SEO is one of the best ways for a business to boost its online visibility. There are several software solutions out there that will help your website gain a spot among the top search engines. While they are abundant, software solutions are not free and can pose a problem for small-time businesses with a non-flexible or tight budget. However, there are some that are free SEO tools, and some that allow you to have a free trial run before buying it.
Here are a few of the best SEO tools that are tried, tested, and guaranteed to work.
Tools by Google
Google offers a number of great products and services when it comes to SEO-related purposes.
Below is a list of some tools offered by Google that will help SEO professionals and marketers alike:
1. Google Keyword Planner
This tool will be of your aid in your keyword research. The first step is to set up the Keyword Planner in your systems, after which you will be given two options: Find Keywords and Get Search Volume and Forecasts.
The Find Keywords option takes a given term or phrase of your choosing and gives you a range of keyword suggestions that you can use. Apart from that, it also gives you stats about your competition, average monthly searches as well as high and low ranges for the top-of-the-page bid.
If you have your keywords and simply want to know how they will perform, you may use the Get Search Volume and Forecast option. This will present an estimate of the clicks, impressions, costs, Click Through Rate, and Cost Per Click for the keyword entered.
2. Google Analytics
This tool tells you if your SEO efforts are paying off and if yes, to what extent.
Google Analytics provides you with useful insights on your site like:
- Organic Traffic
- Sources of traffic
- Bounce rate
- Time spent on the site
- Page speed
This tool comes with certain unique features like Campaign Parameter Tracking, which allows one to see how their online campaigns are going, Audience Reports, which gives you insights into the kind of audience you are attracting, their needs, and finally, Goal Tracking, which helps you track conversions.
Since all the data comes directly from Google, it’s far more reliable than a lot of other online tools. While it may not be an exclusively SEO tool, Google Analytics is something every SEO professional ought to have in their toolbox.
3. Google Search Console
This multifaceted tool is one of Google’s best SEO tools as it offers a wide range of solutions to SEO-related problems for businesses as well as digital marketers.
This tool allows you to monitor the performance of your website in Google search and also to troubleshoot in the event of an issue occurring. Additionally, it helps you view the index status of your pages, fix indexing problems, and request a re-indexing of your web pages. Along with these, this tool also allows you to see all the sites that link to you as well as the search terms that might lead you to your site.
Google Search Console also sends out an improvement report that highlights the issues like inconsistencies with the title and content, inadequate meta descriptions or tags, non-indexable content, etc.
Another area where this tool might help you is in optimizing for AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages. This is supplemented by an online tool that is a part of the Console; a convenient Mobile-Friendly Test, which helps you make sure your web pages look right on mobile screens and function seamlessly without any errors.
4. Google PageSpeed Insights
This tool allows you to check the speed and performance of your website, on both mobile and desktop and then assigns a score. It gives you suggestions on optimizations to increase the page load along with detailed diagnostics. When you know how well your website is doing, you would be better educated to make the right changes that increase traffic and visibility.
Free Tools By Moz
Moz is a pioneer in the field of SEO and sells inbound marketing and marketing analytics software subscriptions. This company hosts a website that has an online community of more than one million digital marketers and marketing-related tools. They offer tools for keyword research, link building, site audits, and insights on-page optimization, which help companies gain a better understanding of their position on SEs.
Most of the complete solutions Moz offers are not exactly free. However, they come with a 30-day free trial. Following are some of their free tools:
1. Moz Link Explorer
This tool allows for analyzing your links as well as that of your competition’s, too. This tool allows one to monitor inbound links, look for the source of inbound links for your competition, find broken links, analyze anchor text, and get Page Authority and Domain Authority Scores as well.
2. Mozbar
MozBar allows you to create custom searches, find highlighted keywords on a page, distinguish between “follow,” “no follow,” internal and external links, view page elements, attributes, etc.
SEMrush
SEMrush is a Search Engine Marketing tool that can provide intelligence data; keywords, website traffic information, projected AdWords spend, site audits, topic research, and several other SEO-related data. Through SEMrush, one can find out what keyword a site is ranking for, making keyword research really simple.
Once the keyword research is finished, you can add in the keywords to track their positions in every major search engine based on geographical location. Their position tracking app lets one view their keyword position from their mobile phones.
What makes SEMrush a popular SEO tool among millions of users is that they have different plans for different use cases; from a free trial if someone is a beginner and is new to SEM research, to the Guru plan with features like branded reports, historical and extended limits, and finally the Pro plan which offers a detailed analysis of your website and that of your competitor’s.
Open Admin Tools
This is a set of web tools used to track a website’s rank, traffic stats, indexed pages, server analysis, etc. It gives you instant data, and because it is web-based and can be accessed from any device, it is very convenient to use.
Along with the aforementioned, it performs DNS record analysis, HTTP header analysis, social network analysis, and much more.
SEO Minion
SEO Minion serves as a literal minion, lending a helping hand to SEO professionals, marketers as well as business owners. Being a browser extension that helps you with your daily SEO tasks, you can use it for on-page SEO analysis, redirects, perform broken link checks, and hreflang checks.
This tool checks your site’s rankings along with multiple locations and contains a SERP preview tool as well.
While it is completely free, SEO Minion is currently only compatible with Chrome and Firefox.
Answer The Public
Answer the Public stands out from the rest of the SEO tools in the market because of its quirky interface and its simple but brilliant concept. This tool taps into the autocomplete results of Search Engines like Google and Bing, giving the user insights into the intents behind each query. Answer the Public functions under the conviction that these results are the most underutilized source for keyword research. It divides these results into several lists presented in an innovative and user-friendly manner.
Answer the Public has recently rolled out a paid version where it offers unlimited searches, report saving, high-resolution images, and more. It is just the tool for you if you are working on a brand new website and are looking for fresh ideas for keywords.
Honorable Mention
Sitechecker
Sitechecker is an all-in-one SEO tool that provides users with a variety of features to improve their
website’s SEO performance. Its SEO Checker feature allows users to analyze their website’s on-page and off-page SEO factors, including keywords, meta tags, and backlinks. This feature helps users identify areas that need improvement and provides practical recommendations for optimizing their website’s SEO.
Sitechecker offers four subscription plans: Basic, Standard, Premium and Enterprise. You can also sign up for a free trial.
Conclusion
Free SEO tools are an excellent way a web marketer can boost their website performance and promote it further. The tools listed above are some of the best out there which have been tried and tested to provide you with the best solutions for your SEO-related issues. While most of them are freely available, the others are available at nominal prices. If yours is a business with a robust marketing budget and you’re looking to promote your online business, you should definitely invest in some of the paid SEO tools as they offer a little more as compared to the free tools.
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