In today’s world, lol just kidding I’m writing this post myself.

It’s hard enough to find reliable quality products for the several tasks we manage as SEO’s.

For that reason I decided to set up this page, no affiliate links here, so you get the best the SEO world has to offer so let’s dive in right away!

On-page SEO tools

To get near perfect scores of up to 99% (the highest we reached) in Google Pagespeed Insights it’s not just about optimizing with plugins, you also need to use a professional WordPress theme that has the right things in place or you might struggle forever.

Two free WordPress theme that I achieved very high scores with are Kadence and Adjustable Blog,

I will add more themes as expand our own private network. Those themes you can easily find in the WordPress respository by simply going to Add Theme and entering that in the search box.

Now let’s look at some plugins:

• JCH Optimize Pro (the pro version is paid and only costs slightly more), this plugin that I recently found replaces the need for W3 Total Cache, Asset CleanUp, Async Javascript, WP Rocket, and Autoptimize. 5 plugins replaced with one single plugin.
• Autoptimize, not a must but if you want to get that extra 1% you can install this one as they have a way to aggregate Javascript code like no one else and thus one less warning in Pagespeed Insights.
• Imagify, if you don’t want to spend money on JCH Optimize Pro, they charge to compress images, you could use a free plugin like Imagify which compresses your images to the new WebP and AVIF formats. This reduces images from 5MB to as little as 80kb.

Three plugins and if you don’t care about that extra 1% and don’t mind about spending a few bucks JCH can do it all including the image compression.

Not bad right?

Off-page SEO tools

This section is a bit too broad and I will later divide it into sub sections but for now just out of the top of my head:

Indexing services:

• GSC, yes Google Search Console, why not use Google’s own product. When I need to index a lot of web pages on a brand new site I pick one post from each category and submit it to Google’s inspect mode, and overnight everything gets indexed. It’s like you just need to give Googlebot a push in the right direction.
• IndexMeNow, we just tested this on a very nasty one that wouldn’t index despite using multiple index services and building tiered links to the page, after submitting it to this service it indexed within 24 hours. It’s not exactly cheap, $1/post at their most affordable plan.
• OmegaIndexer, a friend just recommended this as a more affordable solution for bulk tasks such as indexing backlinks.

Link building services:

• SERPTrust, we are one of the rare guest post vendors that actually gives a damn when it comes to quality and at very sharp prices. Sure you can argue it’s biased but we know what we stand for, and we only offer links on premium English sites.
• Authority Builders, another gem but on average 200% more expensive then SERPTrust, they also offer links on foreign sites so if you’re active in foreign markets you could consider this though I would try to find a more affordable vendor. When you do go for more affordable make sure to perform your only quality checks by looking up how sustainable their organic traffic is.

Backlink analysis:

• Ahrefs, I like how user friendly it is for quick research. We’ve done a post in the past about the reliability of traffic, actually a case study and Ahrefs scored worst of all but it still provides some quick insights with their bulk analyzer.
• SemRush, I’m not much a fan of it, it’s not user friendly at all, it’s confusing and they measure traffic in two entirely different ways so with one tool you get a traffic number that’s somewhat similar to Ahrefs and when you use the other tool you get hugely inflated numbers like you’d expect from SimilarWeb.
• SerpStat, a much smaller competitor but their traffic data is more reliable than the big players. In terms of user friendlyness I think there is plenty to improve and I don’t use it enough to comment on their other features.

AI Content:

I’m a great fan of OpenAI myself, their API is convenient and it’s competitively priced but let’s look at a few others as well:

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT4.0, I prefer to use model gpt-4, not the gpt-4-turbo as I think the turbo version is inferior and cheaper. Their API is always reliable and they beat all the others in benchmark tests, still AI can be stubborn at times.
• Claude 3 by Anthropic, I would say I like the writing style of Claude over ChatGPT but it has a much smaller dataset to work with so I find it less thorough, for social media posts I’d probably prefer Claude but for in-depth articles I stick with ChatGPT.

Image/data API’s:

I’ve been working on my own AI generation script for a while now, and I tested many API’s to make our content stand out.

For images:

• Pexels, the most horrible image API I ever encountered, they don’t use any AI so the images are never truly relevant, their database is tiny compared to others and often you receive what I would categorize as placeholder images in your response.
• Pixabay, just as bad and their API is unreliable, I’ve dealt with so many instances of images not working that I gave up on it.
• ValueSERP, this one doesn’t come with a database but scrapes Google, but you don’t get live results even when setting the location right, the images were of poor quality and outdated, I could not get what I wanted from Google, go figure. On top of that it suddenly stopped working and my code was unchanged. They are cheap and in this case cheap comes at a price.
• DataForSEO, they perform live searches and their responses are consistent, I did encounter an issue where the Google URL incl our query was included in the response while that shouldn’t have happened so I had to add additional code to filter the Google search URL ouf of its response. Once that was in place I couldn’t be more happy with the images Google provides.

Content Parsing/Analysis:

• TextRazor, we use this to pull topics and entities, what we do is we pull the top 10 search results from Google with DataForSEO API and feed it to TextRazor to pull in as much data as we can. They never failed us and their service is free. What more do you want? If you have large scale needs paid plans start at $200/month which is rather expensive but I think it’s worth it.
• DataForSEO, I haven’t tried their content parser yet but it’s on top of my to do list so I will update the post later with my personal experiences.

I haven’t tried any other content analysis API’s because I had no need for it thanks to TextRazor, why replace something solid right? TextRazor is probably the king in their niche.

Did you miss anything such as keyword research tools?

I’m not a fan of keyword research tools, I’ve tried many tools in the past and they all disappointed me BIG time.

The way the founders interpretate the competition, it’s just flawed in every way like there’s no logic at all.

How can so many people disappoint is hard to believe. I think most just see it as an easy way to launch a product with recurring income and they put no effort in it whatsoever, like a typical snake oil guru product.

My only go to tool for keyword research is SemRush these days, it ain’t perfect but I think it’s as good as it gets compared to all the other garbage out there.

I did not cover AI image generation tools either, DALL-E-3 is reaonsable but it’s all the same style, maybe in the future we’ll add a section for that. The featured image for this post was re-generated 3 times and than I gave up on it so that says something.

That’s it, hope this helps you as I’ve spend hundreds of hours using and testing these tools and these are the creme de la creme!