If you’re looking to create long-term brand awareness, expand your target audience, and earn more revenue, then search engine optimization is crucial. The benefits of SEO to your business can not be overemphasized amongst which are: gives a competitive advantage, targets quality traffic, drives traffic to your website E.t.c
SEO is an essential part of any marketing strategy. And, if done correctly, SEO can be the difference between making $100 or $100.000 per year in revenue.,However, search engine optimization (SEO) tools can run into thousands of dollars, putting many of these premium tools out of reach for smaller businesses. That doesn’t make it impossible to implement and see through an excellent SEO strategy, though.
In this article, We’ve put together a list of the top fifteen best SEO tools that identify keywords, monitor page rankings, evaluate backlinks, and more, and the good thing is that all these tools are free.
But just before we dive in, WHAT ARE SEO TOOLS?SEO tools are basically software that helps you with the search engine optimization process. They collect data from your website and give you insights making it easier for you to improve it. Using these SEO tools correctly can help you rank higher in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. SEO tools are all about improving your rankings by enhancing the quality of your content and optimizing the way search engines see your website. Over time, this will significantly impact your business as more people will start finding you online!
Below is a list of fifteen(15) FREE SEO tools that we will be discussing in this article:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Ubersuggest
- SEOBILITY
- Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
- Ahrefs’ SEO toolbar
- Ahrefs Backlink Checker
- Google Ads Keyword Planner
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Animalz Revive
- Exploding Topics
- Google’s page speed insight
- WooRank
- Local SEO Checklist
- Answer the Public
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. It is a powerful free SEO tool available today. It offers almost all the data needed to identify how your potential customers navigate your website and where they go when they leave after reading one of your blog posts (or not).
How Does Google Analytics Help SEO? Google Analytics contains valuable data that your business can use to monitor (and improve) SEO performance) from keywords to your website’s top referrals and so much more. It gives you access to a wide range of data that you can use to improve your SEO. It lets you track and analyze data about your site and visitors.
Google Analytics tracks three types of activity on your site:
- Pageviews: This is activated each time someone visits a page on your site.
- Events: This is activated when someone takes an action on your site.
- Transactions: This is activated when a visitor buys something on your site.
Google Analytics is a tool that cannot be ignored when it comes to the subject of SEO.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.
How Does Google Search Console Work?
Google Search works in essentially three stages:
- Crawling: Google searches the web with automated programs called crawlers, looking for pages that are new or updated. Google stores those page addresses (or page URLs) in a big list to look at later. We find pages by many different methods, but the main method is following links from pages that we already know about.
- Indexing: Google visits the pages that it has learned about by crawling, and tries to analyze what each page is about. Google analyzes the content, images, and video files on the page, trying to understand what the page is about. This information is stored in the Google index, a huge database that is stored on many computers.
- Serving search results: When a user searches on Google, Google tries to determine the highest quality results. The “best” results have many factors, including things such as the user’s location, language, device (desktop or phone), and previous queries. For example, searching for “bicycle repair shops” would show different answers to a user in Paris than it would to a user in Hong Kong. Google doesn’t accept payment to rank pages higher, and ranking is done algorithmically.
Google search console is packed full of super awesome features that further accelerate your SEO.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a keyword research tool that pulls all the possible search queries for your topic based on Google suggestions. It is an all-in-one SEO tool designed to help you win in the game of SEO.
This SEO tool can be helpful when you don’t want to reinvent the wheel with regards to coming up with keywords but need some new ideas or inspiration. It’s also useful if you’re looking for words and phrases related to your niche which are currently popular in terms of search volume.
To use it, type in a keyword that you want to rank for (or a competing website that you want to rank above).
You can get information on your competitors’ top keywords and sites and produce up to three reports each day. You’ll get practical tools for outranking your competitors, as well as new keyword suggestions based on what they’re doing.
It’s important to note that Ubersuggest is a great alternative to the Google Keyword Planner tool.
SEOBILITY
Seobility is an online SEO software for better website optimization. Seobility checks your complete website, by crawling all linked pages. All found pages with errors, problems with the on-page optimization, or problems regarding the page content like duplicate content are collected and displayed in each check section.
SEObility crawls your entire site and lets you know about search engine optimization issues like Slow loading pages, Blocked pages, Sitemap problems. Technical SEO issues e.t.c
SEObility has amazing features such as:
- SEO Checker gives you insights into spelling and grammar issues, broken outbound links, page loading time, and other technical SEO issues that you can readily address. Apart from auditing your SEO performance, it also features a number of tools that help you improve SEO.
- Keyword Checker analyzes how effectively keywords are deployed on a given webpage. It helps address a number of questions: Does your keyword show up in the first 120 characters of the meta-description? Does it show up in image attributes? Is your keyword part of an H1 heading? You get a Keyword Score percentage based on the answers to these questions and tell you how much you can improve.
- Ranking Checker which checks your website rankings for any keyword in Google’s search results for different countries or at the city level. Desktop and Mobile as well.
Google’s Mobile Friendly Test
Over half of all web traffic today is generated by mobile devices. If your site focuses on particular niches like technology, your own ratio of mobile traffic will likely be higher. This makes a great mobile experience essential. Because search engines factor in mobile-friendliness, it has a direct impact on your page ranking.
If your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you’re in big trouble. Fortunately, you don’t need a full-time developer to make your site mobile-friendly. All you need to do is run your site through the Mobile-Friendly Test tool. And it tells you whether or not Google considers your site mobile-friendly.
One of the best features of this tool is the “Page loading issues” This feature shows you how you can improve your site’s code. That way, Google’s mobile crawler can find and index all of the resources on your site.
Ahrefs’ SEO toolbar
Ahrefs SEO Toolbar is a free extension for Chrome and Firefox that provides useful SEO data about the pages and websites you visit. This amazing tool will make you know why your competitors rank at the top. Also, you’ll find about the work you require to complete for outranking them.
Now you have the ability to find the right keywords to which your competitors rank under organic searches.
Ahrefs SEO Toolbar has Key features such as:
- On-page SEO report
- Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
- Broken link checker
- Link highlighter
- SERP positions
It’s worthy to note that one of the limitations of this tool is that the Technical and on-page SEO features are free, but you’ll need an Ahrefs account to see SEO metrics within the SERPs.
Aherfs Backlink Checker
Backlinks are a key measure of how well your content is performing. A high number of quality backlinks boosts your site authoritativeness, bringing your results to the top of the Google search page.
Backlinks — also known as ‘inbound links’ or ‘ external links’ — refer to links on one website pointing to another website. Building up the number of high-quality backlinks to your site is like getting votes of confidence for your page. Because sites with a high amount of backlinks often rank high in the SERPs, link building is a crucial part of your SEO efforts.
The Aherfs Backlink Checker gives you an all-in-one dashboard for backlinks to your website. You get a breakdown of backlinks by domain type and can view the top 100 backlinks for each domain type. You also get a number of insights about backlink quality, including whether the backlinks do-follow or no-follow links, the domain rating of the backlinking site, lost and new backlinks, and more.
A great way to use this tool is to paste your competitor’s website and find potential link-building opportunities.
Google Ads Keyword Planner
Solid keyword research underpins every successful SEO strategy. After all, to drive increased traffic from Google, or to run a profitable Google Ads campaign, you need to know what your audience is searching for and base your growth strategy around this.
If you don’t know how searchers are looking for the products you sell, the services you offer, or the information and expertise which you are sharing, you are working blind.
How To Use The Google Ads Keyword Planner tool:
The tool is simply used by entering a keyword or group of keywords into the tool, and Google Keyword Planner will return all sorts of helpful stats to guide your keyword strategy: monthly search volume, competition, and even suggested terms you might not have considered.
It is important to note that Google Keyword Planner gives you keyword suggestions but does a very little extra. If you want analytics or other integrated functionality, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider :
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that helps you improve onsite SEO, by extracting data & auditing for common SEO issues.
This tool crawls your site using a Google-like crawler. And it generates a report of potential issues (like HTTP header errors, javascript rendering issues, bloated HTML, and crawl errors).
Some of the key features of this Tool Includes:
- Find Broken Links, Errors & Redirects
- Analyse Page Titles & Meta Data
- Review Meta Robots & Directives
- Audit hreflang Attributes
- Discover Exact Duplicate Pages
- Site Visualisations etc.
Animalz Revive
Quality content has a long lifespan and typically continues to generate traffic for months or even years. However, over time, a lot of your older material might start to drop in rankings because newer, more relevant material has been published on the topic.
Animalz Revive helps you find older content on your site that needs an update, an upgrade… or both. Before this tool, you had to manually comb through your Google Analytics account to find these pages. Which was a giant pain.
Here’s how it works:
- Authenticate: You’ll need to authenticate your Google Analytics account. Animalz revives will never share or sell your data.
- Analyze: Your site will be analyzed to look for content decay. The results will be emailed to you..
- Update: You will be told which articles should be refreshed.
Animalz Revive doesn’t tell you how to update your content. It just gives you a strong indication that you should do so.
Exploding Topics
This tool helps you discover Trends before they start trending. It bubbles up topics that are just starting to trend. That way, you can create content around these emerging trends (or optimize your old content around a new keyword).
SEOs often target topics with high search volume, but that means targeting topics that are already popular. What if you could find and target topics right before they hit the mainstream? This tool will help you achieve this.
The ‘’Categories ‘’feature of this tool lets you drill down to a specific topic category that’s important to your business. For example, let’s say you are running marketing for a Cryptocurrency brand, You just Type in ‘crypto’ and get a list of emerging topics in that Niche.
Google’s page speed insight
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool to help you analyze your website’s performance and get suggestions to make it better. Since Google rewards pages that load faster, improving your site’s speed can lead to better rankings.
It reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices and provides easy-to-understand suggestions on how that page can be improved.
Google PageSpeed Insights has The Following Features:
- Provides a performance score that summarizes your page’s performance
- Results are based on real-world field data
- Provides suggestions on how to improve the page’s performance metrics
WooRank
WooRank is an automated website reviewing tool with advanced SEO auditing and monitoring, keyword tracking, competitive analysis, and a powerful site crawl. With WooRank you can easily monitor your SEO health and get actionable advice and insights to optimize your website.
Your website gets an overall score out of 100 based on three factors:
- Accessibility-considers page load time and site access
- Readability- assesses how easily search engine crawlers can ingest data from your site.
- Quality – evaluates the actual human user experience.
You can use WooRank to simplify your digital marketing by tracking and analyzing your site’s SEO, social media, usability, and other critical factors.
Some Key Features of Woorank Includes:
- See all your important SEO data in one place
- Track your SEO strategy’s success by knowing where you rank for target keywords
- Discover and fix how Google interprets your website for use in search results
- Identify and qualify leads and create sales pitches based on real website data
Local SEO Checklist
Yoast SEO is a comprehensive WordPress SEO tool. It optimizes your WordPress website and webpages to rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs). It offers a range of features you can use to leverage meta descriptions, title tags and keywords and push your content to the front page.
How does Yoast improve your SEO?
Yoast SEO simplifies content optimization for search engines by:
- Providing SEO analysis, so you know where to improve your website’s SEO
- Helping you set a keyword and optimize your content for it
- Monitoring the content’s age — so you can update it when required
- Performing a readability assessment so you can optimize your writing for the target audience e.t.c
To use this Tool, Enter the main keyword for your blog post and Yoast SEO will suggest how to tweak your blog post to optimize it for search engines.
Answer the Public
Search engines are a way to answer questions, and Answer the Public Works with this idea to great extent. It breaks down the questions people search for, converting these into sets of keywords you can use to help you create content and write web copy.
AnswerThePublic is a keyword research tool that gives you visualizations of search questions and suggested autocomplete searches. The results are organized in categories like what, where, and why, giving an overview of the questions people are typing into search engines across various devices.
How Does This Tool work?
Enter any relevant keyword, and Answer the Public will provide a huge list of long-tail keyword opportunities, plus common questions asked.
Conclusion:
Above, is a list of 15 SEO tools that can help you increase your organic traffic. The good thing is that these tools are free.
The truth is, there’s no magic bullet for SEO. Quality content, continuous engagement, and good backlinks are the only real ways to long-term success. However, these free SEO tools can go a long way towards ensuring that you have your bases covered, addressing everything from keyword research to local SEO to mobile optimization.
