The 7 Best SEO Tools & Software in 2024

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
ChatGPT - AI SEO assistant
RankIQ - Best SEO content analysis to rank higher

Best SEO tools for content marketing

StoryChief (web)

StoryChief is a content marketing platform that helps businesses create, distribute, and analyze content. It allows for SEO-friendly blog posts, social media posts, newsletters, and more. It also provides insights into how your published content performs, making it easier to tweak and optimize the content strategy.

StoryChief includes all the essential SEO tools marketers use to optimize their stories: keyword research, SEO content editor, readability and word count SERP analysis, Google search console integration, and more.

StoryChief integrates with Google Search Console to pull in your website performance stats. Easily monitor your website's SEO performance, gain valuable insights, and receive actionable recommendations to increase your traffic.

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: start a free trial.

Best all-in-one SEO tool

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, and taking content marketing to the next level.

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.

Best SEO tool 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.

Best tool 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.

Best tool for 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

ChatGPT (AI chatbot)

ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by OpenAI. It's used to generate human-like text based on the input it's given.

In the context of SEO tools, you can use ChatGPT prompts for SEO to create engaging, SEO-friendly content, get help with analyzing exported keyword data, ask for a review of your content, and more. It can help in creating content that not only ranks well on search engines but also resonates with the audience.

Best SEO tool for content research

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 are useful for some part of SEO:

Wincher: Track your rankings on the SERP so you know if your positions are improving or declining. Other rank tracker tools: WooRank, SE Ranking, Ranktracker, AccuRanker, Rank Ranger.
Google: Google has its own set of tools for SEO: Google Search Console, Google Trends, Keyword Planner and Google Analytics.
Answer the public: Uses the data from Google’s autocomplete for Google Search, YouTube and more to tell you what people are searching for.
Foudroyer: Helps you index your blog posts to Google, Bing, Naver and Yahoo.
Moz Pro: Another suite of SEO tools marketers use.
KW Finder: A tool by Mangools, helps you find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

The best SEO tools do more with our platform

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.

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