12 of the best paid SEO tools

There are a lot of great free SEO tools out there, and a lot of them provide powerful insights to get your content ranking. But if you're willing to splash some cash, you can delve even deeper into your SEO analysis.

Paid SEO tools abound, and not all of them are created equal. That's why we've picked our 12 favorites. If you're going to pony up for a premium account, it's hard to go wrong with these tools.

Long Tail Pro lets you enter a seed keyword and delivers up to 400 long tail keyword suggestions within seconds. You can filter results by CPC, rank, search volume and advertiser competition. The tool also allows you to examine your competitors' keyword strategies by looking at the keywords they rank for. And you can measure your progress with a daily Rank Tracker tool.

Price: Starting at $25 USD per month for 30 tracked keywords, to $98 USD per month for up to 1,000 tracked keywords.

SECockpit pulls data from some great keyword tools to give you a broad keyword analysis from a variety of sources. You'll get keyword ideas and metrics from Moz Semantic and Searchmetrics, Google Suggest, Google Adwords, Google Related Searches and SEMRush's Amazon and YouTube Suggest. You'll also get search trends for every keyword idea, with data from Moz and AdWords. Best of all, SECockpit lets you organize your keyword ideas into folders and export keyword reports.

Price: From $39 USD per month for 10 keyword searches per day to $149 per month for unlimited keyword searches.

Serpstat gives you all the familiar features of a good keyword research tool: long tail keyword ideas, keyword variations, CPC and competition data for each keyword and an analysis of search trends. What we like about it is the ability to target specific countries and languages, and to determine which pages on your site are most relevant for particular search queries. You can even measure your page's relevance against competing pages and see which relevant keywords your content is missing.

Price: From $69 USD per month for 4,000 queries per day up to $499 USD per month for 12,000 queries per day.

Keyword.io's free Keyword Tool is a great resource if you're not looking to spend money, but their Pro subscription ups the ante. You can get search volume data for up to 70,000 keywords per day, and you can break the data down to an extremely granular level, from every country and language supported by Google to more than 47,000 cities. That's powerful local SEO insight. Keyword Tool pulls from Google's autocomplete function to find keywords that don't appear in Google Keyword Planner, so you can find high volume, low competition keywords your competitors have overlooked.

Price: From $69 USD per month for 7,000 keywords per day to $159 USD per month for 70,000 keywords per day (plus CPC and Google Adwords competition data.

Screaming Frog has a very handy free version, but if you've got a sizeable website it's worth shelling out for the paid version. Screaming Frog crawls your site and shows you broken links, analyzes your title tags and meta descriptions and gives you a full view of your backlinks and internal links. It can also generate custom robots.txt files and XML Sitemaps. The premium version also allows you to integrate Screaming Frog with Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Price: Around $190 USD per year.

Sitebulb will crawl your site and deliver a list of technical recommendations based on more than 300 technical SEO checks. It will find URLs hidden by robots.txt, URLs that aren't being tracked by Google Analytics, broken links, images missing alt text and canonicals that point to noindex pages, among other technical SEO snafus. Sitebulb will also produce data on page speed and crawl depth, and presents all its data in easy visualizations. While other technical SEO tools can identify the same issues Sitebulb tackles, few do it with a nicer UI.

Price: Around $340 USD per year.

Whitespark is a must-have for local SEO. The tool will find all your local citations, uncover the gaps in your citations, examine your competitors and monitor your monthly citation growth. You can also do comparative searches to find citations your competitors are getting that you aren't. It's affordable for local business, with small business plans starting at just $17 USD per month.

Price: From $17 USD for 20 searches per day and 5 projects to $80 USD per year for 100 searches per day and 100 projects.

WebCEO has a full suite of features, including keyword research tools, backlink analysis and social media analytics. But we're focusing on its technical SEO tools, which can run regular audits on your site to check for common technical errors, server issues and site usability issues such as slow page load speeds, missing and broken images and orphaned pages. It also spoon-feeds you solutions for your technical SEO problems, walking you through instructions on how to fix each issue.

Price: From $39 USD per year for 1 project to $299 USD per year for up to 30 projects.

SEMRush is one of the most full-featured SEO tools on the market, and it could easily fit in any category on this list. But its competitor research tools are a cut above many other all-encompassing SEO solutions. You can research your competitors' traffic, their paid search strategies, their keyword rankings and their backlink profiles. You can also compare your site to your competitors to find keyword and backlink gaps.

Price: From $99.95 USD per month to $399.95 USD per month.

SimilarWeb will a full analysis of competing websites that includes traffic, traffic sources, the most popular pages and the sites users visited in the same browsing session. What makes SimilarWeb unique is that you can get these same insights for a competitor's mobile app. You can see current installs, active daily users and the average usage time.

Price: Contact for pricing.

SpyFu gives you an almost unholy amount of information on your competitors. Enter in their domain and you'll be able to see every keyword they've bought on Google Adwords, everything they've ranked for organically and every ad variation for the last 13 years. You can also track every competitor currently bidding on your Adwords, get a full picture of their backlink profile and see the keywords they're ranking for that you don't. It's a step away from corporate espionage, and we love it.

Price: From $33 USD per month to $299 USD per month.

One of Raven's best features is its UI. It's clean and easy to use, and presents data in a digestible format. But Raven is more than just a pretty face. It also gives you a wealth of competitor data. All the usual metrics are here, including backlinks, domain authority and keyword targeting. Raven goes a step further, however, by also showing you your competitors' site performance, with load times and page speed scores.

Price: From $79 USD per month to $399 USD per month.