The 12 Best SEO Tools To Use (2021 Edition)

Is having the best SEO tools important?

Heck yeah!

That’s like asking whether having a good tennis racket is important if you’re a tennis player, right?!

Throughout my years of blogging, I have used several excellent SEO tools which will help with your SEO efforts.

Today, I will share with you the ones I love the most (and some that come highly recommended by my friends).

Behold, the 12 best SEO tools of 2021! These SEO tools are not listed in any particular order.

Disclosure: All links marked with an asteriks (*) is an affiliate link.

The 12 best SEO tools to use in 2021

Before we proceed:

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Okay, back to the article…

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin created by Joost De Valk. It is a great SEO plugin for both newbies and advanced SEO peeps. I have been using it since I started blogging years ago. 🙂

This plugin helps you to optimize your blog posts for Google. Simply write your target keyword, and this plugin generates a checklist which tells you exactly what you need to change so that your blog post is properly optimized for SEO. This is very useful for beginners who don’t quite know how to optimize their blog posts yet.

There is also a snippet preview which you can use to see exactly how your post will look like in search engines. You can easily change the post title and meta description that appears in search engines accordingly.

You can also set the image that shows up when your article is shared on social media. This is a nifty feature which I use to ensure that the correct image is featured when my articles are shared on Facebook and Twitter.

Yoast SEO also allows you to generate a sitemap for your website (don’t know what is a sitemap?), and to set certain pages as “no-follow” if you don’t want Google to crawl certain useless pages of your website.

Price: Free

Check out Yoast SEO here.

2. All In One SEO

This WordPress Plugin is similar to Yoast SEO. Both plugins have nearly the same set of features. However, the above-mentioned checklist found in Yoast is not available in All in One SEO.

If your theme has some issues integrating with Yoast SEO, All In One SEO Pack is a great alternative.

I prefer Yoast though, although All In One SEO is definitely great as well.

Price: Free

Check out All In One SEO here.

3. Google Keyword Planner

Can’t figure out which keyword Google likes? Why don’t you figure that out with information provided by GOOGLE herself?

There is no better person to get keywords from than Google. *I mean, if you are trying to please your boss, information your boss tells you would give you a better gauge than what random third parties are trying to tell you, right?*

The Google Keyword Planner does exactly that. All you have to do is to provide a seed keyword and the keyword planner will automatically generate a list of keywords for you, together with the approximate no. of monthly searches.

Price: Free

Check out the Google Keyword Planner here.

4. KW Finder*

Unfortunately, the Google Keyword Planner does not tell you is the exact number of monthly searches (unless you pay to run ads via Google Adwords), as well as exactly how competitive the keyword is.

KWFinder to help me to do just that. In my opinion, KWFinder is the best seo tool for keyword research if you’re a beginner due to its ease of use.

Simply type in a seed keyword, and KWFinder helps me to generate a list of keywords, along with the exact no. of monthly searches and how competitive the keyword is (out of 100 points)

KWFinder is a tool that’s intuitive and idiot-proof. Also, unlike certain SEO tools (I shall not name and shame here), its information is pretty accurate.

I highly recommend this keyword tool. I personally use it and absolutely love it.

Just go try it yourself, there’s a pretty useful free version too!

Price: Free – $29/ month

Check out KWFinder here.*

5. SEMRush*

SEMRush is one of the best SEO tools I’ve seen that receives a lot of love, for good reason. I LOVE SEMRush.

SEMRush has a ton of features, but here are my favorite ones:

• Discover new organic competitors
• See competitor’s best keywords
• Observe position changes of domains
• Conduct a deep backlink analysis
• Find the right keywords for SEO and PPC campaigns
• Gather phrase matches and related keywords
• Get long-tail keywords
• Find keywords with less competition
• Estimate keyword difficulty instantly

As you can probably tell SEMRush packs a punch. I suggest that you head over there and take a look for yourself.

Price: Free – $99.95/monthly for a Pro account

Check out SEMRush here.*

6. Ahrefs

Honestly I haven’t tried Ahrefs because it works quite similarly to SEMRush and I never had a need to check it out.

However, I’m including it here as I’ve heard great things from many successful internet entrepreneurs I know who swear by Ahrefs.

Here’s what it does:

• Get a deep backlink profile for any URL
• Analyze your competitor’s search traffic
• Discover the most popular content for any topic (by backlinks, organic traffic and social shares)
• See every site that’s linking to a particular piece of content so that you can create a list of outreach targets
• Position tracker
• Identify SEO issues with your site

Price: $99/month

Check out Ahrefs here.

Related post: Need some SEO blog tips? <-

7. Google Search Console

After you’ve done a bunch of SEO work, you may want to check if your efforts are actually reaping fruits.

The Google Search Console was created by Google herself to give you a rough idea of your search performance.

This is a MUST for any website. Go sign up now if you haven’t, it’s 100% free.

Here are a couple of things it does:

• Submit Sitemap
• No. of impressions and clicks your site is getting from Google
• See a list of *some of* the keywords you’re ranking for, and which position you’re at
• Your backlinks
• Check if your stuff has been indexed by Google
• Get notified of any security issue Google has with your site

Price: Free

Sign up for Google Search Console here.

8. Majestic

Another tool that does roughly what SEMRush and Ahrefs does.

It also has a pretty handy Google Chrome Plugin called Majestic Backlink Analyzer (free) that will help you to analyze a weblink you’re on and see who is linking to that article.

Price: $44.99/ monthly

Check out Majestic here.

9. Keywords Everywhere

Speaking of Google Chrome Extensions, here’s a great one that gives you the no. monthly searches and how competitive it is – Keywords Everywhere.

However, I find that KWFinder (no. 4) and SEMRush (no. 5) gives me more accurate data. But that’s just me.

Price: Free

Check out Keywords Everywhere here.

10. Buzzsumo*

I love Buzzsumo so much that I even wrote a buzzsumo tutorial for you! It is so much more than just a SEO tool, but you definitely can use it for SEO purposes as well.

Here are some of the stuff that Buzzsumo can do for you:

• Analyze which content performs best for any topic or competitor (aka most shared)
• Get alerts for keywords, authors and domains, including competitor sites.
• Influencer outreach: Find key influencers for any topic
• There is a cool button called “view sharers” for any piece of content and you can see who has tweeted the content. You can also view the number of followers and how often people retweet their stuff. If you want to reach out to influencers on Twitter, you’ll now know who to contact.
• … and a ton more.

I would highly recommend that you check it out.

Price: $99/ month

Check out Buzzsumo here.*

11. Long Tail Pro*

Long Tail Pro was created by Spencer Haws (he has since sold the company) to be THE best keyword research tool to find long tail, non-competitive keywords.

I used it once years ago but it was too laggy for my liking. However, I’ve since heard great things about it. You can check it out.

Price: $25/month

Check out Long Tail Pro here.

12. SEO Quake

Another free Chrome extension which you may find useful –

• Conduct on-page SEO audit in a flash
• Examine internal and external links
• Compare domains and URLs in real time

 Price: Free

Check out SEOQuake here.

13. Ferzy*

Post update: Someone from Ferzy reached out to me to check this out and I find it to be quite robust. Hence I have decided to add Ferzy to this post!

Ferzy is a keyword research tool that lets you discover great keywords to rank for. It provides accurate search volume, keyword difficulty score, and suggests other long tail keywords as well.

There’s a free plan that provides more searches than KWFinder, and I find both tools to work pretty similarly.

Check out Ferzy here.

Related posts:

• SEO Blog Tips: Ranking Your Blog Content
• 101 Best Blogging Tools and Resources
• How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines

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