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There are well over 350 SEO tools in the world. How do you know which SEO tools are worth checking out?
I’ve now tested over 170 tools, and keep an eye out for new ones coming. So maybe I saved you about 300 hours of research 😉
Below I review the top 20 tools. Big 2025 update where I include new tools and give my update on current ones.
By the way: If you are looking for the most simple tools we have made a list of the easiest SEO tools for beginners too.
Which SEO tools are best as of May 2025?
As of May 2025, there are over 350 free and paid SEO tools on the market.
Here are the 20 SEO tools that stood out the most to me in 2025
| Name | Category | USD/month | Features | AI Tools ✨ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🏆 🤖 🔗 | |
| Ahrefs | 💵 Paid | 129 | 🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 | Yes |
| Morningscore | 💵 Paid | 49 | 🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 | Yes |
| SEMrush | 💵 Paid | 140 | 🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 | Yes |
| Surfer SEO | 💵 Paid | 99 | 🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 | Yes |
| Moz Pro | 💵 Paid | 99 | 🏆 🤖 🔍 🔗 | Yes |
| Rich Results Test | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🤖 | |
| PageSpeed Insights | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🤖 | |
| Compress PNG | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🤖 | |
| Answer The Public | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🔍 | |
| Claude Sonnet 3.7 | 🎁 Free | 0 | ✍️🤖 | Yes |
| SEO.ai | 💵 Paid | 49 | ✍️ | Yes |
| Detailed (Chrome extension) | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🤖 | |
| Screaming Frog | 💵 Paid | 22 | 🤖 | |
| Seobility | 💵 Paid | 50 | 🏆 🤖 🔍 | |
| SE Ranking | 💵 Paid | 65 | 🏆 🤖 🔍 🔗 | Yes |
| AccuRanker | 💵 Paid | 116 | 🏆 | |
| Yoast SEO (WordPress plugin) | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🤖 ✍️ | |
| Rank Math (WordPress plugin) | 💵 Paid | 5 | 🤖 ✍️ | Yes |
| Schemantra | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🤖 |
The Features column from the table above is explained here:
| Feature | Explanation |
|---|---|
| 🏆 | Rank tracker tool |
| 🤖 | Technical SEO (onpage) |
| 🔍 | Keyword research |
| ✍️ | Help to write content |
| 🔗 | Backlink tool |
Review of the 20 SEO tools
1. My personal test of Google Search Console
🏆 🤖 🔗 Price: Free.
Google Search Console has become one of the most best SEO tools. Much has improved in the last couple of years. It is Google’s own and it gives them some advantages. Among others, no tool can match the size of their list of keywords and the accuracy of traffic and visibility coming to 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. There are many cool features inside Google Search Console that are only found here.
2025 update: Google added a bunch of new tools during 2024. Security features, integrations with other Google products, but the biggest is their Recommendations: Search Console can now suggest changes to your SEO that could improve visibility. Pretty cool stuff, but still quite limited since Google has to be careful here. Also we are still waiting to see if Google will add AI Overview tracking. Didn’t happen yet, but I expect it in 2025.
2. My personal test of Ahrefs
🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 Price: $129 per month
Ahrefs data quality is among the best on the market and the tool is especially popular in tracking backlinks and researching 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
2025 update: Last year I wrote about uproar about Ahrefs raising and changing pricing. They did it again 😉 The full package lowest plan is now $129/month up from $99/month in my review last year. But they also introduced a “Starter plan” from $29/month. On the features side, AI features were added during 2024, and they recently released their own AI writer too. Not very valuable for me personally, but I think they did a good job.
3. My personal test of Morningscore
🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 Price: $49 per month
Morningscore is an all-in-one SEO tool that lets you measure the value of organic traffic to your website in Dollars. 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. Disclaimer: This is our own tool. You can test it free here (no credit card).
2025 update: Contrary to other premium SEO tools, Morningscore lowered prices during 2024 and now starting at $49. 3 major releases also happened that gave users internal links data, 5 new health checks, AI features in missions and a lot more gamification.
4. My personal test of Semrush
🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 Price: $140 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.
2025 update: Similar to Ahrefs, Semrush has changed their pricing quite a lot and many users got unhappy. This story kept reappearing during 2024. On the data side the tool is still strong, giving you tons of fresh data and the biggest feature list of any SEO tool I tested. Including AI features now. The downside is still the same though: User experience is as confusing as ever. I never became a fan of the workflow.
5. My personal test of Surfer SEO
🏆 ✍️ 🔍 Price: $99 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.
2025 update: As I wrote this review 2 years ago, the tool cost $29 / month. Now the starting price tripled to $99 / month. It’s still a fair price if you are hardcore around your SEO content strategy. Solid new features were added during 2024. For example their AI writer. But for small business owners with a simple need I no longer recommend SEO Surfer.
6. My personal test of 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
2025 update: Not exactly the tool itself, but Moz has now released a new v3 API. Playing around with the API I realized how good Moz English keyword data is. In other markets it’s the opposite story, but if your need is primarily English, Moz has solid data for sure.
7. My personal test of 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.
2025 update: More and more experts claim you get improved visibility in both AI bots and Search with great Schema and that this is an increasing trend. So this oldie but goldie tool is as relevant as ever in 2025!
8. My personal test of 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. This is still important in 2025.
2025 update: This tool is still the king of speed optimization. The scoring and baseline keeps getting updated so don’t treat it as a one-time thing to check and improve. I suggest you check your scores every quarter.
9. My personal test of 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. My personal test of 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. My personal test of Claude Sonnet 3.7
✍️ 🔍 Price: Free.
This is the leading AI content writing tool. It has multiple advantages over the current ChatGPT models if you ask me. First of all, it writes better across different languages. ChatGPT often does a mediocre job in small languages. Writing quality and intelligence is also just a bit higher. The bigger context windows of Sonnet 3.7 enables you to write long posts. And they have all these little features that make it look like Claude was designed for writing content. Sometimes it even suggests and writes entire new articles at very high quality for you related to what you wanted, just because it saw a great related topic. Truly magical at times.
2025 update: I have replaced ChatGPT with Claude in my May 2025 update for the reasons above
12. My personal test of 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.
2025 update: They kept the $49/month price tag while releasing more great features. Which makes me recommend this tool for 2025. There are a ton of competitors in this space though, so I would google “best AI writers” and see how they all compare 😊
13. My personal test of Detailed (Chrome extension)
🤖 Price: Free
This tool has been hyped during the last year. So I had to try it out. It’s honestly nothing special, but I still add it here because I think the user interface is good.
What does it do? It gives you some quick data on any page you are currently visiting. So as you can see in the photo it can give me quick info on meta, headings, internal links, images, schema and social media.
The most useful part is the Overview tab. The rest is a bit cluttered and I would rather use a proper SEO tool for those.
14. My personal test of Screaming Frog
🤖 Price: $259 per year. Limited free version too.
This is an expert tool. Screaming Frog is a piece of software that you download to your computer and use to check the “onsite” 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
2025 update: I have used it quite a bit during the last year. This tool is by far not perfect, many “false positives” but that is because the internet is so complex, so don’t hold against these cool Brits 😊. It’s a super nerdy tool, and I don’t find myself enjoying using it. But one thing I enjoy: It’s freaking fast!! (to the point where Screaming Frog actually ignore the robots.txt on people’s websites telling crawlers to slow down… Hmm Screaming Frog, from the biggest health crawler I expected a little more 😑)
15. My personal test of 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 does not feel inspired to action. This is of course a personal preference. The data is solid though and the price is sharp. And they have a free version. Which is why they made it onto this prestigious list after all 😎
16. My personal test of SE Ranking
🏆 🤖 🔍 🔗 Price: $65
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.
2025 update: Prices increased for the 2nd year in a row. Now starting at $65. They also added AI features which work quite OK. I especially like their AI Overviews rank tracking, which is currently in beta. The tool still feels quite bulky and slow and the UX is not my cup of tea. But I would say SE Ranking is one of the tools that keep improving and growing year after year.
17. My personal test of 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. Accuranker are kings when it comes to large and complex keyword tracking needs. And their filtering and tagging of keywords is quite deep.
2025 update: Their new search volume engine is interesting. They combine data sources to give you are more precise search volume on keywords.
18. My personal test of Yoast SEO (WordPress plugin)
🤖 Price: Free and paid upgrade.
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. My personal test of 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.
2025 update: I haven’t used it a ton, but I haven’t seen any new features that makes this plugin better. Their AI tools are still bad. Their Search Console integration is also still spitting out totally wrong numbers. The basics still work as they should though (like automatically generating alt tags for images) – and they are good!
20. My personal test of 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.
Founding year and country of the 20 SEO tools reviewed
Out of curiosity I decided to research the founding year and country of each SEO tool I reviewed here 🙂
| Name | Year Founded | Country |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | 2015 | United States 🇺🇸 |
| Ahrefs | 2010 | Singapore 🇸🇬 |
| Morningscore | 2018 | Denmark 🇩🇰 |
| SEMrush | 2008 | United States 🇺🇸 |
| Surfer SEO | 2017 | Poland 🇵🇱 |
| Moz Pro | 2004 | United States 🇺🇸 |
| Rich Results Test | 2017 | United States 🇺🇸 |
| PageSpeed Insights | 2010 | United States 🇺🇸 |
| Compress PNG | 2021 | Latvia 🇱🇻 |
| Answer The Public | 2014 | United Kingdom 🇬🇧 |
| Claude (Anthropic) | 2021 | United States 🇺🇸 |
| SEO.ai | 2022 | Denmark 🇩🇰 |
| Detailed (Chrome extension) | 2020 | Hong Kong 🇭🇰 |
| Screaming Frog | 2010 | United Kingdom 🇬🇧 |
| Seobility | 2013 | Germany 🇩🇪 |
| SE Ranking | 2013 | United Kingdom 🇬🇧 |
| AccuRanker | 2013 | Denmark 🇩🇰 |
| Yoast SEO (WordPress plugin) | 2010 | Netherlands 🇳🇱 |
| Rank Math (WordPress plugin) | 2018 | India 🇮🇳 |
| Schemantra | 2022 | Canada 🇨🇦 |
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.
Of course I am biased towards my own tool, but I hope you can see from my writing above, that I try to be 100% honest and use clear writing. AI is NOT used for the writing of this post!
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 2025🔻
- Keyword Tool
- Rankwatch
- Authority Labs
- Pitchbox
- LinkMiner
- SEOptimer
- Xenu’s Link Sleuth
- KWfinder
- Keywords Everywhere
- DareBoost
- Check My Links
- BuzzSumo
- Whitespark
- Twinword Graph
- Frase
- AIPRM (ChatGPT Chrome extension)
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!
Conclusion
I hope this guide gave you some good and original insights and that you could see this was my personal opinion and not some garbage AI generated text 😉
I wish you a ton of luck with SEO in 2025 🎉
