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The best digital marketing professionals always look for new and better ways to reach their target customers—and one of the most effective ways to reach a particular audience is through organic growth.
Yes, you can spend thousands of dollars on ads, giving you a quick return on investment (ROI), but nothing beats a company that has mastered organic growth. With this method, it might take time to reach the first page of Google, but your efforts will have a more significant long-term ROI.
Organic growth is the ultimate goal. By investing in a search engine optimization (SEO) tool, you can improve your marketing strategy, focus on reaching your target audience, and rank organically on search engine results pages (SERPs).
In this article, we’ve rounded up the best free and paid SEO tools for business-to-business (B2B) marketers, including some that we use at OneIMS to grow our clients’ digital presence and help their websites rank higher on search engines.
SEO Marketing Tools for B2B Business: An Overview
There are several factors to consider when choosing the right SEO tool for your needs. One of the most important things to keep in mind is whether you’re looking for a tool designed for B2B or business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. There are many great SEO tools specifically designed for one or the other, so choosing one that will fit your needs is important.
Additionally, you should determine what features you need from your SEO tool. Some tools offer a more comprehensive list of features than others, so choosing one with all the features you need is essential. For example, if you’re looking for a tool to help you with keyword research, you’ll want to choose an SEO tool offering everything that encompasses keyword research. Remember that some platforms have both free and premium options; paying for the tool will make more features available.
It’s also important to consider reviews when choosing an SEO tool. Reading user reviews is the best way to understand how well a tool works in the day-to-day life of a B2B digital marketer.
Why You Should Use SEO Tools for B2B Businesses
There are many SEO tools for digital marketing, but not all are created equal. The best SEO tools will help you track progress, track backlinks, optimize your company’s online presence for the best results, understand your audience, and adjust your strategy, among other things. The SEO tool you choose should be able to provide you with the data and information you need to make informed decisions about your digital marketing strategy.
Some of the best-rated SEO tools include Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and Semrush. These tools can help you improve your website’s ranking in search engines, understand your audience, and create optimized content.
Also, remember that the best SEO tools should be affordable and easy to use.
The Best Paid SEO Tools to Improve Rankings Online
Semrush
Semrush is one of the most popular SEO tools on the market. Known as the best SEO tool for B2B companies, it offers a wide range of features to help you optimize your digital marketing campaigns.
Learning how your competition works—and researching the ins and outs of their marketing strategies—makes it easier to improve your own website’s performance and grow your organic search traffic. With Semrush, you can gather data on your competitors’ websites, including their best performing pages, keyword rankings, and estimated organic traffic, and use that information to optimize your digital presence and beat out the competition.
One of Semrush’s strengths is keyword research. For example, the organic research tool can create lists of target keywords and identify topic clusters that your website could address. Then, you can optimize content for those keywords and topic areas, promote new and revamped content across social channels, and watch your website traffic grow.
In addition to keyword research, competitor analysis, and link building, Semrush has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to start, even if you’re not an SEO pro. It’s the perfect tool for anyone serious about optimizing their SEO results.
Key Features
- Track the most popular keywords on search engines
- Spy on competitors using the domain overview feature
- Analyze the on-page SEO of your website pages
- Check the backlink profile of any domain
- Generate hundreds of content topics based on your industry and location
- Manage your leads with the lead generation tool
- Find keyword opportunities for ad copy
- Improve the quality of your content with the SEO writing assistant
Pricing
Semrush has a three-tiered pricing structure, ranging from about $120 to $450. Free users can get and manage one project and track 10 keywords at a time.
BrightEdge
BrightEdge offers a wide range of features that are built to address a variety of digital marketing needs. It is built to crawl the web, collect first-party data, and provide real-time measurement of content engagement across all channels (social, search, mobile, etc.).
The most common way for potential customers to find your website is through a search engine, so optimizing your website for SERPs is a critically important part of your organic traffic strategy. With BrightEdge’s Data Cube, you can target specific keywords, improve your search engine ranking, and uncover untapped markets.
You can also optimize content with BrightEdge’s ContentIQ features, powered by a sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning engine. Providing content that adds value and is helpful to your website visitors is the first step to converting them into quality leads.
Other BrightEdge tools we want to highlight are the backlinks feature, which enables you to benchmark your performance against competitors, and the tasks tool, where you can organize your campaigns and manage your workflows.
All these features (and more) make BrightEdge one of the best SEO tools for organic growth.
Key Features
- Industry-leading forecasting that helps you quantify your SEO-based ROI
- Daily lists of high-converting keywords
- Customizable content reporting dashboard
- Optimized lists of keywords and topic areas
- Comprehensive on-page, backlink, social, and internal link recommendations
- Seamless integration with Majestic and Moz to view backlink portfolios of competition
- Social media insights and engagement data across channels
- In-depth analysis of your content performance footprint
Pricing
To see details on BrightEdge’s pricing structure, request a quote.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another popular SEO tool for digital marketers. This all-in-one toolkit includes everything you need to research keywords, perform site audits, track your ranking progress, and analyze your competitors.
To increase your website traffic, you need to reach new buyers in your target market. Ahrefs offers a site audit that can help you find relevant internal linking opportunities that encourage new visitors to stay on your website. You can also use Ahrefs’s keyword explorer tool to see a list of high-volume, low-competition topics and keywords that will help you reach new audiences.
Ahrefs’s site audit feature identifies and fixes any issues with your website’s performance, and its site explorer tool presents a content gap report to show you how to best optimize each page. Since search engines like Google prioritize authoritative, well-maintained, and updated websites, using these Ahrefs tools can greatly benefit your organic growth strategy.
Whether you’re just getting started with SEO or you’re a seasoned pro, Ahrefs is a valuable tool in your arsenal.
Key Features
- Analyzes website keyword rankings, backlinks, SEO health
- Creates a list of competitors trying to rank for the same keywords as your website
- Shows what keywords your competition ranks for that you don’t
- Compiles technical reports on your website that notes any errors or missing links
- Alerts you when your competitors get a new backlink or start to rank for a targeted keyword
- Compares domains of two to five websites at a time to identify gaps in your content
Pricing
Monthly prices start at $99, going up to $999 for big agencies and enterprise accounts. Additional taxes may apply depending on your country.
Ahrefs offers its webmaster tool for free to website owners to enhance website performance.
READ: HubSpot vs Marketo: Which is Best for Your B2B Marketing?
Clickx
Clickx is a scalable enterprise platform that creates custom solutions to address your digital marketing needs. It provides a variety of tools to help improve the quality of your website content, generate new leads, and increase organic traffic.
With Clickx, you can get the most out of your existing SEO methods and make sure your website performs at its best. By analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each page on your website, the Clickx SEO Grader identifies problems on a page as well as gaps in your content so you can make adjustments that increase the page’s ranking on SERPs.
Additionally, the Clickx app makes it easy for you to monitor your website traffic, promote your content across social channels, and track your click-through rates—clarifying what works and what doesn’t. The tool also allows you to analyze search terms and keywords to see which are most effective for your business. Then, you can focus your time and resources on strategies that are efficiently increasing organic website traffic.
Clickx is one of the best SEO tools on the market, and it can help you boost your ranking and get more website traffic.
Key Features
- Provides a detailed overview of all critical marketing metrics at a glance
- Delivers custom campaigns with total client transparency
- Offers Clickx Academy training to new and experienced digital marketers
- Includes a state-of-the-art dashboard built for agencies
- Creates custom proposals and payment links
Pricing
Pricing plans for Clickx’s inbound marketing platform range from $299 to $799 a month.
SpyFu
Most people think of SEO as a matter of keyword research and ranking. Even though that’s undoubtedly important, you must consider other factors to succeed long-term. A good SEO strategy encompasses everything from your website’s design and user experience to the types of content you create and the relationships you build with other websites.
In other words, it’s about much more than just getting links from high-authority websites. That’s why a workflow devoted to better SEO should start with research.
By understanding your audience, your competitors, and the latest Google algorithm updates, you can develop a plan for creating content that will reach the right people at the right time—and keep them coming back for more.
SpyFu leads the industry in SEO reporting and research. It can track backlinks, conduct ongoing site monitoring, view the entire ranking history of a competitor’s website, and analyze advertising metrics. With its ability to track competitor activity and identify opportunities for improvement, SpyFu can take your SEO game to the next level and help you develop a holistic approach to SEO and organic growth.
Key Features
- Discover your top online competitors with the competitive analysis tool
- Find new high-ranking keywords to use in content and advertisements
- Search any domain to see comprehensive search marketing data
- Monitor paid and SEO rankings on Google, Bing, and Yahoo
- Generates rich data on the SEO performance of any website
- Provides over 13 years of paid search data for major websites
- Tracks your website’s Google search rankings over time
Pricing
SpyFu’s annual basic plan costs $33 a month. Users can also purchase a monthly plan for $39 a month. Professional plans range from $58 to $79 a month, while team plans cost between $199 and $299 a month.
Surfer
Running a website without optimizing it for SEO is like opening a store in the middle of nowhere—you may get some visitors from word-of-mouth, but most people will never find out about it.
Surfer is an SEO tool that lets you research, audit, and optimize your website quickly so you can rank higher on SERPs and get more organic traffic. It is one of the best tools on the market for optimizing existing content, providing data-driven SEO recommendations, and improving search result rankings page-by-page.
Among content optimization tools, Surfer leads the pack. The content editor feature lets you screen and analyze your content before publication, and the analysis function compares your content to pages currently ranking on search engines for your targeted keywords or topics. Additionally, the free Google Chrome extension makes it easier than ever to find the right keywords to reach your customers and increase website traffic.
Surfer is an excellent SEO tool for any digital marketer looking to optimize and increase the SERP rankings of web pages.
Key Features
- Analyze SERP rankings to identify gaps in your content
- View how your website’s SERP data has changed over time
- Get SEO and keyword recommendations as you’re writing in the content editor
- Compile a list of keywords to consider when you are optimizing your web pages
- Use the audit tool to compare the SEO metrics of your website with the competition
Pricing
Surfer has a three-tiered price point depending on how many websites you would like to grow. The basic plan is $49 a month for one website, the professional plan is $99 for up to five websites, and the business plan is $199 for up to 10 websites.
The Best Free SEO Marketing Tools
Google Trends
SEO is a complex and constantly evolving field. As a result, businesses that want to stay ahead of the competition need to use the best tools available, and this is where Google Trends comes into play.
Google Trends is an SEO tool that allows you to track specific keywords over time. It provides an anonymized and unfiltered list of search requests made to Google, which makes it easy to perform keyword research and identify trending topics in your industry.
Additionally, you can compare keyword data across different regions. Businesses that want to optimize their websites for specific geographical areas will find this helpful.
Aside from providing valuable insights into related keywords, Google Trends also suggests keywords of interest. You can use this data to fine-tune your SEO strategy and stay ahead of your competitors.
By analyzing the data provided by Google Trends, you can create content that meets the needs of your targeted audience and increase website traffic.
Key Features
- Get an unfiltered sample of real Google search requests
- Collect real-time data from the last seven days or non-real time data as far back as 2004
- Analyze and aggregate interest in a variety of fields, categories, topics, and regions
- See visuals displaying when and how much a target keyword was searched
- Displays the top five related searches next to any term you search to help inform your content
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a powerful SEO tool that can help digital marketers troubleshoot and improve their website’s performance in Google’s search results. The tool allows you to find and fix errors, submit sitemaps, and view backlinks. It’s free, but it’s packed with features that make it an essential SEO tool for serious marketers.
Not only can you use Google Search Console to view organic traffic statistics about your website, but you can also see data on click-through rates, search queries, code errors, and impressions. These factors all contribute to how your website ranks on SERPs; to promote organic growth, you need to take advantage of this data.
Google Search Console is a great place to start if you want to maximize your SEO efforts.
Key Features
- Review website traffic and performance
- Integrate with other Google tools like Trends and Analytics
- Monitor server errors, site load issues, and security issues
- Resolve common markup issues
- Get a performance report that details keyword queries your website ranks for
Google Analytics
If you want to increase your organic website traffic, you need to first understand how your website is currently performing. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular SEO tools for digital marketers and webmasters. It provides a complete picture of your website or app’s performance, including traffic, mobile app traffic, trends, and other data sources. With the data compiled by Google Analytics, you can make well-informed business decisions that lead to tangible results.
This free SEO tool is intended to provide a snapshot of website usage data—specifically relating to the behavior of your website visitors. You can use those insights to improve your digital marketing campaigns, content strategy, product development, and more.
Google Analytics is an excellent option if you’re looking for an SEO tool that can give you actionable insights.
Key Features
- Tracks website traffic trends over time
- Reports how many people visit your website every day
- Monitor conversion points like contact forms or landing pages
- See what keywords and search terms visitors used to find your website
- Create custom analytics dashboards to streamline your website administration process
INK
You know that online visibility is key to success as a business owner. You also understand that SEO is a complex and ever-changing landscape. But you might not know there are tools available that can help you navigate the SEO waters and create content that will rank highly on SERPs.
INK is an SEO writing tool that uses a combination of patented AI technology and natural language optimization (NLO) to optimize your content. The program scans your content and provides recommendations in real-time. Using this tool, you can increase your content ROI, outrank your competitors, and get more clicks.
If you want help creating website content that is optimized for search engines and draws visitors to your website, an SEO content editor like INK can help.
Key Features
- Make your content rank higher on search engines through real-time SEO suggestions
- Rewrite your content and fix grammatical issues in one click
- Group relevant keywords together to prevent content overlap
- Write high-quality articles informed by AI technology and optimized for natural language
Conclusion
There are countless SEO tools on the market. When it comes to choosing the right SEO tool to integrate into your B2B marketing strategy, research your options, read the reviews, and ensure the tool you select has all the features you need.
What is your favorite SEO tool? Have you successfully used a tool not mentioned in this post?
