Whether you’re a total beginner or a WordPress expert, there are countless free and affordable tools that can help you manage and update your website. Whether it’s your blog, portfolio, client management system, forum, or landing page, this directory of tools will get you up and running with the applications you deserve.
Want to spend a lot of time or money on your website? You might have a great idea but what will you do to improve your site’s ranking? In this article, I’ll show you some easy ways to ensure that you’re getting as much as possible from your website. It’s all done with simple tools that everyone with access to the internet can easily use!
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a collection of services you can use to figure out how the search engine views your website. This service provides you with a wide array of free SEO tools, covering many different aspects of optimization.
For example, Google Search Console enables you to check out any crawling errors that have occurred on your website so you can correct them right away. It can also point out when your site is affected by malware, what keyword phrases people are using to find your site, the backlinks you’ve received, and more.
The many features this service offers makes it a near necessity if you’re concerned about your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings. There’s a clear focus on Google results here, but don’t worry. If you can rank well on Google, the chances are high that you’ll also do OK in other search engines.
As far as actually using the service goes, Google Search Console is very simple to understand. It’s also easy to add your website and get started, so there are no reasons to avoid it.
Key Features:
- Monitor how Google perceives your website.
- Keep track of what keywords visitors are using to reach you.
- Stay on top of any crawl, meta tag, or sitemap errors.
- Update your robots.txt file.
- Monitor your site’s backlinks.
- Get alerts if your site is infected with malware.
Price: Free!
BuzzStream
BuzzStream offers you a collection of tools to help with domain research, email marketing, and project management. It’s a very all-in-one type of platform, and the sheer number of options it provides can be intimidating. With that in mind, let’s focus on how it can help you tackle your SEO needs.
When it comes to research, BuzzStream can help you collate lists of results for the keywords you look into. Then it provides you with information about each of those websites, including overall rankings, related social media accounts, domain age and authority, and more.
In practice, you can use these features to help you do a thorough SEO audit, researching who your competitors are and the content they’re publishing. Moreover, it can even help you create lists of their authors and what each one is up to, so you can keep an even closer eye on their strategies.
Key Features:
- Research your competitors based on any keywords you want to target.
- Collect data about domain age and authority for specific websites.
- Find out what your competitors’ rankings are in the SERPs.
- Locate the social media accounts for your competition’s sites.
- Create lists of authors who write for competing websites and follow what they’re doing.
Price: BuzzStream plans start at $24 per month.
Ahrefs: SEO Keyword Tool
Ahrefs is one of the most recommended SEO tools online. It’s only second to Google when it comes to being the largest website crawlers. SEO experts can’t get enough of Ahrefs’ Site Audit feature as it’s the best SEO analysis tool around. The tool highlights what parts of your website need improvements to rank better in search engines. From a competitor analysis perspective, you’ll likely use Ahrefs to determine your competitor’s backlinks to use them as a starting point for your own brand. You can also use this SEO tool to find the most linked to content within your niche, check and fix broken links on your website,and get an overview of your best-performing pages (so you can see what information is drawing in the visitors).
Syed Irfan Ajmal, a Growth Marketing Manager at Ridester, loves the SEO keyword tool Ahrefs. He shares, “Ahrefs is surely our most favorite tool when it comes to various facets of SEO such as keyword research, rank tracking, competitor research, SEO audit, viral content research and much more. We add our site and those of our competitors to it. The tool then shows us the sites which have backlinked to our competitors but not us. This helps us find great link opportunities. But this wouldn’t have been so easy if Ahrefs didn’t have the largest database of backlinks. Ahrefs has been instrumental in getting our site ranked for several major keywords, and getting us to 350,000 visitors per month.”
SEMRush: Marketing SEO Tools
Marketing SEO tools like SEMRush tend to be fan favorites in the SEO community. Experts love that they let you easily assess your rankings as well as identify changes and new ranking opportunities. One of the most popular features of this SEO tool is the Domain Vs Domain analysis, which allows you to easily compare your website to your competitors. If you’re looking for analytics reports to help you better understand your website’s search data, traffic, or even your competitors, you’ll be able to compare keywords and domains. The On-Page SEO Checker tool allows you to easily monitor your rankings and find some recommendations on how to improve your website’s performance.
Liraz Postan, Senior SEO & Content Manager at Outbrain, recommends SEMRush as one of the best SEO tools. She says, “My favorite SEO tool is SEMrush with the feature of “organic traffic insights”. This feature lets me see all my leading articles with one dashboard, along with related keywords, social shares and word count. This gives me a quick overview of what’s working and where to optimize. I generally use SEMrush on my daily work, love this tool, and love using its site audit to optimize our site health. We improved our site health by 100% more since we started using SEMrush, and we increased conversions by 15% more from our content pages.”
Google PageSpeed Insights
Check the speed and usability of your site on multiple devices
Limitations: None
Enter a URL and this tool will test the loading time and performance for that URL on desktop and mobile. It then grades your site’s performance on a score from 0 – 100. It tells you exactly how fast it takes to load the site according to different metrics, and also suggests areas for improvements.
Conclusion
There’s a lot a website can do that doesn’t have anything to do with being optimized for search engine results. Sure, the code for your webpage is important, but you can actually improve your site without making coding changes or having any knowledge of coding whatsoever. Just think about some of the stuff you do on your site that users respond well to: