# 7 Top-Rated SEO Software | Capterra > Looking for the best search engine optimization (SEO) software? These seven top-rated solutions can help users improve the ranking and search relevance of their websites. Source: https://www.capterra.com/resources/top-rated-seo-software --- Marketing 101Marketing # 7 Top-Rated SEO Software By Shephalii Kapoor Shephalii Kapoor Writer Experience I’ve been writing for Capterra since September 2021, providing expert insights to help small businesses find the right software solutions. ... [See bio & all articles](https://www.capterra.com/resources/author/skapoor/) Published June 26, 2023 13 min read Table of Contents - [1\. Ahrefs](#1-ahrefs) - [2\. BrightLocal](#2-brightlocal) - [3\. Rank Math](#3-rank-math) - [4\. Scalenut](#4-scalenut) - [5\. Semrush](#5-semrush) - [6\. SE Ranking](#6-se-ranking) - [7\. Surfer](#7-surfer) - [How much does SEO software cost?](#how-much-does-seo-software-cost) - [Frequently asked questions when selecting SEO software](#frequently-asked-questions-when-selecting-seo-software) Amidst the evolving search engine algorithms, it is important for search engine optimization (SEO) and digital marketing experts to keep up with the latest updates while simultaneously committing to increasing organic traffic. While an [SEO tool](https://www.capterra.com/seo-software/) can help website owners optimize their websites for search engines and improve search engine visibility, how do you identify the best SEO tool? To help you make the right choice, we have highlighted the seven top-rated SEO software solutions, in alphabetical order, based on verified software reviews. [Read more](#methodology). All the products mentioned below are dedicated SEO tools that assist users with keyword research, on-page optimization, and technical SEO analysis. Some of the common features across all these tools include rank tracking and backlink monitoring. ## 1\. [Ahrefs](https://www.capterra.com/p/176340/Ahrefs/) Ahrefs is an SEO software with a suite of features for keyword research, link building, competitor analysis, and site audits. The software offers a site structure report that allows professionals to understand how different structures of a website contribute to its SEO success. The report displays the website’s structure in a tree format, allowing users to quickly analyze the sections that are driving the most organic traffic, referring domains, or paid traffic metrics.  **Product features of interest****:** - **SEO site audit:** Evaluate your website to see how well it is performing in search engines, and uncover technical and on-page issues. The software offers audit tools to help you assess your website for over 140 pre-defined SEO issues, including content quality, social tags, localization, incoming links, outgoing links, and HTML tags.  - **Domain comparison:** Compare major competitor domains side-by-side by analyzing their untapped keywords, backlink profiles, and pages worth building. The software allows users to pull SEO metrics for up to 200 competing websites and get a visual competitive map of their organic competitors. - **SEO alerts:** Get notified of lost and new backlinks, keyword rankings, and web mentions by setting up SEO alerts in Ahrefs. The system sends alert emails to notify you of important changes.  **Customer support options:** Knowledge base and help center ### Who should consider Ahrefs? Businesses or SEO managers looking to understand the performance and trends of their website over time can consider Ahrefs SEO tool. The software allows users to view historical keyword rankings, specify a time period for historical data comparison, and view the traffic, position, and ranking URL changes dating back to 2015. #### Trial/Free Version - Free Trial - Free Version #### Starting price $99 per month #### Device Compatibilty \* Analysis Accurate as of May 2023 ## 2\. [BrightLocal](https://www.capterra.com/p/182621/BrightLocal/) BrightLocal is another SEO tool for tracking search rankings, generating traffic, and improving local search visibility. The software specializes in local SEO and helps businesses optimize their online presence to attract prospects from specific geographic locations. It offers a local search audit feature that scans the business’s digital footprint across different online directories, review sites, and search engines.  **Product features of interest**: - **Local rank tracking:** Track local rankings and understand exactly where your local business ranks in different search engines. The software allows users to monitor up to 100 different keywords at one time, making it easy to monitor trends and changes in search rankings.  - **Citation tracker:** Automate the process of finding and auditing your citations. The feature displays a list of all sites and directories where a business is listed, also known as live citations, and identifies the citation sites where the competitors are featured.  - **In-built lead management:** View, contact, and manage leads without leaving the platform. The software offers built-in lead management features, such as lead alerts and a LeadGen widget to help you manage leads in one place.  **Customer support options:** Live chat, knowledge base, and help center ### Who should consider BrightLocal? Businesses with clients across multiple locations can benefit from BrightLocal SEO. The software offers roll-up reports that allow users to aggregate data from multiple rank tracker reports into one large overview report. These reports offer an analysis of the overall brand performance across multiple locations, thereby helping businesses identify the underperforming locations and prioritize their SEO work. #### Trial/Free Version - Free Trial - Free Version #### Starting price $35 per month #### Device Compatibilty \* Analysis Accurate as of May 2023 Pro tip Consider an SEO system that integrates well with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, content management systems, and market automation solutions. Additionally, it should provide collaboration tools to help SEO managers work and communicate with other teams on important SEO tasks. ## 3\. [Rank Math](https://www.capterra.com/p/242098/Rank-Math/) Rank Math is a search engine optimization plugin for WordPress that provides SEO tools to improve website SEO and attract more traffic to the website. The software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help you write SEO-friendly content. Content AI in Rank Math offers smart suggestions based on your target country and tells you exactly how many words to write, links to insert, or media to embed for better SEO optimization. **Product features of interest**: - **Custom schema generator:** Add structured data markup, also called schema markup, to your website. Schema markup provides search engines with additional information about your content, which helps it rank better. You can use this feature to create and add schema markup to different types of content, including articles and posts. - **Unlimited keyword optimization:** Choose unlimited focus keywords per post, which means that you can optimize your content for unlimited keywords using Rank Math and generate more traffic. - **SEO analyzer:** Perform an in-depth SEO analysis of your website and get a detailed report to understand what’s working and what needs to be improved. SEO Analyzer not only helps you find SEO-related issues on your website but also fix them using actionable data suggested by the tool.  **Customer support options:** Email and knowledge base ### Who should consider Rank Math? Businesses that are new to creating SEO-optimized content can use Rank Math to generate content that helps them drive organic traffic. The content AI feature in Rank Math offers users relevant suggestions related to keywords, questions, and links that can be placed inside the content, headings, or meta tags to put together an SEO-friendly article. The feature supports over 80 languages and you receive 5 Content AI credits with a free Rank Math account. Most affordable #### Trial/Free Version - Free Trial - Free Version #### Starting price $4.92 per month #### Device Compatibilty \* Analysis Accurate as of May 2023 ## 4\. [Scalenut](https://www.capterra.com/p/235306/GenerateAI/) Scalenut is an AI-powered SEO and content marketing solution that helps you plan, research, generate, and optimize content. The platform offers a cruise mode AI that can help generate long-form content and improve your text readability. It also offers a comprehensive list of semantically-related words for your target keyword. These can be included in your content to optimize it better for search engines.  **Product features of interest**: - **AI templates:** Create quick and original content for different copy needs, including short and long-form content needs. The software offers over 40 AI templates that can help you write diverse content, including product descriptions, social media posts, website copies, emails, and advertisement copies.  - **Real-time SEO score:** Improve your content ranking with a real-time SEO score. The software provides actionable insights and recommendations to drive more traffic to your website.  - **Plagiarism checker:** Identify the originality of your content using the plagiarism checker tool offered by the software. You can scan either the entire document or a section of it to check whether your content already exists anywhere else on the internet.  **Customer support options:** Phone, live chat, and knowledge base ### Who should consider Scalenut? Business owners and content writers looking to generate long-form content can use Scalenut to save time. The software, with cruise mode, can help generate over 1500 words for an article within minutes. Users can use the tool to generate all types of long-form content, including blog posts, ebooks, and articles. #### Trial/Free Version - Free Trial - Free Version #### Starting price $23 per month #### Device Compatibilty \* Analysis Accurate as of May 2023 Pro tip Look for an SEO platform that offers page-level SEO analysis for better search engine visibility and ranking. An ideal tool examines the page’s content, including headings, meta tags, and body text to ensure that they align with the target keywords and follow SEO best practices. It also suggests improvements around keyword usage, content structure, and readability. ## 5\. [Semrush](https://www.capterra.com/p/151962/SEMrush/) Semrush is another SEO tool that assists users with keyword research, competitor analysis, and Google Ad campaign optimization. The software helps content marketers discover and track inbound links, and identify link outreach opportunities based on the competitor’s backlink profiles. It also offers a backlink audit tool to monitor backlink profiles and avoid penalties, as well as a bulk analysis feature to analyze your competitor’s backlinks in bulk. You can enter up to 200 website URLs to compare them and check results. **Product features of interest**: - **Keyword gap analysis:** Get a detailed side-by-side comparison between keyword profiles of up to five competitors. With this feature, users just have to enter the domains and select the types of keyword rankings—organic, paid, product listing ad (PLA) to analyze the common keywords shared by the sites, top keyword opportunities, and total keyword overlap.  - **On-page SEO:** Improve the rank of specific website pages and pinpoint your website’s weaknesses using the on-page SEO checker from Semrush. The tool provides users with actionable steps to improve rankings by comparing their pages with the top 10 organic competitors for each target keyword.  - **Keyword overview:** View information regarding the search volume of a specific keyword, its intent, competition level, cost-per-click (CPC), and estimated value to attract more traffic.  **Customer support options:** Email, knowledge base, and help center ### Who should consider Semrush? Businesses and content marketers looking to build an effective backlink strategy can use Semrush to evaluate and compare competitor link profiles. The software’s backlink analytics tool helps users spot new backlinks, filter data to see new or lost backlinks, find the date when a backlink appeared, get data on lost domains, and get informed when backlinks are deleted. It also allows them to break down backlinks by type—text, image, follow, no follow, and frame. #### Trial/Free Version - Free Trial - Free Version #### Starting price $119.95 per month #### Device Compatibilty \* Analysis Accurate as of May 2023 ## 6\. [SE Ranking](https://www.capterra.com/p/142169/SE-Ranking/) SE Ranking is an SEO platform with a marketing plan module that offers a comprehensive SEO strategy, along with a suggested list of trusted directories for business listings. It also allows SEO specialists to monitor page changes and keep themselves informed about any notable changes in content, meta tags, links, index status, and robots.txt files. The software’s webpage monitor crawls web pages and provides alerts whenever the page is modified in any way, whether knowingly or unknowingly. This ensures that nobody accidentally changes any key on-page SEO element. **Product features of interest**: - **Report builder:** Create manual and scheduled reports to monitor SEO progress. You can generate these reports in various formats—.PDF, .HTML, and .XLS file formats. The software also offers pre-structured report templates that are basically the reports users have created before and saved for future use.  - **Guest link:** Share your dashboard with teammates and other stakeholders, and provide a guest link to clients so that they can view website statistics without special permission from you.  - **Backlink monitor:** Monitor the status of every backlink related to your site and identify bad links using the backlink monitor tool offered by the software. The platform also offers email alerts to update users of any backlink changes.  **Customer support options:** Phone, knowledge base, and help center ### Who should consider SE Ranking? Small businesses or SEO newbies looking for a detailed roadmap to develop their marketing and SEO strategies can use the SE Ranking tool. The software, in its marketing plan module, offers aspiring SEO practitioners a comprehensive step-by-step SEO strategy based on best practices. This checklist offers guidance on all the points, including keyword research, on-page optimization, social media management, and off-page optimization that can help boost SEO performance. #### Trial/Free Version - Free Trial - Free Version #### Starting price $31.20 per month #### Device Compatibilty \* Analysis Accurate as of May 2023 Pro tip Consider a search engine optimization tool that provides you insights into your competitor’s online presence, strategies, and performance. Typically, SEO software with competitive analysis capabilities offers competitor identification, competitor website analysis, keyword analysis, and backlink analysis. ## 7\. [Surfer](https://www.capterra.com/p/218703/Surfer/) Surfer is an SEO tool that facilitates content creation by leveraging a combination of search engine results page (SERP) and natural language processing (NLP) analysis. The system also uses its own proprietary optimization algorithms and AI technology to generate human-like content speedily. As a Surfer user, you can define the tone and outline of the article, and select websites to fine-tune your content. You can also activate the anti-AI detection mode before generating an article to allow text to be read more naturally.  **Product features of interest**: - **SERP analyzer:** Analyze competitor pages that are ranking high on Google. The software helps improve on-page and off-page SEO activities based on a detailed analysis of ranking factors, such as keyword usage, header tags, and meta descriptions. With this feature, you can gain insights into your competitor’s content and improve your pages.  - **Content editor:** Outline and write content that’s well-optimized for search engines. The tool features a content editor that analyzes content on the first page of search results, including images, word count, and average paragraph count, and allows you to optimize your content for up to 20 keywords. - **Keyword Surfer extension:** Uncover insights on search volume, keyword suggestions, visibility metrics, and related terms using the Chrome Surfer extension offered by the tool.  **Customer support options:** Live chat, email, and knowledge base ### Who should consider Surfer? Businesses wanting a tool for content creation can use Surfer. The software offers several features, such as content score based on SERP analysis and anti-detection AI that can help you write content while minimizing the risk of search engines recognizing the AI-generated content and avoiding ranking penalties. Best functionality #### Trial/Free Version - Free Trial - Free Version #### Starting price $19 per month #### Device Compatibilty \* Analysis Accurate as of May 2023 ## How much does SEO software cost? An online SEO solution can cost as low as $3 per month, or all the way up to $170+ per month, depending on various factors—advanced features, usage limits, user licenses, integration, and additional services provided by the software. Most SEO tools typically offer the following pricing plans: - **Free trial:** No-cost trial plans ranging from 5 to 45 days, giving users access to either all or limited features of the software. - **Free version:** Free software plans offer basic features and limited premium feature access. These are ideal for small businesses or individuals with a limited budget. - **Entry-level:** Starts at $3 per month and offers limited features, such as a limited number of projects that you can manage, keyword credits, and a rank tracker. This is a good option for small businesses or teams with basic SEO needs. - **Mid-tier:** Mid-range pricing for SEO ranges from $19 to $114 per month. It is ideal for midsize businesses with multiple software users looking for more advanced features such as an SEO dashboard, site audit, content editor, and shareable links.  - **High-end:** Advanced plans offer high-end features, such as content reports, multi-language support, WordPress integration, competitor tracking, and advanced data segmentation. These are ideal for large enterprises. ### Hidden costs associated with SEO software There may be some hidden costs associated with online SEO software, including training, data limits, integration, customization, technical assistance, and version update charges. Other than the software prices, small businesses should take these into consideration when considering the top SEO software. ## Frequently asked questions when selecting SEO software Does the software offer international search tracking? International search coverage has increasingly become important for businesses with a global outreach. Consider a tool that monitors and analyzes your website performance across different countries or regions. International search tracking capabilities in SEO software may include international keyword research and global search volume data integration into the platform. Does the software facilitate site audit? The best SEO tool provides you the option to perform a full-scale site audit to understand its overall health, performance, and optimization from an SEO perspective. Typically, SEO software offers on-page SEO analysis, technical SEO analysis, duplicate content detection, site performance analysis, and recommendation tools to help SEO professionals assess the strengths and weaknesses of their websites and identify areas of improvement. What are the different reports generated by the software? SEO software typically generates various reports to provide users with valuable insights about their website’s performance. These may include keyword rankings, backlink analysis, on-page optimization, traffic, technical SEO audit, site health, and link-building reports. ## Capterra's 2026 Software Buying Trends Report ### Download our 2026 Software Buying Trends Report to see how successful software adopters avoid disappointment and how your business can, too. * * * **Methodology** To be considered for this list, products had to: - Feature in [Capterra Shortlist report 2023 for SEO software](https://www.capterra.com/seo-software/shortlist/). We selected the top seven products with the highest ratings to include in this article. - Include backlink monitoring and keyword rank tracking as core features. - Meet our SEO software market definition: _“SEO software helps companies manage their search engine optimization with backlink and rank tracking, keyword research, social analytics, and website auditing tools.”_ The “best functionality” tool is identified based on the highest user ratings for functionality that a vendor received based on user reviews as of June 8, 2023. The “most affordable” tool is identified based on the lowest pricing a vendor offered on their website in terms of cost to upgrade as of June 8, 2023. Read more about our editorial independence. Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from [Capterra’s SEO software directory](https://www.capterra.com/seo-software/). The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in the Capterra directory that offer them. Only products with publicly available pricing information, as of June 08, 2023, were considered for pricing calculation. * * * Looking for SEO software?Check out Capterra's list of the [best SEO software](https://www.capterra.com/seo-software/) solutions. ### Was this article helpful? * * * ## About the Author [### Shephalii Kapoor](https://www.capterra.com/resources/author/skapoor/) Shephalii Kapoor is a writer at Capterra. 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