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Best SEO Tools Recommended By Experts

The Best SEO Tools Recommended by Industry Experts (2020 Update)

Are you looking for the best SEO tools in 2020?

You’re at the right place. We reached out to the top SEO experts in the industry, and they shared the tools they use with us. We only asked for their top 3 SEO tools.

Instead of trying every tool out there, save some money, time and stress by using what the experts use.

Some of the experts in this article have been in the industry for decades. They deliver remarkable results for their clients. And they are respected in the search industry.

Note that we update this article every year. From time to time, we contact emerging experts to tell us the tools they use for their SEO campaigns.

Without the right tool, it’s hard to deliver remarkable results for your clients. The better the tool you use, the better the recommendations, and information you’ll gain from it, which would help you formulate the right SEO plan.

Below are the answers of each SEO expert to this question:

“What’s your top 3 SEO tools?”

The Top SEO tools based on expert’s opinions

#1:  SEMrush – (12 recommendations)
#2: Screaming Frog and Google Search Console – (9 recommendations)
#3:  Moz – Ahrefs  (7 recommendations)
#4: Majestic SEO and BuzzSumo tied with- (4 recommendations)

Apart from these top seven SEO tools, we also received good responses for Searchmetrics and  Google Analytics.

Best SEO Tools Recommended By 31 Successful SEO Experts

Let’s start with our first SEO expert.

1. Rand Fishkin – Founder of Moz and Sparktoro

SEO tools recommended by Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin co-founded Moz in 2001. Moz grew to become a respected SEO publication, community, and technology company under his watch before leaving in 2018. Today, Rand runs Sparktoro, another company he founded. Sparktoro is a search engine for intelligence audience.

  1. Moz
  2. BuzzSumo
  3. Getstat

2. Neil Patel – Founder of KISSMetrics, CrazyEgg, QuickSprout

SEO tools recommended by Neil Patel

Neil Patel has been doing digital marketing since 2001. He’s founded companies that created tools for digital marketers. He started as an SEO at age 16. Now in his 30’s today, Neil is one of the most influential SEO expert.

  1. Ahrefs
  2. Google Analytics
  3. Google Search Console

3. Derek Edmond – Managing Partner of KoMarketing

SEO tools recommended by Derek Edmond

Derek Edmond has over 12 years of experience working in SEO and online marketing working with a range of clients across industry sectors. While some of the more well-known brands include John Deere, Hallmark, Kaspersky Lab, Hewlett Packard, Covidien, and Stanley Black & Decker, Derek’s client experience ranges from the Fortune 500 to entrepreneurial start-ups and family-run organizations.

  1. Ubersuggest – It’s a free alternative to Google Keyword Planner, providing keyword ideas organized alphabetically and visually based on preference.
  2. Seobook’s Rank Checker – This tool allows people to check and export target keyword rankings in Google and Yahoo! search results.
  3. Pingdom Website Speed Test – Pingdom website speed tool is a free tool that helps people to identify issues in load times for a website.

4. Lisa Buyer – CEO/Founder of The Buyer Group

SEO tools recommended by Lisa Buyer

Lisa Buyer is the CEO/Founder at TheBuyerGroup, a global social PR agency. She has over 20 years in PR, branding and search engine marketing. In fact, she heavily relies on SEO tools on finding high-quality sites for great PR.

  1. Yoast
  2. BuzzSumo
  3. Search Engine Optimization Tools by Bruce Clay

5. Erik Emanuelli – Blogger at NoPassiveIncome

Erik-Emanuelli

Erik Emanuelli is a highly respected blogger who teaches his audience how to use search engines to drive visitors that make money. He enjoys talking about passive income. He’s a passive income earner himself. He uses his deep knowledge of SEO to drive a lot of visits to his blog.

  1. LongTailPRO – great for long-tail keywords research and creating niche sites based on them.
  2. SEMRush – good for monitoring site rankings and target them for link building or guest posting campaigns.
  3. Google Keyword Planner – fantastic free solution by Google to look for keyword ideas and check how they can perform.

6. Gabriel Weinberg – CEO and Founder of DuckDuckGo

The SEO tool Gabriel Weinberg recommends

Gabriel Weinberg is the founder of DuckDuckGo, an internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers’ privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. He has a deep knowledge of search engines.

  1. Only Moz.

7. Dan Sharp – Founder of Screaming Frog

Dan Sharp best SEO tools

Dan co-founded Screaming Frog, a marketing agency in the UK that also created a powerful SEO tool, and has developed search strategies for a variety of clients from international brands to small and medium sized businesses for over a decade, working in some of the most competitive industries online.

  1. Majestic
  2. Sistrix
  3. Searchmetrics

8. Gabriella Sannino – Founder of Level343.com

Gabriella Sannino best seo tools

Gabriella Sannino by title is an international marketing consultant and SEO strategist. She founded Level343, an SEO company in San Francisco, California in 1994. Since then, she’s helped hundreds of corporate clients and written 2,00+ articles on search engine optimization.

  1. HootSuite
  2. SEMrush
  3. Google Search Console and Analytics

9. Matthew Capala – Founder and Managing Director at Alphametic

Matthew Capala best SEO tools

Matthew Capala is a digital marketing strategist, speaker, and author. As a practitioner above all, he has spent the last 14 years delivering results to some of the most iconic brands in the world, leveraging the latest tools and strategies in SEO, SEM, content, social, and digital ads.

  1. Keyword Planner– Google Keyword Planner is a must-have in my keyword research toolbox. I use this tool primarily to discover search terms that are generating enough search volumes on Google to be worth targeting. I also use this tool to get more synonyms and variations of the niche keywords I am researching.
  2. SEMrush– SEMrush offers a lot of free features every SEO should appreciate. I use SEMrush to analyze the competitive landscape on search terms I am looking to target in my SEO strategy. I also use SEMrush to track keyword ranking performance of my clients’ websites and those of their competitors.
  3. Moz – I use Moz to identify link building opportunities, identify top pages, view social activity, and analyze anchor texts.

11. Marcus Miller – Founder of Bowler Hat

Marcus Miller best SEO tools

Marcus Miller is an experienced SEO and PPC consultant based in Birmingham, UK. Marcus focuses on strategy, audits, local SEO, technical SEO, PPC and just generally helping businesses dominate search and social. Marcus is managing director of the UK SEO and digital marketing company Bowler Hat.

There are also many that are good for a given situation so it is tough to suggest a top three but the following are three tools I use on an almost daily basis:

  1.  Übersuggest – am a big fan of Übersuggest for keyword research. It just saves us so much time and tends to provide a lot more data than doing this manually or using the severely limited Google Keyword Planner. I am also growing ever more fond of Answer the Public for more keyword and topic ideas for content marketing.
  2.  Screaming Frog– I just love Screaming Frog. It is a search geeks wet dream. Screaming Frog gives us a search engines view on how the site is hung together. Using the data here with data from other tools like Search Console and Google itself we can get to the bottom of the most technical issues.
  3. Google Search Console– another great tool is Google’s own diagnostic platform Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools). This enforces a structured look at crawling, indexation and optimization issues which is always a good thing.

In many cases it is the intersection of multiple tools where the real value lies and as an example we have been recently looking into a fairly technical SEO issue with AJAX rendering and crawling issues for a new client. The content is spread between two sites and is created with the Angular framework. There was a number of issues here yet we identified and resolved the issues with Screaming Frog and Search Console alone.

11. Trond Lyngbø – Senior SEO Consultant and Founder at Search Planet

Trond Lyngbø best SEO tools

Trond Lyngbø is the founder of Search Planet and a senior SEO Consultant. He has over 10 years of experience in SEO, e-commerce, content strategy and digital analysis. His clients include multinational Fortune 500 corporations and major Norwegian companies.

  1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
  2. Google Search Console
  3. SEMrush

12. Kristi Hines – Certified Content Marketer

Kristi Hines best SEO tools

Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, ghostwriter, and copywriter in Phoenix, AZ who develops blog content, ebooks, emails, lead magnets, and website copy for marketing agencies, B2B, and SaaS. Her writing has appeared in over 50 online publications including Content Marketing Institute, Moz, Salesforce, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, and Social Media Examiner.

I’d have to say my favorite SEO tools are as follows.

  1. Monitor Backlinks– This tool will email you a daily summary of changes to your backlink profile – backlinks you’ve gained, backlinks you’ve lost, and backlinks that might have changed in status, such as from dofollow to nofollow. It will also help you keep an eye on your competitors so you can stay on top of new link opportunities and help you monitor your keyword rankings.
  2. Impactana– This is a tool that is perfect for those who are creating content with SEO in mind. It’s similar to BuzzSumo in the fact that it will let you find the most popular content based on social popularity. But it goes beyond that and also shows you the most popular content in terms of number of links that it gained. So when you’re in doubt about whether a certain type of content will generate backlinks, you can use this tool to find out.

13. Ilyas Teker – Founder, SEO Consultant at Mosanta

Ilyas Teker best SEO tools

Ilyas has been working in the SEO field for 13+ years. He is now Founder & SEO Consultant at Mosanta.com. He had worked as an SEO Director of iProspect’s Chicago office, one of the world’s largest digital marketing agencies.

  1. Deepcrawl
  2. Search metrics
  3. Link research tool (LRT)

14. James Reynolds – Found at SEO Sherpa

James-Reynolds

James Reynolds is the Founder and Head Sherpa of SEO Sherpa, an agency based in Dubai. James has spoken at conferences in the United Kingdom, Australia, Bahrain and UAE to name just a few and has appeared alongside notable speakers such as Michael Gerber (E-Myth), Larry Winget, Chris Brogan and Scott Stratten in the successful Guinness World Record attempt for the longest-ever online seminar.

  1. Ahrefs
  2. Majestic SEO
  3. SEM Rush
  4. Screaming Frog

15. Adam Connell – Founder of BloggingWizard

Adam-Connell

Adam Connell started Blogging Wizard in 2012, as a platform to share what he was learning in his new role at a marketing agency. Since then it’s grown into a go-to resource for both beginner and intermediate bloggers. Connell used his SEO knowledge to build a successful blog that now receives hundreds of thousands visits per month.

  1. Buzzstream– this is a rock solid outreach tool, and it works great as a CRM too. I wanted to find a CRM that was a good fit for a marketer rather than a sales person, oddly enough Buzzstream worked better than other CRM’s I tested. Also, our team at UK Linkology use it and find it helps keep everyone organized and in sync (e.g. no emailing the same contact twice).
  2. SEMrush– right now, this is my top-level SEO dashboard. I use it mostly for rank tracking, site auditing, and competitor research.
  3. Ahrefs– there’s a lot of cross over between Ahrefs and SEMrush now. I used to only use it for backlink checking but it’s keyword research/competitor research functionality is amazing now.

16. Marcus Tandler – Co-Founder and Managing Director at Ryte

Marcus Tandler best SEO tools

Marcus is one of the most famous internet experts in Germany and one of the pioneers of search engine optimization”. For over 15 years he has regularly been holding keynote speeches on the topics online marketing and website optimization.

I’m using well over 10 different tools in my day-to-day work, so it’s not easy to name just three tools I wouldn’t able to live without in 2020.

  1. The first tool is a no-brainer: Google Search Console; I guess most SEOs are aware of the awesomeness that is Google Search Console data. So much valuable data to harvest – logging into GSC once a week (or at least once a month) is an absolute must for every savvy SEO.
  2. My 2nd tool tip is a shameless self-plug – of course, I have to mention our own software solution here : Ryte; With over 150.000 users worldwide, Ryte has swiftly become the leading technical SEO software. Auditing websites has never been easier. The TF*IDF analysis tool for content optimization is also an innovative approach for finding keyword inspiration and writing better content.
  3. A 3rd tool I cannot live without is Searchmetrics; Searchmetrics just offers the best data for competitive-, keyword- and social impact research. I’ve been an avid Searchmetrics user ever since its launch. The quality of Search metrics research data is just unparalleled.

17. Dan Shure – Founder at Evolving SEO

Dan Shure best SEO tools

Dan has been doing SEO since 2007. Today, he runs his own small boutique SEO agency and release regular podcasts on various topics related to SEO and digital marketing.

  1. Screaming Frog– Screaming Frog is the best-in-class all purpose web crawler.
  2. SEMrush – SEM Rush is a data driven keyword research and intelligence tool.
  3. Moz– Moz has the best link metrics, Keyword Explorer

17. Pedro Dias – Director of Optimization at apis3

Pedro-Dias

Pedro is a Digital Marketer, Optimisation consultant, Usability enthusiast and Google Marketing Expert. He’s also one of the few ex-Google Search Quality team members working in Digital Marketing. Pedro holds deep knowledge in Google Search and a solid knowledge of the Online Industry across Western European language markets and South America.

1. Google Free Tools

2. Crawlers/Spiders

3. Links Profile Analysis

19. Andy Crestodina – Co-Founder at Orbit Media

Andy Crestodina best SEO tools

Andy has been in the web design and interactive marketing space since January of 2000. In that time, he’s helped thousands of people do a better job getting results online. He’s a true evangelist for content marketing and ethical digital marketing.

  1. SEMrush
  2. Moz
  3. BuzzSumo

20. Barry Adams – Founder at Polemic Digital

Barry-Adams

Barry Adams has been an active SEO practitioner since 1998, and has earned a fair share of awards and accolades: The Polemic blog was nominated for Best Blog at the 2013 UK Search Awards, and Barry was awarded Digital Industries Person of the Year at the 2014 DANI Awards.

Here are my top SEO tools that I use almost every day:

  1. Screaming Frog SEO crawler – This is a must have tool for those who are involved with the SEO. The tool is basically a crawler that tries to find every page and asset on your site and extracts relevant data about it.
  2. Majestic – The previous tools I have mentioned is all about on-page SEO. When it comes to off-page-optimization (i.e. links) you need a different tool. For link analysis I generally use Majestic and it’s a very effective tool.
  3. SEMrush – SEMrush is a competitor analysis tool. With this tool you can get a very good snapshot of a site’s performance in search results, and compare that to those of its rivals.

21. Mike Blumenthal – Co-Founder of GatherUp and LocalU

Mike Blumenthal best SEO tools

Mike is commonly referred to as the grandfather of local digital marketing. Mike has been involved with offering web marketing services since 1995.

  1. Moz local
  2. Whitespark
  3. GatherUp

22. Sean Si – Founder and CEO of SEO Hacker

Sean-Si

Sean is a highly respected SEO Consultant. His company, SEO Hacker is based in the Philippines and serves clients in based in different parts of the world.

Here are my recommendations:

  1. SEMrush – It’s just the best tool for competitive SEO out there. And SEO by nature is competitive. After all, it’s a zero-sum game with only 10 results on the first page.
  2. AccuRanker – Hands-down the fastest rank tracking tool. Very easy to use and pulls data as you please.
  3. Screaming Frog – It’s the shiznit. Everything on site SEO and technical SEO can start and end with screaming frog. Try it.

Bonus: It’s not directly an SEO tool but Qeryz has helped me know which pieces of content my audience loves to read and share. If your SEO strategy is content-centric like mine, that’s very important.

23. Rick Ramos – Chief Marketing Officer at HealthJoy

Rick Ramos best SEO tools

Ramos is the Chief Marketing Officer at HealthJoy, a healthtech venture-backed SaaS startup who’s on a mission to change the healthcare experience. He was heavily involved in the early stages product development of product development at the company. Ramos has been in the digital marketing game for two decades. He has a flair for rolling up his sleeves and getting things done.

  1. BuzzSumo
  2. Spyfu

24. Nick Eubanks – Co-Founder at Traffic Think Tank

Nick Eubanks best SEO tools

Nick founded his first company at age 19, and sold his first business at age 24. Now, he consults on SEO strategy to billion-dollar businesses.

  1. Term Explorer
  2. Sentinel
  3. SEMrush

25. Steve Wiideman – President of Wiideman Consulting Group

Steve Wiideman best SEO tools

Steve has consulted for various enterprises and well-known brands for over 10 years, while playing key roles within multiple agencies and solution providers in the inbound marketing industry.

Specializing in SEO Strategy, Steve likes to organize search into specific disciplines broken down by business model. For natural search, Steve believes in only three fundamental requirements: Relevancy, Visibility and User Behavior. For local search, Data, Landing Page, Citation and Reputation are the keys to success.

  1. Moz
  2. SEMrush
  3. Botify
  4. Ahrefs

26. Marko Saric – Renown Blogging Expert

Marko Saric best SEO tools

Marko had a seven year experience with running blogging, content marketing and social media marketing activities for a large, publicly traded online gaming company in London, UK.

Marko has also had a three year, remote work experience wearing many hats as the head of strategy for marketing and product in a venture funded, B2B SaaS startup in the social media analytics industry. Today, he teaches others how to build massive audience through blogging.

  1. Google search console
  2. AMP Plugin for WordPress
  3. Yoast SEO

27. Matthew Howells-Barby – Director of Acquisition at HubSpot

Matthew Barby best SEO tools

In addition to being the director of acquisition marketing at HubSpot, Matthew is also the co-founder of Traffic Think Tank, a private-membership SEO community. Alongside this, he’s an advisor to a number of startups and large SaaS businesses, an investor, lecturer, and global speaker.

  1. Ahrefs
  2. AccuRanker
  3. Lumanu

28. Venchito Tampon – Founder of Sharp Rocket

Venchito Tampon best SEO tools

At the age of 21, Venchito Tampon pioneered SharpRocket, a premiere digital marketing company in the Philippines that caters to local and international companies – from small to medium sized businesses to Fortune 500s.

  1. Mention
  2. Semrush
  3. Mailtrack.io

29. Laura Lippay – SEO Lead at Comcast

Laura-Lippay

For almost two decades Laura has worked with many of the biggest brands online and offline, including Red Bull, several Microsoft, Yahoo & AOL entertainment and lifestyle properties, Netflix, Tesla, CNET, Icelandair, Nylon Magazine and many others, on uncovering opportunities to attract, engage and convert target audiences.

  1. Getstat
  2. Google Structured Data Testing Tool
  3. Chrome Dev Tools

30. Dennis Seymour – CoFounder at LeapFroggr

Dennis-Seymour

Dennis Seymour is the co-founder of LeapFroggr, a startup that helps small-to-medium-size businesses build apps for different platforms. Dennis has deep knowledge of SEO, mobile marketing, and SaaS development.

  1. Google Search Console
  2. Screaming Frog
  3. Market Samurai

31. Casandra Campbell – Testing and Experimentation Lead at Shopify

Casandra-Campbell

As the Experimentation Lead at Shopify, Casandra is constantly testing and refining new marketing strategies to help businesses grow. Before that, she was building Shopify’s own content and SEO strategy.

  1. Keyword Planner
  2. Ahrefs
  3. Search Console

Wrapping it up!

Huge thanks to all the SEO experts who contributed to this blog post.

Just to recap, here are the top results once again:

#1:  SEMrush – (12 recommendations)
#2: Screaming Frog and Google Search Console – (9 recommendations)
#3:  Moz – Ahrefs  (7 recommendations)
#4: Majestic SEO and BuzzSumo tied with- (4 recommendations)

Please share this blog post with your friends on social media.

What are your best SEO tools for 2020? Let me know below in the comments.

Comments (38)

  1. Hii,
    Great list, What great tools for SEO collection for knowledge and in implementation. Thats an awesome set of tools, its great to see which of the experts are using which tools. I for now mostly use MOZ and SEMRush. I sure did see a number of tools here that I was not aware of. i excited to work in new tool which you have given through this blog. Let see what experience i will get.

    It’s a big list of useful SEO tools, Recommended By Industry Experts Bloggers Worlds.

    Thanks Jabed for an extremely informative post.

    Have a Nice Day. Happy Blogging 🙂

  2. Great post!
    Been using SEMrush for a long time. Finally got tired of their slow databases update. Switched to SERPstat.
    My list goes like this:
    Ahrefs for backlinks
    Netpeak Spider for audit
    SERPStat for competitors research.

  3. It is really a great and useful piece of information. I’m glad that you simply shared this useful info with us. Please stay us up to date like this. Thanks for sharing.

  4. Nice roundup Jabed! I am really surprised that AhRefs is not higher on the list. You haven’t mentioned your favorite tools?

  5. SEO Tools:
    1. Ahrefs/Majestic – Ahrefs will pick up more links but Majestic have more user friendly interface
    2. SEMrush – Traffic charts payed and organic are totally wrong (if you compare it to Google Analytics). Good for newbie analizis.
    3. Pro Rank Tracker – keyword tracking nice and easy to use, updates every 24 h, actually accurate.
    4. Google Webmasters Tools/Search Console – for penalty check, targeting, sitemaps, indexing.
    5. Keyword Planner – Keyword Research Da!

    In the end of the day I can do all of my SEO work with just 2 TOOLS:
    Majestic and Google Search

    PS: Moz and Semrush are done!

  6. Great list! I tried lots of the listed tools with SEMrush being my overall favorite so far.
    I’d go:
    SEMrush
    Ahrefs
    Ubersuggest

    Also I’ve been working with SEOCrawler.co . It’s our all-in-one SEO suite (and it has a 14 day free trial). Give it a try once you have the time.

    Cheers!

  7. I am so glad to have a chance to read your wonderful article. I am looking forward to read more of your works and posts

  8. The knowledge you share really changes me in life, I sincerely thank you for the things you have done, sure your blog will help more people. Sincerely thank

  9. I heard only few from the above list Moz & cognitive SEO. I like to try all other listed SEO tools. Cognitive SEO is not free but they are providing a 14 day trial for first sign ups, Thank You.

  10. Great list of SEO Tools and it’s cool to see who the pro’s favorites are. Personally, I use Semrush the most for local SEO, but I also use a combination of a lot of these when necessary. Thanks for sharing!!

  11. Hey Jabed Hasan,
    it is really a grate collection. Very Well Research really! I Used few of them and next to get the test of lumanu soon! 🙂

  12. Amazing! I have used some of the tools and get to know some new from this post. I Must say “If nobody created tools for us we’d never get anything done. “

  13. Hey Jabed Hasan,

    This is an awesome list – so many great tools mentioned. I have used many of these some of my present favorites are Ahrefs and NinjaOutreach. I just recently signed up for Ninja outreach and it really useful tool for Outreach. Ahrefs and Majestic are a part of my daily life these days.

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  15. Hy Jabed, I heard about almost all the tool mentioned by you in the list, but getting the knowledge about expert interest and involvement in these Local SEO software is something very interesting. Looking forward for more interesting topic in future!

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  17. Thanks for such a great suggestion. so many best tools are suggested and it surely helps me to for the growth of my project. I am also using some the best tools. I think u missed gtmetrix

  18. Nice idea for paying attention on the best tools suggested by experts. everyone has its own path for choosing the tools, but this post can help many people.

  19. Great tool suggestions, thank you. I am curious though how useful the paid services are these days when the free one – even with those annoying ads – can be very helpful.

  20. Screaming Frog and Ahrefs are my two absolute favorite tools when it comes to SEO. Screaming Frog finds plenty of work for an SEO that knows what to look for as well as doing On-Page analysis for potential clients. Ahrefs is a no-brainer. Fast, efficient and loaded with info. If I could only choose two tools to work with it would be these. Great article. Looking forward to more!

  21. I’ve been using ahrefs for at least 7 years so I’ve got to say that is the top of my recommendation list, however I also use neilpatel.com as he has been building up a rival tool and now critical mass has been reached has started charging for it. I can see that been a challenger in the future though ahrefs and of course moz.com are streets ahead of all others currently.

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