There are many seo tools available at your disposal that can help you track, optimize, analyze and measure your online traffic. Have you ever wondered what seo tools are out there that will help you achieve your goals? The following are some of the helpful seo tools for freelancers you should consider to craft the best marketing strategies for your business.
You’ll probably agree that the best SEO tools for freelancers are those that allow us to do serious research on our clients, documentation and track clients from beginning to end. In this article I’m going to show you how you can use a few of my favorite web-based tools to dig up information about your client or client’s business/website, then track them for improvement over time.
Why would you need an SEO tool?
If you are an SMB owner, spending too much time on the all-important SEO means you will not have time available for other areas of your business (or personal life). In that case, having a monitoring tool with only the most important metrics such as backlinks and keywords might be the best way to go.
If you are a freelancer, it often comes down to personal preference and finances. However, there are cases where clients might insist on reports using some specific tools, if your area of expertise is digital marketing, for example. In these cases, you would also have to consider their choice of preference.
In any case, there are two metrics of utmost importance: the quality of the data you get and your time. High-quality and reliable SEO tools speed up your research process and allow you to browse tons of relevant data, helping you get more industry insights.
Factors to consider when picking the best SEO tool
To pick what is best for you, you should take into consideration several factors. Do you run a large corporation that needs a full-blown SEO suite that a team of experts can use? Are you a digital agency looking for the best ROI for your corporate clients? Alternatively, are you a freelancer helping local businesses?
In any case, you can begin by answering these few questions:
- What is my specific purpose of using an SEO tool?
- What is my budget?
- How advanced am I?
- What is my personal preference?
- What does the client want?
Giving specific answers to these questions is a valuable exercise because it can impact your campaigns and have a positive influence on your bottom line. You have heard the cliché “there is no one-size-fits-all solution.” Still, you see many new entrepreneurs going for high-end (and sometimes too complicated) tools. The following paragraph will explore some of the best SEO tools out there, so you can see their offer and decide whether they are too complicated or just right for you.
Technical SEO
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog has a very handy free version, but if you’ve got a sizeable website it’s worth shelling out for the paid version. Screaming Frog crawls your site and shows you broken links, analyzes your title tags and meta descriptions and gives you a full view of your backlinks and internal links. It can also generate custom robots.txt files and XML Sitemaps. The premium version also allows you to integrate Screaming Frog with Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Price: Around $190 USD per year.
Sitebulb
Sitebulb will crawl your site and deliver a list of technical recommendations based on more than 300 technical SEO checks. It will find URLs hidden by robots.txt, URLs that aren’t being tracked by Google Analytics, broken links, images missing alt text and canonicals that point to noindex pages, among other technical SEO snafus. Sitebulb will also produce data on page speed and crawl depth, and presents all its data in easy visualizations. While other technical SEO tools can identify the same issues Sitebulb tackles, few do it with a nicer UI.
Price: Around $340 USD per year.
Whitespark
Whitespark is a must-have for local SEO. The tool will find all your local citations, uncover the gaps in your citations, examine your competitors and monitor your monthly citation growth. You can also do comparative searches to find citations your competitors are getting that you aren’t. It’s affordable for local business, with small business plans starting at just $17 USD per month.
Price: From $17 USD for 20 searches per day and 5 projects to $80 USD per year for 100 searches per day and 100 projects.
WebCEO
WebCEO has a full suite of features, including keyword research tools, backlink analysis and social media analytics. But we’re focusing on its technical SEO tools, which can run regular audits on your site to check for common technical errors, server issues and site usability issues such as slow page load speeds, missing and broken images and orphaned pages. It also spoon-feeds you solutions for your technical SEO problems, walking you through instructions on how to fix each issue.
Price: From $39 USD per year for 1 project to $299 USD per year for up to 30 projects.
Keyword Research Tools
Keyword Planner
A strong keyword tool is a must-have for any freelance SEO specialist. Keyword Planner from google may be the best – it provides useful keyword word data, such as competition, search volume and average cost for advertisers. You can also gain insight into variants of your main keywords and niche-specific keywords to help with targeting.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is an excellent alternative to Google’s Keyword Planner. It provides more data than Planner does, and it’s possible to arrange the suggestions to your preferences, like search volume, seasonality or cost per click data. The best part, is it’s completely free!
SEObooks’s Rank Checker
SEObook’s Rank Checker allows you to identify and export target search terms as they’re ranked in Google and Yahoo.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics seems to fall into all categories, providing data on keyword strength, social impact and competitive research. It guarantees quality results.
Long Tail Pro
Long Tail Pro is probably the most popular SEO tool among SEO specialists beyond Keyword Planner. This tool provides keyword data such as search traffic, and helps judge the performance of your competitor websites by offering information on their page/domain authority (PA/DA).
Keywordtool.io
Keywordtool.io is similar to Ubersuggest. A keyword search reveals more than 700 content ideas relevant to the keyword.
Competitor SEO Tools
SEMRush
SEMRush is a comprehensive SEO tool, providing comprehensive reports on the performance of your website and competitors’ websites. It’s also useful at analyzing the performance of search terms used in an SEO strategy.
Rival IQ
Rival IQ is purely a competitor research platform. It accepts competitor domains and then crawls the websites to find out the number of backlinks in the domains, their authority, SEO titles, organic search traffic and much more. This feature has made it an excellent tool for performing SEO audits.
Similar Web
Similar Web is used for comparing the amount of traffic on two different websites. It has become a valuable competitor research tool.
Conclusion
Are you doing SEO but still haven’t made any money? If you’re looking to join the ranks of the seo freelancers, then it’s important that you have a tool that will allow you to quickly test websites with free options. The tools below are some of the best SEO tools for freelancers.