Top SEO Tools
Whether your business is brand new or has fifty years of experience, there’s one thing you need to do in 2019; adopt an SEO strategy. By optimizing your website, getting content to the front pages of Google, working on local SEO, obtaining inbound links, creating the best-possible content, and more, your business will be in the right position to grow. Over time, more prospective customers will notice your brand and this will lead to a boost in revenue and profit.
Despite popular belief, implementing an SEO strategy doesn’t have to be an expensive process. As long as you’ve thought about what you want to achieve, there are some awesome free SEO tools just waiting to help. In this guide, we’re going to provide you with some of the best:
If you’ve been working on your SEO strategy for some time, this first suggestion isn’t likely to come as a surprise. Considering you’re trying to rank on search engines just like Google, it makes sense to take advantage of the tools offered by them. Google Analytics is a necessity for everybody wanting to increase the number of visitors to their website.
Over time, you’ll need to learn which metrics apply best to your own needs. This being said, some of the most valuable metrics include:
- Bounce Rate
- Lead Generation Costs
- Conversion Rate
- Value Per Visit
- User Demographics
- Average Session Duration
- Sessions Per Channel
- Pages Per Session
Over the years, we’ve seen plenty of people searching for a tool that provides analytics ‘better’ than Google. In our experience, Google Analytics is one of the easiest to use and the tool most likely to meet the needs of businesses. What’s more, most other tools that provide similar data actually piggyback on Google’s data.
For Google Analytics to be effective, you need to not only track the right metrics but also then use the information gathered correctly. If you can learn about the traffic coming from different sources, how long they’re staying, what’s going well, and what’s going poorly, you’ll be correctly positioned to adapt your content, website, etc. to maximize your results.
Next up, we all know that keywords are an important part of SEO…but how do you know which keywords are best? This has been the all-important question for marketers for many years, and having a resource like keywordtool.io will mean you don’t have to waste time testing. Once you’ve entered a keyword, this tool will suggest a number of long-tail opportunities alongside statistics for each.
For each keyword, you’ll be shown the search volume, trend, competition, and CPC. As you perform this research, you’ll find the keywords that have enough traffic yet not too much competition as to make ranking impossible.
Ubersuggest is another great keyword planning tool.
When it comes to SEO, those who seem to get results normally have one advantage over everybody else; knowledge. It’s very much a journey to finding the right information, and this is where MozBar excels.
After installing this tool onto your browser, the toolbar will have a small MozBar button. After clicking the extension, a ‘Page Analysis’ will display all sorts of useful information. Specializing in three main areas — Link Data, Page Elements, and Page Attributes. These will tell you more about your own website and can give great insights into other websites too.
Whether you want to focus on title descriptions and H1 tags or load time and ranking factors, the tool is yours to use as you wish. Before moving on, we should note that you’ll need to subscribe for all the features to become available. If you don’t have funds, don’t dismiss the idea entirely because the free version can still provide incredible value.
Do you ever get frustrated by how long a website takes to load? If so, there will be visitors to your website thinking the same if there are certain pages that don’t load quickly enough. After entering your URL into Google PageSpeed Insights, you’ll be provided with loading information for both mobile and desktop. In addition to this, the tool will suggest ways to improve and this keeps people happy while they navigate your site.
While backlinking isn’t something we can necessarily control, it is something we can monitor with Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker. With the free version, the top backlinks will show for any entered URL address. As you assess who has been linking to your pages, the information includes URL Rating and Domain Rating for further analysis.
One reason why we like this tool is because, if used correctly, it could open up doors for high-quality backlinks. If you haven’t spotted the opportunity yet, begin by enter a URL from your competitor’s website and can see if they have any valuable links.
If you want the official Google program for keywords, this is called Keyword Planner (previously called Keyword Tool). If you already have AdWords, you’ll find the tool in here and it offers several functions all with keywords in mind. Rather than just focusing on organic keyword research, the benefit of using the Google Keyword Planner is that there’s an emphasis on AdWords generation.
If you want to spend an hour doing some keyword research, the Google Keyword Planner will always be a good place to start. The tool displays a lot of useful metrics including competition and monthly search volume. You can also use the tool as a good starting point for keyword optimization by searching recommend terms for your niche.
If you want a simple yet comprehensive report of your webpage with regards to SEO, SEO Web Page Analyzer is one of the best around. After scanning the page, the tool will show an overall score alongside areas that need improving or fixing. Common issues include heading structure errors, page bloat, and missing image alt tags.
Do you know how your web pages look after making changes? For many of us, we make adjustments to descriptions and meta titles without fully knowing how the new information will appear. Therefore, we recommend SERP simulator. Before publishing a web page, the SERP (search engine results pages) Simulator will display a preview of your link on Google. Although something incredibly simple, this tool allows you to play around with the title and description until you’re happy with it.
SERP Simulator will work for both desktop and mobile as you fix issues and perfect the link and description.
If you’ve ever struggled to find the ‘best’ SEO tools, you’re probably now starting to notice that Google produces most of the valuable options themselves. This being said, we must be fair to Bing here because their Webmaster Tools will allow you to optimize your website for this alternative search engine. Although Google has a large percentage of the market share when it comes to search engines, there are some people that use Bing and you don’t want to exclude those potential customers.
With these webmaster tools, you can essentially learn what the two largest search engines think of your website. Whether you want to find bugs and indexing issues or you want an overall review of your site, these are the best tools to use.
At this point, we should note that they’ll require a little more effort than other tools in the list. With a WordPress website, you should be able to add the code through a plugin such as Yoast or Jetpack. If not, it’ll require some installation.
Finally, we want to finish with a tool that helps to identify any broken links on a given web page. After being installed as a Chrome extension, the HTTP status of the web page’s links are assessed. If any are broken and give a ’404’ message, these will be highlighted and you can take steps to fix them. Again, this improves the experience for the visitor and search engines won’t punish the page.
Other Tools
If you aren’t currently using SEO tools for your website, don’t be scared of the process because the tools we’ve mentioned here are extremely easy to use. For keywords, assessing backlinks, or any other task, you should have everything you need here. If you want more suggestions, we like the tools below too:
- SEOWorkers Analysis Tool
- Woorank
- QuickSprout
- Browseo
- SERP Robot
- Google Trends
- Robots.txt Generator
