It's a brand new year and businesses are as keen as ever to push their businesses online to grow and expand. It's become trickier than ever to rank a website on search engines including Google and Bing. Huge competiton and competitors with a large marketing budget mean it has become extremely challenging to reach page one with your business website.

SEO is still very much alive, although due to Google's ever evolving algorithms, simple keyword stuffing or link buying has become a thing of the past. Search engines are clever enough to know what genuine content is and which are genuine backlinks, to create a better user experience with well established, genuine businesses.

That said, SEO can be done properly. Either with affordable SEO from an experienced and reputable SEO agency. Or by yourself, saving yourself some money, but making yourself some extra work, including a lot of learning and research of the best SEO practices.

If you're going to do it alone, you'll need the help of some amazing SEO tools, let's take a look.

The top SEO Tools for 2021

Here we go, let's dive in with arguably one of the best SEO tools on the market. Certainly my go-to SEO software.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a large company based in Singapore, offering a comprehensive set of tools to move your website to the next level. Known above all for it's backlink explorer tool, Ahrefs has many more tools including Site Explorer, Keyword Explorer and Site Audit. The company offers a 7 day trial of it's tool for just $7! Well worth every single penny! And in my opinion you'll be signing up before your trial expires! Ahrefs is the largest web crawler after Google, meaning they lead the way when it comes to finding backlinks and scoring websites with their DR (domain rating) metric.

MOZ

Moz, formally known as SEO Moz, are one of the best known names in the SEO industry. Like Ahrefs, they too offer a comprehensive set of tools to help promote your website online. Moz offer a free option with limited functionality, and various paid subscriptions. Moz are known for their DA (domain authority) metric. A great way to judge websites according to their backlink profile. As Google no longer offers Page Rank, at least not publicly, as a way to measure the authority of a web page, DA is a good way to assesss your domain's backlink strength. In my opinion, Ahrefs is the better option of these paid tools, as it has significantly larger crawling and backlink indexing features.

Google Search Console

Google has for some time, offered it's free search console tool. One of the best resources available for growing and monitoring your website presence online. From the ability to submit a sitemap, to traffic and impression monitoring, to advanced features including backlink disavow. Google Search Console has a lot of useful tools to help push your website up the organic rankings.

Yoast SEO

Diving into a bit more of a specialist area of SEO. Yoast primarily offer tools to help create SEO friendly Wordpress websites. Their free SEO plugin has had millions of downloads over the many years it's been available. It is a great helping hand when making sure your website is ready for search engines. The most popular features include keyword content in titles and page content, readability of content and schema or structured data set up. It's a must have for all Wordpress website owners when tackling SEO.

Conclusion

So there it is, my selection of top SEO tools for 2021. If you plan on doing your website SEO yourself, you need to take a look at these tools. Even if it's just for the purpose of getting started with SEO, then perhaps investing in professional SEO packages as your website progresses.

If you have any other suggestions for great SEO tools, I'd love to hear about them!