In March 2023, we started working with a B2B Fintech Startup to help them rank on search, grow organic traffic, and drive mobile app downloads.

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Using SEO tools like Semrush, BuzzSumo, and Keywords Everywhere, we created a SEO topic cluster strategy and published search-optimzed blog posts. The result?

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Less than two months later, they started ranking for their desired keywords, saw a 100% growth in website traffic, and recorded an increase in app downloads. Using the right SEO tools was crucial to achieving their business goals.

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The right SEO software will help you quickly achieve your marketing goals. But with so many SEO tools out there, choosing the best ones can be confusing.

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In this article, you’ll find 13 user-friendly and affordable SEO tools to drive results for your small business or startup. 

A Quick Overview of the SEO Software and Tools

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Here’s a summary of all the tools we use for different content strategy stages. In the next section, we’ll share the pros and cons of each tool.

Strategy Tools

Semrush

BuzzSumo

Keywords Everywhere 

Google Sheets  

Creation Tools 

Grammarly 

Hemingway App

Surfer SEO 

Google Docs 

Measurement Tools

Search Console 

Google Analytics 

Content Mentions during Sales Calls 

Feedback from the Customer Support Team 

Social Media Mention

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The Best SEO Tools for Your Marketing Team: Pros and Cons

When choosing SEO tools, you should consider whether the tool has all the features you need and meets your budget. You may also consider how user-friendly the tool is.

We’ll review each tool so that you can choose the best tools that suit your startup’s unique needs and goals. Knowing the benefits of the paid tools in this list will also help you successfully convince your leadership team to purchase a subscription.  

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Strategy

1. Semrush

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Semrush is every content marketer’s favorite tool for one reason—it’s a one-stop shop for all SEO marketing needs. Semrush has over 15 tools that aid and manage every aspect of online visibility.

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It provides a site audit tool that analyzes and checks for technical website issues and suggests possible solutions to improve ranking. You can also use it to identify ranking opportunities and the long-tail keywords your website can rank for. 

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In addition, you can access tools for advertising, social media management, rank tracking, and competitor SEO analysis. 

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The best part about Semrush, especially for content strategy, is its monthly one-on-one consultation with a customer. As a CMO or marketing manager, you can use this Semrush feature during your strategy process – or outsource by hiring a content strategist. 

Pros 

• Wide range of features and tools for content creation and distribution, link building and tracking, competitor SEO analysis, content marketing, social media listening, and monitoring
• Reduces the need for a large SEO team 
• A demo version is available for a 30-day trial
• It is integrated with web analytics tools

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Cons 

• It might be expensive for marketers on a lean budget.
• Hard to use on mobile
• It takes a while to learn the interface
• It provides data insight for only one search engine, Google

Free Trial and Pricing

• 7-day free trial for Pro and Guru plans
• $129.95 to $499.95 monthly (billed annually)
• $108.66 to $416.66 monthly (billed monthly)

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TRY SEMRUSH

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2. BuzzSumo

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Buzzsumo is another excellent research tool for competitor analysis. Its Content Analyzer tool is a favorite among marketers. 

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If you’re in a saturated market, this tool gives insights into what content ranks best within your industry and generates content ideas for your business.

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On Buzzsumo, you can: 

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- Find your competitors' keywords to rank for a specific topic 

- Generate evergreen content ideas

- Track mentions for your brand and compare them to competitor mentions 

- Check press coverage for the keywords and topic

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Buzzsumo gives insights into the best-performing keywords in your niche and reports how they perform on different search engines. It is also the most recommended SEO tool for PR marketing. 

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You can also research and analyze content while surfing the internet with Buzzsumo’s Google Chrome extension.

Pros

• Offers resources for competitor analysis and influencer research
• Helps you discover hidden keywords to rank for
• Great for PR marketing
• Helps you find social trends
• Has a Chrome extension feature

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Cons

• Social media insight is limited to some platforms alone 

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Free Trial and Pricing

• 30-day free trial available for all plans
• $119 to $999 monthly (billed monthly)
• $95.2 to $799.2 monthly (billed annually)

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TRY BUZZSUMO

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3. Keywords Everywhere

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Keywords Everywhere is a freemium Chrome extension that helps more than 1.6 million users with online marketing. 

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This tool generates keyword data and questions within your search engine results. You can access metrics for any list of keywords you want to rank for and download them in CSV, PDF, or Excel.

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It has both free and paid versions with all the features. Also, you can buy credits instead of purchasing subscriptions to access the features. You’ll be charged the credits for paid benefits while you use the free version.

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We use the Keywords Everywhere extension to get semantic data, improve on-page SEO for our clients, and find related FAQs people ask.

Pros

• Measure SEO Metrics like keywords difficulty, on-page and off-page difficulty, brand queries, and more
• View monthly traffic estimates and the top 10,000 keywords for your domain
• Access 200+ optimized ChatGPT prompt templates on the free version 
• Useful for social media search insights and related trends

Cons

• The free version is limited. For example, there's no volume data for Instagram and Pinterest insights
• Lacks competitor analysis capabilities
• Relies on search engine results for keyword data, unlike other tools with historical data
• Not capable of competitor analysis

Free Trial and Pricing

• $1 to $80 monthly (billed annually) for Bronze and Platinum plans
• $15 to $1000 for credits worth 100,000 - 15 million credits.

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TRY KEYWORDS EVERYWHERE

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4. Google Sheets

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Google Sheets is an excellent tool for collating research data, building topic clusters, and creating content schedules for marketing teams. 

For example, while using research tools, you can extract your research results as a CSV and paste them into a Google Sheets spreadsheet. This will give you a bird’s eye view of everything you found valuable to improve your content. 

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Sheets are also helpful for creating content briefs and managing deliverables from your team members. It is a great way to track the status of articles and blog posts in the works. This way, content can move from writer to editor to designer on the same platform.

Pros

• Keyword data analysis and visualization
• Useful for team collaboration
• Easy to use with other apps on Google Workspace
• Paid plan has more advanced functionality
• Paid plan for business is affordable

Cons

• It doesn’t have as many features as other project management tools.

Free Trial and Plans

• Free for personal use
• 14-day free trial for business plans
• $6 - $18 per month (billed annually)
• $7.20 - $21.60 monthly (billed monthly)

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TRY GOOGLE SHEETS

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Creation

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5. Google Docs

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Done with strategy and ready to put your ideas together? You should use Google Docs, a free web, and app-based word processor on Google Workspace. Google Docs is a versatile tool for content writing, which is why it’s popular among content marketers.

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With Google Docs, you can easily collaborate with your content team to write, edit, and make real-time comments. You can also view the edit history to see changes collaborators make on a document. 

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Additionally, you can access Google Docs from anywhere with or without an internet connection. This makes it convenient to work offline. 

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Google Docs has only some of the advanced features specialized writing tools offer. To solve this, connect other creation and editing tools like Grammarly and SurferSEO to improve your writing.

Pros

• Free for personal use
• Easy to collaborate and edit in real-time
• Connected with Google Drive and Workspace
• Add-on support
• Tracks change history

Cons

• No dedicated desktop app. You’ll need to use a browser
• Offline access is limited to some features.

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Free Trial and Pricing

• Free for personal use
• 14-day free trial for business plans
• $6 to $18 monthly (billed annually)
• $7.20 to $21.60 monthly (billed monthly)

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TRY GOOGLE DOCS

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6. Grammarly

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Want to craft clear, concise sentences that engage your readers? You should use Grammarly, an AI-powered writing assistant. 

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Grammarly detects grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors in your writing and suggests corrections. It also checks for plagiarism, word choice, sentence structure, tone, etc. 

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Grammarly has a free and paid version. The free version offers basic features that are enough to enhance the quality of your marketing content.

However, if you produce long-form content consistently, you may want to consider the paid version, which offers additional features like plagiarism detection, sentence rewrites, tone suggestions, formatting suggestions, and more. 

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Our favorite thing about Grammarly is its ability to detect subtle errors like confusing its and it’s. Let's be honest: We all have those tiny grammatical errors that get us every time, and it’s nice to have Grammarly look out for us. 

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Pros

• Available as a web app, desktop app, Microsoft Word plugin, mobile keyboard, and Chrome extension
• ICheap and affordable, even for personal use.
• Available plans for all team sizes
• Saves editors lots of time

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Cons

• The premium version is not cheap
• Suggested sentence rewrites may miss context sometimes, so you’ll need to use your judgment
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Free trial and Pricing

• Free plan available
• $12 to $15 for premium and business plans, respectively.
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TRY GRAMMARLY FREE

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7. Hemingway App

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Hemingway is a great editing tool that will improve the readability of your content. It helps to simplify complex sentences and highlight passive voice, adverbs, and other writing issues.

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Hemingway grades readability on a scale of 1-10. A low score shows that your content is straightforward to read and understand. 

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The basic problems that the Hemingway Editor highlights are: 

• Complex words or phrases

• Extra-long sentences
• Long sentences
• Too many adverbs
• Too many instances of passive voice

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It has a free online version and a paid version for desktop applications. Both come with excellent features to improve writing quality. 

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One of our editing rules at BloomContent is to ensure every long-form content passes through Hemingway. However, we only use Hemingway as a guide, not a strict rulebook. We prioritize using our judgment and following our content style guide when editing your content more.

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Pros

• Free-only version available
• Helps to streamline writing style
• Helps you if you’re prone to writing long and windy sentences

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Cons

• Always eliminates adverbs in sentences

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Free Trial and Pricing

• Free for the online version 
• $19.99 for the desktop version
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TRY HEMINGWAYAPP FREE ONLINE

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8. Surfer SEO

If your content marketing goals are to improve search result rankings as soon as possible, then consider SurferSEO. 

SurferSEO is an on-page optimization tool for content marketers. It provides an in-depth analysis of a website's on-page and off-page SEO. It also provides tools to optimize for search engines and improve your online visibility.

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SurferSEO offers a Content Planner that generates topic clusters of related keywords you can use to create well-optimized content. It provides insights into each keyword, such as keyword difficulty, keyword intent, and monthly search volume. 

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You can connect the Surfer Keyword Research tool with your Google Search Console to get insights into relative keyword difficulty. This indicates how hard it will be to rank for a specific keyword on your domain. 

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The Surfer tool also scores your content according to structure, headings, terms, and more relative to similar content on SERPs. However, don’t obsess over the score; always keep your audience top-of-mind while writing. 

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Pros

• Google Chrome extension for SERP analysis 
• Supports connection to Google Search Console
• Easy integration with Google Docs
• Suggestions on word count and number of headings in the article
• Surfer AI writing assistant available

Cons

• Expensive for individual content creators
• May not be as useful for topics or keywords with low search volume

Free Trial and Pricing

• No free trial
• $69 to $249 monthly (billed annually)
• $89 to $299 monthly (billed monthly)

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TRY SURFERSEO

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Measurement

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9. Google Analytics (GA4)

Google Analytics is the most popular and used tool for measuring content efforts. It is a tool generally used to analyze traffic and view visitor insights for your website. It also shows information about how visitors interact between pages on your website.

This tool gives insights and reports that are helpful for all teams within an organization. But it is most helpful for content marketing such that it gives reports of traffic sources, popular landing pages, bounce rate, conversion rate, and page views.

It helps you see how any content piece is performing on your website, and which page pulls the most traffic. This can help you understand what kind of content your readers are consuming and where to focus resources.

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For example, in the image below, you can see the two major drivers of traffic to this client's site are two of their top-performing blog posts.

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Here are the standard terms to understand on google analytics:

• Traffic channel: This is a high-level overview of where your traffic comes from.
• Users: the number of people who have visited your site.
• Real-time: This is the activity that’s happening on your website in real-time.
• Sessions: the number of times people have visited your site.
• Bounce Rate: the percentage of time people come to your site and immediately leave.‍
• Session Duration: how long people stay on your site.

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Pros

• Free analytics tool.
• Shows traffic data in real-time.
• Manages multiple websites in one account.
• Accessible to Google account users.

Cons

• Might be technical for beginners. 
• Lack of customer support

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Freemium

• Free

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10. Search Console

Google Search Console is another useful tool for measuring the success of your content efforts. 

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This tool can analyze your website’s traffic and optimization within the Google search engine. It includes features that pinpoint indexing errors, display URL-related search data, and measure website responsiveness for search engines.

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Search Console analytics offers insights into your best-performing content. You can see which page gets the most views, has the longest session time, and drives the most traffic to your products. With these insights, you can optimize your content and make better decisions.

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You can also analyze your keywords or queries and see metrics such as clicks, impressions, click-through rates, and search position.

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Above is an old screenshot from our client’s search console page showing leads reading the blog posts for 6 minutes. You can also book a free project consultation to discuss getting an engaging, high-quality content strategy. 

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Pros 

• Free analytics tool with complete insights for measuring content efforts. 
• Easy-to-use interface for beginners. 
• Various types of search insights are available. 
• Graphs to compare different search performances.

Cons 

• Data is only available for Google search engines.

Free trial and plans 

• Free tool by Google 
• No paid plans 

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TRY SEARCH CONSOLE

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11. Content Mentions During Sales Calls

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Measurement may have gotten easier and more technical over time but organic forms of measurement remain helpful.

This is an organic way to track content performance as a marketer. You can find out how many new customers refer to your content as a reason for their purchase or subscription.

It is mostly helpful for analyzing the success of bottom-of-the-funnel content from your team. 

Pay attention to what customers say when they refer to the content that they came across. How helpful was it for them to make a decision? The feedback will help craft future content ideas.

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Pros

• Organic and free form of measurement. 
• Easily accessible information.
• No software is needed.

Cons

• Not sufficient alone to prove performance.

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Free Trial and Plans

• Free
• Not software.

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12. Feedback from the team

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Your content should aim to reduce the number of questions customers ask the support team. You can determine how effective your content is by checking in on the support team regularly.

Ask questions like, “Are customers still asking a lot about this problem?”, “How much time do you spend answering this question since this was published?” 

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Use the feedback to decide how to reduce the support tickets one problem at a time.

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One of our clients gave feedback about how they stopped getting a lot of questions about a problem when we worked with them. This is how significant content marketing is in achieving efficiency.

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Pros

• Cheap and organic form of measurement
• Ensures inter-team collaboration in a start-up environment

Cons

• Not enough information to tell the success of content
• Needs to be compared with other tools for measurement

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Free trial and plans

• Free. No software needed

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13. Social media mention

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Most social media platforms offer tools that help businesses see how their content is performing.  

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With these social analytics tools, you can track your direct mentions on social media platforms.

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You can also use social listening tools to track your indirect mentions.

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When people find value in your content, they don’t need to be compelled to share. So, checking mentions is a way to tell whether your content is helpful or valuable. 

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Pros

• Organic form of tracking performance

Cons

• Need to use social listening tools to see indirect mentions

Free trial and plans

• Free tool. No software is needed.

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Conclusion 

Ranking on search, growing organic traffic, and gaining qualified leads as a startup with a new website isn’t easy. But with the right tools (and professionals), you can save time and money when executing your content strategy. 

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Knowing the benefits of your SEO tools will also help you successfully convince your leadership team to purchase a subscription. Thinking training your content team or outsourcing your brand's SEO content strategy? Book a free consultation with us today. 

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