If you want to grow your website, you probably know that you need to rank your website in the search engines. In order to rank high on search engines, your SEO game should be on point.
There are many SEO plugins for WordPress that help in optimizing pages for better rankings. But that’s not enough because your competitors are also doing that. You need to be ahead of the curve and make use of different SEO tools available on the market.
Now, before you even think, I know that there are many SEO tools out there. Some are good for link building while some help in keyword research.
Choosing tools from a pool of thousands of SEO tools might be a daunting task. That’s why I have created this list of the best WordPress SEO tools.
In this list, I’ve covered the best tools you should add to your arsenal to secure higher rankings in [current_date format=Y] and beyond.
Let’s begin.
1. SEMrush
SEMrush is probably one of those rare magical SEO tools that provide all the features in one place.
This SEO tool lets you do keyword research, backlink analysis, SEO audits, check competitor rankings, and more.
With SEMrush, you don’t have to rely on different tools for SEO. Just using this tool, you can do everything.
Let’s talk more about how SEMRush as it might be the ultimate SEO tool you’re looking for.
SEMRush has more than 800,000,000 keywords and over 130,000,000 domains in their database. With this kind of data, it is very easy to find keywords and pages that are ranking for those keywords.
You can check the keywords a website is ranking on top in Google. Just enter the domain name and boom! You’ll have a list of valuable keywords that you can target in your website. Features like keyword difficulty make your keyword research process even better.
But that’s not it. With SEMRush, you can do backlink analysis easily. You can check any page’s backlinks. You can export this data and then use it to create links for your own website.
There’s a lot more you can do in SEMRush like uncovering a website’s top performing content, conducting a keyword gap analysis, long-tail keyword research, monitoring your website rankings and links, track PPC competitors, and more.
All in all, SEMRush is the ultimate a tool that can take your SEO game to the next level. The best part is that you can ditch all other tools that you are using for different purposes and switch to one tool that does everything.
SEMRush pricing plans start at $99 per month which is perfect for an SEO tool that can save your money from ten different tools that do the same thing.
SEMrush has recently launched a plugin name “SEO Writing Assistant” for WordPress.
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another SEO tool, and it’s just as good as SEMRush. I love Ahrefs for its keyword research and backlink analysis features.
Ahrefs crawls the entire web 24/7 and 872 million pages indexed in their database. Over 5.6 billion keywords are indexed in the Ahrefs database, and this makes it among the best SEO tools in the market.
With Ahrefs, you can do competitive research, keyword research, backlink research, rank tracking, and web monitoring easily.
There are many tools provided by Ahrefs. These tools are:
1. Site Explorer
Ahrefs Site Explorer gives you an in-depth look at any website’s organic traffic, backlinks, and keywords.
You can see what your competitors are ranking for and the keywords that are bringing them traffic.
It also allows you to look at the backlinks of these websites and where they are coming from.
Lastly, with Site Explorer, you can also do paid traffic research of any website.
2. Keywords Explorer
Ahrefs Keywords Explorer opens up a wide avenue of doing keyword research on a different level. You can analyze keywords, the search volume, their difficulty, and calculate the ranking potential.
This tool is the best when it comes to keyword research because it not only provides data about the one keyword. It also gives keyword suggestions so that you never run out of keyword ideas.
The search volumes, keyword difficulty, and other metrics are very accurate which make the keyword research process work for you.
3. Content Explorer
Discover the popular content of any website using Ahrefs Content Explorer. You can enter any website or keyword and look at the most popular content of that website or topic.
You can sort these results by the number of backlinks, social shares, domain rating, traffic, word count and organic traffic.
Content Explorer can help you get ideas to create content for your website but most importantly, it allows you to find link opportunities.
4. Rank Tracker
With Ahrefs Rank Tracker, you can track your website’s desktop and mobile rankings for any location. Ahrefs provides daily, weekly, and monthly reports so that you can monitor your website performance with great ease.
You can also track positions history of your pages to help you understand how well you are performing on the search engines.
Also Read: 9 Best Keyword Rank Tracker Plugins & Tools For WordPress
5. Site Audit
Site Audit allows you to do a complete SEO audit of your website. With this SEO audit, you can monitor and improve your website’s SEO.
In a nutshell, Ahrefs is the holy grail of SEO tools, and if you’re serious about improving your website rankings, you should definitely consider including this tool in your arsenal.
The pricing for Ahrefs starts at $99 for the lite plan and goes up to $999 based on the features.
3. Google Search Console
This is a must-use SEO tool not only because it’s free but also because it gives you very valuable information about your website’s performance on the search engines.
Google Search Console gives you information about the appearance of your website on Google, search traffic, crawl data, and more.
It’s an underused SEO tool which is very powerful. You can look at the links pointing to your site, keywords your pages are ranking for, and audit reports of your website.
While many other SEO tools are good at keyword research and link analysis, Google Search Console is good at providing reports about your site.
It notifies you of any errors on your website so that you can fix them. The crawl stats shows the crawl activity of your pages. You can test your robots.txt file and check your sitemap.
Google Search Console is a must-have SEO tool as it provides very important information and data about your website.
4. Google Analytics
In simple words, Google Analytics is Google Search Console on steroids. It provides complete data about your website. And it’s free.
You can look at your real-time traffic, top pages, site speed, keyword searches, and a lot more. The list goes on.
Google Analytics provides data about your website’s traffic. You can check your mobile traffic, social traffic, organic traffic, direct traffic, referral traffic, traffic by location etc.
The audience data is so overwhelming as you can get a lot of information about your site visitors. You can find their interests, age, gender, language, location, technology they are using etc.
This data is helpful in terms of SEO as you can understand your audience and improve your targeting.
Apart from this, Google Analytics also provides search console and Google Adwords data.
When it comes to understanding user behavior, no one can beat Google Analytics as it’s simply remarkable. You can look at the flow of a user on your website. This includes the pages landing page, exit page, and the pages they visited in between the session.
This helps in uncovering leaks in your website flow and improve them.
From SEO perspective, if you are not using this tool, you are losing on tons of data that can help you rank higher in search engines.
5. Google PageSpeed Insights
Not all SEO tools are about finding keywords and link opportunities. To rank well in search engines, your website should load extremely fast.
This can only be done if you optimize your website. And Google PageSpeed Insights is one such tool that shows you the performance of your website.
This tool gives a rating of your website’s performance on desktop and mobile devices. With this rating, you can also view the errors that are slowing down your website.
You can look at these errors and where they are coming from so that you can solve them easily.
6. GTMetrix
Google PageSpeed Insights is a good tool to analyze your website’s performance. But it still doesn’t provide the actual data like the loading time, page size, number of requests, etc.
GTMetrix is a tool that shows all this information and is free. You can test your website’s loading time, and it also gives a score of your performance.
But unlike Google PageSpeed Insights, it gives detailed information about the errors and how to fix them.
If you want to optimize your website’s speed, you should do it with the help of GTMetrix. Or else, you’re going to have a hard time.
7. KWFinder
SEMRush and Ahrefs might be the best WordPress SEO tools on the market, but they are a bit expensive. And if you cannot afford these tools, then KWFinder is for you.
Though it’s not as good as SEMRush and Ahrefs, it still helps you do a proper keyword research, understand a website’s backlink profile, track your rankings, and analyze SERP results.
With KWFinder, you can enter any website and look at the keywords it is ranking on. It also shows keyword difficulty number which is pretty accurate and reliable.
KWFinder is a paid tool which costs $29 per month for the basic plan. But you can also use it for free. The free plan allows 5 keyword lookups in 24 hours and 50 keyword suggestions per keyword.
I have used this tool and loved it because of how accurate the data is and how affordable it is.
8. Ubersuggest
Many times, you want a tool that can just suggest keywords to you. No detailed keyword research and SERP analysis. Just a list of keyword suggestions for a particular keyword without paying a lot of money.
That’s what Ubersuggest does and it’s completely free. The tool is now acquired by Neil Patel and many great features have been added since then.
You can enter any phrase or keyword and it’ll suggest you keywords along with their search volume and competition.
What makes Ubersuggest even better is that it also shows you the keyword difficulty of the keywords and phrases you enter.
Having a tool like Ubersuggest in your arsenal is very handy as you can use it anytime you want to do a quick keyword research and want keyword suggestions.
9. Grammarly
They say content is king. But it’ll only remain the king if you write good quality content without any punctuation or grammatical errors.
To help you with this problem, Grammarly is the best tool to help you improve your writing significantly.
It shows you the errors in your content as you’re writing. You can fix these errors by the suggestions given by Grammarly itself.
The best part of this tool is that you can install its chrome extension which is compatible with WordPress.
So whenever you’re writing a post, Grammarly will show you the grammar and punctuation errors. Simply click on the error and it will give you suggestions on how to fix it.
As someone who writes a lot, Grammarly has become a life-changer as I don’t make mistakes a lot now. And even if I do, Grammarly is there to save me.
10. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
Good content is only as good as it’s headline. If your headline sucks, no one is even going to bother to click and read your content.
CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer tool can help you write better headlines. Just enter your headline in the tool and it will give a score based on different criterias.
The score depends on how long the headline is, what kind of words are included, whether it’s a common headline or not etc.
This helps in understanding what kind of headlines work and what don’t. Headline analyzer shows you the contents of your headline and what you need to make it better.
The tool is totally free to use and it has become my habit to check headlines as it’s been really helpful.
11. NinjaOutreach
In the above tools, we had features that allowed to us to find link opportunities. But how to get those links?
In a world of over hundreds of link building methods, email outreach is the most popular and has the highest conversion rate.
NinjaOutreach is the best email outreach tool in the market. You can find influencers, save them, reach out to them and build links easily.
If you have done email outreach before, you know how messy the whole process is. NinjaOutreach eliminates this completely and helps you run outreach campaigns just using one tool.
You can search over 25 million influencers within seconds, make a list of influencers, and run your outreach campaign.
With NinjaOutreach, you can create and save templates that you can use in your outreach campaigns.
Sending and following-up is also a seamless process, as you can set automated email campaigns with auto-follow ups.
NinjaOutreach provides email statistics of your outreach campaigns to identify the results of your campaigns. You can sort email stats by open rates, response rates, and click-through rates.
It also lets you set up email alerts when someone replies to your emails so that you can reply to them and keep the conversation running.
With great features comes great pricing. The pricing for NinjaOutreach starts at $69 per month which allows you to store 1500 contacts.
But given the features provided, it’s totally worth it. And if you run outreach campaigns a lot, this tool is definitely for you.
12. Voila Norbert
Another great email outreach tool to use is Voila Norbert. Norbert gives you the correct email addresses for prospects you are reaching out to for links. It claims to have a 98% success rate. To ensure your emails end up in the correct inbox’s you’ve got to use this tool.
It was elected the most accurate email finder out there according to ahrefs. Whether you’re trying to reach out to influencers, build marketing connections with link building or reach potential recruits, Norbert’s got you covered. They give you 50 credits for first time users to test out the tool.
Conclusion: Which Is The Best WordPress SEO Tool?
So these were the 11 best WordPress SEO tool for achieving higher rankings in 2018. You can find many tools out there, but these are the best ones you can find.
Now, if you are looking to choose just one tool, SEMRush is the one. SEMRush provides everything you need in an SEO tool.
From keyword research, SERP analysis, backlink analysis, and site auditing, SEMRush is the complete SEO suite that will help you rank higher on Google.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use other tools. There are many free tools mentioned in the list, and you should definitely give them a try and decide which one deserves to be in your 2018 SEO toolkit.
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