Let’s face it – there are a TON of SEO SaaS tools out on the market, and it’s tough to know which to choose for what you’re specifically trying to accomplish.
We work using tools on a daily basis to help conduct high-level keyword research, internal link analysis and other everyday SEO activities for our clients, and we often get asked:
What are the tools we should be using in-house and have a subscription for to best manage our SEO efforts?
We’ve compiled the list of the best SaaS SEO tools we actively use for our client’s work, and the ones we’d recommend in each category checking out. 👇
Keyword research is an integral part of building content.
Tools allow you to analyze how competitive terms are to rank, how to structure your page’s content as well as how to prioritize your content marketing efforts.
Ahrefs is one of the most robust SEO tools on the market. It’s our go-to solution for keyword research when we’re in the “tool phase” of research, but it has many other core functionalities around internal and external linking, as well as the ability to review competitor’s pages and keywords.
If we had to choose one single go-to solution that hits on most-items SEO-related, Ahrefs is a must-have.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Starting at $99 a month
Is there a free version? No free version and no trial is available.
SEMRush is the core competitor to Ahrefs and is also the swiss army knife of SEO tools. Although we also use SEMRush, mostly for its toxic backlink analysis and review, our go-to all-around in Ahrefs.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Starting at $119.95 a month
Is there a free version? Yes, 7 days. Get started here.
Google Trends is an excellent, free resource from Google which lets you analyze search terms that are trending in popularity across the web. This can be a great resource to start building some high-level keyword research around, especially for new terms and jargon that has popped up in the space.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Free!
Keywords Everywhere is a browser extension that layers on top of the Google search results to dig-out secondary keywords and long-tail keywords right within the SERPs themselves. This tool can be extremely helpful when building out content briefs.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Starting at $10 for 100,000 credits.
Is there a free version? No free version or trial, but $10 a year is a pretty great price for what you get from the tool.
Content research tools allow us to dig further into topics we want to build content around, especially at a more granular level when getting into page-level details and specifics.
Exploding Topics is something like Google Trends on steroids – seriously. Rather than having to “be in the know” about such topics, you can easily get a quick list of what’s trending by category, and dig in further.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Starting at $47 per month.
Is there a free version? There’s a free version, but you have to upgrade to get access to “Members Only” trends and keywords.
Answer The Public allows instant insights into the minds of your customers by providing back search query data around questions.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Starting at $X a month
Is there a free version? ANSWER
ClearScope is a content optimization platform that allows you to plug in a primary keyword or phrase, and pull back SERP data based on ranking pages, including topically-related keywords and other relevant data from each and every individual top 10 ranking page.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
The one thing it doesn’t do well:
Price: Starting at $170 per month
Is there a free version? No free version, and no trial.
Technical SEO for SaaS has a few core factors you should be keeping an eye on, but that doesn’t mean it should be neglected. Be proactive in monitoring issues with these tools, depending on your website’s size and complexity.
SiteBulb is our go-to crawler which we use every single day to crawl clients’ websites, pull back all of the technical factors, and push that through our Growth Audit phase.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Starting at $13.50 per month
Is there a free version? No, but there is a trial. Get started here for 14 days of free crawling goodness.
Screaming Frog is the classic, free SEO crawler used for smaller-scale websites. Its simple UI allows you to jump right in and start gathering powerful data in a matter of minutes.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: $209 per year
Is there a free version? Yes! Free under 500 URLs. You’ll be missing some of the full functionalities, though.
Struggling to grow organic demos signups? Rock The Rankings is a top-ranked SaaS SEO Agency that helps SaaS businesses make organic their customer acquisition engine. We’ll create a free marketing plan for your business, and walk you through step-by-step exactly what needs to be done to grow faster.
OnCrawl is the go-to for heavy-hitting websites that are complex, and have a large page structure (i.e. more than 500,000 total pages). This allows for advanced crawling and datasets which other tools like SiteBulb or Screaming Frog are unable to handle.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Starting at $49 per month – how much you will need depends on site size.
Is there a free version? No, but there is a free 14-day trial.
There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t use the Detailed SEO Extension. It’s the perfect tool to get quick page-level overviews on core technical and on-page SEO items.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Free.
Site speed is a core component of Technical SEO for SaaS brands. With that in mind, we want to keep a close eye on site speed across our pages, as well as Google’s Core Web Vitals.
GTMetrix allows you to plugin a URL and quickly understand the page speed performance around page speed load times, as well as other
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Free!
Google Page Speed Insights is a free developer tool from Google allowing you to monitor page performance. GPSI plugs directly into Google’s Core Web Vitals, including LCP, FID, and CLS.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Free.
Link Building for SaaS is one of the most important components to dominating Google and driving MRR.
Help A Reporter Out connects you with journalists looking to do write-ups and stories across a plethora of indutries, one of which specifically being SaaS/Software. This is the perfect place to pick up backlinks and build brand awareness if you have a unique product offering.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Free
These are the simply must-haves for SEO performance tracking and analysis. If you are using no other tools and are bootstrapping to save every dollar, these three tools will take you most of the way.
Google Analytics should make any SEO tools list, as it’s the most basic and primary tool you should be using on a daily basis to track performance. With Google Analytics 4 being rolled out across all accounts in July 2023, a whole new powerful experience is coming to take performance tracking to new heights.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Free.
Google Search Console is one of the most underused, yet most powerful tools on this list. Most SaaS organizations have it set up, but don’t use GSC to its full power when it comes to keyword and topic ideation. If you know your way around this tool and understand how to dig into performance at a granular level, it can completely change your SEO performance.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Free.
Google Data Studio is a tool for converting datasets into customizable reporting and dashboards, which can be shared easily internally, or externally. There’s endless customization on the appearance and what datasets you can pull in with third-party connectors.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Free.
Is there a free version? Yes.
User experience tools give us great insights into optimizing for more conversions, such as demo sign-ups or trial starts.
HotJar’s positioning is simply awesome – on their homepage, they state “Understand how users behave on your site, what they need, and how they feel, fast.” This perfectly sums up what HotJar allows you to do – quickly capture screen recordings and heatmaps of your website users, and understand how they interact with your website – extremely powerful.
Why it’s useful for SaaS SEO:
Price: Starting at $39 per month.
Is there a trial? You can use HotJar for up to 35 sessions per month free, forever.
Everyone has their own flavor of favorite tools they use.
These are ours, and exactly what we use on a daily basis internally and for our clients.
Remember – tools are only one step of the game – the rest comes from strategy and execution.
Struggling to grow organic revenue, trials and/or demos booked? If you’d like to learn how we can help you grow faster and overcome those hurdles, book a Free Grow Faster Session with our team.
We love providing value and giving away our expertise to help SaaS brands grow. Here are two ways we can help you grow faster:
Founder of Rock The Rankings, an SEO partner that helps B2B SaaS brands crush their organic growth goals. An avid fan of tennis, and growing micro-SaaS businesses on the weekend. 2x SaaS Co-Founder – Currently working to build and scale Simple Testimonial.
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