Here, we’ll explore the best AI tools available — both paid and free – and provide actionable tips on how to use AI for SEO in 2025. Use this SEO checklist to improve your website’s search engine rankings. If you want to improve your search engine rankings in 2025, you need to get backlinks.

Mistakes to avoid when optimizing for generative search

Today, I get a steady stream of organic traffic from people searching for that keyword that I created. If I had only optimized for “white hat SEO”, I wouldn’t have received any organic traffic until I hit the first page for my target keyword. SEO analytics is about tracking how well your website performs on search engines and understanding how users interact with it.

Or for troubleshooting international SEO issues on a client site. This saves me time when I’m trying to understand what makes top-ranking pages successful. Keyword Insights gathers live search terms from Google Autocomplete, People Also Ask, and Quora. So, it might surface more up-to-date, trending topics, but without the data of a tool like Semrush. If you have an article about a certain keyword cluster, Keyword Insights will show you which keywords are best to optimize for. Honestly, I find myself going back and forth between these two tools from time to time.

• For example, this page is optimized around the keyword “SEO strategy”.
• Because of its cross-over with web development, it’s a challenging area for most SEO agencies.
• So if you tend to publish a lot of visual content, spend an afternoon executing this search engine optimisation technique.
• To make sure that people who need your website or web app are discovering it, search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial.

Target Keywords Your Competitors Are Ranking for

Instead, you need to make strategic updates if you want to see a measurable impact on your traffic and rankings. You can think of these as “linkable assets” or “link bait” — content that is largely designed to get backlinks. If you run a marketing agency for example, you might analyze results across client accounts to identify trends — information your competitors don’t have.

You can then take the necessary actions, such as contacting the web admin or reporting the site to gain back your traffic. This free SEO tool lets you look at the search term’s popularity per region and other related search queries on Google. It’s a handy free SEO tool for marketers looking for related keyword suggestions. While Semrush has a suite of paid SEO tools, it also has plenty of free features that can spy on your competitor. It also analyzes your website’s vitals, enabling you to identify areas for improvement.

It offers features related to competitor analysis, content creation, and internal linking, among others. AI tools are pretty good at handling some parts of your content creation. For example, creating searched-optimized outlines for your blog posts. So long as you receive sufficient clicks on your ads, you can use the data about which headlines and descriptions perform best to update your pages’ title tags and meta descriptions. After researching keywords for all your topics, you’ll need to map your cluster. This mapping process will allow you to see (and organize) all your content.

Broken link building involves identifying broken links on other websites and offering your content as a replacement. This tactic helps website owners improve their user experience by fixing broken links while allowing you to acquire new backlinks. As you’ll shortly see, adding more content, optimizing image filenames, or improving internal links can affect your rankings and search visibility. And that’s because each of those actions improves a ranking factor. Increase your site’s visibility and rankings with search engine optimization, content marketing, and link building. Not only does technical SEO help improve your search rankings, but it also determines your user experience.

You can easily find dozens of trending topics and keywords with a free tool called Exploding Topics. And in my experience, it will sometimes spit SEO Anomaly out a GREAT keyword that you’d be hard pressed to find in any other keyword tool. And you’ll get a list of questions that people are asking online about that topic. All you need to do is enter a broad topic (like “keto” or “link building”). There isn’t really any difference between a keyword and a key phrase.