SEO monitoring tools are essential whether you’ve just started your freelancing journey or running an SEO agency.
We’ve listed some of the best SEO monitoring tools, which can help you optimize and fix website issues and build strategies for growing your website and your client’s website.
Along with that, these SEO tools help you monitor your keywords and search results and can easily send reports to your clients.
Let’s start with one of the most important tools,
1. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is one of the most important SEO monitoring tools. It’s a free tool from Google that helps us monitor our search performance on Google.
It provides valuable insights, such as the website’s search traffic, number of impressions on SERP, clients, click-through rate, and the average position of our keywords and pages.
Along with the above features, it also alerts with any crawl errors, indexing issues that prevent us from ranking better on Google SERP, mobile friendliness. And some other insights like overall page experience that help us to improve our user experience to increase the engagement and conversions.
Here are some of the Google Search Console Pros and Cons,
Google Search Console Pros:
- It’s a completely free tool.
- It can help you to monitor and enhance your website visibility.
- It easily integrates with other tools, such as Ahrefs Webmaster, SurferSEO, Google Analytics, and many more.
Google Search Console Cons:
- There is always a delay of data from 1 to 3 days.
- The navigation can be a little complicated for new users.
- It provides limited historical data (2 years).
Google Search Console Pricing
Google Search Console is free for all for a lifetime.
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the best and most advanced SEO monitoring tools. It’s known for providing the most accurate date for keyword volumes and backlinks. With their paid plans, they also offer a free Ahrefs WebMaster, which is good for small business owners, bloggers, and freelancers to enhance their website performance.
The tool offers various competitive features, such as keyword research, backlink analysis, keyword rank monitoring, competitor research, and website audits.
Additionally, Ahrefs offers keyword research for YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, and many other search engines.
Note: Ahrefs is one of my favorite SEO tools. I’m using it for so many things, from Website Audits to backlink building with the help of their content explorer tool.
Ahref Pros:
- It offers a very easy-to-use interface.
- It offers very detailed website audit reports for free with its Webmaster tool.
- It frequently updates its metrics, ensuring you get the most accurate data.
- It contains the largest database of over 11 billion keywords.
Ahref Cons:
- It’s a little expensive compared with all the best tools in the market.
- It also does not offer any free trials.
Ahref Pricing
Ahrefs pricing starts from $129/month.
3. SE Ranking
SE Ranking is another most favorite tool for SEO specialists both from agencies and in-house teams, as well as for independent experts. It offers accurate data and a powerful and intuitive suite of SEO tools with solutions like keyword rank tracking, competitor analysis, website auditing, backlink monitoring, and much more.
SE Ranking also offers comprehensive on-page SEO analysis. It helps you optimize individual web pages for specific keywords and improve website health. You can also track the performance of hundreds of keywords across multiple projects and websites.
With all the SEO features, it also offers white-label solutions to create branded SEO reports for your clients and prospects. You can access unlimited automated reports, Lead Generator, and more, all available in its Agency Pack.
SE Ranking Pros:
- Powerful solutions for all major SEO tasks.
- Its intuitive dashboard is easy to set up and track.
- Its white-label automated reports constantly keep your clients updated.
- It can easily integrate with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Looker Studio, etc.
- Excellent customer support.
SE Ranking Cons:
- Its mobile version is not very intuitive.
- Automated reports within subscriptions are limited.
- It has limited social media metrics.
SE Ranking Pricing
SE Ranking pricing starts from $65/month and goes up to $259/month.
4. Semrush
SEMRush is another SEO monitoring tool in the list. It’s primarily designed to help small business owners improve their online visibility and search ranking. This tool stands out with its robust features for keyword monitoring and for backlink buildings.
It offers a comprehensive toolset for detailed website audits, keyword research, competitor research, content marketing, and technical SEO. Semrush Keyword Magic Tool gives you millions of keyword ideas within seconds.
Additionally, SEMrush offers you to manage your paid advertising campaigns, whether PPC or social media marketing.
Semrush Pros:
- Its Keyword Magic Tool offers millions of keyword suggestions.
- It also offers actionable tips and insights to improve your website performance.
- It provides an automated replies feature for GMB (Google My Business) reviews, and you can also manage multiple GMB listings.
- It can easily integrate with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, CrazyEgg, and Hotjar.
Semrush Cons:
- Its free version offers very limited features.
- It’s a little complicated to use, especially for the newbies.
- It has limited historical data.
Semrush Pricing
Semrush Pricing starts from $129/month.
5. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free analytics tool for your business. It helps you understand how your customers interact with your website and gives you data such as customer demographics, engagement activities, and browsing behavior.
With the recent upgrade from Google Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4, you can get various detailed metrics like organic sessions, organic conversions, engagement rate, bounce rate, scrolled users, engaged sessions, and average session duration of your customers on the website.
Google Analytics Pros:
- Easy to set up for beginners without much technical knowledge.
- Its user-focused method helps you to understand your user journey more effectively.
- Easier Event Tracking like viewed products, carted products, and transactions
- Addition of Machine learning gives you more customer insights, future behavior predictions
Google Analytics Cons:
- Major Interface changes from Universal Analytics,
- Limits on custom dimensions and custom metrics,
- It can take 1-2 days to show your data,
- There are few options to change charts, except in explorations.
Google Analytics Pricing
Google Analytics is free for all for a lifetime. But they do have a paid plan with Google Analytics 360, it’s for the enterprises. You have to get in touch with the Google Analytics team for Google Analytics 360 pricing.
6. Moz Pro
Moz Pro is another all-in-one SEO monitoring tool. It helps track and optimize keywords and content, providing valuable insights into search volume and keyword difficulty. The platform alerts users about ranking drops and technical issues, such as broken redirects and missing title tags.
It crawls and audits large sites quickly and tracks their rankings and those of their competitors. Additionally, Moz Pro helps generate detailed reports to improve site rankings and drive more traffic.
Moz Pro Pros:
- Its DA and Spam scores are still relevant for our Off-Page SEO activities.
- You can track up to 4,500+ keywords.
- It provides a free DA and spam score checker extension.
- It can easily integrate with the Google Search Console, GA4, Moz Cast, and many more.
Moz Pro Cons:
- It’s not very user-friendly for the newbies.
- Pricing is a little higher than that of other SEO tools.
Moz Pro Pricing
Moz Pro pricing starts from $99/month.
7. SpyFu
SpyFu is one of the best Competitor keyword monitoring tools. With SpyFu, you can easily analyze your competitor’s SEO and PPC keyword strategies and target the most profitable keywords for your business.
It also helps you in analyzing your ad copies and landing pages. Keyword grouping, list building, SERP analysis and backlink research and reporting.
With deep insights and comprehensive reports, SpyFu provides fast access to historical ranking data and thorough SEO analysis.
SpyFu Pros:
- SpyFu is also user-friendly and an easy to use SEO tool.
- It can be used for both SEO and your PPC campaigns.
- It can easily integrate with Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Search Console, and other marketing tools.
- High-level customer support.
SpyFu Cons:
- Its free version has very limited features.
- It doesn’t have an SEO audit feature as most of the other tools have in this list.
- Sometimes, you may experience inaccurate data (as per G2.com).
SpyFu Pricing
SpyFu pricing starts from $39.
8. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is another powerful SEO monitoring tool known for its in-depth website crawling features. It is specifically designed for experienced SEO professionals and digital marketers.
It helps you track and fix technical issues such as broken links, redirections, redirection loops, and metatag errors. It also checks for duplicate URLs and 404 errors, reviews robots.txt directives, and generates XML sitemaps.
With its detailed technical insights, you can optimize your website’s structure, core-web-vital score, and overall On-Page SEO and boost your SERP performance.
Screaming Frog Pros:
- It offers in-depth website crawling that helps to fix all our technical issues.
- You can schedule regular website audits.
- It easily integrates with your Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed insights for deeper insights.
Screaming Frog Cons:
- Its free version allows crawling and downloading 500 URLs only.
- Lack of customer support
- Integrations with other tools and platforms are available with the paid plan.
Screaming Frog Pricing
Screaming Frog has just one paid plan that costs $259 per year.
9. Majestic SEO Tools
Majestic SEO is another excellent SEO monitoring tool for tracking your backlinks. It helps with detailed backlink and website authority analysis, new and lost backlinks, anchor usage, and much more to optimize your backlink strategies accordingly, whether you’re doing SEO for your SaaS startup or financing one or more competitive markets.
It also provides topical flow insights at URL, domain, and even subdomain levels and shares detailed reports with anchor text usage.
Majestic SEO Pros:
- It’s easy to navigate across the platform
- Its link graph helps you to understand the whole website link map.
Majestic SEO Cons:
- Its pricing is a little higher as compared with the competitors,
- Customer service is not responsive and supportive,
- Sometimes, their data is inaccurate.
Majestic SEO Pricing
Majestic SEO pricing starts from $49.
Disclaimer: The pros and cons of Majestic SEO are taken from G2.com. We’re not using Majestic SEO in our agency so far.
Conclusion
These are some of the best SEO monitoring tools in the market. It’s very hard to select the best monitoring tool for your in-house projects, freelance gigs, and for your agency. So ensure you’re getting all the features at the right price you’re looking for.
And if you’re very new to this market then Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Semrush and Google Analytics should be in your top list. Best of luck with your SEO journey!
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