Have you ever wanted to improve your blog’s SEO? Or maybe you’re an SEO consultant who wants a killer tool for analysis. There are a lot of SEO related tools you can use – which ones should you use?
In this post I’ll show you some free online SEO analysis tools that you might find useful.
Readability Test Tool
In the SEO world, things like keyword density and backlinks tend to get the lion’s share of attention. But at the end of the day, what really matters is whether or not people find your content interesting and informative. The best way to reach a wider audience in this arena is to focus on readability, or making your content as digestible as possible so that visitors, both young and old, native or foreign will want to spend more time on your site.
The Readability Test Tool is a quick and simple service that analyzes the content of your site and spits out a results score that shows the youngest age of reader who could read and comprehend the content. A grade level of 4, for example, could be easily understood by 9-10-year-olds. Ideally, you’ll want to aim for grade levels between 6 and 8, but as long as you don’t creep too high, you’ll do just fine.
The Readability Test Tool is a final stage service that lets you put the finishing touches on any piece of written content. By drawing in a wider audience with less technical jargon, shorter sentences, and more direct language, you’ll increase the engagement rate and encourage visitors to stick around and read a few more pieces of content before clicking away.
- Tool Type: Text analysis
- Price: Free
KWFinder
It doesn’t matter what type of content you create or how far your social media reach extends, one thing all bloggers obsess over is SEO difficulty. Should you go after the long tails with a low impact but less competition? How about aiming for the high end and duking it out with the big publications? There’s no single answer for this quandary, which is why services like KWFinder are so crucial to your success.
KWFinder is an easy to use SEO research tool that aims to deliver the perfect keywords straight to your screen. It analyzes backlink quantity (among other things) for any given phrase to help determine the overall difficulty of those keywords, giving you an idea of how much time and effort you’ll need to spend to capture a piece of that SEO pie. With that information in hand, you can continue your research with the company’s other tools, including SERPChecker and LinkMiner.
Long tail keywords are the hidden gems of the SEO world. KWFinder helps you uncover the right ones for your business so you can spend less time fretting and allocating more time to reaching success. It also has an extremely user-friendly interface, which is always a nice touch.
- Tool Type: SEO keyword difficulty researcher
- Price: Free with plan upgrades
SEO SiteCheckup
Are you one of those people who think that search engine optimization is a complex, advanced process that can never be solved?
I know where you’re coming from. I used to be in the same position as you. But, through experience and the use of the right tools, things began to come together for me.
One tool that I suggest you use is SEO SiteCheckup. It provides a variety of features, including, but not limited to:
- Analysis of SEO issues
- SEO monitoring
- Competition monitoring
- Ability to create SEO reports
If you want to see what this tool is all about, get started by running your first free search. This is as simple as typing your URL into the search box on the home page. The results are listed for easy review:
If you’re lucky, your website will receive a perfect score. This means that you’re doing everything right, from an SEO perspective.
Of course, this isn’t something that you should expect. There’s a good chance that you’ll need to address at least one issue within your SEO campaign, such as the “headings status.”
Pro tip: running a site check-up is only the first step. If it turns up any problems, click the “how to fix” button, for advice on resolving the problem.
With this digital marketing tool, you’ll always know where your site stands, from an SEO perspective. If you follow the advice as outlined, you can rid your site of lingering SEO campaign problems, with the hopes of pushing towards the top of the search engine rankings.
Google Search Console
Are you using this free and powerful search engnine optimization tool?
I can’t tell you how many times I have asked people if they are using Google Search Console, just to be surprised by their answer: no!
Yet another free digital marketing tool by Google, this is one that will give you a clear idea of how your site is performing, and it’s a must for every small business.
The dashboard will give you a solid overview of your site’s health:
This is a good jumping-off point, but you’ll want to dig deeper. The search traffic tab, for example, can give you to information regarding:
- Search Analytics
- Links to Your Site
- Internal Links
- Manual Actions
- International Targeting
- Mobile Usability
Search analytics is one of my favorites, as it allows you to “analyze your performance on Google Search.” You can search for data in many ways:
Of course, Google Search Console is one of the best and most accurate ways of tracking links to your site. And. as you know, this is imperative to ranking high in the search engines. Be sure to track not only the number of links, but also how your data is linked and which pages have the most links.
With Google Search Console, the more you dig, the more you’ll find. And, remember this: your data is updated on the fly, so don’t be afraid to review your dashboard at least once a day.
SpyFu
Have you ever heard the saying “keep your friends close and your enemies closer?”
This isn’t to suggest that your small business competitors are enemies, but instead to explain that it’s a good idea to know what they’re doing, in regards to search engine optimization and digital marketing.
While there is a lot that you can do on your own, you only have so much time for tracking and reviewing your top competitors, as a small business. This is why you want to rely on a tool, like SpyFu.
With this in your digital marketing toolbox, you can quickly see what your competitors are up to.
Head to the tool’s homepage and type in the URL of any website.
From there, run your search and wait for the information to be displayed (it only takes a couple of seconds.)
If you wanted to learn more about my website, a search would turn up a report page that looks like this:
But, that’s just the start. You can continue down the results page, collecting data related to:
- Shared keywords
- Top keywords
- Ranking history
- Inbound links
So, what if I know what the competition is doing?
There’s no doubt that you want to spend more time focused on the effectiveness of the SEO campaign of your small business and less time on the competition. But, that doesn’t mean that you should turn a blind eye.
With the help of SpyFu, you can do things, such as:
- Uncover new keywords to attempt to rank for.
- Determine if you or your competition are having more success for a particular keyword or keyword phrase.
- Learn more about a competitor’s link profile, thus giving you the opportunity to secure the same links.
Start with a couple of your top competitors and then move on from there. Soon enough, you’ll know who your biggest threats are, when it comes to ranking your website.
Cyfe
What method do you employ to track all of the data that’s related to your business?
Like many, you may not have an answer to this question. Instead, you move from one tool to the next, to pull data and review numbers.
If you’re tired of wasting time on this, you’ll want to learn more about Cyfe. As one of the most user-friendly business dashboard solutions, you can get up and running in no time at all. And, since it’s free of charge, you might as well give it a try.
Cyfe sells itself as a tool that brings together all of your business metrics in one place. You don’t have to separately log into each application to track your data. This is the old school way of doing things.
The main reason that I like Cyfe is the fact that it has one of the largest integration libraries of all of the business dashboard providers. It connects to a long list of social networks and applications, such as:
- YouTube
- Google Analytics
- Stripe
- Zendesk
- Salesforce
- Shopify
And, that’s just the start. Chances are good that if you’re pulling data from a source, it can be integrated into your Cyfe dashboard using their pre-configured widgets. And if they don’t have the widget you’re looking for, then it’s simple enough to build your own.
If you’re anything like me, you enjoy tracking and comparing data, as often as possible, but you don’t enjoy spending hours on this task. That’s why you should create a Cyfe dashboard, before the end of the year.
Social Mention
When it comes to search engine optimization and social networks, there are a few things that you need to know. It’s hard to quantify the exact impact of a sound social media marketing strategy on search engine rankings, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Even if your social media marketing strategy doesn’t directly impact your rankings, it will help enhance your brand. As a result, your social media marketing strategy will eventually pay off.
Social Mention provides “real-time social media search and analysis.” It’s one of the most basic tools on this list, but that doesn’t mean that it offers nothing of real value. Especially for helping to understand how to navigate your social media marketing strategy more effectively.
In addition to clicking on one of the many trends below the search box, you can also run a unique search for any keyword or keyword phrase.
After doing so, you’ll be presented with a list of recent social network mentions. This is accompanied by a data box that looks something like this:
You’re given access to other information, as well, such as sources, top hashtags, and top keywords and keyword phrases.
You can use this tool in many ways. For example, you can use it to track brand mentions. As you come across these, you are presented with the opportunity to engage with your audience.
Or, maybe you’ll use Social Mention to keep tabs on your competition, knowing that you can learn more about them, with the idea of “one upping” them in the near future.
You can do a lot of digging around on social networks, without the help of high-powered tools. However, this can be a time consuming process that doesn’t produce any hard data for your SEO campaign.
If you want to track social network mentions, without wasting time, there aren’t many small business, social media marketing tools that offer higher quality or more in-depth data.
Ahrefs.
Ahrefs is one of my favorite SEO tools on the market. Not only is it the second-fastest web crawler (only behind Google) but it has the best user interface out of all tools on this list.
It’s primarily used for backlink audits, competitive analysis, URL rankings, keyword research, and more. Like SEMrush, Ahrefs also offers organic search reports to analyze the traffic of your competitors’ sites.
Users then use that extracted data for link building, keyword research, SEO strategies, rank tracking, and content marketing.
I use Ahrefs every day to check on new backlinks, my keyword’s search positions, and check out competitor insights.
I especially love their keyword explorer tool, which allows you to see keyword difficulty and related keywords that “also rank” for target phrases.
All these impressive features make Ahrefs a highly competitive SEO tool used by numerous SEO professionals and entrepreneurs worldwide.
KEY FEATURES:
- Amazing Keyword Tools – Ahrefs generates millions of keywords on a single research query.
- Ranking History – You can see the ranking history of any keyword used on any page of your website.
- Content Explorer – You can do a content search within the Ahrefs database that contains more than 1 billion web pages.
- Monitor Outbound Links – Ahrefs shows outgoing links report in the site explorer. This helps you keep proper track of where your guest posts are linking.
PRICING:
You can test out the product by opting for the 7-day trial for $7. After that, you can upgrade to the subscription plans start from $99 and range up to $999.
USED FOR:
- Getting website improvement tips for increased visibility and ranking
- To get a clear backlinks analysis report
- To know the URL rating
- To get historical backlink data analysis
- To build a content strategy
CONS:
- Lack of automated client-facing reports if you’re running an agency.
Conclusion
Are you a blogger who wants to boost your traffic? Improve your rankings? Earn a freelancing job writing for other people? Then this is the best post for you. In this post, I tricked everyone by including “Buzzwords” like SEO, meta tags, keywords…and even an infographic. And now that I have their attention, it’s time to show you some useful things you can do to dramatically improve your blog traffic, rankings, and rank/traffic value—for free with popular SEO tools!