Want to improve your blog or small business website SEO in 2020? Well, you're in luck! In this post, I'll share some of the best SEO tools, apps, and plugins you can use to improve your SEO, crush the competition, grow your traffic, and boost your revenue.
OK, so we're almost halfway through 2020, but there's still so much time left to think about your website's SEO and ways you can improve it. But before you start, you'll first need to get your hands on some new tools.
I know what you're thinking, you can't afford to invest in any new tools right now, especially with the way things are. OK, I get it, times are hard, especially with the Coronavirus thing going on. But, don't let that interfere with your plans to grow your business.
To achieve growth, sometimes you have to invest a little, and yes I'm talking about spending money. But not always because there are plenty of free SEO tools available out there. But, adding some new tools to your digital marketing toolkit makes perfect sense.
Right then, enough ranting and let's get on with it. Here is my list of 22 of the best SEO tools you need to check out this year -
Let’s start with a list of the best SEO plugins in the business right now.
Why SEOPressor? You might be thinking!
SEOPressor Connect is a powerful all-in-one SEO plugin for WordPress. It is the perfect plugin for bloggers and marketers wanting to have more control over their on-page and site-wide SEO.
So, if you’re looking for a professional tool for optimizing your blog posts and content-rich pages, then this plugin is for you.
SEOPrssor comes with a host of top-end features, including – site auditing tools, broken link checker, SEO health checker, homepage SEO, multiple-keyword optimization, and more.
You can also take advantage of the local SEO options, over-optimization checker, social SEO, all built right into this plugin.
I started using SEOPressor way back in 2012, and over time the plugin has improved with many updates and new features.
SEOPressor Connect plugin is a subscription-based service and will cost you just $9 per month. Sadly, there isn't a free version of the plugin available.
The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress repository, with over 25,000 five star reviews, and installed on over 5 million WordPress sites.
Like SEOPressor Connect, the Yoast plugin comes complete with a suite of features and advanced options.
Yoast SEO plugin lets you take control of your entire on-page and site-wide SEO, social media optimization, meta-robots, SEO for tags and categories, keyword optimization, metadata, and more.
Yoast SEO is completely free to install and use, which makes it one of the most appealing solutions for WordPress. However, there is a premium version available that provides even more features and options, including the ability to optimize up to 5 keywords.
A single site license of the premium plugin will cost you $89 per year.
Click here to compare SEOPressor Connect with Yoast SEO.
Broken links on your WordPress blog or website are bad for two valid reasons.
With the Broken Links checker plugin, you can scan and find broken links and missing images, and then fix them accordingly.
Note: SEOPressor plugin comes with broken link checker built-in.
Broken Link Checker is a free-to-use plugin. It is currently installed on over 700K active WordPress sites. Click here to download it.
The Ultimate Nofollow plugin is one of my favorite plugins for WordPress, as it helps to save a lot of time when having to make certain links 'nofollow'. Such links include affiliate links or links to any sites that you simply don’t wish to pass SEO juice.
This is a plug and play plugin and using it is simple. Whenever you want to link to an external page or resource from your content, you are given an extra option to check the box to make that link a 'nofollow'.
It’s free! Grab it here. Of course, if you don't wish to install yet another plugin, you can simply make your links 'nofollow' by editing the HTML portion or block in your editor, and adding the 'nofollow' tag manually.
This plugin is an absolute must for ALL SEO bloggers and WordPress site owners. Using a Sitemap on your website helps search engines like Google get a better understanding of your website structure and content when crawling your posts and pages.
Both the Yoast SEO plugin and SEOPressor plugin have XML Sitemap features built-in, however, I personally think that with the dedicated ‘XML Sitemap plugin’ you have better control and management of your sitemaps.
This is a free plugin from the WP directory. You can download it here.
Now, this is one plugin that no WordPress website should be without.
I originally added this to my list of best plugins for small business websites, and it just makes sense to include it here too.
Have you ever tried manually adding the Google Analytics tracking script into your WordPress website?
It can be pretty finicky, and it’s not the best way to make the most of tracking visitor activity on your website either.
MonsterInsights gives you greater control, as well as access to smart tools and metrics to make the most of analyzing your website traffic and data.
MonsterInsights is free to install and use, however, if you want to have better-detailed reports and extra options, including features such as AMP, then there are three plans to choose from – A Basic plan, Plus, and a Pro plan. Plans start from $39. Click here to check out the plans (Aff).
Now let’s take a look a the best off-site SEO tools, web apps, technologies, and services available for bloggers and marketers.
The Keyword Planner in Google Adwords is a useful tool for finding new keywords and checking out the competition, search volume, and trends.
The tool is primarily used for finding competitive keywords for running ad campaigns in Google AdWords. However, you can still use the keyword planner tool to give some background information on potential keywords to use for your blog post ideas.
It's not the best or most comprehensive tool for doing keyword research for content ideas, but as a free alternative, it can give you the basics.
You can access the keyword planner via your Google Adwords account if you have one set up. If you don’t have one, you’ll need a Google account to set one up.
SEMrush is the top choice, all-in-one, marketing suite of data analysis tools and research reports for professional SEO bloggers and marketers.
With an active SEMrush account, you're provided with everything you need to help you find and research profitable keywords and competitor keywords.
In addition, you also get access to the tools you need to help you improve your website's SEO, audit your content, monitor backlinks, and much more.
SEMrush can be quite expensive as pricing starts from $99 per month. A good strategy, I think, would be to firstly schedule in your calendar the time you have to pay attention to using SEMrush properly, then invest in a three months plan (paid monthly) and then cancel after the third month.
This is something I did myself a while back for auditing the content and improving SEO for my blog.
Unamo SEO, originally called Positionly, offers a suite of affordable digital marketing tools to businesses and bloggers. The service provides include –
Unamo SEO tools are ideally suited for bloggers and small businesses that want to keep tabs on daily traffic metrics, including keyword rankings, and competitor rankings.
Other features include SEO audit tools, local SEO, and you can integrate your account with Google search console and Google Analytics.
The Basic plan will cost you just $19 per month for 100 keywords, unlimited domains, campaigns, and engines. You can scale up your plans according to your marketing needs. Click here to signup.
I’m sure you’ve heard me mention something about Ninja Outreach several times in the past. Well, that’s because Ninja Outreach is a smart and powerful tool.
This is a complete influencer outreach software used by many top bloggers and marketers today.
With a Ninja Outreach account, you can research influencers, marketers, authoritative blogs, and websites, especially useful when you’re using outreach emails to help you with your website link building campaign, guest post pitching, making connections with influencers, and more.
Ninja Outreach is not free. You have 4 plans to choose from – Blogger at $69 per month, Small Agency at $99 per month, Large Agency at $249 per month, and Enterprise at $599 per month. Click here to signup.
We all now know how important having a mobile responsive website is, and the impact it can have on our website's search engine visibility.
According to Comscore, smartphone internet consumption grew by 78% between December 2013 and December 2015.
The Google Mobile-Friendly test tool is especially useful for checking and ensuring your website’s pages are mobile-friendly in Google’s eyes.
Update: Mobile-first indexing will be enabled for all websites starting September 2020. You can read more here.
Nothing! It’s completely free, click here to use it to check your website pages.
Another online service that no website owner should be without, and that’s the suite of tools available from the Google Webmaster Console.
The webmaster console can provide critical information about your website’s health, search engine visibility, crawl accessibility, AMP and more.
If you need to find and fix your broken links and 404-error pages? Google Webmasters is a great place to start.
It’s free to open and use the webmaster console. You’ll need a Google Account, though.
If you need to obtain detailed information about your website’s resource usage and loading performance, I can’t recommend GTMetrix enough.
GTMetrix came to my rescue a few years back when my blog was running extremely slow. In addition, I was experiencing incredibly high CPU throttling with my web host, often hitting limits. It turned out that the cause was a feature built into a theme I was using at the time.
As well as providing detailed reports on why your site could be loading slow or underperforming, you’re also given actionable recommendations on what to do to optimize your website's resources and thus improve performance and page speed.
GTMetrix is free to use and you get access to all the amazing features. If you want to use GTMetrix on a professional level, perhaps you're a web designer or agency, then you have 4 plans to choose from, starting from just $14.95 per month. Click here to get started.
WooRank is both a useful and fun tool to use. If you want to get a full review and lowdown of your website’s SEO performance and an overall score, then this is the tool you need. No-fuss, no gimmicks added.
In addition, WooRank helps you to see your website’s social reach.
You have three plans to choose from – a Pro Plan, a Premium plan and an Enterprise plan. Pro plan will set you back £49 per month ($65 per month). Click here to get started.
Barracuda’s Penguin Tool helps you to look at the history of algorithm changes Google has made, against your website’s organic traffic flow.
If your website has recently been given a penalty from Google, or, if your rankings have been affected by an algorithm change, good or bad, the Penguin Tool is the perfect starting point to help you pinpoint what has happened.
You can then use the data to accurately decide how you can fix your site ready for the next algorithm refresh.
Penguin Tool is free to use by authenticating with your Google account.
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a downloadable software that you can use to crawl all of the pages of your website or blog.
The free version allows you to use the tool to crawl up to 500 URLs.
Using this tool can help bloggers and website owners do a range of things with the reports generated from SEO Spider. Here are some uses you might find beneficial –
It’s free to download, install and start using, however, for £149 per year, you can get access to a host of additional features, including unlimited crawls and free technical support. Click here to learn more.
Want to know the hottest thing that’s trending right now in your niche or industry?
Maybe you want to write content that will help drive a ton of traffic to your blog. Well, either way, you can start by using the Google Trends tool.
Or, if you run an eCommerce website, for instance, you might find the Google Trends tool especially useful for working out what kind of seasonal products to bring in and when.
Yes! You can access the Google Trends tool here.
Mangools offer seriously juicy and affordable SEO tools that bloggers and marketers will not be able to resist. Their suite includes –
Mangools boasts an attractive and simple-to-use UI and dashboard, with lots of great metrics to discover. Wow, just look at all that data!
Mangools offer three plans – Basic, Premium, and Agency. Prices start at 29.90 Euros. See more here.
If you’re looking for a reliable keyword tool to help you find long-tail keywords for your next blog post, give the Keyword Tool a try.
There is a free version and a premium version to choose from, however, with the free version you can generate up to 750 long-tail keywords for each search term.
Using the tool is free, however, with limitations on the data you receive. If you want to access more keywords with accurate Google search volume, CPC, and competition, you can sign up for one of the pro plans. Pro plans start from $48 per month. Click here to get started.
I’ve been a long-time fan and user of Long Tail Pro and I can honestly say, this is my favorite go-to tool for finding and researching long-tail keywords.
Occasionally, I use LTP for Magnet4Blogging but most of the time I use it for finding profitable keywords for my small niche websites.
With LTP, you can calculate keyword profitability, keyword competition, and a whole lot more.
Check out this post on how to find and use long-tail keywords in your blog posts.
There are three plans to choose from with LTP – Starter, Pro, and Agency. Plans start at $25 per month. Click here to start your 7-day free trial of Long Tail Pro.
SpyFu is a great website tool for researching and analyzing your own and competitor keywords. In addition, you can use SpyFu to monitor inbound links, rankings history, top organic competitors, and more.
How much does it cost?
SpyFu offers three plans to choose from – Basic at $39 per month, professional at $79 per month, and Team at $299 per month. Click here to signup.
Are you stuck for keyword ideas for your next blog post?
Or, perhaps you have a keyword or phrase in mind but need some suggestions to go with it. Well, the UberSuggest tool is the perfect tool for this.
With UberSuggest, you simply add your keyword ideas into the box provided and hit suggest. From the list of generated keyword ideas, you can take your research further by using something like the Long Tail Pro tool to find great content keywords.
UberSuggest is a free online tool. Click here to use it.
Finally, we arrive at Hexometer. Hexometer is a convenient and simple to use website health monitoring web app. You can create a free account and add your website to begin monitoring it right away. There are some features you can unlock with a paid plan. Here are some of the things you can do with Hexometer -
Upgrading starts from as little as $1 per month, which makes Hexameter extremely affordable.
So, there you have it. A complete list of some of the best and essential SEO tools for you to sink your teeth into and start using in 2020, and hopefully beyond. Of course, you will not need to use all of these tools, find the one that best meets your needs and make the most of it.
Don’t forget to bookmark this post for the future, as I’ll be updating it again shortly. (Hit Ctrl+D to bookmark).
Don't forget that you can get in touch with me if you have a particular tool you think should make this list!
