Announcing the Top Rated SEO Tools for 2018

May 8th, 2018 6 min read

Today, we awarded the 2018 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for SEO Tools. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are unique in that they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user satisfaction scores.

Here are the winners in each segment, listed in order of research frequency on TrustRadius. We have also provided insights on how to pick the right SEO tool based on your needs and current industry trends.

Overall Top Rated

Top Rated by Enterprises

Top Rated by Mid-Sized Companies

Top Rated by Small Businesses

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a method of driving free or organic traffic to your website by optimizing your headers, web copy, and metadata tags to index your site and drive it to the top of the search results on engines such as Google or Bing. SEO tools provide you with features designed to help improve your content strategy and track your results. These systems help you assess your keyword choices and the structure of your site to ensure that the search engines will recognize your site and list it in the search results when searches match the key products and services your business offers.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM), also known as PPC (pay per click) search advertising, follows the same principles as SEO, but rather than ranking organically you pay to be listed when certain keywords or phrases are searched online. Many businesses use both SEO and SEM, and tools in this category often have features that can support both paid and organic tactics.

Trends in SEO

SEO is an extremely effective way to drive traffic to your website, but determining which keywords will give you the best results can be challenging. Tools can help you nail down the formula for the relevant keywords where there is an opportunity to rank. This can be a bit of a moving target since it depends on the strategies other websites are using to rank for those terms, which makes SEO part art and part science.

Additionally, search engines (particularly Google) are always working to improve search from a user standpoint, to help people find exactly what they’re searching for online. These algorithm updates always cause a ripple for SEO marketing, as businesses and marketers try to figure out what the search engines are looking for, and how to rank on the coveted first page or first position of results.

There is also a special focus on mobile, social, and local SEO strategies, so it will be interesting to see how Google’s algorithm will evolve, and what opportunities that will bring for businesses to attract highly targeted organic traffic to their websites.

Key capabilities of SEO Tools

SEO tools offer features that are designed to help you incorporate industry best practices into your marketing plans, ensuring all of your web content is SEO-optimized to appear in searches for the kinds of products and services your company offers. Some of the most useful capabilities are keyword recommendations, analysis and tracking to help you hone your keyword choices for best results.

You can also localize your SEM campaigns to bring more people to your business based on their proximity to your physical location, or acquire backlinks to add domain authority (a concept developed by Moz) to your site and content. Backlinks are important in SEO because they connect sites together, which makes your site more reputable and demonstrates to search engines that your content is vouched for by other sites.

Using an SEO or SEM tool, you can track backlinks and domain authority of the sites that are linking to yours and analyze how this impacts your own rankings. You can use reviews to evaluate the features and functions you care about most, based on use cases that are most similar to your own.

Top Rated Criteria

Products included in the 2018 Top Rated SEO Tools list must have been in the top tier of their category TrustMap on April 27, 2018, to earn a Top Rated badge. To qualify for the SEO Tools TrustMap, products must have 20 reviews and ratings on TrustRadius. Every reviewer is verified and every review is vetted before publication. Products are plotted on the map based on end-user data, including users’ likelihood to recommend scores as well as buyer research patterns. To learn more about TrustMaps and Top Rated methodology, check out this page.

Was this helpful?

100% Trusted, No Ads, No Bias, Quality First