The 20 best SEO tools in 2023 – Free and paid

There are well over 200 SEO tools in the world. How do you know which SEO tools are worth checking out?

I’ve tested over 100 tools, and keep an eye out for new ones coming. So maybe I saved you about 200 hours of research 😉

Below I review the top 20 tools. Big 2023 update – everything is reviewed and many new tools are on the list.

If you, on the other hand, are looking for the most simple ones we have made a list of the easiest SEO tools for beginners too.

Which SEO tools are best in 2023?

In 2023, there are over 200 free and paid SEO tools on the market.

Here are the SEO tools that stand out the most in 2023 (💵 = paid, ➕= new on the list)

• Google Search Console ➕
• Ahrefs 💵
• Morningscore 💵
• SEMrush 💵
• Surfer SEO 💵➕
• Moz Pro 💵
• Rich results test ➕
• Pagespeed insights ➕
• Compress PNG ➕
• Answer The Public
• ChatGPT ➕
• AIPRM (ChatGPT Chrome extension) ➕
• SEO.ai 💵➕
• Screaming Frog 💵
• Seobility 💵➕
• Yoast SEO (Wordpress plugin)
• Rank Math (Wordpress plugin) 💵➕
• SE Ranking 💵
• AccuRanker 💵

Review of the 20 SEO tools

In the table, you can see the categories I have divided the tools into.
The price shown is the minimum package per month.

Category	Explanation
🏆	Rank tracker tool
🤖	Technical SEO (onpage)
🔍	Keyword research
✍️	Help to write content
🔗	Link tool

1. Testing Google Search Console

🏆 🤖 🔗 Price: Free.

Google Search Console has become one of the most best SEO tools. Much has improved in the last 3 years. It is Google’s own and it gives them some great advantages. Among others, no tool can match their list of keywords and traffic data on them. However, there is one limitation that affects all features: you can only get info on a website you own (or are invited to) which makes this tool useless for competitor analysis and e.g. finding new keywords or links.

2. Testing Ahrefs

🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 Price: $ 99 per month
Ahrefs data quality is among the best on the market and the tool is especially popular in tracking backlinks and keywords. Ahrefs also allows you to check how your competitors are approaching SEO. Ahrefs is a great database if you know what you’re looking for. However, it is not a tool that guides you in the right direction. You need to be an expert to get the full value. If you are, Ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools. See table with features

3. Testing Morningscore

🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 Price: $ 65 per month
Morningscore is an all-in-one Danish SEO tool that lets you measure the value of organic traffic to your website in dollars and cents. The tool uses game elements to make working with SEO fun and simple. Therefore, you don’t need to be an expert to get results. This translates into small SEO missions that help you generate results and give you XP when completed, which helps you level up while growing traffic from Google. You get access to keywords, links, health (technical SEO), and competitor monitoring. The data quality is close to the biggest SEO tools.

4. Testing SEMrush

🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 Price: $ 119.95 per month
SEMrush is a very comprehensive SEO tool that provides an overview and detailed insight into all your keywords and links. Personally, I never considered Semrush among the best SEO tools. The user experience is fragmented, with almost 50 different sub-sections (see left side on the image below). However, their data is strong and they are arguably the biggest SEO tool on the market, so I can’t make this list without also mentioning Semrush. See table with features

5. Testing Surfer SEO

🏆 ✍️ 🔍 Price: $ 29 per month
I have only played a little with Surfer SEO but can say it is intuitive and many hype it on the web. It compares your content to those that rank highest on Google and shows you where your content lags versus theirs. It’s a simple idea but not easy in practice, so the Polish guys behind the tool have executed it well. For example, if you work with content on a daily basis, this tool is definitely worth checking out.

6. Testing Moz Pro

🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 Price: $ 99 per month

With Moz, you get an all-in-one tool for backlink analysis, keyword, and onsite optimization. They’ve been in the game since 2002 and have a great reputation. I don’t find their tools intuitive, but the data is solid. So if it’s important to you, give them a test. I can also only praise their culture and openness in an industry that is often a bit dirty and closed. Moz is strong on links data, often better than Ahrefs, which is why we also use their data in our own SEO tool, Morningscore. See table with features

7. Testing Rich results test

🤖  Price: Free.

If you’re new to SEO, don’t start here. One of the hard parts of SEO: This tool helps with Schema, also called structured data. It is an extra “invisible layer” on your website that can feed Google with more info that allows you to achieve better rankings on Google. Rich Results Test can tell you if your website can achieve these extended positions on Google.

8. Testing Pagespeed insights

🤖  Price: Free.

The speed of your website has become important in SEO. And Google’s requirements for speed have become greater. With this tool, you can test your website speed and get a score from 0-100. Note that you get a score for both mobile and desktop speed. Both are important.

9. Testing Compress PNG

🤖  Pris: Free.

Super small tool to compress images so they take up less space and your website gets faster = Google is happy. Not only the PNG file format but also JPG, GIF, and even PDF. You can often compress file sizes by over 50%!!

10. Testing Answer The Public

🔍 Price: Free.

Answer The Public is a super free tool to find more “question keywords”. For example, if you have the keyword “real estate agent” you can type it in and the tool will give you a bunch of suggestions for questions related to the keyword the tool thinks people are searching for. Unfortunately, you don’t get searches/month on the suggested keywords, but you can put them into another tool, such as Morningscore, and then the search volume showed there.

11. Testing ChatGPT

✍️ 🔍 Price: Free.

This is the leading AI chat tool. Among other things, you can get help brainstorming content and for example, asking the bot to help you generate 5 headlines from a keyword. See the example in the image. It’s that easy. Just ask the bot SEO questions and you’ll get help right away. Requires a user which you can create for free. Be careful not to copy 1:1. Try to customize the content and make it personal. Then there’s no danger of Google having a problem.

12. Testing AIPRM (ChatGPT Chrome extension)

✍️ 🔍 Price: Free.
This is a Chrome browser extension for ChatGPT that gives you SEO superpowers. You basically get a series of predefined questions you can ask ChatGPT where you simply insert the keyword or topic you want help with. Watch this super Youtube video if you want tips on how to get started.

13. Testing SEO.ai

✍️ 🔍 Price: $ 49 per month
A Danish-developed tool. I know parts of the team behind it and think they stand for good software. They have a 7-day free trial which requires a credit card. I haven’t had time to test it myself yet, but have heard from several that it works well. That’s why it makes the list here.

14. Testing Screaming Frog

🤖 Price: $ 259 per year

Expert tool. Screaming Frog is a piece of software that you download to your computer and use to check the health of your website. The tool allows you to crawl your website in the same way as Google’s web crawlers do, and based on the analysis of your onsite SEO – i.e. the quality of your website in the eyes of search engines – you can identify common errors and problems, analyze metadata and generate XML sitemaps. Free version is available where you can scan 500 landing pages. Use Screaming Frog if you really want to geek out about onpage SEO. There are many alternatives that make the job easier. For example SEObility, Ahrefs, and Morningscore from this list. See table with features

15. Testing Seobility

🏆 🤖 🔗 Price: $ 50 per month

SEObility started as a health (technical SEO) tool to scan your website and find improvements. I think they do that well, I’ve been a customer in the past. Today they cover the whole palette and can be called an “all-in-one” SEO tool. Their user experience is not my cup of tea, it’s a bit too grey. A German team is behind 😀 . I personally am not inspired to action. This is of course personal preference. The data is solid though and the price is sharp. And they have a free version. See table with features

16. Testing SE Ranking

🏆 🤖 🔍 🔗 Price: $ 49.
SE Ranking provides a complete toolbox of SEO tools. All-in-one tool. I was a customer for 2 years. However, personally, I found only their rank tracker so really good. Their link tools were confusing and the data was not super. Technical SEO was so-so. It may have changed since I was a customer. Price/quality is sharp. Probably partly why SE Ranking has grown a lot in the last few years.

17. Testing AccuRanker

🏆 🔍 Price: $ 140 per month

AccuRanker is a Danish-developed rank-tracking tool. That is, they focus on tracking keywords and their ranking on Google. They are really good at this and help big companies and agencies to track thousands of keywords. I was a customer for 1 year. So if you have a big rank tracking need and want to be able to filter deep into that data, AccuRanker is worth checking out.

Several new clients of ours have mentioned Morningscore as a good alternative to Accuranker. Of course, this depends on the need.

18. Testing Yoast SEO (WordPress plugin)

🤖 Price: Free.
Yoast is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. You can use it to optimize the technical aspects of your SEO, and the tool also helps you in the right direction in terms of keyword optimizing your written content. If you have a WordPress website, Yoast is a super extension that will automatically make your website more SEO-friendly.

19. Testing Rank Math (WordPress plugin)

🤖 Price: $ 5 per month

At Morningsore, we switched from Yoast to Rank Math in 2023 as many hyper Rank Math these days. The tool helps with migration. It wasn’t completely painless though and the hype doesn’t quite hold up in my opinion. The free version is not worth much, so we upgraded. Cheap though. Rank Math Pro has a lot of neat little features that save time. Examples: automatic alt tags on images. Automatically find videos on the page and tell Google about them (Schema). Schema templates. Show the number of internal and external links on pages (very basic though). All in all, I’m satisfied. But if you have Yoast and are happy, stay there.

20. Testing Schemantra (structured data)

🤖 Price: Free

If you are an SEO geek and need to make your own Schema data, but obviously can’t remember all details in your head, then I would recommend this tool. I have used it myself to generate Schemas for Morningcore. There are many generators, but all the others I’ve tested have a very small selection. Here you get the complete list. It’s loooong.

 

Explanation of categories

In the list of SEO tools above, I used icons to categorize the tools. Here is an explanation:

🔗 SEO tools for links

Link tools help you check the number of links from other websites and examine the quality of the links etc. “Link building” and “Backlinks” are among the phrases you will encounter here. If you want to know more about backlinks and why they are important for your rankings, you can read this beginner’s guide: How do backlinks work?

✍️ SEO tools to help you with content

These tools help you create content for your website. For example, writing texts and headlines for you. Many of them are boosted by AI. Super smart. Be careful not to get too seduced by them, though. Use your common sense when creating content. Ask: would you read your own content?

🔍 SEO tools for keyword research

The tools in this category help you find the best keywords and typically tell you how many searches per month a keyword has, plus a bunch more.

🏆 SEO tools for keyword rank tracking

These tools can measure the position of the keywords on which your website ranks in search engines. Tracking your website and keyword rankings is an essential part of the SEO process. The work helps you make good decisions about your content.

🤖 Technical SEO tools

Technical SEO is, in short, about everything other than your written content. The term refers to the work of optimizing your website so that search engines can access, crawl and index it.

In essence, technical SEO covers everything you can do to help Google understand the content and structure of your website. It can be difficult to fully master – which is why we recommend you try one of the following tools.

Morningscore vs. the other SEO tools

Right now, you’re on Morningscore.io – and our own SEO tool is in the list of recommended tools.

Yes, that might be unbelievable. But I have endeavored to showcase tools I can vouch for and have used extensively myself.

If you’re curious about Morningscore I can provide some more info here:

Morningscore is designed in a fun and simple way that motivates you to get your SEO tasks done.

Because in the end, that’s what it’s all about: getting SEO done. There are a ton of tools out there. Tools don’t alone determine whether you’ll be successful. Your effort does.

We see in case after case that our clients get more traffic because they were motivated to get their SEO fixed.

So maybe you should give Morningscore a free 14-day trial?

 

 

PS.

These tools have been removed from the list of recommendations for 2023🔻

• Keyword Tool
• Rankwatch
• Authority Labs
• Pitchbox
• LinkMiner
• SEOptimer
• Xenu’s Link Sleuth
• KWfinder
• Keywords Everywhere
• DareBoost
• Check My Links
• BuzzSumo
• Whitespark
• Twinword Graph

Reason: I haven’t had time to test these tools in the last few years and they weren’t essential to my own SEO work. This does not make them bad!