Now the trick is to find the best free SEO tools that are right for you. These can be hard to find because there are so many websites that are promoting their free tools.
The easiest way for you to find these tools is to simply use Google or another search engine to find them. You will also want to make sure that they are reputable websites and not just using the words “free” in an effort to get people on their website.
When creating content online, it’s important to have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy alongside your content strategy. Doing so will ensure your posts are as optimized as possible. SEO tools can help you identify ways to improve the discoverability of your site.
Benefits of SEO
- Channel Share. Fifty-three percent of traffic to websites comes from organic search (source: BrightEdge Organic Channel report). Organic search delivers the most traffic to websites by a wide margin.
- Search Share. On average, 83 percent of the traffic from search engines comes from SEO, and 17 percent from paid search (source: BrightEdge internal data).
- Share of Focus. Even though organic search accounts for the majority of traffic, most companies spend more money on paid search. Paid search owned 15% of web search in 2019.
- Long-Term Traffic Equity. While SEO does require an upfront resource investment, SEO rankings, once earned, have long-term duration.
- Organic Traffic. SEO traffic has no media cost and can provide a substantial ROI – higher than most other channels. Search engines appreciate and reward content that is relevant to readers and written for them rather than for bots. Focus on optimizing for your target audience.
- Structure. Proper SEO helps organize your website and makes it easier for your visitors to navigate and transact.
- Alignment. Marketing works best when all channels are aligned on the same message – including organic search. Multiple channel alignment improves results in all channels.
- Brand Elevation. SEO success secures a share of voice on the search engine results pages, and this is an integral component of your brand and creating brand trust.
- Content Distribution. Focusing on SEO and legitimate link building leads you to develop relevant, useful content that people want to share and provides digital word of mouth.
- Global Reach. SEO has global reach and can even provide dynamic translation and localization that can bring in new and unexpected customers from all corners of the world.
That’s 10 solid reasons why SEO service should always have a prominent seat at the marketing mix
Search Console
Probably the most useful free SEO tool on this entire list, it’s hard to imagine doing modern SEO without access to the data inside Google’s Search Console. This is the most reliable location for information on how Google crawls and ranks your site, and is one of the only places where you can get reliable keyword data. Search Console limits downloads to 1000 rows, so also bookmark the free Search Console Data Exporter to download up to 25,000 rows at a time.
Get it: Search Console
Helpful Add-on: Search Analytics for Sheets
Keyword Surfer
Keyword Surfer is a free Chrome extension that pulls relevant keyword metrics into your browser as an overlay when using Google. You can toggle it on and off, and it’s a useful tool for your keyword discovery phase, where you are trying to understand where and how to concentrate your efforts.
The Keyword Surfer Chrome extension overlays information as you search, allowing you to see all the useful keyword metrics and trend information necessary to evaluate a keyword. Source: google.com.
Rank Math Plugin
Rank Math is a WordPress plugin that helps you optimize your website content. It lets you add meta titles, descriptions and structure your data more easily. Simply download and install this plugin to your WordPress website to begin using it.
Benefits
Rank Math gives your content an SEO score for each page. When you indicate what keyword you’re targeting, this plugin suggests ways to increase your ranking for that keyword. You can also identify and fix dead links on your site and redirect URLs to new pages.
Yoast SEO Plugin
The Yoast SEO plugin makes it easy to optimize your WordPress site and identify gaps in your content. If your site runs on WordPress, install and activate the Yoast plugin to begin.
Benefits
The Yoast plugin allows you to improve and modify your content in three ways: SEO, readability and social. With Yoast, you can set meta descriptions, titles, canonical URL, and label index/no-index pages and other backend settings on your site. This plugin will assign every post a readability score by measuring sentence and paragraph length and other criteria. And Yoast also has excellent features to help you improve the shareability of your posts on social media.
Google Trends
As the name suggests, Google Trends helps you track the popularity of topics and trends in your industry over time. Use this tool to identify current trends and use that information to craft a timely and relevant content marketing strategy.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest started out as a simple Google Suggest scraper, collecting and aggregating data from the suggested keywords in the search bar for keyword suggestions. It’s evolved into a fully-fledged SEO tool and remains free, providing keyword metrics including keyword difficulty scores.
Ubersuggest presents keywords from Google Suggest ordered by interest and with additional metrics like trends, search volume, estimated CPC, and keyword difficulty. Source: neilpatel.com/ubersuggest.
Moz.com
Moz Pro is a complete SEO tools suite that provides site crawl, keyword tracker, backlinks analysis, and domain lookups. It’s a paid tool, but offers free access to domain lookups where you get a view of competitors, top keywords, and even frequently asked questions relating to a site. A great place to go for a quick domain lookup.
The free domain lookup feature from Moz provides a great initial overview of a domain’s SEO characteristics and main keywords. Source: moz.com.
KWFinder
KWFinder stands out for its ease of use for building keyword lists. The free version gives you a limited number of keyword lookups per day, and the results pages will give you all the relevant metrics for your keywords.
KWFinder provides an easy-to-use keyword lookup providing all the metrics you need for evaluating a keyword. Source: KWFinder Software.
SEMrush
SEMrush is a paid tool providing a complete set of SEO and paid search features. It offers a free domain lookup feature giving you immediate access to a comprehensive view of a domains’ activity in organic and paid search. It illustrates paid search strategies at a glance.
In this domain lookup of amazon.com, the organic versus paid search trend is clear, and SEMrush provides at-a-glance strategic insight. Source: semrush.com.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a source for many free tools. It’s free within Google Ads, which provides access to keyword research and metrics. You can use it both as a domain lookup tool and as a list generator from seed keywords. It provides rough metrics for volumes and CPCs. It’s intended for building paid search campaigns but anyone with a Google account can access and use the tool.
You can do a lot of your keyword research using the free Google Keyword Planner tool. All you need is a Google account. Source: ads.google.com.
AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic is a great tool. Its homepage is worth a visit whether you’re looking for keywords or not, simply for the experience. The tool analyzes related search queries when you enter a keyword and displays them on relationship charts. This allows you to understand semantic relationships and define keyword categories and relevant questions that your content should provide answers to.
AnswerThePublic is a great tool for keyword research since it helps you ask questions and categorize topics and keywords. Source: answerthepublic.com.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC), previously known as Google Webmasters, helps you understand how Google crawls and indexes your site. To use the Google Search Console, create an account and add your website as a property within the account. Once you’ve added your domain, verify you’re the site owner before you can access all of its features.
Benefits
There are several features to highlight about Google Search Console, one of which is that it can help you diagnose technical errors on your website. It can also help you understand what keywords or content are ranking for your site.
Bing Webmaster Tools
An often overlooked tool, Bing Webmaster also has a full suite of analytics to help you analyze your website and search analytics. Create your free Bing Webmaster Tools account, add your website and verify your ownership of the site. Then create or upload your sitemaps. Once complete, you’re able to start optimizing your site and its content using Bing Webmaster Tools’ features and suggestions.
Benefits
Bing Webmaster Tools can provide useful keyword research, reporting, and can crawl your website to identify issues. It’s a good way to get a virtual second opinion on your site or find any new information that Google Search Console didn’t reveal.
Google Analytics
To know if your SEO efforts are working, you need to analyze your site’s findability to see where your traffic is coming from. You may notice a spike in traffic after making post optimizations, but that traffic could be coming from another source like social media. Google Analytics provides you with in-depth details about your website visitors, as well as real-time activity.
With an existing Google account, sign in to Google Analytics and connect with your website. To get the most helpful SEO information, pair it with your Google Console account. When you link the two tools, you’ll be able to see the keywords people are using to find your site, identify your click-through rates on those keywords, and more.
Benefits
Google Analytics lets you see how people interact with your website. Using Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see how many people are visiting your site, where your traffic is coming from, how long people are spending on the page and so much more.
SpyFu
Initially a competitive keyword research tool for paid and organic search, SpyFu has evolved into a platform that provides a broad range of features, including search data and backlinks analysis, and rank tracking.
SpyFu will identify your competitors and look at the keyword overlap sections where you can find your strengths and weaknesses and of course identify opportunities and priorities for your organic and paid search. Source: Spyfu Software.
AlsoAsked.com
AlsoAsked.com must have been inspired by AnswerThePublic. It takes the concept of questions one step further, looks up additional queries, and finds more questions. It’s in itself a categorization tool that outputs a number of questions that can guide your content strategy.
When querying AlsoAsked.com for “amazon marketing,” the tool provides several iterations of questions which are categorized around various concepts like “the marketing Amazon does for itself,” “what you need to do to market your company on Amazon,” and more. Source: alsoasked.com.
Bing Webmaster Tools
While Google Webmaster Tools gets all the glory, folks forget that Bing Webmaster offers a full suite of website and search analytics. Especially useful are keyword reports, keyword research, and crawling data.
Get it: Bing Webmaster
Also useful: Yandex.Webmaster
Data Studio
If you need to merge data from different sources (say Search Console and Google Analytics), visualize it, and share it – this is Google Data Studio’s comfort zone. For an idea of all the SEO tasks and dashboards that you can build for free, check out these Google Data Studio Resources from Lee Hurst.
Get it: Data Studio
Enhanced Google Analytics Annotations
How do you know if your dip in traffic (or rise) is associated with a Google Algorithm update, or perhaps a major holiday? This is a highly-recommended Google Chrome plugin that overlays additional data on top of your analytics, so you can easily send screenshots to clients showing exactly how outside forces impacted traffic.
Get it: Enhanced Google Analytics Annotations
Alternatives: Panguin Tool, Zeo Tools
Conclusion
While SEO is a crucial part of the content process, it works best when combined with other marketing strategies like content and social media marketing. You’ll get the most out of your optimizations when using both SEO and social monitoring software together. And these free SEO tools help you build a foundation to these strategies.
The best SEO Tools can increase your online visibility and help you achieve higher rankings. It is an important part of on-page SEO. The free SEO tools will also help you to get traffic from search engines.