The 15 Best Special-Purpose SEO Tools

Revised April 20, 2023
Revised February 9, 2022
Revised February 24, 2021
Revised July 22, 2020

Given the importance of search engine optimization—organic search remains the top source of traffic for most B2B websites—t’s vital to use the right tools to help with various aspects of optimization, for any size website.

Previous posts in this series have covered tools for specific SEO functions including content ideation, keyword research, and rank tracking.

This post reviews more than a dozen special-purpose SEO tools for functions like finding HTML errors, checking for broken links, performing technical SEO analyses, optimizing video content, checking page-load speed, and more.

1) Google Search Console
Google Review Count: 600

A basic but essential SEO tool—check for HTML errors (such as duplicate title tags), search keywords driving traffic to your site from Google, crawl errors, manual actions, and security issues.

Sample review: “There are plenty of Google tools that you cannot live without – one of them is Google Webmaster Tools (now called Search Console). Regularly check your webmaster tools account to make sure you are on the right side of Google and see what improvements you need to make so you stay ahead of the game.” — Cent Muruganandam

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: RazorSocial (Technology), HubSpot, iMedia Connection, Perception System, MarketingLand, Cent Muruganandam, SmartBug Media, StoreYa Blog, Robbie Richards

2) MozBar
Google Review Count: 290

A browser plugin that displays, for any page visited, metrics for search results, markup, links, and social shares.

Sample review: “Designed to install in Chrome or Firefox, the Toolbar allows you to see important SEO metrics as you bounce from site to site, as well as allowing you to create custom searches, research keyword ranking difficulty, validate authorship and markup, and view social metrics.” — Express Writers

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: StoreYa Blog, Express Writers

3) ScrapeBox
Google Review Count: 282

Harvest search URLs for competitive research, influencer marketing, or link building; find blogs, guest books, image sites, and other potential backlink sources; and generate keyword suggestions.

Sample review: “One of the most inexpensive, but powerful tools for SEO. Can get backlinks and social share counts from websites and more. ” — Robbie Richards

Pricing: $97

Showcase reviews: Robbie Richards

4) Website Grader
Google Review Count: 210

A simple free tool that analyzes any website on performance (site speed), security, SEO (meta tags, site map), and mobile friendliness, and offers suggestions for improvement.

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Kissmetrics, Buffer Social

5) Link Prospector
Google Review Count: 190

Choose one of 16 different report types (such as guest posts, accessible journalists, reviews, or expert interviews), enter a keyword phrase, then get a list of link building opportunities.

Sample review: “This is one of my personal favorites because it’s all about link building and how that relates to your content. You choose your type of report – guest posting, links pages, reviews, donations, content promotions, or giveaways – and then enter your key phrases. A list of link-building opportunities based on what you’re looking for is generated for you.” — Kissmetrics

Pricing: “pay as you go” option or $47, $127, or $497 per month

Showcase reviews: Kissmetrics

6) Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Google Review Count: 185

Enter any URL to find out if the site is “mobile-friendly” in the eyes of Google, then access additional mobile usability resources.

Sample review: “The Google Mobile-Friendly Test allows you to earn a “Mobile friendly” label below your organic search results when you pass the comprehensive mobile efficiency test. It’s easy, free, and can help you land more organic search results.” — Express Writerss

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Express Writers

7) Monitor Backlinks
Google Review Count: 180

A valuable tool for monitoring backlinks and finding backlink opportunities based on competitors’ backlink profiles. Include Trust Rank and Citation Rank from Majestic, Moz Rank, referring traffic for  each backlink, disavow backlink functionality, and more.

Sample review: “Great customer service, and you can follow different competitors’ backlinks and have them sent straight to your inbox, with a description of which are the highest domains, which are the lowest, and whether or not they are dofollow or nofollow. You have a dashboard you can look at and compare your results, but I like to use it primarily to look at links my competitors are earning.” — Kissmetrics

Pricing: several levels from $25 to $187 per month, plus enterprise pricing by quote

Showcase reviews: Kissmetrics, Robbie Richards

8) Broken Link Checker
Google Review Count: 179

This free online checker / validator not only shows you which of your hyperlinks are dead but also where exactly those stale references are located in your HTML code.

Sample review: “Broken links are the best way to drive traffic away from your website and blog. Broken Link Checker is a tool that will go through your website and find any broken links.” — Social Media Today

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Social Media Today

9) Google PageSpeed Insights
Google Review Count: 178

Enter any URL and get a site speed score (0-100) for both desktop and mobile site rendering, plus specific suggestions for how to improve performance.

Sample review: “Perfect for optimizing pages and ensuring that you’re staying competitive in your field, this tool allows marketers to track how quickly a page is loading on mobile and desktop while also showing you where you can improve.” — Express Writers

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Express Writers

10) Xenu Link Sleuth
Google Review Count: 166

A free, downloadable software for finding and fixing broken links.

Sample review: “I use Xenu because it allows me to take a full analysis of a websites broken links. It scrapes the entire website and spits out a great report in HTML format, which can be saved for later analysis.” — Robbie Richards

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Robbie Richards

11) Open Site Explorer
Google Review Count: 160

A tool to help research backlinks, find link-building opportunities and discover potentially damaging links.

Sample review: “The first stage (in) optimizing content is understanding how highly your domain / pages on your domain are ranked. Opensite explorer is a tool provided by Moz that shows you your domain and page authority. The higher they are the easier it is to rank for content.” — RazorSocial (World)

Pricing: a component of Moz Pro, which is priced at four levels from $99 to $599 per month

Showcase reviews: Buffer Social, Kissmetrics, Robbie Richards, RazorSocial (World)

12) Drop My Link
Google Review Count: 136

A tool to help identify sources for and build legitimate backlinks through comments, forums, guest posts, and link roundups.

Sample review: “Drop My Link is a free tool that helps you find link building opportunities. (I) use this tool to quickly find resource pages and link roundups to pitch my content to.” — Robbie Richards

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Robbie Richards

13) Video SEO for WordPress
Google Review Count: 90

A WordPress plugin that automatically optimizes the display of and odds that your videos will appear in Google video search results. This is a great, simple way to increase your visibility and presence in Google organic search results.

Sample review: “We don’t like paying for plugins but this is the one situation where we felt it was important to pay for a good solution.  We purchased the Video SEO for WordPress Plugin by Yoast…It was very easy to set up.  After installation you just specify the type of posts that contain videos which you want to index.” — RazorSocial (Video)

Pricing: five levels from $69 per year for a single website to $799 for up to 100 sites

Showcase reviews: RazorSocial (Video)

14) On-Page Optimization Tool
Google Review Count: 88

Type in any URL and this free SEO onpage optimization tool will analyze the meta tags, keyword density, word count, internal links, and source code.

Sample review: “This free onpage optimization tool from Internet Marketing Ninjas is a one-stop look at what’s going on a specific page of your site. Toss in a URL and see stats on keyword density, internal and external links and more.” — Buffer Social

Pricing: free

Showcase reviews: Buffer Social

15) LinkResearchTools
Google Review Count: 80

LinkResearchTools collects links from 24 different link data sources including MajesticSEO, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz,  Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Facebook, and Twitter, and reports a wide range of metrics for each link (e.g., social metrics, Trust Flow) to help discover opportunities for building high-quality links, disavow low-quality links, and identify competitors’ strongest backlinks.

Sample review: There’s “no better tool (than LinkResearchTools) to understand your link profile and why certain links are bad.” — Robbie Richards

Pricing: four levels from $169 to $1,999 per month

Showcase reviews: Robbie Richards

More Tools

1) LSI Graph
Google Review Count: 200

A free Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keyword tool that enables you to easily generate LSI keywords for your SEO content. Recommended in this post where top experts recommend their best SEO tools.

Pricing: free

2) SEOJet
Google Review Count: 117

Backlink management software for SEO professionals and SEO-savvy marketers. SEOJet builds your backlink profile, helps identify and eliminate or disavow bad backlinks, and assists in the process of building impactful, high-quality backlinks in order to improve search ranking.

Pricing: $29/$49/$99 per month

3) Prerender
Google Review Count: 117

Get higher rankings by serving crawlers a static HTML version of your Javascript website, without affecting the user experience. Prerender is a Google-recommended Javascript rendering service that fully renders JavaScript pages at fast speeds. Unlike client-side or server-side rendering, dynamic rendering is preferred by search engines and incurs no SEO penalty for cloaking content.

Pricing: free or $25/$99/$299/$1,990 per month, based on page count

4) Linkio
Google Review Count: 117

Linkio uses backlink information for your website combined with competitor backlink data to help SEO professional target the best anchor text phrases for link building initiatives. The tool shows you exactly what anchor text to build next and in what order, crawls and validates backlinks, and simplifies disavow file management.

Pricing: four levels from $20 to $149 per month

5) Scalenut
Google Review Count: 96

Plan, research, create, and optimize content for SEO, all from one tool. Scalenut enables you to build AI-powered content clusters; analyze competitors; create plagiarism-free, search-optimized content; refresh existing content; optimize posts and web copy with key NLP terms; and generate other forms of content like emails and product descriptions from a library of templates.

Pricing: $23/$47/$89 per month

6) EXPERTE.com Bulk Mobile Friendly Test
Google Review Count: 93

Unlike Google’s Mobile Friendly Test tool, which tests only a single website page for mobile-friendliness, the free Experte tests an entire site (up to 60 pages). You can also submit a list of URLs for testing, or use Keyword mode, in which the tool will display the top 50 results on Google for that phrase, along with the mobile-friendliness of each ranking page.

Pricing: free

7) rankingCoach
Google Review Count: 86

Identify high-potential keywords, conduct technical website audits, track keyword ranking (including local ranking results), and monitor competitors. The dashboard shows all key metrics plus which optimization tasks you should complete next, and how much time you should plan, at a glance.

Pricing: $30/$130 per month; enterprise pricing by quote

8) Pulno
Google Review Count: 72

An on-site SEO tool, Pulno lets you enter a URL then scans it and reports on more than 100 ranking factors including meta tags, duplicate content, linking errors, page speed, CSS issues, and more. It provides recommendations for how to fix any problems found, including poorly optimized CSS files and unused fonts which can unnecessarily slow down page load speed.

Pricing: free or $12/$24/$60 per month

9) LinkHunter
Google Review Count: 68

Find hundreds of relevant sites quickly, along with a preview and SEO value for each site. Instantly discover site contact email addresses, reach out using built-in email templates, personalize your messages with dynamic fields, and automatically follow up.

Pricing: $49/$99/$199 per month

10) Dashword
Google Review Count: 42

Dashword helps you grow your organic traffic by writing relevant, optimized content. Discover key topics to include in your content, then see how your article, post, or page performs against top-ranking results for your target keyword phrase, along with tips on how to improve it. Answer questions your audience is asking, evaluate keyword ranking difficulty, and collaborate with your team to produce high-quality content.

Pricing: $99 per month

11) Web Text Analyzer
Google Review Count: 2

Enter any URL and get complete textual breakdown of the page, from navigation, meta tags, image alt tags, and link anchor text to word and phrase counts. Compare results to any competitive page.

Pricing: four levels from $8 to $80 per month

12) Link Extractor
Google Review Count: N/A

Enter any URL to check the status of all offsite links found on that page. The output displays status codes for each offsite link found, including 404s and 410s, so you can find and fix and broken links.

Pricing: free

Showcase Reviews

Buffer Social
Cent Muruganandam
Express Writers
HubSpot
iMedia Connection
Kissmetrics
MarketingLand
Perception System
RazorSocial (Video)
RazorSocial (World)
RazorSocial (Technology)
Robbie Richards
SmartBug Media
Social Media Today
StoreYa Blog

This was the 19th post in the Best Online Business Tools series.

#1: Best Online Business Tools Series Kicks Off Today

#2: The 12 Best Competitive Intelligence and Benchmarking Tools

#3: The Nine Best Facebook Marketing Tools

#4: The 14 Best Content Planning and Research Tools

#5: The 23 Best Content Ideation Tools

#6: The 24 Best Online Writing Tools and Apps

#7: The Six Best Google+ Marketing Tools

#8: The Four Best Online Education Tools For Business Pros

#9: The 14 Best Marketing Automation Tools

#10: The 17 Best Keyword Research Tools for SEO and SEM

#11: The Seven Best File Sharing Tools

#12: The Five Best Infographic Creation Tools and Services

#13: The 28 Best Influencer Marketing Tools

#14: The Five Best Pinterest and Instagram Marketing Tools

#15: The 24 Best Visual Content Creation Tools

#16: The Six Best Online HR, Payroll, and Employee Scheduling Tools

#17: The 20 Best SEO Rank Tracker Tools

#18: The Six Best Screen Capture Tools

#19: The 15 Best Special-Purpose SEO Tools