35 Best Blogging Tools You Definitely Need In 2024

Succeeding as a blogger has much to do with the tools you use. There’s a plethora of tools to choose from. Today, I’ve listed the 35 best blogging tools I use to run this blog and some client blogs. Let’s jump right in!

Disclaimer: This blog post contains affiliate links to products that help me run this blog. If you decide to use the products, it won’t cost you anything extra. I only recommend products and services I’ve tried myself and liked.

SEO Tools 

Ahrefs 

This is the best SEO and keyword research tool on the market today. Ahrefs handles everything you need to prepare blog posts and build your blog’s SEO foundation. 

How Ahrefs helps you:

• Keyword research
• Competitor analysis 
• Backlinking
• Content gap analysis
• Website audit
• Rank tracking
• Exploring website 

Ahrefs has been crawling the web and collecting data for ten years. The Ahrefs bot is ranked first among all web crawler tools. 

Ahrefs also offers a free Webmaster tool to perform basic website audits and analyze ranking patterns and site performance weekly. If you don’t want to commit to the paid tool, start with the free Webmaster tool and test its deliverability yourself.

It’s the best tool for building backlinks, and when it comes to traffic estimation, it most closely correlates with Google Search Console. 

Pricing: The paid Ahrefs plan starts from $129 per month. It’s ideal for small businesses or bloggers working for small brands. The price goes up with their other plans. The standard plan costs $249 monthly, and the advance is $449 monthly. You can get a customized plan, which is ideal for big enterprises and agencies, starting at $14,990 on an annual contract basis. 

G2 Rating:  4.5/5

Semrush 

While Ahrefs is an SEO tool through and through, Semrush is a more comprehensive digital marketing tool. It offers features beyond SEO, such as content creation, paid advertising, content marketing, and social media. 

It has a more extensive database of keywords, competitors, and other SEO metrics. Semrush also offers a detailed overview of keyword and competitor research thanks to its database. The keyword research report offers more information. 

Semrush gives you much more data as it’s a well-rounded tool covering both SEO and PPC. It has a larger database with more features than other SEO tools. It offers many apps and supporting tools for content creation, such as AI marketing, an AI social content generator, AdCreative.ai, etc.

Pricing: Semrush is more costly, with its plans starting from $129.95 per month and going up to the business model, which is customized depending on your needs. 

G2 Rating: 4.5/5

RankMath

I’ve been using Rankmath and love it for making WordPress SEO a breeze. After SEO research, you absolutely need a WordPress SEO plugin that will ensure you hit all the right marks while publishing content. Rankmath takes care of everything. 

What I love the most is the plugin’s ease of use and simple interface. Most of the features you need are available in the free plan, but I recommend you opt for the paid plan, which gives you additional features to ensure you’re doing everything right to get that #1 rank on search engines. 

What Rankmath can do: 

• Connect with Google Search Console and Google Analytics for real-time information 
• Offer 20+ structured data/schema
• Optimizes the website for local SEO
• Optimizes for WooCommerce
• Offers Image SEO
• Builds Sitemap
• Tracks ranks of your articles 
• Maintains position history 

And much more.

Pricing: As I said, most of the features you need when starting are available in the free version. The paid plans start from $7.99 per month and go up to $59.99 per month. 

G2 Rating: 4.8/5

Surfer SEO

SEO tools are somewhat costly for an average or beginner blogger. Each tool offers unique features, and you need different tools for writing and researching. 

With Surfer SEO, it’s different. You get to research, plan, write, and see how to rank blog posts with this tool. When you select a keyword for your article, you will be given complete keyword research with the top related keywords, their search volume, and keyword difficulty. You get to compare with the competitors who have used and ranked for those keywords. 

While writing the article, you get to analyze headings used in ranked articles, and you can add them to your blog outline. Surfer SEO offers to help you write the article and has a “Write With AI” feature. While creating the article, you can set the tone and get advanced options to customize your article further using the SERP results. 

The best part? You get an SEO content score out of a hundred, which helps you understand where your article lies in terms of getting ranked. The plagiarism test is already available, so you don’t need to use another tool.

Finally, multiple integrations with tools like WordPress, Google Docs, Jasper, etc. exist, so you can add the blog post directly to WordPress. 

Pricing: The Essential plan starts at $89 per month, which scales up to $219 monthly for the Scale AI plan. You can also customize a plan for your needs. There’s also a 7-day free trial available.

G2 Rating: 4.8/5

Google Keyword Planner

GKP is the best free keyword research tool next to Ahrefs and Semrush. If you don’t have the budget for these tools or don’t want to invest in paid tools right away, GKP is the right start. 

It’s a tool marketers use for paid advertising on Google, so the data it stores is much more accurate and regularly updated. You can easily find and shortlist keywords for your entire content plan through GKP.

Since it’s free, it doesn’t offer every feature of a paid SEO tool like Ahrefs. But with the keyword difficulty and volume features and some additional free tools, you can create a sound keywords bank. 

Key Features: 

• Accurate data on keyword volume and difficulty as GKP provides this data directly from Google’s search engine.
• You can filter keyword suggestions based on location, language, search network, and date range. 
• The tool shows related keywords for your seed keyword and shares the keywords your competitors rank for simply through their URLs.
• The tool provides historical statistics on search volume and competition for keywords, which can help analyze trends and seasonality.
• It forecasts clicks, impressions, cost, and average cost-per-click (CPC) for selected keywords based on your specified location and budget.

Google Trends

SEO is a mix of evergreen content that brings consistent traffic to your blog and seasonal or trending content that gives a quick surge in traffic and huge benefits for relevant queries. 

Google Trends is a free tool that helps you find trending topics for your blog. This tool comes in handy for niche blogs that are highly time-dependent, such as those covering news and current events, fashion and beauty, entertainment, and pop culture. 

This tool shows you the trending topics in your niche and also helps predict future trends based on past patterns. 

Key Features: 

• Search Term Analysis
• Trending Searches
• Regional Interest
• Related Topics and Queries
• Category Analysis
• Data Export
• News Headlines Integration
• YouTube Integration
• Comparative Analysis
• Custom Time Range

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