Tools for Blogging

Having the best blogging tools can make or break your business as a blogger. In this comprehensive list, we’ve ranked all of the most impactful (free and paid) blogging tools you should prioritize using to help build, manage, and grow your blog this year. We cover marketing, AI, writing, research, SEO, social media, design, editing, and more.

Introduction

Over the past 10 years of growing my blog from zero to 500,000+ monthly readers, one critical thing I’ve learned is just how important it is to utilize the best blogging tools from day one—and to also know when you’ve progressed enough and are ready to move on to the next level of tool. Regardless, be sure to check out my own stable of free blogging tools I made for bloggers like you ☺️

When you employ the right tools for bloggers on your website (whether you’re a beginner or full-time blogger), it can literally save you hours of time that’d be otherwise spent on much more manual work. Especially if you’re employing some of the new, powerful AI content writing tools.

Not only will these blogging tools save you valuable time & effort, but they’ll also enable you to actually do things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible without investing in hiring your own team of marketers, writers, virtual assistants, or software engineers.

53 Best Blogging Tools in 2023 for Better Marketing, SEO, Writing, Social Media & Research

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission. Know that I only recommend tools, products, and services I’ve personally used and stand behind. When you purchase a tool using one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep all of my in-depth content free of charge for readers.

From keyword research to competitor analysis, writing blog headlines, email marketing, nailing your blogger outreach, scaling your social media promotion, and much more—we’re breaking down all of the top blogging tools you need to be using on your blog today.

Now before we dig into today’s roundup—if you’re totally new to blogging, I’ve put together the ultimate guide to getting started with your blog. Actually getting your blog online and well-optimized (with the right tools) is the first step to laying a foundation that’ll eventually attracts readers. And my 25,000-word guide to starting a blog will position you best for going on to bring thousands of readers to your blog in the near future.

If you haven’t yet gotten your blog off the ground yet, then head over to my ultimate guide to starting a blog.

Try My AI Writing Tool: RightBlogger

Try my very own AI-Powered Content Creation Toolbox for Bloggers: RightBlogger, to get access to 30+ blogging, SEO, marketing, sales, and productivity-focused tools to blog faster & more effectively today.

First up, we’re exploring AI-powered content generation tools, and the most effective research & analysis-related tools on the market today, so that you can take a more effective approach to how you’re growing your blog in the first place.

RightBlogger was built to be the complete AI-powered content creation suite of tools for bloggers. It’s the toolbox I wish I had when I first started blogging. If you want to take your content creation process to the next level—RightBlogger will help you write faster & more SEO-friendly content for your blog.

By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, RightBlogger makes it easier than ever to craft engaging, high-quality content in the click of a button. Here are just a few of the 30+ tools you’ll get unlimited access to inside RightBlogger:

• Article Writer
• Listicle Writer
• Introduction
• Paragraph
• Conclusion

Smart Suggest (get blog post ideas based on your blog URL), Blog Post Idea Generator, Headline Generator

Outline Generator, FAQ Writer, List Generator, Rewriter, Shortener, Expander

Keyword Research Tool (unlimited), Meta Title, Meta Description, Keyword Cluster

Video Title, Video Description, Video Script Outline, Tweet Ideas, LinkedIn Post, Facebook Post, Pinterest Pin

Email Subject Line, Cold Email, Call-To-Action, Product Description, Ad Copy, AIDA, Feature/Benefit/Outcome

Summarizer, Content Filler, Explain Like I’m Five

RightBlogger is adding new AI content tools into the platform every week—plus subscribers have the opportunity to suggest new tools & features, almost all of which get implemented within a few weeks.

2. Free Keyword Research Tool by Ryan Robinson

My very own keyword research tool is incredibly simple. Type in your keyword phrase and instantly get monthly search volume, difficulty & suggestions for other keyword phrases to target for your blog content. Give it a try, that’s why I made it a free tool!

I built this free AI-Powered Keyword Tool to solve a problem I’ve had in the blogging industry for nearly a decade. Anytime a new (free) keyword research tool comes out and gains popularity, a switch flips and it’s suddenly only a paid tool—or has dramatic limitations on usage. This keyword research tool was built to be forever free.

When you type in a keyword you’re considering blogging about, you’ll get dozens of research-backed ideas for keywords & topics to write about on your blog today. You’ll get insights like:

• Monthly Search Volume: A snapshot of how many people search for a particular keyword phrase each month on major search engines like Google.
• Difficulty Level: How hard it’ll be to rank for a particular keyword phrase, based on the amount of existing (and anticipated future) competition from established websites.
• Country Targeting: The default country view is for the US (United States), but you can select other countries from a dropdown menu to see what regional search volume & difficulty looks like for your target keyword phrases.
• Ideas: Use the ideas tab (or click the lightbulb) to get dozens of AI-powered blog topic ideas related to the keyword you’ve chosen.

3. Blog Title Generator Tool by Ryan Robinson

Sitting at the top this list of free blogging tools is my very own Free Blog Title Generator—an AI-powered SEO blog title idea generator that quickly comes up with dozens of headline ideas based on the keyword phrase you want your article to rank for.

Based on the artificial intelligence-powered headline ideas you’ll instantly generate from this tool, you can always tweak the wording, length, and order of words to really hone in on a title that’ll boost your Google search rankings & get more clicks on social media. It’s important to note though, that even a title generator tool isn’t always perfect—it wants headlines to conform to a template that most best ranking content is currently following, but you won’t always get perfect headlines right out of the box. That being said, a headline generator is an excellent user-friendly blogging tool for writers to get a feel for how they could cover a particular set of blog topics—and keep an eye out for an update soon, including a headline analyzer function.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs has more than earned its reputation as one of the best blogging tools when it comes to nailing your blog SEO strategies, with a special emphasis on keyword research & competitor analysis. Though to be clear, if you’re brand new to blogging—this tool may be a little advanced (and it’s not free).

Having started out as just a backlink checker back in the day, many bloggers aren’t fully aware of how powerful Ahrefs has become as a blogging tool. Their most relevant features for bloggers, is that it quadruples as a content research and analysis juggernaut, keyword rank tracker (with historical SERP movements going as far back as when your blog began ranking for its first keyword), a competitor research tool and on-page SEO tools like their analyzer. I know, that’s a lot.

New features still come along quite often and they’re never released at the expense of their most loved features—they still boast the largest index of backlinks of any blogging tool in its class.

While their Keywords Explorer tool is my go-to (paid keyword tool) these days, Ahrefs really earns its stripes as a backlink analysis tool. When conducting an analysis of either your own backlink profile or that of a competitor you’re trying to learn from, you can choose to view columns like only new links, lost links, no follow, or do follow links. You also can group similar links, see just one link per domain name or view links by blogging platform. The flexibility lets you easily get to the bottom of your queries.

Here are a few of my daily searches on Ahrefs:

• Top Pages: This shows you a list of the highest traffic-grossing pages for the site you’re analyzing
• Best by Links: This view ranks the pages of a site based on the number of backlinks it’s received
• Content Explorer: Allows you to quickly generate blog post ideas that put the spotlight on trending topics in your space
• Competitor Research: This’ll quickly show the keywords a competitor site ranks for (along with traffic estimates)

Keep in mind that traffic estimates are calculated based on a site’s organic ranking positions, their number of featured snippets, search carousels and everything else in between. As such, organic traffic reports can be shockingly accurate, even for small blogs. And if you want another SEO tool to compare Ahrefs against, check out SEMRush.

Google Analytics

Since 2005, Google Analytics has been a (free) web analytics service built and offered by Google that allows blog and website owners to track and report on their website traffic. Today, it’s just one of the tools offered inside of the overall Google Marketing Platform brand, designed for marketers and advertisers to reach more readers.

In the screenshot above (from my own Google Analytics dashboard for this blog), you can see critical data points like how many readers come to my blog each month, the breakdown of new vs returning visitors, how many pages the average visitor views, how long they spend on a page, my blog’s bounce rate—and so much more. Here’s a step-by-step guide from Google on how to install Google Analytics on your blog.

To put it simply, MonsterInsights is a dead simple Google Analytics plugin for WordPress—that allows you to view your GA data directly within your WordPress dashboard.

This plugin makes our list of the best blogging tools because it allows you to easily connect your WordPress blog with your Google Analytics account (without hiring developer or writing any code yourself)—a task that can sometimes be a bit more complicated than most new bloggers bargain for, depending upon which of the best WordPress themes you’re using.

With the click of just a few buttons in MonsterInsights, you can set up relatively sophisticated event tracking, eCommerce tracking (depending upon the eCommerce website builder you’re using), form submissions, and more features that’ll help you better understand your blog readers as you grow.

Serp Robot

Serp Robot is a free Google rank checker that tracks the position of your blog’s articles for the keywords you input.

It’s forte is accurate rankings—hilarious when you consider that’s the only job of a rank tracker… but not as hilarious if you’ve ever tried using a rank tracking blogging tool.

Most rank trackers miss the mark, big time. Accurate tracking is key to understanding your blog’s health (as it relates to your ability to deliver organic search traffic), as a heavy decline could hint at a potential manual penalty from Google.

Yoast SEO for WordPress Plugin

Quite possibly the most-installed WordPress plugin of all time (made by an independent company), Yoast SEO is indispensable amongst the best blogging tools.

Whether you’re running a personal blog or working in marketing and SEO for a company that’s put you in charge of managing their corporate blog, Yoast SEO is a powerful free plugin that’s been designed to help make your blog as search engine-friendly as possible. In fact, it’s been an essential part of optimizing my content on my side blog where I’m starting to rank for terms like the best gifts for hikers and the best hiking boots on the market today.

After installing the plugin, you’ll immediately see the above mini-SEO tools dashboard at the bottom of every post on your blog once you’re in editing mode. All you need to do is input your focus keyphrase (target keyword you want the article to rank for in organic search), and the plugin will give you a detailed analysis of how to write a better headline, meta description, alongside recommendations on the number of links your article should contain, the number of times your keyword phrase should be mentioned, article length, and more.

If I had to go down to using just one of these tools on my site today, I’d choose Yoast SEO.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo’s Content Research blogging tool generates a list of the most popular blog posts on a given topic—and you get to view pre-validated ideas for blog posts.

With Buzzsumo, you can also monitor your blog’s mentions across the web as they happen in real-time. This makes them very useful amongst the best blogging tools specifically for marketers—since you can reach out to unlinked brand mentions and turn them into new links for your growing blog SEO strategy.

The question analyzer features the ability to search and lists out questions asked on a particular keyword phrase your readers may be searching for—which is important if you want to capture featured snippets.

Twinword Ideas

Miss the old (free) Google Keyword Planner or looking for another free alternative (aside from my own keyword research tool) to some of the more advanced tools like Ahrefs? Well, Twinword Ideas is another great one to try. It’s a free keyword research tool you can use to learn which phrases you should create targeted content for (in order to bring more of the right readers to your blog from search engines).

Twinword Ideas—a free blogging tool from the team at Twinword—gathers keyword data directly from Google, making it more accurate than most other completely free keyword research tools out there today. So, if you’re wondering… do people still read blogs? the answer is a resounding yes today.

In addition to just the basic search function, you can view “Popular Topics” together with data that calculates how much SEO competition there will be on the topic—suggesting how difficult it’ll be for your blog to rank high in organic search results. Unlike Google’s original Keyword Planner tool (no longer a completely free resource) that gives a range of monthly search volumes, Twinword Ideas lists exact search volumes you can count on. This tool helped me decide to pursue topics like the best hikes in Yosemite and the best time to visit Yosemite during the year—surprisingly not as competitive as you’d think.

SimilarWeb

What I like about SimilarWeb is their ability to turn the often inscrutable numbers into easy-to-understand colorful graphics. Insights that might take hours to glean elsewhere when relying entirely on numbers can be drawn pretty quickly with the graphic presentations on SimilarWeb.

The free version of SimilarWeb makes our list of top tools because it lets you see everything that the paid account does—with the exception that your time range is restricted. With a free account, you can see a blog’s website traffic analytics for the past 3 months. With a paid account, you can see detailed traffic reports for six months. It also displays worldwide traffic, broken down by country. There’s also a category rank showing your own popularity within the niche you blog about—for example that could include food blogging, fashion blogging, travel blogging or otherwise.

You can analyze data on visitor locations, how much search traffic you’re getting, referring sites, social traffic, keywords you’re ranking for, paid advertising data, and similar sites you’re competing with today. Traffic figures should be taken with a grain of salt though. SimilarWeb tends to underestimate traffic count for sites averaging below 50,000 visitors a month, while often overestimating traffic for others.

For example on my blog, SimilarWeb estimates the monthly pageviews for May at 960,587.

The actual pageviews for May? Only 736,679.

Laser sharp accuracy isn’t the purpose of a blogging tool like this, though.

SimilarWeb doles out what Ahrefs doesn’t—helping you to visualize every channel that sends your blog traffic (and take action to learn how to write blog posts that’ll repeat your successes).

Can I Rank?

Can I Rank? is one of the most exciting new blogging tools I’ve discovered this year. At the core of their product, is an AI-powered software engine that gives you actionable blogging tips and advice for how to improve your blog’s SEO rankings, get more traffic, and even gather the best blog post ideas to pursue based on your existing content—and which opportunities will provide the most potential traffic value in the months to come.

Beyond just the SEO-focused recommendations you’ll get from Can I Rank?, their platform gives you detailed DIY instructions for how to best implement their advice—or the opportunity to delegate the task to an SEO consultant within their network. It’s pure genius, and I’ve already discovered several high-impact content opportunities I’m capitalizing on for my blog, so I recommend every serious blogger to give them a try.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking is another of my picks for exciting new blogging tools to burst onto the scene this year. With a very broad feature set ranging from keyword ranking tracking to research tools, competitor monitoring, advanced traffic analytics, marketing planning, and more—this is one of the most robust new tools I’ve come across in some time, and it’s quickly become an essential part of my workflow whenever I update my blog business plan.

What I like most about SE Ranking is that beyond just the keyword position monitoring function that sits at the center of the product, this blogging tool also provides a very extensive website audit function that’ll give you extremely actionable feedback on how to improve your blog’s technical SEO footprint, which is valuable for all small businesses. While this is amongst the paid tools here on this list, if you’re taking your blog growth seriously—then SE Ranking is well worth your while to consider weaving into your tech stack.

Outreach-Focused Blogging Tools to Scale Your Content Promotion

With the more research-heavy tools behind us, let’s dig into the best outreach-oriented ones.

These are designed with the express purpose to help you nail your blogger outreach, scale your content promotion, land high-quality guest posts, and build partnerships with other bloggers in your industry.

Hunter

The premise of this free blogging tool is deceptively simple—Hunter scrapes the Internet for email addresses and allows you to enter a domain and see all of the emails associated with that company (that have made their way into the Hunter database). It’s my go-to email finding tool today.

Whether you need the email address of a CEO, content manager, or social media rep, Hunter’s email finder feature will return either their exact email address or their best guess based on other company emails they’ve uncovered. What ups the ante with this blogging tool is the bulk feature, where you can upload a list of domains or contacts to find or verify contacts for a larger scale outreach campaign.

Respona

Respona is an all-in-one blogger outreach platform with all of the necessary tools to set up and launch an email campaign of any kind, be it for link building, digital PR, marketing, or even sales.

It’s integrated with Google’s search engine for streamlined prospecting, and pulls metrics like Domain Rating and Ahrefs Rank directly from Ahrefs. An easy-to-use email finder is also included, making it extremely easy to find the right person’s contact information without having to rely on any other tools. Their features include:

• Automated email outreach
• Great for prospecting and finding contact information
• Deep personalization of outreach campaigns
• Built-in analytics and reporting

Respona’s intuitive interface guides you through every step of creating and launching your outreach campaigns, keeps track of your performance, and also the status of your conversations with each prospect. The tool will be especially useful to link builders, as it was initially used to help Visme scale their link building outreach efforts, helping the website gain over 2 million organic visitors a month.

Voila Norbert

Voila Norbert’s remarkable in the way it’s able to process even hundreds of raw CSV files, and feed you highly accurate contact information for your blog outreach campaigns.

Primarily built to become one of the top lead validation tools, Voila Norbert also integrates with other tools like Drip and Pipedrive, making it particularly useful for sorting your leads and lining up campaigns to launch quickly.

Ninja Outreach

Ninja outreach is on this list of the best blogging tools because it’s an all-in-one outreach tool that you can use to connect with influencers, pitch guest posts, and build relationships with other bloggers in your niche—at scale.

Its primary function as a link prospector can be accessed within the Outreach section. Enter a topic to find the top blogs you should connect with, with several columns highlighting social stats, SEO metrics, traffic figures, and contact info for the people you should get in touch with and email with your collaboration idea.

The features column even shows whether or not the target website is currently accepting guest posts—making this amazing amongst the top tools for bloggers who want to land more guest posts and attract high-quality links as a part of their SEO strategy. Consider whether or not this kind of outreach can fold into your greater blogging strategy & it may be worth the extra expense.

Clearbit

The stand-out feature that makes Clearbit one of the most useful tools for content creators, is its awesome integration with Gmail. Once Clearbit is installed, you can click on a contact you’re about to send an email to—and you’ll get a mini widget with a short bio about the person, their website, and the company they work at.

It’s useful for not only personalizing your emails during an outreach campaign but also for testing & validating whether or not a particular email address you have is accurate 😉

Productivity-Centric Blogging Tools to Get More Work Done (Faster)

Alright, shifting gears again—let’s talk about the productivity-related tools—which is something of an obsession of mine.

These are my picks for the most essential productivity-oriented blogging tools that’ll help you save time on tasks that can be done faster (and more effectively).

Wordable

If you’ve been blogging for any amount of time and have ever gone through the (hilarious) process of trying to copy & paste a blog post you wrote as a draft in a Google Doc—and get it loaded into WordPress, then you know how much of a nightmare the re-formatting will be. Wordable is one of my favorite writing tools because it’s saved me literally hours of my life.

Once you’ve signed up for Wordable’s free trial, you’ll download their plugin and install it on your WordPress blog. Then, in literally one click, you’ll be able to instantly export Google Docs into a WordPress post or page on your blog—without any formatting challenges. Seriously. It’s incredible, and it’ll even import images using the titles you’ve given the files originally within your Google Doc. Keep an eye out for future functionality with other tools for bloggers, like Trello and Evernote to possibly come down the pipeline with Wordable one day.

FocusMe

FocusMe has a special place on my list of the best blogging tools because of how much it, well… helps me stay focused when I need to get critical work done.

As a website and app blocker, FocusMe aspires to help you kill energy-draining multitasking and limit the amount of time you spend on distracting websites. Its promise of efficiency is set on the belief that setting a daily 2-hour curfew for a specific website or app can translate to 25% higher levels of productivity.

Inbox When Ready

The makers of this special Chrome extension for Gmail realized just how obsessed we’ve become with emails today—and sought to rein in that obsession so you can spend more time on the tasks that’ll actually help grow your blog (rather than answering every single email as it comes in).

Once installed, the extension helps you batch process emails and minimize how long you spend on each email—by adding a “Show Inbox” button and alternatively a “Hide Inbox” button for when you’re ready to either dive into email or hide your email inbox from sight. Personally, it helps me think twice about opening up my email inbox.

Another great feature is that you can still compose new emails while the inbox remains hidden, so you don’t have to worry about new emails popping up and stealing your attention. You can also assign a frequency limit on how many times you want to check your email in a day—plus allocate specific time limits for each email.

Marketing-Related Blogging Tools to Grow Your Traffic and Build an Audience

Marketing. Like it or not, recent blogging statistics illustrate that you’ve got to promote your blog content if you hope to build an engaged target audience—and the right tools can help you do that much more effectively than ever before.

These are my picks for the most essential tools that’ll specifically help you market your blog more effectively.

ConvertKit

While I’ll be the first to tell you stick with free email marketing tools like Mailchimp as you’re just getting started—that won’t be the best blogging tool for growing your email list in the long-term as your small business scales and you can afford to invest in blogging tools like ConvertKit that’ll do more to create things like automations & sequences that can generate revenue from your email list while you sleep.

Your email subscribers are just a small step away from becoming paying customers of your online course, the eBook you wrote, or service you’re offering. For example, I’ve been able to set up completely automated sales emails that promote the purchase of either my blogging books or one of my premium blogging courses depending upon when and how a new subscriber signs up on my blog. ConvertKit’s functionality is designed specifically for bloggers and is affordable (starting at $29/mo) for their jam-packed feature list including building your email list, making landing pages, setting up automated emails, messaging subscribers, and templates to start with. They also integrate directly with WordPress and other top tools, making it a crucial dashboard for an experienced blogger.

If you’re still not convinced, take a peek at my recent comparison between ConvertKit vs AWeber vs Mailchimp.

Sumo

Sumo actually bundles together more than twenty different useful tools into one single package. Here, I’ll talk about their three social media optimization tools—and if you want some more guidance on this subject, check out this updated list of the top social media tools on the market today.

We all know that posts with images get shared more, right? What if your blog visitors also want to share the images they find in your blog posts? That’s easily done in just one click with Sumo’s Image Sharer tool. Beyond that, the Sumo Highlighter makes it easy for readers to share snippets they like from within a blog post by highlighting it (for other readers to notice) and tweet about it.

Sumo share is a slick, well-optimized set of social sharing buttons that you can embed within a blog post or along the side of your blog, so that readers are encouraged to spread the word about the content they like on your blog.

Jasper

I won’t blame you for being skeptical about AI-generated copywriting software. After all, how can artificial intelligence replicate the intangible aspects of a human’s voice, style, and tone? Well, they can’t really (yet). But Jasper is shockingly effective at crafting copy for blog posts, as well as other short forms of copy like Facebook ads, tweets, headlines, video scripts, and sales pages.

The way I see a tool like this being best used today, is as a complement to your own abilities and other proven blogging tools like Clearscope. Functionally, you can use it to speed up your blog writing process, eliminate writer’s block, and start generating content—or to fill the gaps in when it comes to getting your content to the finish line. I’ve tried several of these tools, but they tend to produce incomprehensible copy. Not Jasper, though. Their AI-based writing assistant is trained by conversion and copywriting