The Best SEO & Digital Marketing Tools for 2018

If you’re looking for the best digital marketing tools out there – you’re going to be pretty happy with this comprehensive guide. We put every one of these to the test ourselves. Here’s our list of the best digital marketing tools, SEO tools and web applications & services that make running your business (and your life) easier.

Updated: November 4, 2018

KWFinder

KWFinder is an easy-to-use keyword research tool bringing perfect keyword ideas. Get real-time keyword SEO difficulty in one click, and it also shows the actual SERP results within the tool.

SEMRush

Another super powerful keyword research application. We usually use SEMRush for keyword research, but it's also a much more comprehensive SEO tool.

Longtail Pro

Use Long Tail Pro’s step-by-step system to discover thousands of profitable, targeted keywords and calculate Keyword Competitiveness for almost any niche.

KeywordTool.io

A great tool that uses autocomplete data to find more keywords in your vertical.

Keywords Everywhere

A great tool that shows you Google Adwords Keyword Planner search volume data every time you do a search! Super helpful for uncovering valuable new opportunities by accident.

SEO Quake

SEMRush’s chrome plugin. Overlays super useful data right into the search results.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

This used to be the defacto starting point for your keyword research in SEO. Due to current design, this tool is much more effective if you have a bigger paid search budget. If you don’t, use some of the other keyword research tools we recommend.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a great additional tool to check query volume on a relative basis.

SERPWatcher

SERPWatcher is a rank tracking tool built with focus on a effectivity and ease of use.

SEMRush

Semrush' Position Tracking tool allows you to track your website’s ranking for target keywords in the Google top 100 organic and paid results. Daily updated data helps track your optimization efforts for keyword rankings progress over time.

RankTrackr

Retrieves data by a "10 results per page" per one request process instead of the traditional "100 results per page" process that's used by most rank trackers to save resources. It also features advanced approaches to access ranking data for local tracking.

Ahrefs

My personal favorite. The best link analysis tool in the industry. Their link database seems to be the largest, and the way you can cut the link data is extremely comprehensive.

SEMRush

SEMrush is a powerful and versatile competitive intelligence suite for online marketing, from SEO and PPC to social media and video advertising research.

SERPChecker

SERPChecker is a competitor analysis tool providing 49+ SEO metrics.

Majestic SEO

Link analysis tool that helps you understand the link profile of your own, as well as competitor websites and can empower the rational study of Search Engine positioning.

Link Research Tools

With its advanced proprietary technology, LRT is "all things links". From building high-quality links to competitive link detox, this tool has it all.

LinkGrabber

Extracts all the links on a page and gives it to you in an easy-to-use copy and paste format.

Instapage

Highly-customizable landing page builder with extensive integrations system, a publishing platform, analytics and optimization. Good for A/B testing and creating high converting landing pages.

Thrive Architect

A true front end and visual editor that empowers you to quickly turn your ideas into practice. Fastest way from design to production with minimum friction.

ThriveCart

Just some of ThriveCart's point-and-click features! Get ready to boost your revenue with high converting cart pages, one click sales funnels, affiliate campaigns and track your entire business with ease.

Sumo

Sumo arms you with a suite of tools to increase your traffic, build a following and track your success every step of the way. Get up and running in 37 seconds to start converting your visitors into lifelong customers.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a powerful lead generation software that converts abandoning visitors into subscribers with dynamic marketing tools and Exit Intent® technology.

Drip

Drip helps you bring your marketing automations to the next level. Using the visual workflow builder you’ll easily design comprehensive, custom email campaigns and simplify your sales funnel.

ActiveCampaign

Integrated email marketing, marketing automation, and small business CRM. Send beautiful newsletters, setup behavioral based automations, and benefit from sales automation.

Convertkit

Rather than try to build every feature possible, ConvertKit focuses on being the best at email marketing and then building great integrations with ecommerce, landing page, and membership site providers.

Stencil

Stencil is ridiculously simple image creation for social media marketers, bloggers and small businesses. It's the fastest way to create & share visual content on the web.

Snip.ly

Sniply adds your custom call-to-action to any page on the web, allowing you to engage your followers through every link you share.

WPEngine

WP Engine provides best-in-class customer service on top of innovation-driven technology. This is why over 70,000 customers in 120 countries have chosen us for their mission critical WordPress hosting needs.

Bluehost

Bluehost is one of the largest and most trusted web hosting services powering millions of websites. Join Bluehost now and get a FREE domain name!

Dreamhost

DreamHost is the leader in shared web hosting, vps hosting, dedicated hosting, WordPress hosting, cloud storage and cloud computing. Voted as the Best Web Hosting Service 3 Years in a Row.

Updraft

Offering both a premium and a free version, Updraft is the world's most trusted Wordpress backup plugin. The free version has all the basic features.

Thrive Themes

Themes & plugins, built from the ground up to make your entire website convert more of your visitors into subscribers, customers & clients! The visual editor with true front editing capabilities allows for fastest route from idea to production.

ThemeForest

Discover 1000s of premium WordPress themes & website templates, including multipurpose and responsive Bootstrap templates, email templates & HTML templates.

LastPass

LastPass remembers all your passwords, so you don't have to. Stop wasting time writing, remembering, and resetting passwords. Only remember one master password, and keep the rest locked up and easy-to-find in the LastPass password manager.

Teachable

Create and sell beautiful online courses with the platform used by the best online entrepreneurs to sell $50m+ to over 4 million students worldwide.

LucidChart

Create beautiful process flows and unleash the power of planning. From content strategy to automation workflows, LucidChart is a versatile tool.

Browseo.net

See how search engines view your site with Browseo. This is great for diving into how Google and other search engines view your site. It’s particularly helpful with identifying redirect chains, and 302 redirects that should be 301s.

Redirect Path

A simple tool that shows you the redirect page a search engine takes on any page.

Screaming Frog

A fantastic tool for crawling your site and understanding the myriad technical problems that are inevitably happening. Screaming Frog crawls your website just like Google does, and tells you exactly what you need to fix.

Xenu

Find broken links and errors with Xenu. While Screaming Frog is significantly better and has a lot more functionality (it’s actually kind of crazy to even compare the two), this one is free.

Google Page Speed Tools

Google’s tool which shows you exactly what you need to fix in order to speed up your site.

Gift Of Speed

Improve your website's page speed and its overall performance using the benchmarks and recommendations built within this tool.

GTMetrix

GTmetrix gives you insight on how well your site loads and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize it.

Pingdom Page Speed Tools

A free and simple to use page speed tool.

Clearscope

Clearscope is SEO software for content teams. You feed it your primary keyword and your content, and it analyzes the top 10 google results for that keyword, and tells you what you need to tweak. Think of it like LSIGraph.com but on steroids.

Clearscope

Google Chrome

This recommendation will seem funny to most people – but yes there are still some people trying to do SEO with Safari or Firefox! From developer tools to a massive ecosystem of SEO plugins, you really should be using Google Chrome if you’re serious about SEO.