Best SEO tools for 2025: AI to the rescue?

In some industries, you can get by with just a laptop and a clever mind or skilled hands. But in content marketing, you can’t do your work without the most effective SEO software and tools.

In some industries, you can get by with just a laptop and a clever mind or skilled hands. But in content marketing, you can’t do your work without the right SEO tools.

To help our customers in their journey to create and distribute their content, we asked and reviewed the SEO tools that real SEO experts use and how they use them. For our own blog and across many of our clients, we compiled the absolute best of the best SEO tools that exist today. Here’s what we found:

StoryChief - All-in-one content marketing platform with SEO tools
SEMrush - Best SEO tool for BULK research without limits
Ahrefs - Great for tracking performance and results over time
Screaming Frog - Best for technical SEO
Keywords Everywhere - Cheap keyword research right in the SERP
Perplexity - AI SEO assistant
RankIQ - Best SEO content analysis to rank higher

Effective SEO software for content marketing

StoryChief (web)

StoryChief is a content marketing platform that helps businesses create, distribute, and analyze content. StoryChief includes all the essential SEO tools digital marketers use to optimize their stories: keyword research, SEO content editor, readability and word count SERP analysis, Google search console integration, and more.

StoryChief offers a seamless Google Search Console integration and a robust Content Audit tool to enhance your website's performance. By connecting to Search Console, you can access key insights such as ranking keywords, top pages, and search metrics, helping you understand how your site performs on the Google SERP.

The Content Audit tool provides a thorough site analysis to discovr on-page seo issues, improve website content and drive better website optimization. It evaluates your target keywords and provides detailed reports on how well your content aligns with your keyword strategy. This tool also helps you assess competitors' websites, enabling competitor analysis to identify valuable fresh keywords and content gaps.

StoryChief is a helpful tool for conducting a site analysis, refining your SEO strategy and boost your Google search results.

Here are some examples of the SEO reports you can find in StoryChief:

Content audit tool — Get SEO opportunities based on your Google Search Console data and with the touch of AI

CTR performance matrix — Get SEO opportunities based on your Google Search Console data and with the touch of AI

If you want to optimize your content for SEO while killing it at content promotion, then you need to try StoryChief. Bring SEO, writing, review, publishing, and promotion together in one beautiful platform.

Most effective all-in-one SEO software

SEMrush (web)

SEMrush is an all-in-one SEO tool suite and enhances online visibility and provides marketing insights to SEO marketers. It offers comprehensive tools for SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR, Content Marketing, Marketing Insights, and Campaign Management.

Overall, SEMrush helps in monitoring and managing organic rankings, developing compelling PPC campaigns, general keyword research, and search engine optimization efforts.

It also provides key data on competitors' paid and search strategies, offers keyword and link building suggestions, and generates relevant site audits with critical issues that need attention.

Effective SEO software for rank tracking

Ahrefs (web)

Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset that helps grow search traffic and optimizes websites for SEO. It crawls the web, stores vast amounts of data, and makes it accessible via a user-friendly interface.

As a complete suite, Ahrefs offers tools like Keywords Explorer for relevant keyword ideas and traffic estimations, Rank Tracker for tracking desktop and mobile rankings, Site Audit for analyzing your website for common SEO issues, and Alerts for keeping you notified of new & lost backlinks, web mentions, and keyword rankings.

Finally, Ahrefs also provides a lot of free SEO tools like a Meta Description Generator that uses a language model to generate human-like meta descriptions, which can improve website ranking and click-through rates on search engine result pages.

Effective software for technical SEO

Screaming Frog (web)

Screaming Frog is a website crawler that allows SEO experts to fetch key onsite elements to analyze from an SEO perspective. It's particularly famous for its SEO Spider tool, a highly flexible and efficient tool for quickly analyzing, auditing, and reviewing a site from a technical SEO perspective. It provides insights into potential SEO issues, such as broken links, duplicate content, or missing meta descriptions.

Effective software for SEO keyword research

Keywords Everywhere (chrome extension)

Keywords Everywhere is a chrome extension for keyword research. This SEO tool shows users how often certain keywords are searched for, how competitive these search queries are, and what people are searching for around those topics. This tool helps SEO professionals to optimize their content around relevant keywords, improving their visibility in search engine results.

Best AI assistant tool for SEO

Perplexity Pro (AI assistant)

Perplexity AI is a versatile AI tool that can significantly enhance your SEO efforts. It performs well compared to other AI writers and AI chatbots.

One of Perplexity's strengths is its ability to create detailed, SEO-friendly content outlines. By providing Perplexity with a topic or keyword, it can generate a well-structured outline complete with relevant headings, subheadings, and talking points, saving significant time in the content planning process.

While ChatGPT is a powerful language model, Perplexity has several advantages that make it better suited for SEO tools:

Real-Time Web Access: Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity can access and analyze live web data. This ensures your SEO insights are always up-to-date and relevant.
Claude 3 Model: Perplexity's Pro plan utilizes the advanced Claude 3 model, which provides more accurate and nuanced outputs compared to ChatGPT. This leads to higher quality SEO recommendations.
Source Citations: Perplexity always provides links to the sources it uses to generate responses. This transparency is crucial for SEO, as you can verify information and cite authoritative sources in your own content.
Detailed Answers: For complex SEO queries, Perplexity tends to provide more comprehensive and actionable answers compared to ChatGPT. This level of detail is invaluable when developing an SEO strategy.

Bonus: 7 Powerful ChatGPT Prompts to Create SEO Content Faster

In summary, Perplexity AI is an effective SEO software in the SEO professional's arsenal. By leveraging its content outlining capabilities, real-time web access, advanced language model, and detailed outputs, you can supercharge your SEO efforts and achieve better results in less time.

While ChatGPT remains useful for certain tasks, Perplexity is the clear choice for SEO in 2025.

RankIQ (web)

RankIQ is an AI-powered SEO tool designed to help bloggers and other online content creators to rank on the first page of Google. It provides a list of low competition, high traffic keywords for a specific blog category. It also gives an SEO report card for each blog post, showing what's been done correctly and what needs improvement.

Bloggers use this RankIQ to research content on the top 10 search engine results on Google and to see what topics they should write about. It also has a handy keyword library and a SEO title analyzer.

SEO tools we like but didn’t make the list

There are more than 7 SEO tools on the market. Here are some more software products that our customers and experts use but didn’t quite make the list yet. Each of them is useful for some part of SEO:

Wincher: Track your rankings on the SERP so you know if your positions are improving or declining. Other SEO rank tracker tools: WooRank, SE Ranking, Ranktracker, AccuRanker, Rank Ranger.
Google: Google offers several tools for SEO: Google Search Console, Google Trends, Keyword Planner and Google Analytics, which is particularly valuable for keyword research and identifying search volume trends.
Answer the Public: Uses the data from Google’s autocomplete for Google Search, YouTube, and more to show what people are actively searching for.
Indexing tools: These help you ensure that your content is indexed properly across search engines like Google, Bing, Naver, and Yahoo.
Moz Pro: Another suite of all-in-one tools that SEO professionals use to manage rankings, backlinks, and on-page optimization.
KW Finder: A tool by Mangools that helps you discover long-tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. This keyword difficulty checker is great for finding less competitive phrases.
Keyword Surfer: A browser extension that gives you instant keyword metrics while searching Google, making it a convenient keyword generator for quick insights.
Keyworddit: A unique tool that pulls keyword ideas directly from Reddit, offering niche long-tail keywords often overlooked by other tools.
Yoast SEO: The most popular SEO plugin for WordPress sites, helping you optimize content, improve site structure, and enhance snippet optimization directly within your WordPress dashboard.
Crawling Tools: Tools like Screaming Frog and DeepCrawl help SEO pros find technical issues on their site, ensuring that their SEO health is intact by identifying broken links, redirects, and other technical barriers.
Links Report: A backlink manager that helps SEO agencies track placed links and maintain a healthy link-building profile.

Each of these tools serves a different function in the SEO process, from keyword research and rank tracking to crawling and snippet optimization, allowing you to fine-tune every aspect of your strategy.

More SEO tools

For a more detailed overview and specific SEO tools, take a look at our SEO tools articles below:

The most effective SEO software for you

Choosing a single “best” SEO tool is impossible since you need different categories of SEO software to get your job done. Choosing the right software will depend on your niche, the level of your competition, your budget and the size of your team.

Whether you’re a small business owner or managing a larger enterprise, tools like StoryChief, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, Yoast SEO, and Deepcrawl offer excellent solutions for site crawling, improving keywords, and website auditors.
With tools such as HubSpot Website Grader and AWR Cloud, you can evaluate page quality, page speed performance, and website accessibility, ensuring your site meets the highest standards.
For competitor analysis tools, platforms like SpyFu and Semrush (even with a free Semrush account) allow you to track backlink profiles, analyze high-buying intent keywords, and understand user behaviors. These tools also offer robust backlink analysis and link-building tools to strengthen your domain authority.

Whichever tool you pick, StoryChief can help you seamlessly integrate SEO, writing, review, publishing, and promotion all in one place. Start your free trial today and experience the power of a platform that not only optimizes your content for search engines but also ensures it resonates with your audience.

Tired of playing the SEO guessing game? Access real-time search performance insights, identify decaying content, and discover new content opportunities for increased organic traffic. Try it free.

SEO tools