24 best SEO tools I'm using in 2025 (free + paid)

I've also worked with dozens of software companies to help them with their SEO revenue growth.

It's safe to say that I've tested and used all of the best SEO tools on the market. And I'm constantly looking for the newest tools that can give me and my clients an edge.

In this post, I'm breaking down 24 SEO tools (across different categories) so you can pick what's best for your specific needs. I'll also include an "ease of use" score for each tool (beginner, intermediate, or advanced) to help you choose tools that match your skill level.

These aren't in a particular order, but they lean a bit more on the side of how much I value them. Also, I tried to group many of the tools for logical clarity so you can easily find what you're looking for.

Don't worry, this is not a biased post by some SEO company trying to sell you their tool. This post is 100% written by me. I only recommend the SEO tools I've used, and will talk about what I like and don't like about each of them. No AI-generated slop, just real insights from someone who uses these tools every single day.

What is an SEO tool?

An SEO (search engine optimization) tool is a platform that helps you plan and strategize ways to improve your site's visibility in search engines. This is not just limited to Google. This includes Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and all the other search engines on the market.

These tools all do different things. Some of them help you with keyword research, some of them help you analyze competitors' traffic and backlinks, some of them help you create content that is optimized for search engines, some of them help you create automated SEO workflows, and some of them help you improve the technical health of your website.

Some of the tools we'll go over in this post aim to do all the things I just mentioned, while some of them only do one specific thing very well. Overall, I've used every single tool on this list and have written a comprehensive review of all of them below.

But my goal is to help you understand what tool to use for yourself, so let's first go over what I consider to be the best SEO tools to use.

What do I consider the best SEO tools?

For beginners, I generally recommend using the free tools that Google gives you. This includes using Google Autocomplete, Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, and even Google Trends.

With just these free tools alone, I've been able to rank #1 really fast. In fact, here's a video of me doing my entire workflow to try and rank in 24 hours:

The Google tools are some of the best free tools (and I'll show you more in this post) that I think you should start out with first.

From there, you want to get into the content creation part, and some of the tools that I believe are the best there would be Surfer, Claude, or Clearscope.

When it comes to keyword research and analyzing competitors, my favorite tools are Ahrefs, Semrush, and using Google Autocomplete.

And when it comes to creating SEO automations, my favorite tool by far is Gumloop. Again, all of these we're going to go over below.

Okay, no more rambling. Let's get into the list.

24 best SEO tools I've personally tested in 2025

Here are the best SEO tools right now:

1. Surfer (best for content optimization)
2. Gumloop (best for SEO automation workflows)
3. Ahrefs (best for competitor & backlink research)
4. Semrush (best for all-in-one SEO management)
5. KeySearch (best for budget keyword research)
6. SE Ranking (best for affordable rank tracking + audits)
7. Google Search Console (best for first-party data + indexing)
8. Google Keyword Planner (best for search volume & CPC estimates)
9. Google Autocomplete (best for search-intent discovery)
10. Bing Webmaster Tools (best for free technical audits)
11. AlsoAsked (best for H2 heading ideas)
12. AnswerThePublic (best for finding long-tail queries)
13. SimilarWeb (best for analyzing competitor traffic)
14. ProductRank.ai (best for brand tracking in AI search)
15. Google Trends (best for trend spotting + prioritization)
16. Nightwatch (best for local rank tracking)
17. Screaming Frog (best for technical SEO audits)
18. Clearscope (best for content scoring & topic coverage)
19. AirOps (best for AI-powered workflows)
20. Claude (Anthropic) (best for content proofreading)
21. Keywords Everywhere (best for in-SERP keyword metrics)
22. Google Analytics 4 (best for site analytics)
23. Looker Studio (best for custom SEO client dashboards)
24. Webflow (best for building SEO-optimized sites)

Let’s go over each one in depth.

1. Surfer

• Category: Content optimization
• Best for: Writing SEO-focused blogs
• Ease of use: Beginner to intermediate
• Pricing: Starts at $99 per month

Founded in 2017, Surfer is an SEO and content optimization tool that promises to help you boost your visibility in Google, ChatGPT, and other AI search engines. It's actually a tool that I've used for a few years now, and I find it to be a staple in any SEO or content marketer's workflow stack.

How Surfer Works

At its core, Surfer originally started as a content optimization tool, and this is widely what I have used it for in the past. Essentially, what you do is create reports based off certain keywords you want to go after, and Surfer helps you create a content outline based off your target keyword. 

What the platform does is it scrapes through all the top-ranking pages for a given keyword, figures out what are common keywords used within those articles, and then spits them back out into your content brief inside of Surfer.

So you can write an article targeting a keyword that is matching the correct intent and is giving you a bunch of optimization recommendations like what keywords to include, how long the word count should be, how many headings you should ideally have, etc.

But since its optimization days, Surfer has launched new features like Surfer AI that helps you write content using AI in your own branded voice, and it also now allows you to show up and optimize for AI chatbots.

They also have a bunch of free tools like an AI content detector tool and an AI content humanizer tool. Again, it's debatable on the accuracy of these tools, not just from Surfer but from pretty much any company out there. But it's nice if they include these for free, so you don't even need to be on a paid plan to get access to it.

Who is Surfer for?

As someone who's led content marketing, started an SEO agency, and runs a media company (the one you're reading on right now), I think Surfer can actually be used for anybody that creates editorial SEO content. Meaning their goal is to create amazing content for their own website or their company's website with the goal of having that content show up high in search engines based on specific keywords their potential customers are searching for.

Pricing plans

Surfer has three pricing tiers, and you also get a 20% discount if you pay annually, but I'm going to just list out the monthly prices below because that's generally what most people, like me, care about first.

Here are Surfer's plans:

• Essential: This runs you $99 per month and gives you pretty much everything you need to generate reports and publish content that is optimized around specific keywords. It also has built-in templates so you can stay on brand and add in your own custom voice.
• Scale: This runs you $219 per month, and it gives you everything in Essential except you get five times higher limits. So what this means is you'll get more keyword reports that you can generate, you'll get more content monitoring reports, and you'll even get advanced topical maps to help you get a better idea of what type of content you should be creating based off of what already works on your site.
• Enterprise: This is totally custom pricing, and it's tailored to whatever businesses need and whatever rate limits they need. So you'll get everything in the Scale plan, but it'll also come with white labeling, API access, and SSO logins, which are pretty important for larger organizations.

Pros and cons

This wouldn't be a real review without a pros and cons section, as all of my reviews on this blog aim to be as unbiased as possible. However, I do tend to mention only tools that I have personally used and actually like.

Here are some of the pros and cons of Surfer:

Pros:

• The content optimization reports are amazing. If you're looking to better optimize your existing content for SEO, it's an amazing feature.
• It can easily integrate with Google Docs or WordPress. I love the Google Docs integration because I write everything in a Google Doc—even this blog post that you're reading right now is being written in a Google Doc.
• If you're a larger company that cares about your brand voice and collaboration, even on the basic Essential plan you get both of those things.
• It's a pretty big company and a trusted tool used by Intuit, Square, ClickUp, FedEx, FreshBooks, and a ton more big companies. So I know nothing's going to break, and it has a team behind it that actually cares.

Cons:

While Surfer is great and I use it, I do think that people should be careful using these kinds of tools without knowing any SEO fundamentals.

Here are some of the cons with using Surfer:

• If you're a small startup, the entry-level $100-a-month plan might be a little bit too much, and there are alternatives in the space (albeit not as great) that are about half the price.
• You need to have some sort of basic understanding of SEO to get the most out of the tool. If you're an absolute beginner, this is probably not a tool that's going to increase your skills by a magnitude of 10. What it really does is help you go from having an 80% page to publish to a 100% page to publish. But if you don't know how to get to that 80% on your own, then Surfer or really any other tool won't help you.
• No technical SEO tools built in, the platform just focuses on creating and analyzing content.

Surfer rating and reviews

Now let's check out some reviews of Surfer from third-party websites:

• G2: 4.8 out of 5 stars (from +537 user reviews)
• Capterra: 4.9 out of 5 stars (from +417 user reviews)

As you can see, Surfer is a solid tool with amazing reviews from others. I recommend checking it out if you're looking for something like this. They have a 7-day money-back guarantee too, so there's no huge risk in trying it out.

2. Gumloop

• Category: Automation & workflows
• Best for: Creating SEO-automated workflows
• Ease of use: Intermediate
• Pricing: Free plan, paid plans start at $97 per month

Founded just less than 2 years ago, Gumloop has quickly become my favorite AI marketing tool for creating any sort of workflow, including SEO workflows.

How Gumloop works

Gumloop is a tool that helps you build any sort of AI workflow. You can think of it as Zapier combined with ChatGPT. What this really means is that you can connect it to any of the tools that you use in your SEO tech stack and combine it with any LLM (like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc.) to give your tools and workflows an AI layer.

It essentially helps you become an AI engineer without needing to know how to code. The great thing about Gumloop is that many of the tools that are built in, like access to ChatGPT or even Semrush, are free to use, so you don't even have to pay for an extra account on those other platforms.

For example, you can create an AI agent that scrapes competitors and monitors them through Semrush's data, and then you can feed that information to a Google Doc or a Slack message that automatically sends you reports. Or you can take that information and give it to the ChatGPT node in Gumloop and prompt it to create a blog outline, which can then send that to a Google Doc for you to write. And there's just so much more.

It pretty much becomes like an AI SEO assistant in your workflow of doing SEO at your job, whether that's working in-house or working at an agency or being even a freelancer. It's like a junior-level SEO employee.

But as with all AI tools, their effectiveness depends on how well you can train them. So I mentioned it's more of an intermediate/advanced tool because you have to be a pretty decent SEO already so that you can train it and create an AI SEO agent that actually helps you double, sometimes even triple your productivity.

Who is Gumloop for?

Gumloop is great SEO professionals and content marketers who want to automate repetitive tasks in their SEO workflows. It's actually really powerful if you're a freelancer or agency owner that manages multiple clients, or you work in an in-house team handling a big website with lots of SEO operations.

The tool really shines in what I know a lot of big companies use it for, which is for competitor analysis and for creating automated reports. However, it's more than just an SEO tool, you can literally use it for any part in your marketing workflow.

I discovered this tool about 7 months ago, and I loved it so much that I flew out to San Francisco and met the Gumloop team. Here's a picture of me in their office in front of their logo (lol):

And their CEO Max was generous enough to give me a 20% off discount for any of my readers that want to use the paid plan. You can use code MARKETERMILK at checkout for 20% off (and no, they're not paying me to say that or include them in this list, I just love them).

Pricing plans

Here are Gumloop's paid plans:

• Free: $0 a month, and this comes with 1,000 credits, which is more than enough to build out your first flow and really see the power of the tool.
• Starter: $97 a month and gives you up to 30,000 credits per month.
• Pro: $297 per month and starts at 75,000 credits per month.
• Enterprise: Custom. This is completely custom pricing based off of what you need.

Again, if you want 20% off any paid plan, use code MARKETERMILK at checkout.

Pros and cons of Gumloop

But this wouldn't be a real review without looking at the pros and cons, so let's look at those.

Pros:

• Build any SEO workflow and automate it with AI agents.
• Integrate your Google Analytics data and even use Semrush for free inside of Gumloop to build out genetic workflows that are leveraging real data, whether from your own website or your competitors.
• The free plan is super generous, and you can create your first AI agent with it, probably for free.
• It has the best UI and UX of any AI SaaS tool I've seen. I've met the UI/UX designers on the team at Gumloop, and they're absolute legends, so I'm not surprised at how nice the tool looks and how intuitive it is.
• There's a feature called Gummie, which is essentially the chatbot in the tool, and when you're creating your workflows, you can use Gummie to help you either fix any areas within an existing workflow that you've created yourself manually, or Gummie can help you even go out and build that entire workflow from scratch.

Cons:

• No smaller tiered plan to test out beyond the free plan. The entry level plan might be tough for indie creators on a budget.
• Somethings can break at times because the team is constantly shipping new features. They are fast to respond though if you reach out.

Gumloop rating and reviews

Because Gumloop is so new, and they are focused more on building out their product (over marketing), there aren’t a lot of reviews. But, I did write an in-depth Gumloop review if you want to check it out.

As you can see, this is still a very underrated tool, but it's growing really fast and it's actually used by teams at Webflow, Instacart, Shopify, and a ton of other big brands internally, so that should show just how powerful the tool is.

3. Ahrefs

• Category: Competitor & backlink research
• Best for: Analyzing competitor sites and backlink profiles
• Ease of use: Beginner to expert
• Pricing: Starts at $108 per month

If you know what SEO is, you probably already know about Ahrefs. Ahrefs is an SEO-first tool, although they are migrating over into being an overall marketing platform for all search engines and LLMs.

How Ahrefs works

Personally, I use Ahrefs almost every single day to track how my website is performing, how my client sites are performing, and how other websites in my clients' niches are performing. There are really different ways you can use Ahrefs. I find that it's great for doing pretty much anything with SEO. In fact, if there's probably only one tool you will ever pay for that is genuinely useful besides something like Surfer, it's going to be Ahrefs.

But I find it's especially good if you are trying to analyze competitor sites through their Site Explorer feature or even use it as a keyword research tool to help you identify specific topics you might be thinking about, although there are some free tools that I think I like even more than Ahrefs for keyword research that I'll cover in this list below.

Who is Ahrefs for?

Ahrefs is great for any level from beginner to intermediate to expert, and it's great if you work at a startup and you run SEO, it's great if you run your own company and your own websites, it's great if you're a freelancer. It fits every sort of persona that is involved in SEO or content marketing.

Pricing plans

Ahrefs is known to not be the cheapest tool out there, so let's look at some of the pricing plans:

• Lite: This starts at $108 per month and gives you up to 5 projects, 750 tracked keywords, and 500 credits per user (one credit is used per action with Ahrefs).
• Standard: This starts at $208 a month, gives you up to 20 projects, 2,000 tracked keywords, and unlimited credits per user.
• Advanced: This starts at $374 per month and gives you up to 50 projects, 10,000 tracked keywords, and a few extra features.

Ahrefs does have a secret $29 a month Starter plan for doing basic stuff with a limited amount of credits as well. But it's a bit hidden on their pricing page. If you want to check out more of their pricing features, you can check out their landing page here.

Pros and cons

Let's check out some of the pros and cons of Ahrefs:

Pros:

• Probably one of the most accurate SEO competitor analysis tools without actually needing your own data. They're constantly scraping the web to figure out how websites and keywords perform (can't imagine how much this costs them).
• The team behind Ahrefs really cares, and they're constantly adding new features, especially new features around tracking mentions in AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
• It's fairly easy to use and understand, plus they have a ton of educational content on their YouTube channel that shows you how to use the tool and what to use it for.

Cons:

• It's really pricey, which is a common complaint that a lot of people have in the SEO community. However, I think the price is justified to some degree.
• The rank tracking isn't the most accurate that I've seen, at least compared to some other tools that are on this list below.
• Sometimes the traffic numbers that it generates in Ahrefs don't align with actual first-party data I see with my clients' websites, but it is pretty much the closest I've seen in comparing it with other tools that rely on third-party data.

Ahrefs rating and reviews

Here are some reviews of Ahrefs on third-party review sites:

• G2: 4.5 out of 5 star rating (from +581 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7 out of 5 star rating (from +579 reviews)

Overall, Ahrefs is a great tool, and if you're not already using it, I recommend checking it out. There is an alternative to Ahrefs that is very similar called Semrush that we'll get into now.

4. Semrush

• Category: All-in-One SEO Suites
• Best for: All-in-one SEO management
• Ease of use: Intermediate to Advanced
• Pricing: Starts at $139.95 per month

If Ahrefs is Apple, then Semrush is Microsoft. And just like how I now have an Apple computer, I actually started with a Windows PC.

Okay, I don't mean to be cryptic. What I'm trying to say is that Semrush was the first SEO tool I ever used back in 2015. It's a massive tool in the SEO and marketing space. In fact, I'd argue that it's the most widely used SEO tool on the market, and I know their annual revenue is twice as much as Ahrefs.

How Semrush Works

The tool can help you do everything from tracking traffic trends of your own website or competitor websites to helping you optimize your content through their different Semrush apps like ContentShake, to helping you track keywords on a national level or a local level. It can pretty much do almost everything that you would need in an SEO tool.

Who is Semrush for?

It's a great platform for marketing agencies, startups, local businesses, or large enterprises who run any sort of SEO operations.

Pricing plans

Pricing for Semrush also runs on the premium side, but here are the pricing tiers:

• Pro: Starts at $139.95 per month and gives you up to 5 projects and pretty much everything you need to get started.
• Guru: This starts at $249.95 per month and gives you up to 15 projects, everything in the Pro plan, ChatGPT search tracking, and multi-location data.
• Business: This starts at $499.95 per month and gives you up to 40 projects, share of voice tracker, and API access.

You can compare and check out all other plans by visiting the pricing page here.

Pros and cons

Let's check out some of the pros and cons of Semrush:

Pros:

• The one tool that you can pay for that can pretty much do everything you need from an SEO platform.
• It's a widely used tool, so there's tons of tutorials, guides, and resources, both from external creators on YouTube and blogs to Semrush Academy, which curates free courses from SEO experts in the industry.
• Publicly traded company, so it's constantly trying to create features to stay ahead of every other SEO tool on the market.

Cons:

• It's a bit expensive for people just starting out in SEO and who are on a tight budget.
• The user interface can be a bit overwhelming and clunky, although it has improved a lot over the years. But being the nature that it can do everything, it can have a little bit of a learning curve.

Semrush rating and reviews

Let's look at reviews of Semrush on third-party review sites:

• G2: 4.5 out of 5 star rating (from +2,680 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.6 out of 5 star rating (from +2,294 reviews)

5. KeySearch

• Category: Keyword & Topic Research
• Best for: Budget-friendly all-in-one SEO
• Ease of use: Beginner to Intermediate
• Pricing: Starts at $24 per month

KeySearch is a budget-friendly SEO tool that aims to do everything that Semrush and Ahrefs can do. Well, not everything, but like 70% of it, and it's honestly still pretty accurate (it uses the Moz Pro API).

However, it is the second SEO tool I ever used, and I have been paying for a subscription since 2017 because it is so cheap compared to everything else on the market that can do what this tool can.

How KeySearch Works

It's great if you're an absolute beginner and you're looking for the most budget-friendly SEO tool to help you analyze competitors, brainstorm keywords, track your ranking keywords, and a ton more.

It doesn't have the most intuitive user interface and it can be a bit slow for certain features, but because of its price, I think it makes up for that.

Who is KeySearch for?

KeySearch is great for any content or SEO professional just starting out. It’s super budget-friendly and it’s a great way to start learning how to use premium keyword research tools. It’s also great to start learning how to analyze search rankings of competitors.

Pricing plans

KeySearch keeps it super simple with just two paid plans:

• Starter Plan: $24 a month gives you up to 200 keyword searches per day, 80 tracked keywords, and 5,000 AI credits.
• Pro Plan: $69 a month gives you 500 searches per day, 200 tracked keywords, 15,000 AI credits, and includes their Foresight feature.

Pros and cons

Now let's look at the pros and cons of KeySearch:

Pros:

• Their basic plan gives you everything you need, and it's the plan that I'm on. You'll get keyword research, live SERP analysis, competitor analysis, backlink analysis, YouTube research, and a ton more.
• It's fairly easy to use and learn your way around.
• There's no other tool in the market that does what KeySearch can do at this price.

Cons:

• It can be a bit slow and clunky at times.
• There's not a large team around it, so customer support can be questionable at times.

KeySearch rating and reviews

Let's look at some reviews from third-party review sites:

• G2: 4.9 out of 5 star rating (from +10 reviews)
• Trustpilot: 4.2 out of 5 star rating (from +25 reviews)

Overall, KeySearch is amazing for the value, and it's a tool I continue to pay for even though I use tools like Ahrefs and Surfer.

6. SE Ranking

• Category: All-in-One SEO Suites
• Best for: Agencies managing multiple clients
• Ease of use: Beginner to Intermediate
• Pricing: Starts at $65 per month

SE Ranking is another great SEO tool that can do everything from keyword research to SEO monitoring to competitive research and backlink analysis.

SE Ranking is honestly an amazing tool, however, I do think that it's built more for agencies and content marketing teams that manage a bunch of clients. So it may not be the best tool if you're an in-house marketer or if you're just a business owner working on your own website. In that case, I would probably recommend something like Ahrefs or Semrush. But if you're an agency, this is definitely a tool to check out.

Who is SE Ranking for?

This tool is specifically designed for SEO agencies, freelancers managing multiple clients, and marketing teams that need to track and report on several websites at once. The platform's structure and pricing make it most cost-effective when you're managing at least 3-5 websites.

Pricing plans

Let's check out SE Ranking's pricing and plans. I'm going to show the monthly plans, but note that you can get a 20% discount if you sign up for an annual subscription. Here are the SE Ranking plans:

• Essential: Starts at $65 per month and gives you up to 5 projects and 500 keywords to track daily.
• Pro: $119 per month and comes with 30 projects, 2,000 daily tracked keywords, as well as an LLM tracker.
• Business: Starts at $259 per month, comes with unlimited projects and starts at 5,000 keywords to track daily, and it also includes dedicated customer support and API access.

Pros and cons

Now let's look at the pros and cons:

Pros:

• Designed to manage multiple websites and allows you to track all of your client website data in one singular place.
• Has built-in automation workflow features to help you manage all of your client work.
• Includes powerful AI insights that help you create SEO reports for your clients as well as show them how they are showing up in AI search engines.

Cons:

• Not the best tool to use if you are only managing one website, the pricing doesn't make sense for single-site use.
• Sometimes the rank tracking data may not be the most accurate, which is also confirmed by another user on Reddit.

SE Ranking rating and reviews

Here's how customers rank SE Ranking on third-party review sites:

• G2: 4.8 out of 5 star rating (from +1,381 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7 out of 5 star rating (from +285 reviews)

7. Google Search Console

• Category: Technical SEO & Site Health
• Best for: First-party data + indexing
• Ease of use: Beginner to Intermediate
• Pricing: Free

You might already know this one, and it's arguably the number one SEO tool, but next we have Google Search Console. GSC is an amazing tool that I check every day. Even though the data takes around 24 to 48 hours to update, it is the only resource in terms of getting first-party data from Google.

There are many different ways you can use Google Search Console. Of course, you can use it for tracking your own pages and keywords, but there are also a few different use cases that I use it for, like using the compare feature to see which pages on my site are losing traffic and need to be updated. And also on the side of content updates, figuring out what keywords I'm getting a lot of impressions for but not a lot of clicks and adding that into my pages. I have some guides on my site for this that you can check out here.

This is where you'll also submit your sitemap and request indexing of new pages or pages that you just updated.

Who is Google Search Console for?

Google Search Console is completely free to use, and it's designed for every single person that is trying to grow a website through SEO, whether you're a beginner, intermediate, or advanced.

Pros and cons

Here are some of the pros and cons with Google Search Console:

Pros:

• It's the main source of truth for first-party data as it relates to SEO rankings on Google.
• Gives you clear visibility into what's happening with your website.
• It's completely free to use.

Cons:

• It takes a while for the data to actually show, but this, to be honest, is not a big deal.
• It's only for information related to your website, so you can't use it for analyzing competitors.

Google Search Console rating and reviews

Here are what people rate Google Search Console on third-party review sites:

• G2: 4.7 out of 5 star rating (from +419 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.8 out of 5 star rating (from +207 reviews)

8. Google Keyword Planner

• Category: Keyword & Topic Research
• Best for: Search volume & CPC estimates
• Ease of use: Beginner
• Pricing: Free

Next is Google Keyword Planner, and this is another free tool offered by Google. It's actually a tool you access within Google Ads, and it's designed to help people with their PPC campaigns.

However, I do use this for SEO, and mostly I use it to track how many searches a keyword has and its competition level. Also, understanding the CPC (cost per click) for each keyword shows the value of the keyword that I want to go after.

Who is Google Keyword Planner for?

This tool is pretty much designed for anyone, beginner to advanced, and I don't see it talked about a lot when it comes to keyword research. You can also use Keyword Planner to identify new keywords as well, so if you really have absolutely no budget for paying for a tool, this is probably one of the best free keyword research tools on the market.

Pros and cons

Let's look at some of the pros and cons of Google Keyword Planner:

Pros:

• It's a Google product, so it's very accurate in terms of forecasting keyword data and giving you ideas of what people are actually searching for.
• It's completely free to use and super underrated.

Cons:

• You do need access to a Google Ads account to be able to use this feature, it's not built into something like Google Search Console.
• The feature can be a little bit buried inside of Google Ads as a whole, which can feel a little bit overwhelming if you are a beginner marketer.

Google Keyword Planner rating and reviews

Here's what people rate Google Keyword Planner on third-party review sites:

• G2: 4.7 out of 5 star rating (from +10 reviews)
• Prebo Digital: 4.9 out of 5 star rating (from +16 reviews)

9. Google Autocomplete

• Category: Keyword & Topic Research
• Best for: Search-intent discovery
• Ease of use: Beginner
• Pricing: Free

This is my favorite way to figure out what keywords to target, and it's using Google Autocomplete, or sometimes referred to as Google Auto-suggest. This is when you open up a window in incognito mode and go to simply google.com and start typing in a seed keyword and see what Google auto-completes. This will then give you long-tail keyword ideas to go after that people are searching for in real time.

This is actually the tool that I've used to find hidden gem keywords that have turned into some of my highest traffic blog posts to date. Even right now, some of the highest-visited blogs on this site that have been read well over 100,000 times (I have multiple of them) have been found through using Google Autocomplete.

Who is Google Autocomplete for?

But to take it a step further, I actually combine this tool with the one we just talked about, Google Keyword Planner, and it's how I find hidden gem keywords. Some people also refer to these as "zero volume" keywords. I actually made a YouTube video on this that you can watch here:

There are no real pros or cons to review for this tool, and it's completely free to use. It's pretty much just using Google, so I'm not going to include pros/cons or ratings information here.

10. Bing Webmaster Tools

• Category: Technical SEO & Site Health
• Best for: Free technical audits
• Ease of use: Beginner to Intermediate
• Pricing: Free

Bing Webmaster Tools is pretty much the Google Search Console for the search engine Bing. It's actually very underrated and doesn't get a lot of love.

I think when it comes to figuring out technical errors, Bing Webmaster Tools actually does a better job than Google Search Console does sometimes. It's also a great tool to submit your sitemap and request to index your individual pages to get ranked inside of Bing. This is especially important if you care about your rankings in ChatGPT, as it relies heavily on doing Bing searches.

Who is Bing Webmaster Tools for?

The great thing about this tool is that if you already have Google Search Console set up, you can simply log in to Bing Webmaster Tools with your Google account that is associated with your GSC account, and it'll automatically import everything over.

Again, this is a free tool to use, so I'm not going to really include any pros and cons or third-party ratings.

11. AlsoAsked

• Category: Keyword & Topic Research
• Best for: H2 heading ideas
• Ease of use: Beginner to Intermediate
• Pricing: Free (3 searches/day), paid plans start at $12/month

AlsoAsked is an SEO tool that helps you find questions and long-tail keywords based off of a seed keyword that you want to go after. It's actually super powerful at helping you find questions from People Also Ask (also known as PAA in the SEO space).

The tool is honestly fantastic, and I highly recommend using it if you're trying to find heading ideas within your blog articles. For example, even in this article I found an H2 heading for "Is SEO worth it?" that is actually the conclusion of this blog post, and I found that through People Also Ask.

Who is AlsoAsked for?

The tool is great for anybody that is a beginner, intermediate, or even advanced person trying to create helpful content and make sure they cover a topic in-depth.

Pricing plans

You get three free searches per day, and once those credits are used, you have to choose between three different paid plans. The company is European-based, so these plans do include tax, but I'm not listing the tax in the plans below:

• Basic: $12 a month and gives you 100 credits per month
• Lite: $23 a month and gives you 300 credits per month
• Pro: $47 a month and gives you 1,000 credits per month

AlsoAsked rating and reviews

Here's what third-party review sites say about AlsoAsked:

• Product Hunt: 5 out of 5 star rating (from +2 reviews)

Overall, I think it's an amazing tool to have in your content creation stack. Yes, you can use Google and look at the People Also Ask section, but this tool not only helps you discover those questions but actually broadens it and helps you find even more questions that you might not see initially within Google.

12. AnswerThePublic

• Category: Keyword & Topic Research
• Best for: Question-based keyword research
• Ease of use: Beginner
• Pricing: Free (3 searches/day), paid plans start at $11/month

AnswerThePublic is a tool that's been around forever, and a few years ago it was actually acquired by NP Digital, which is Neil Patel's digital marketing agency. The tool helps you find questions related to keywords or topics so you can understand the intent of what people are searching for on the internet.

It's actually a great tool to discover questions you can add in your blog posts that can potentially help you show up for questions that people are asking in LLMs.

Who is AnswerThePublic for?

It's a great tool for anybody who wants to get a better understanding of what types of questions people are asking around specific keywords. The tool also works outside of Google and can help you discover questions people are asking on Instagram, Amazon, YouTube, Bing, and TikTok.

Pricing plans

Similar to AlsoAsked, you get three credits per day, and once those are used, you have to pay for one of the following plans:

• Individual: Starts at $11 per month and gives you 100 searches per day
• Pro: Starts at $99 per month and gives you unlimited searches per day
• Expert: Starts at $199 per month and gives you everything in the Pro plan plus unlimited users if you have a large team

All plans come with a 7-day free trial, so you won't actually get billed until after the first week, so you can try it risk-free.

AnswerThePublic rating and reviews

Here's what people rate AnswerThePublic on third-party review sites:

• G2: 4.5 out of 5 star rating (from +37 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.6 out of 5 star rating (from +10 reviews)

13. SimilarWeb

• Category: Competitor Analysis
• Best for: Analyzing competitor traffic
• Ease of use: Beginner to Intermediate
• Pricing: Free plan available, paid plans start at $1,500/year

SimilarWeb was one of the first digital marketing tools I ever used, and the tool helps you analyze total website traffic of any website. While it may not look like an SEO tool, how I use this for SEO is I use it to analyze specific websites and see how much of their total traffic share comes from search.

It can also show you traffic share split by direct, search, referrals, email, and paid ads, so you can see a whole pie chart diagram of how your competitors are getting their traffic.

Who is SimilarWeb for?

This tool is great for marketers and business owners who want to understand the competitive landscape and see where their competitors' traffic is coming from. It's particularly useful for identifying if a competitor relies heavily on SEO or other channels.

Pricing plans

Let's look at SimilarWeb's pricing plans. This is not a cheap tool to use, and it's mostly used for enterprise companies, but I actually just use the free plan. If you want to upgrade, they have these plans:

• Starter: This starts at $1,500 per year and gives you 1,000 keywords per table
• Professional: Starts at $4,000 per year, gives you 6 months of historical data and 5,000 keywords per table
• Team: Custom pricing that requires talking to sales, but gives you 15 months of historical data with 50,000 keywords per table, and AI agents
• Enterprise: Custom pricing that requires you to talk to sales, gives you 37 months of historical data with unlimited keywords per table, and AI agents

SimilarWeb rating and reviews

Here's what people rate SimilarWeb on third-party review sites:

• G2: 4.5 out of 5 star rating (from +982 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.6 out of 5 star rating (from +219 reviews)

14. ProductRank.ai

• Category: Keyword & Entity Tracking
• Best for: Brand tracking in AI search
• Ease of use: Beginner to Intermediate
• Pricing: Free

ProductRank.ai is a free brand tracking tool to check how your website is performing for specific keywords and questions within LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and even AI search engines like Perplexity. It's a completely free tool to use, and it's great to get a better idea of what types of questions are showing up for different websites, so you can see how sites are performing within AI search engines.

Who is ProductRank.ai for?

This tool is perfect for brands and marketers who want to understand their visibility in AI-powered search results. As AI search becomes more important, tracking your performance in these platforms is becoming just as crucial as traditional SEO.

Since this is a free tool, I'm not including pros/cons or ratings sections.

15. Google Trends

• Category: Keyword & Topic Research
• Best for: Trend spotting + prioritization
• Ease of use: Beginner
• Pricing: Free

Google Trends is another free tool from Google that helps you track how keywords are trending across Google search. I use this tool a lot to track how keywords are doing when I use Google Autocomplete.

I also use this tool when I find two very similar keywords (for example, using Google Keyword Planner) and I want to see which keyword to prioritize. I'll put them into Google Trends and see which one has higher trending data, and I pick that keyword. If you watch my "How to Find Hidden Gem Keywords" video I linked earlier, I show you how I use Google Trends in that video.

Who is Google Trends for?

This tool is perfect for content creators, marketers, and SEO professionals who want to make data-driven decisions about which topics to cover. It's especially useful for identifying seasonal trends and emerging topics before they become oversaturated.

Since this is a free Google tool, I'm not including pros/cons or ratings sections.

16. Nightwatch

• Category: Rank Tracking & Reporting
• Best for: Local rank tracking
• Ease of use: Intermediate
• Pricing: Starts at $39/month for 250 keywords

Nightwatch is one of my favorite rank tracking tools of all time. I used it a lot when I was working and leading SEO at Webflow. It's great for those who are working with local businesses or run a small business and you want to track your local rankings. 

However, it's not just limited to that. You can use it to track any keywords globally, and it's by far the most accurate rank tracker I've found. Since they started, they have also expanded to more features like keyword research and even an AI tracker (as with many of these original rank tracking tools).

Who is Nightwatch for?

This tool is perfect for local businesses, agencies managing local SEO campaigns, and anyone who needs precise rank tracking across multiple locations. It's also great for enterprises that need accurate data for reporting to stakeholders.

Pricing plans

Nightwatch is different than the other tools we have looked at because the pricing is dependent on how many keywords you need to track.

There is a 14-day free trial, but the first plan starts at $39 per month and gives you 250 keywords to track. This price continues to go up as you track more. For example, if you want 500 keywords to track, it's going to cost you $59 per month. And if you wanted to track 10,000 keywords, it'll run you $699 per month. So as you can see, the pricing can scale quite a bit based off the number of keywords you track.

Pros and cons

Here are some of the pros and cons of Nightwatch:

Pros:

• One of the most accurate rank tracking tools I've ever seen
• Super easy to use and has a very clean user interface
• Can integrate with Google Analytics or GSC, and even track keywords across YouTube and Bing
• Has extra features like automated reports, AI suggestions, Looker Studio integration, and cannibalization detection

Cons:

• Pricing can get quite high if you're trying to track thousands of keywords across multiple locations
• Not a US-based company, but this won't matter for most customers

Nightwatch rating and reviews

Here are what customers have to say about Nightwatch on third-party review sites:

• G2: 4.9 out of 5 star rating (from +43 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.8 out of 5 star rating (from +39 reviews)

17. Screaming Frog

• Category: Technical SEO & Site Health
• Best for: Technical SEO audits
• Ease of use: Advanced
• Pricing: Free version available, paid at $279/year

Screaming Frog is a technical SEO audit tool that is used by some of the most professional SEOs out there. It is arguably the best technical SEO tool that you can use to help you uncover any problems or issues your site has.

This tool has actually been a lifesaver for me in the past, helping my clients figure out what's going on with their site from a technical health standpoint. And even one time this saved me when I was at Webflow, because one of the designers by accident put a noindex tag on the homepage, and our homepage disappeared from the search results for a couple days. I was using this tool and found that it said there was a noindex tag on the homepage, reversed it, and all the traffic came back.

Who is Screaming Frog for?

This tool is designed for technical SEO specialists, agencies, and experienced marketers who need to perform deep technical audits. It's not the most beginner-friendly tool due to its complex interface and the technical knowledge required to interpret the data.

The tool is a bit old and outdated in terms of its user interface, but it still gets the job done. Let's look at how much it costs.

Pricing plans

Here's Screaming Frog's pricing:

• Free: This lets you use the tool for free to find broken links or errors with redirects. It helps you analyze your page titles and metadata and a handful of other things (limited to 500 URLs).
• Paid: $279 per year and gives you access to everything that you need to do a full technical audit of a website. Note that this is a license per user, so if you want multiple team members to use it, you'll need multiple licenses.

If you want to check out what each plan includes, you can go to the pricing page here.

Screaming Frog rating and reviews

Here's what third-party review sites rate Screaming Frog:

• G2: 4.7 out of 5 star rating (from +82 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.9 out of 5 star rating (from +132 reviews)

18. Clearscope

• Category: Content Optimization & AI Assistants
• Best for: Content scoring & topic coverage
• Ease of use: Beginner to Intermediate
• Pricing: Starts at $189/month

Clearscope is a content optimization tool similar to Surfer, and it's one of the first tools I used in the content optimization space. The tool works by inputting a keyword, and then it generates a full report on related keywords you should include in your article. It also shows you the outline of competitor articles, and the keywords it recommends are actually really good and high quality. Some of the biggest brands in tech use them.

Over the years, Clearscope has also included some other features outside of just content optimization, like keyword research and even a Content Decay feature to help you figure out what content is starting to lose traffic and rankings on your website.

Who is Clearscope for?

It's great for any managing editor, content editor, content marketer, or SEO person that is focused on creating high-quality blog posts that cover a topic in depth.

Pricing plans

Let's look at Clearscope's pricing. It does run a bit on the higher side:

• Essentials: $189 per month gives you 20 monthly content reports and 500 monthly keyword discoveries
• Business: $399 per month gives you 20 monthly content reports along with a dedicated account manager
• Enterprise: Custom pricing along with custom credits and usage

The pricing is on the higher side because it is kind of a premium tool, but it also is a bit confusing in my opinion because the Essentials plan and the Business plan are more than $100 apart, but they also both come with only 20 monthly content reports, so that is quite confusing. 

In the past, their pricing was a bit different, and you would get more content reports as you went up in plans. So if anybody from the Clearscope team is reading this, I would appreciate it if y'all would increase the content reports as the pricing increased.

Clearscope rating and reviews

Here's what third-party review sites rate Clearscope:

• G2: 4.9 out of 5 star rating (from +91 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.9 out of 5 star rating (from +60 reviews)

19. AirOps

• Category: Content Optimization & AI Assistants
• Best for: AI-powered workflows
• Ease of use: Advanced
• Pricing: Free plan available, custom pricing for paid plans

AirOps is an SEO workflow automation tool that helps you create automated workflows, very similar to Gumloop. I actually wrote a full review on this article you can check out here, but let me run it down for you briefly.

AirOps can integrate with Semrush and your existing tools and help you create workflows that automate all of your SEO tasks. There's also an AI writer in it, so you can feed it your brand guidelines to help you create pages at scale. The really powerful thing about AirOps too is that it can integrate with CMS like Webflow, so you can actually ship pages to your main site straight from AirOps.

Who is AirOps for?

AirOps also has an Answer Engine Visibility tool that can help you figure out how well your site is ranking in AI search engines, and the tool is free to use. This makes it ideal for advanced SEO professionals, agencies, and enterprise teams who want to automate complex workflows and scale content production.

Pricing plans

Let's look at AirOps pricing plans:

• Solo: $0 per month gives you one brand kit and up to 1,000 tasks per month
• Scale: Custom pricing that gives you three brand kits and custom task limits
• Agency: Custom pricing that gives you everything in Scale but also comes with multi-account CMS integrations as well as agency templates

All plans also give you access to over 30 AI models from GPT, Claude, Llama, Perplexity, Gemini, and more. You can also integrate it with SEO API data providers such as DataForSEO, People Data Labs, and more.

Similar to Clearscope, AirOps pricing is a bit confusing, but the tool is designed for large companies or agencies that manage lots of clients. And because it is an AI tool that relies heavily on credits, custom solutions are mostly needed for different customers.

AirOps rating and reviews

Here's what third-party review sites rate AirOps:

• G2: 5 out of 5 star rating (from +1 review)
• Capterra: 5 out of 5 star rating (from +24 reviews)

20. Claude (Anthropic)

• Category: Content Optimization & AI Assistants
• Best for: Content proofreading
• Ease of use: Beginner
• Pricing: Free version available, Pro at $20/month

Claude is an LLM created by the company Anthropic, and it is my favorite LLM to use when working on content workflows to drive SEO traffic. Now, I'm not saying to use Claude to actually generate content that you're going to publish, but the way that I use it is to actually use it as a content proofreader.

Claude has completely replaced my use of Grammarly, as it can help you take any of your original ideas and your thoughts with terrible grammar and make them into very coherent and pleasant to read text.

Who is Claude for?

This tool is perfect for content creators, bloggers, and marketers who want to improve their writing quality without losing their unique voice. It's especially useful for non-native English speakers or anyone who struggles with grammar and sentence structure.

I do recommend using a Pro account that is $20 a month, as it gives you access to Claude Opus 4, which is my favorite model to use. I wrote a newsletter edition on how I actually use Claude that you can check out here.

Overall, it's an amazing tool if you want to take your original writing and have a proofreader edit it for you in literally seconds.

Since this is a well-known AI tool, I'm not including third-party ratings.

21. Keywords Everywhere

• Category: Keyword & Topic Research
• Best for: In-SERP keyword metrics
• Ease of use: Beginner
• Pricing: Free Chrome extension, paid plans start at $72/year

Keywords Everywhere is a free Chrome extension that you can use that gives you keyword search data right within Google search. Instead of inputting a keyword into Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs or Semrush or whatever tool that we've talked about in this post, Keywords Everywhere gives you that data in real time right away.

Who is Keywords Everywhere for?

This tool is perfect for anyone doing keyword research who wants instant data without switching between multiple tools. It's especially useful for content creators and SEO beginners who want quick insights while browsing Google.

Pricing plans

While Keywords Everywhere is free to use, you can pay to enhance its capabilities. Here are the pricing plans:

• Silver: $72 per year and gives you 400,000 credits
• Gold: $300 per year and gives you 2 million credits
• Platinum: $960 per year and gives you 8 million credits

It's a great tool that's used by millions of SEO professionals, so I highly recommend you actually check this one out.

22. Google Analytics 4

• Category: Rank Tracking & Reporting
• Best for: Site analytics
• Ease of use: Intermediate to Advanced
• Pricing: Free

Google Analytics is my favorite tool for analyzing my entire website outside of just SEO traffic. It's from Google and it has all the first-party data that you need.

People have complained that GA4 is not that great, and initially I didn't like it either. But it really grew on me, and the way that I like to actually use it a lot as it pertains to SEO (because this is an SEO tools post) is to actually use the traffic acquisition feature and split up my referral traffic so I can see how much traffic I'm getting from LLMs.

Who is Google Analytics 4 for?

This can then show me what percentage of my referral traffic is coming from ChatGPT, Perplexity, or any AI search engine. And it just gives me a better idea of how my website is performing overall. You can check out this guide on how to actually filter a report to see how your AI traffic is doing.

GA4 is essential for anyone with a website who wants to understand their traffic sources, user behavior, and overall site performance. While it has a learning curve, it's a must-have tool for serious marketers.

Since this is a free Google tool, I'm not including pros/cons or ratings sections.

23. Looker Studio

• Category: Rank Tracking & Reporting
• Best for: Custom SEO client dashboards
• Ease of use: Intermediate
• Pricing: Free

Looker Studio, formerly known as Data Studio, is another tool from Google that allows you to create custom dashboards that you can use as SEO reports for your clients or the company you work at. It's free to use, and it can integrate with multiple different data sources to help you create very comprehensive reports.

For example, you can integrate your Google Search Console data, your Google Analytics data, you can even import Ahrefs data and merge all of it together to create your own custom dashboards.

Who is Looker Studio for?

I personally use it with my clients to show them how their SEO traffic is doing as a whole. And then I'll create different pages within that report that break up that traffic based off of branded search traffic versus non-branded search traffic, as well as breakdowns based off of top keywords and top landing pages.

This tool is ideal for agencies, freelancers, and in-house SEO teams who need to create professional reports for stakeholders. It's particularly powerful when you need to combine data from multiple sources into one cohesive dashboard.

In my content marketing course, I also show you how to add in conversion data so you can create reports based off of what pages from SEO are driving conversions to your website. They have tons of different pre-built templates as well, and I generally start with the SEO template first and then build off from there.

Since this is a free Google tool, I'm not including pros/cons or ratings sections.

24. Webflow

• Category: Site-Building & CMS
• Best for: Building SEO-optimized sites
• Ease of use: Beginner to Intermediate
• Pricing: Free, then starts at $29 per month

Last on my list is Webflow, and this is one of the best website builders for SEO. Most marketers are going to argue with me and say WordPress is the best and that I sound biased because I used to work at Webflow, but I added it to this list because some of my most successful clients are using Webflow.

The platform gives you everything an SEO would need: creating proper metadata, creating sitemaps, robots.txt files, setting canonical tags, setting alt text to images, and pretty much every single thing you need from a website builder for SEO. WordPress also has this, but it comes in the form of using plugins (like Yoast SEO), which can add vulnerabilities to your website and require you to update them regularly.

Who is Webflow for?

Even this blog that you're reading on is built completely with Webflow. And so many enterprise companies that rely on SEO also use Webflow, like Upwork, Monday.com, Dropbox, Lattice, and a ton more. And many of these enterprise companies are constantly asking Webflow to create specific SEO features, and Webflow will actually go out and implement them into their product for everybody to use.

Also, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say this, but here we go: CapitalG, Google's investment fund, is an investor in Webflow, so that should say something about how much Google favors Webflow websites. Nobody says this, but I guess this is just my insider knowledge from working there.

I'm not saying that you need a Webflow website to get good rankings, but if you're in a position to build a brand new website or you have influence over a website builder that your company is looking to use, I can't recommend Webflow enough when it comes to SEO. Just the features it has and the speed of the hosting is amazing.

Webflow rating and reviews

• G2: 4.4 out of 5 star rating (from +852 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5 out of 5 star rating (from +259 reviews)

Is SEO still worth it?

SEO is worth it in 2025, however you cannot approach it the same way as before. What I've noticed is that the sites that get the most SEO traffic are the ones that really care about their audience and don't just try to make money.

Take this blog for example. I outrank some of the biggest marketing companies like HubSpot, Zapier, and even Semrush. I've been able to do this because I speak from my real lived experience, and I talk about things that I know, and I have a personal touch. I also make YouTube videos and embed them in my blog posts to help make my site look like an authority to Google. And this has worked, and it's worked for my clients, and it's worked for my friends that also run media companies as well.

So SEO is 100% worth it. Don't let people screaming on social media tell you otherwise. But those people are likely following an old playbook of outsourcing content to freelance writers who are either faking their expertise or they're outsourcing their writing to ChatGPT, and it's producing content that already exists on the web.

If you want to win at SEO in 2025, it's not necessarily based on the tools that you use, but it's based on your ability to write content in a way that comes from personal lived experience. And at the same time, your knowledge of how search engines crawl, index, and rank content.

If you have those two elements in place, you will win. Just change your frame of thinking from what I can get out of Google to what I can give Google.  If you want to learn more about my free SEO guides, you can just search "marketer milk" on YouTube and watch all of them.

I hope you learned something from this article, and I'll catch you in the next one. Much love, peace out!