precise recommendations with a view to improving your site’s speed and Core Web Vitals.

Crawl Tools Allow Optimising Site Structure for Search Engines

Services exist for analysing the construction of a website and its internal linking: these are crawl analysis tools, such as OnCrawl or Screaming Frog software. They allow you to explore a site like a Googlebot, understand its architecture, analyse logs, and find errors to correct in order to improve your SEO: broken links, duplicate content, pages difficult to crawl…

It is also possible to use Google Search Console (free) to check whether your pages are being correctly crawled and indexed on Google and, if not, why.

Track Your Website’s Positioning on Google

You can only control what you measure: improving your SEO is good, tracking your positioning is better! Many tools allow you to check the positions obtained by your website on Google, based on the keywords used by internet users. They generally indicate search volumes to estimate the organic traffic obtained thanks to a given position on Google. Most position tracking tools offer additional features to help you optimise your SEO by suggesting new SEO keyword opportunities, for example. For this, we could mention Semrush or Monitorank.

Complete SEO Tools for Improving Your SEO

SEO professionals use many tools to optimise content, improve web performance, understand obtained backlinks, analyse competition, or track page SEO on Google. Some SEO tools like SEMrush are all-in-one services that address most of the daily challenges faced by SEO professionals. They can be sufficient for small and medium-sized businesses that want to track and optimise their SEO. SEO professionals at large organisations generally activate a platform of this type and use more specific services depending on their needs.

Free SEO Tools and Paid SEO Services

Some SEO tools are free, notably those offered by Google. Most specialised SEO services offer a free version but their features are limited: to optimise your SEO using the best SEO tools, you usually need to pay a subscription. The price can depend on the volume of web pages to analyse or the number of keywords to monitor on Google.

We hope that our selection of SEO tools will allow you to improve your SEO by activating all levers: increasing site speed, choosing popular keywords, optimising crawl budget, facilitating exploration by robots…

Frequently Asked Questions about SEO Tools

SEMrush, ScreamingFrog, OnCrawl, Babbar, YourTextGuru, Chrome DevTools, Google Search Console, InLinks…

You can activate several levers: optimise the loading of your web pages, use the right keywords, explore your site like Google, correct technical errors, improve your content, optimise your netlinking…

SEO tools help you identify the keywords and topics to prioritise, as SEMrush and Ahrefs do so well. For semantic keyword research, SEOQuantum and InLinks.

Specialised tools help improve web performance by identifying elements to optimise: server speed, web page construction, image and video file size… Use Chrome DevTools, PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, Webpagetest.org.

Most SEO tools are paid, but free services do exist: we think of those offered by Google such as Lighthouse or Search Console. Some tools offer free versions, such as Screaming Frog or Semrush.

A crawl analysis tool allows you to explore your website like a Google robot: an essential action for understanding how Googlebot might see your website. For this, use ScreamingFrog. If you want more specialised tools, OnCrawl is phenomenal. Indeed, this tool also allows you to analyse logs in order to know, among other things, how many times Google’s robots visit your pages.