The Best SEO Software of 2023

Once upon a time, Semrush seemed to be for SEO experts only, but after multiple updates to UI and UX, the dashboard and data are much easier to read, even if you’re new to SEO. We named Semrush the best overall SEO tool because it’s a complete SEO tool that won’t break a small business’s bank.

No SEO platform is right for every user, but Semrush is about as close as it gets. It’s our top recommendation if you’re looking for a new SEO service in 2023.

Semrush checks virtually every box such as keyword tracking, site crawling, backlink analytics, and Application Programming Interface (API) access for third-party integrations. Its prices are relatively affordable, and you can add various tools to your plan for an extra charge.

Furthermore, a visual update gave the application a new, attractive design and made it much easier to use. The left side of the screen displays various categories such as competitive research, keyword research, and link building. Even though it provides a lot of in-depth information, I felt that Semrush makes everything fairly simple to find.

You can easily identify potential high-value keywords based on factors like search volume, difficulty, intent, and recent trends. Even the cheapest plan supports daily tracking for up to 500 keywords at a time. Unfortunately, I felt that the tools themselves could be overwhelming, and there were some usability issues.

When I created a content template, for example, I could only export it as a Word document. Even worse, the document it gave me contained nearly 20,000 words, including the full text of 10 competing articles. There was no way to customize the report, export a smaller version, or export in any format other than Word.

Still, even though other providers might beat Semrush on specific features, it’s hard to find a better overall service for the average small business owner.

Who is Semrush best for?

Based on my experience, Semrush is a good option for most small business owners. You’ll probably spend some time feeling it out as I did with the content template tool, but it’s still more straightforward than most other applications with similarly deep features. For example, you can immediately gather all relevant information about a specific keyword — how many people are searching for it and how your competitors rank for the same search term.

Recent upgrades to Semrush

Semrush developed a new visual style that significantly improved its ease of use and aesthetic appeal and introduced many features. For example, the new Keyword Intent metric synthesizes search data to understand what you are looking for when you enter a specific search term. This makes it easier to develop campaigns that respond to the real desires of your audience.

Pricing

The cheapest version of Semrush is the Pro subscription, which has a base rate of $99.95 per month paid annually, or $119.95 on a month-to-month basis. This plan comes with five projects, 500 tracked keywords, and 10,000 results per report. Guru ($191.62 per month paid annually) and Business ($374.95 per month paid annually) increase those limits and give you access to more advanced features.

Ahrefs packs a lot of nuance into its powerful tools, making it a bit harder to learn. If you have experience though, it can be a great SEO companion. Its keyword research tool is well known in the industry, and it has one of the most extensive crawlers, second only to Google’s.

Compared to the sleek, futuristic design of Semrush, Ahrefs appears a little more technical and complicated. It might not be as welcoming if you are new to it, but it offers some incredibly powerful tools. That’s why I picked Ahrefs as the top 2023 option for more experienced marketers.

I’ve used Ahrefs for years, and it’s one of my favorite SEO tools for keyword (KW) research and competitor analysis. There is a lot more Ahrefs can do, including site audits, content suggestions, and helpful analysis of your site (or another’s). The links report is great for giving you a look at which links are helping or hurting your website.

Who is Ahrefs best for?

Anyone can learn to use Ahrefs effectively, but if you are less experienced you may need some time to understand how the application works. The interface is more barebones than Semrush and other competitors. Ahrefs enables data-driven insights including detailed comparisons and granular filters, but you need to know how to interpret that data to unlock its underlying value.

Recent upgrades

Ahrefs publishes monthly blog posts about recent updates to the platform. It added a SERP history tool that shows the top search results for a given keyword on any given date. This makes it much easier to see how your website has compared to others over time.

Pricing

Ahrefs is available for slightly less than Semrush at a starting price of $83 per month paid annually. That said, the most robust versions actually go far beyond Semrush in terms of price — the Enterprise tier is $833 per month paid annually. This plan comes with features like API access, activity logs, and access management.

SEOptimer offers three plans; the low-priced one is suitable for individuals, while the other two are better for small businesses (specifically content or SEO agencies). Its standout feature is white labeling, so you can create SEO reports for clients with your branding on them.

SEOptimer is a good option for your SEO use, but it stands out, even more, when it comes to white labeling. With its white-label reports, you can give your clients and leads professional SEO reports at the click of a button. That makes SEOptimer a popular choice for SEO businesses that want to improve their offerings.

After signing up, you can easily create reports with custom branding by uploading your company’s name, logo, and colors. This is particularly useful for lead generation — showing a prospect a clear, professional representation of their SEO practices will go a long way toward gaining their trust.

SEOptimer reports cover a wide range of SEO factors such as broken links, page load speed, keyword positions, and search traffic. I ran a report on my own site and compared what I got back to what Google Analytics offers. It’s the same information, but it was far easier for me to read SEOptimer’s report and it’s more visually appealing.

There are some limitations, such as with page crawling — if a site has thousands of pages, you might not be able to crawl them all with SEOptimer.

Even if you’re targeting an international audience, you can generate reports in 11 other languages, including French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Support is available by email or live chat, but SEOptimer typically takes a couple of hours for a response.

Who is SEOptimer best for?

SEOptimer is going to be the best fit for selling SEO services to your clients. It comes with solid fundamental features like SEO crawling and keyword research, but the white-label reports are its main value-add. Given its relatively affordable price tag, you could easily justify the cost with a fairly low volume of sales.

Recent upgrades

SEOptimer has a Feature Request board for customer suggestions. A recent update included an especially hard-hitting feature: the option to add competitors to audit reports so that clients and leads can see how they stack up against other websites in their niche. There were also several smaller additions such as automatic scheduling for recurring reports.

Pricing

After a 14-day free trial, you can continue with one of three SEOptimer subscriptions. You have your choice of paying month-to-month or saving 25% by paying upfront annually. At $19 per month, the DIY SEO tier is intended for your own use. You’ll need to upgrade to the White Label plan ($29 per month) to generate white-label reports for other clients. At $59 per month, the White Label & Embedding subscription enables you to place audit forms on your site for even better lead generation.

Mangools is an easy-to-use suite of SEO tools to help you research and manage keywords, SERPs, links, your site’s health, and your competition. Its claim to fame is keyword research.

Mangools is an SEO software provider that offers a bundle of five tools: KWFinder, SERPChecker, SERPWatcher, LinkMiner, and SiteProfiler. These programs cover keyword research, search engine rank analysis, backlink tracking, and website evaluation.

Each of the five services offers value, but I’ve always been impressed by KWFinder. It responds to one of the biggest SEO challenges: how to identify new keyword ideas with strong traffic potential. I used KWFinder exclusively before I learned how to use Ahrefs.

KWFinder will help you find keywords with low rank difficulty and a relatively high search volume. I was impressed by the way it synthesized so much data into a fairly straightforward visual. Even if you’ve never used an SEO tool before, I don’t think you’ll have much trouble wrapping your head around KWFinder.

Similarly, the competitor research tools are just as straightforward and offer solid value for sites struggling to rank. Rather than searching by keyword, you can search by domain and then see the top keywords sending readers to that website. The one downside I noticed is that there’s no clear way to directly compare two sites for content gap analysis.

Who is Mangools best for?

Mangools is best if you want to focus on identifying valuable keywords for your websites. I found it very easy to visualize and interpret data, and based on customer reviews, most users agree with that assessment. I would highly recommend Mangools if you’re having trouble settling on a content direction.

Recent upgrades

Mangools product updates include new visual metrics added to SERPWatcher, which offers a comprehensive view of keyword performance. You can also watch multiple URLs per keyword and add sub-users.

Pricing

Mangools is available at three price points: Basic ($29.90 per month paid annually), Premium ($39.90 per month paid annually), and Agency ($79.90 per month paid annually). You’ll get a one-hour-only offer for a lifetime 10% off after creating a Mangools account. But one hour isn’t enough time to make a fully informed decision, which makes this feel like more of a gimmick than a true discount.

Yoast is one of the most ubiquitous SEO tools. The WordPress plug-in is simple to use, and it’s a big help for anyone who needs a reminder to add a meta title, description, or targeted keyword on posts and pages. The free version is useful, but the paid versions unlock more helpful features and support.

Yoast is a well-known WordPress plug-in that isn’t a typical SEO tool — and it’s one of the easiest-to-use SEO tools on our list. It’s a great way to analyze on-page SEO and offers suggestions for improving your SEO on pages and posts. It scans the content on your site, sentence structure, passive and active voice, subheadings, and sentence and paragraph length.

You can use a 100% free version, and it’s a bit limiting, but a useful tool. I use it for my own website, which helps me see the problems it spots with my pages and posts. Yoast SEO happens behind the scenes and is automated, such as your SEO title — just choose how you want it to look under Search Appearance in settings.

Who is Yoast best for?

Yoast is essentially a keyword and content optimizer, so it’s ideal if you blog for your business or personal site. It can be helpful for small e-commerce businesses that want to optimize product pages, too. You can’t do competitor analysis, deep keyword research, or run reports on your top pages with Yoast, though (that’s not really what it’s meant to do).

Recent upgrades

The Yoast SEO Changelog provides information about new releases. Recent changes include improved language analysis, discovery of cornerstone articles for Premium users, and a new readability assessment.

Pricing

Yoast is one of a few applications on this list with a free version available. While you will be limited concerning some features, you can use this option indefinitely at no charge. At $99 per year, the Premium tier comes with helpful extras like internal linking tools, 24/7 support, and early access to updates. You can also bundle Yoast SEO with four other Yoast plug-ins for a single payment of $229 per year or $22 per month.

Netpeak Spider is an on-premise SEO tool that’s most helpful for site audits to help you clean up on-page SEO. It also offers data enrichment, so you can more easily do outreach for link building. As a bonus, Netpeak Spider is one of the most affordable SEO tools in the industry with an option for a lifetime license.

Netpeak Spider is a popular SEO tool with a more narrow focus than many of the options on this list. While some other features are included, the primary focus is on site crawling and SEO audit tools. It’s also an easy-to-use tool, but there are a lot of settings that might be overwhelming.

A quick crawl from Netpeak Spider can identify common SEO problems like broken links, duplicate content, and misspelled words. This solves a critical pain point for many website owners: you might not even know what’s holding back your site rankings. Cleaning up these easily fixable issues could give your site more visibility in search engines.

If you wanted to check for the same issues on your own, it would be extremely time-consuming — particularly as your site grows. Netpeak Spider can perform a much more comprehensive crawl in just a few minutes and has other helpful features such as analytics, integrations with other software, and data scraping for backlink outreach.

I used Netpeak Spider for keyword and content gap analysis, but it falls short compared with other options because this is more of a technical SEO auditing tool. With plans available for less than $10 per month paid annually, Netpeak Spider is also much more affordable than full-service SEO platforms.

Who is Netpeak Spider best for?

Netpeak Spider is much cheaper than most other providers listed, so it makes sense for smaller businesses with a limited budget for SEO and content marketing. Given Netpeak Spider’s narrow set of features, it’s best for link building and cleaning up your websites — plus, you should already be confident in your core SEO strategy. Full-service SEO software often comes with similar crawling tools, so consider an alternative if you’re looking for a broader set of features.

Recent upgrades

Netpeak Spider’s release schedule seems to be every other month. There’s no longer a freemium plan but rather a free trial with limits. Netpeak changed its pricing plans and added an onboarding window to make it even more affordable and accessible.

Pricing

Pricing is a substantial advantage for Netpeak Spider compared to most other SEO software. Additionally, Netpeak Spider offers extra discounts for lifetime licenses, so you can save some money if you’re in it for the long haul. The Starter tier ($7 per month paid annually) comes with most basic features, while Advanced ($12 per month paid annually) adds in infinite crawled URLs plus white-label reports and the new audit enrichment tool.

Business ($22 per month paid annually) is built for larger clients with features like VIP onboarding and a dedicated account manager. Rates are double the annual cost for lifetime licenses, but you get all future updates for a one-time fee.

Conductor targets enterprise-level businesses to provide custom solutions for SEO and marketing. The support team from Conductor gets consistently high marks from customers because it offers direct support.

Every piece of SEO software we’ve covered provides value, but it can be difficult to take advantage of that on your own. Especially in the early stages, it’s extremely helpful to work with experienced professionals who can contextualize a platform’s functionality and help you leverage it to the fullest possible extent.

Conductor made our list due to its uniquely responsive and helpful support team. I had an easy time getting help and found that numerous other reviewers have positively interacted with the customer service staff, while almost nobody has had a negative experience.

Conductor has a stronger focus on larger enterprise clients than other leading SEO software providers. However, there is a free Chrome extension that I installed and use occasionally to get an idea of what isn’t working well on my site.

Based on Conductor’s recommendations, I changed the wording on my site to drop the reading level down to a seventh-grade level. I still need to add alt text to my images, which the SEO plug-in pointed out.

If you use Conductor, you’ll have the chance to work with a team of experts who can answer questions and help you achieve your targets. The process starts with an organic marketing assessment in which its team will look at your current practices and help develop a roadmap for the future. That’s a much greater degree of support than you’ll get from most SEO software.

Who is Conductor best for?

Conductor is built for large-scale companies and organizations that want to build industry-leading campaigns. It’s a comprehensive SEO platform that can integrate with your full tech stack and supercharge every area of your digital marketing practices. On the other hand, Conductor’s robust features and custom pricing make it a less practical choice for small- and even mid-sized businesses.

Recent upgrades

Conductor announced new AI-powered content recommendations. This tool can help you develop more focused content by identifying key elements such as questions to answer and keywords to include in the headings and meta descriptions. Other product updates have been announced on a near-monthly basis.

Pricing

Since Conductor is aimed at large-scale businesses, it doesn’t offer any free plan or even pre-set pricing tiers. That said, there is a free Chrome extension with a narrower range of tools. Contact Conductor directly to get an idea of what its services would cost your company.

Google Search Console is a great way to ensure that Google indexes your site correctly. Plus, this tool will point out any errors, and pages that were no-indexed, and show you how well your site performs from a traffic, click-through-rate (CTR), and impression standpoint. And it’s free to use.

The Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that offers basic SEO and site optimization features. It won’t replace the functionality of a premium SEO service like Semrush or Ahrefs, but it’s surprisingly practical if you aren’t looking to spend any money.

Even if you pay for another application, it may still be worth leveraging Google Search Console in certain situations. For example, I used it recently to request a new crawl of my site after I made changes.

These crawls work differently from third-party crawlers like Netpeak Spider. Google will identify some optimization issues, but it will also change the way your site appears in search results. Without a manual crawl, Google may still be indexing your site based on outdated information. Requesting a crawl ensures that Google is using the currently published version of your site.

Google also offers mobile usability reports that help identify any optimization issues that may pop up for mobile users. These could include anything from small text to crowded buttons that are difficult for mobile visitors to select. Most of the Search Console’s features are simple, straightforward tools that offer an immediate SEO impact.

Who is Google Search Console best for?

Google Search Console makes sense if you are relatively new to the world of SEO. As your site grows, you will probably find that it doesn’t offer enough to meet your needs. But in the early stages, this tool will identify plenty of weaknesses and help you move the site in the right direction.

There are also Google-specific functions that continue to be useful even after switching to a more robust platform.

Recent upgrades

Google recently added a new Search Console Video index report to match the growing importance of video marketing. With this tool, you can see how many pages Google has identified a video on. You can also look at why certain pages aren’t indexed.

For example, you might use an unsupported video format, or the video may be too large or small for Google’s crawler to pick up.

Pricing

Google Search Console is free, and there aren’t any paid upgrades or add-ons to consider. If you’re interested in the Search Console, you may also like Google’s other programs, such as Google Analytics. You might add other services to your toolkit later, but Google’s suite of SEO tools offers a solid starting point.

Whether you choose the free on-premises version or a paid cloud-hosted version of SEO Panel, you get helpful features to track your backlinks, page speed, keyword positions, and your site’s rank. Paid versions of the SEO tool come with plug-ins to help you manage social media, customize your SEO Panel, and perform bulk keyword checks.

Active open-source software is incredibly difficult to find, particularly in the B2B space. I was happy to have the chance to highlight SEO Panel, an effective SEO platform that’s surprisingly robust and simple to use. It was an easy selection of the best open-source SEO software in 2023.

With SEO Panel, it was easy to track my position for various keywords, audit my site for basic optimization, and check backlinks leading to my website from other domains. It also supports these features for multiple domains in a single SEO Panel account.

Even though SEO Panel doesn’t have the same amenities as a premium service, you can still use robust support resources. The website offers thorough documentation for virtually every element of the SEO Panel application.

You can even request more help by creating a support ticket. SEO Panel easily integrates any other programs you use through the API. Those might be routine features for a paid application, but they make SEO Panel stand out as a free service.

Who is SEO Panel best for?

SEO Panel is primarily a good recommendation for startups and other small businesses in the early stages of growth. Like most other free software, SEO Panel can only offer so much. Even cloud subscriptions are relatively limited compared to premium alternatives. I also found the visual design disappointing compared to what’s available from paid applications.

Recent upgrades

SEO Panel recently added numerous features, including minor bug fixes, PHP 8 support, and new PDF reporting tools.

Pricing

SEO Panel is free to use, but only on your server. The cloud version of SEO Panel is more analogous to other SEO services. You can get cloud hosting for $25 per month (Personal), $49 per month (Professional), or $99 per month (Business). While each subscription has unique features, they include installation, free upgrades, and a free subdomain.

LinkResearchTools tells you what it's best at with its name: link building. It offers plenty of other tools to help improve your linking strategy, analyze your competition, and prevent manual actions from Google that threaten your rank. Worth noting: It’s one of the more expensive SEO tools on the market.

LinkResearchTools is an SEO tool that focuses heavily on link building and competitor analysis. In addition to its paid plans, LinkResearchTools offers free tools via browser extensions (Chrome and Firefox) that aim at link strength, link verification, and redirects. Although LinkResearchTools does a great job of analyzing backlinks, helping you vet new links, and showing you what your competitors are doing, it isn’t a complete SEO tool.

Although LinkResearchTools helps with keyword research, I was surprised to find that it doesn’t devote a whole tool to keyword research or recommendations — only keyword classification with recommendations for alternative keywords. I found keyword-specific features within other tools, such as link audits and competitor analysis, so I got an idea of which keywords to target. It’s just such a roundabout way of going about it.

The most impressive tools from LinkResearchTools are based on link building, such as Link Juice Thief, Link Detox Boost, and Link Alerts. For example, the Link Juice Thief tool scans your competitors’ outgoing links point so you can link there and get them to indirectly link to your site (essentially “stealing” SEO juice).

I also want to touch on LinkResearchTool’s attention to detoxing your site. The Link Detox Boost tool can help you repair your site after a Google Penalty. It can also prevent manual action — which can tank your domain authority.

Link Detox reportedly helps speed up the process of disavowing links that hurt your score with automatic submissions to Google for recrawls of your disavow file (and probably other proprietary methods).

Who is LinkResearchTools best for?

LinkResearchTools designed its SEO tools for small to large businesses specifically for link building and competitor research and analysis. But its pricing isn’t accessible for most small business owners. It’s also missing a lot of standard tools that industry leaders include at a much lower price.

Recent upgrades

LinkResearchTools publishes a changelog. Some updates include upgrades to support, additional credits and quotas for the Superhero Plus plan, new link data sources, and a redirect fixing tool.

Pricing

LinkResearchTools’ prices may be more than you’re willing to spend on SEO. The cheapest plan will cost you $483.25 per month, paid annually, with more robust tiers going up to $791.58 and $1,999.92. You’ll have to make a single payment of $5,799 just to cover your initial subscription. You can start with a one-week trial for just $17, but you may be charged the full price if you forget to cancel.