The 5 Best Website Optimization Tools Compared

We rounded up our top five favorite website optimization tools, starting with the multi-tool pocketknife of web optimization: Mangools.

We love Mangools because it’s so versatile, and when you’re short on time, that’s exactly what you need. In this post, you’ll meet our four other favorites and get tips on how to start optimizing your website right away.

If you want a quick answer about which website optimization tools to get started with, here are our three favorites:

Mangools: Best Overall — With five tools built to help up your SEO game, Mangools is a beginner-friendly, jill-of-all-trades website optimizer.

Clearscope: Best for Content Optimization — Analyze your content’s SEO-savviness and readability with this convenient, user-friendly tool.

Crazy Egg: Best for Visual Insights — Improve your website design with visual heatmaps, surveys, screen recordings, traffic analysis, and A/B tests.

Mangools: Best Overall

Mangools is our top pick for a few reasons.

It’s super user-friendly, it packs five key tools into one website-optimization punch, and it won’t blow your budget.

When you sign up for Mangools, you get access to:

KWFinder: The world’s easiest-to-use keyword search tool that gives you all the stats you need to pick the right short- and long-tail keywords.
SERPChecker: Find out where your website and subpages land on search engine results pages (SERPs).
SERPWatcher: Track the health (aka rank) of your domain with one easy click.
LinkMiner: Discover, analyze, and evaluate backlinks to spot link-building opportunities.
SiteProfiler: Keep track of your domain authority, page authority, citation flow, and trust flow—aka, all the things that make search engines trust and love your site.

See what we mean when we call Mangools a multi-tool pocketknife of web optimization? And here’s the thing: the folks at Mangools know that the way search engines function changes all the time. (Ahem, Google, looking at you!)

Because of that, the team is constantly improving these core tools or adding newer ones.

There’s the Google SERP Simulator, which lets you enter a title tag and meta description to see what your preview would look like on real SERPs. And the SERPs Location Changer, which lets you see what your Google SERPs look like from other cities, states, and countries.

Best of all, you can start using these tools for free! Once you need to scale up your keyword research, backlinking, and so on, you can get started for $49 a month, billed monthly, or $29.90 a month, billed annually.

See the full pricing breakdown on Mangools’ pricing page.

Clearscope: Best for Content Optimization

For your web visitors, nothing is worse than reading copy that’s stuffed full of keywords, whether we’re talking Google keywords, SEO keywords, long-tail keywords, keywords for sem, Pinterest keywords, keyword rankings, or just keywords, keywords everywhere.

See what I mean? The word keywords almost makes me sick after writing that keywordy sentence.

But of course, these little phrases are important. They’re a core component of web content optimization. And Clearscope helps you rein in the urge to keyword-stuff while helping you create copy that people actually want to read.

You get four key tools with Clearscope:

Topic discovery: Find the most popular topics in your industry, along with the most valuable keywords to include in your content.
Content optimization: Optimize as you write by including all the relevant keywords, weaving in information from top sources, and keeping tabs on the readability level. With extensions for popular word processors like Google Docs, WordPress, and Microsoft Word, optimizing your copy and content is easy peasy.
AI-assisted writing: Let AI help you create the perfect outline for your own human-written content. With suggestions from robots, of course, which you can take or leave.
Page protection: Don’t let the mercurial nature of search engines get you down. With this tool, you’ll get notified ASAP of any content decay so you can jump in and fix it.

I’ve used Clearscope on all sorts of projects, and in my experience, it’s easier to use than competitor tools like Surfer SEO. Google Docs is my favorite platform to write on, and the Google Docs + Clearscope integration is incredibly streamlined.

There’s nothing like seeing all the keywords you need to include on the right-hand side of your screen and watching all the green check marks line up as you weave them into your content.

The downside is that Clearscope is pricey. But in my opinion, it’s well worth the monthly fee, which begins at $189 a month and includes onboarding, training, and top-notch customer service.

Crazy Egg: Best for Visual Insights

Have you ever received messages from random people who have found 189 broken links on your website and pinpointed things that suck about it and want to help you fix it for a fee of $500?

Said person may or may not have your best interests in mind, but at Crazy Egg, we definitely do. And we won’t charge an arm and a leg to help you keep your website as user-friendly as possible.

Our suite of website optimization tools starts with our core product: website heatmaps. These heatmaps show you where users are clicking, scrolling, and spending the most time on your website.

We don’t just have one type of heatmap, either. Over the years, we’ve listened to our users and developed five different heatmaps you can use to analyze web traffic:

Click Map: See where users are clicking most on your webpage.
Scroll Map: Visualize how far visitors scroll down a page before stopping.
Confetti Map: A detailed view of individual clicks, with color-coded dots to segment data by traffic source, device, and other metrics.
Overlay Map: Allows you to track clicks on specific elements of a page.
List Map: Presents a numerical report of clicks on each page element.

Pretty cool, right?

See a detailed breakdown (with screenshots!) on our Website Heatmaps page.

We also have tools that help you optimize your CTA popups, split-test website variants, record user sessions on your website, see if errors are keeping customers from loving your site, and more.

Lots more.

And we’ll continue to evolve and grow as the way users interact with websites continues to evolve and change.

Screaming Frog: Best for Technical SEO Audits

When it comes to site audits, Screaming Frog is a classic with an unforgettable name. I mean, really. It sticks in the memory, does it not?

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider performs in-depth, technical SEO web audits so that you don’t have to.

A desktop-based tool compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux, Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider can identify all sorts of technical issues with your website. This includes:

Finding broken links and server errors
Making it easy to bulk-export errors to fix or send off to a dev
Auditing all your redirects
Analyzing page titles and metadata
Spotting both exact duplicates and partially duplicated content
Generating XML sitemaps
Visualizing site architecture with tree graph diagrams

You can schedule audits to happen at certain intervals and get all the data automatically exported to your favorite spreadsheet system.

A hangup here is that you do need to be proficient at the technical side of SEO in order to use this tool. Otherwise, you’ll get an overwhelming amount of data you won’t know what to do with. But if you love getting into the nitty-gritty tech side of things, Screaming Frog is a must.

As a freemium service, you can use a lot of the basic tools for free but you’ll need to pay for a yearly license—about $250—before using the more advanced features. Check out the full pricing breakdown for more info.

Google is still the biggest search engine out there, by a long shot. So if you have a website and you want it to be found, you’ve got to make sure it’s ranking on Google SERPs.

This is where Google Search Console comes in. A free tool, Google Search Console gives you basic tools for monitoring your presence on Google Search. It helps with four basic functions:

Indexing issues: Identify crawl errors, excluded pages, and other indexing problems to make sure your content is getting discovered by search engines.
Search performance insights: Gather data on your website’s clicks, impressions, and ranking positions in SERPs.
User experience reports: Get detailed insights into mobile usability and Core Web Vitals to improve your site’s speed and accessibility.
Keyword data: See which queries drive traffic to your site and find opportunities to rank higher in search results.

There’s a tiny learning curve when you first link your website to Google Search Console, but you can find all sorts of videos on how to do it. Including right there on the Google Search Console homepage.

After that, it’s smooth sailing. For free.

As you’ve likely noticed, different tools perform different functions. If you’re not sure which website optimization tools to use for your site, use these criteria to help you get started.

Criteria 1: Functionality

Choose a tool that fits whatever goals you have in mind for your website. Is it sharper SEO rankings? Better UX? A firmer grasp on analytics? Look for a tool that matches up with that goal and start there.

You might be able to use it for all your goals, or maybe only for a few. Take advantage of free trials and money-back guarantees to see if the tool is a good fit for your website optimization efforts.

Criteria 2: Ease of Use

Great tools shouldn’t make your blood pressure shoot up through the roof. The best website optimization tools are intuitive and user-friendly. Look for a clean interface, helpful tutorials, and an onboarding experience that makes you practically feel like you’re having a spa day.

Okay, that’s probably a little too much to ask for, but we can dream, right?

Ease of use also applies to how seamlessly the tool integrates into your workflow. Whether you’re connecting it to Google Analytics, your CMS, or your word processor, the setup should feel smooth and easy.

Avoid tools that require hours of training or technical expertise unless you or your team feel ready, time and effort-wise, to take that on.

Criteria 3: Pricing and Value

Don’t strain your wallet just to try to optimize your website.

A lot of the tools on our list have free or low-cost features that are pretty robust. Others come with free trials or money-back guarantees. Take advantage of all of it!

If you’re ready to start optimizing your web content, jump right in with one of our top tools. Before you start, make sure you:

Set aside a chunk of time to learn the ropes for the tool(s) you pick so you can maximize your free trial/money-back period
Know where to find tutorials/information/customer support for the tool just in case you get stuck
Keep track of any high points or frustrations—the more documentation you have, the easier it’ll be to compare tools and know which ones will serve you best going forward

Ready to get started? Try one or all of our top three website optimization tools today.

Sign up for Mangools for free, no credit card needed, request a Clearscope demo, and try a 30-day free trial of Crazy Egg.

A more popular website is right around the corner.

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