SEO tools take out the tedious work of sifting through data for information on our analytics. They allow you to see where there are gaps in your website, determine what part of your marketing strategy is working and help you identify areas of improvement.
The best SEO tools provide you with easy access to information and reports about how you also measure up to the competition.
This is especially helpful and useful to professional SEO’s, digital marketers, and analysts who have the task of assessing the performance of multiple websites.
To save time, and efforts of creating spreadsheets and doing this manually, many of these tools have systems that automate this process and provide you with information instantly.
The best part? All of these tools are free! That means you can track insight quickly and easily and be able to provide your client or yourself, the information necessary to pack and punch in your digital marketing strategy.
Check out our list of the best SEO tools, that will improve your site score, user experience, and overall rank online. The best news? They are 100% free!
Keyword Tools and Trending Topics
Ubersuggest
When you type a keyword into the search bar Ubersuggest will give you detailed data on keyword difficulty, monthly search volume, and more.
It also gives you a list of suggested keywords based on the keyword you’ve entered.
Exploding Topics
This free SEO tool bubbles up topics that are just starting to trend and helps you create content around these emerging trends, so you can stay ahead of the curve. Very cool.
Animalz Revive
Animalz revive helps you find older content on your site that can use a refresh. It scans your pages and points out which articles have suffered since their release dates and visuals on how much traffic has been lost.
Google Trends
This tool is amazing for detecting emerging trends early. It’s also super helpful in determining and understanding the seasonality of certain topics and when conversations begin around things like holidays, events and Google Trends shows you the popularity of a topic over months. Great for tracking the popularity of an item or capitalizing on trending topics.
Answer The Public
This tool is great because it steps outside of searching for keywords within search engines and searches blogs, forums, and social media for questions that people are asking. It then turns those questions into keywords!
MOZ Keyword Explorer
This keyword explorer helps you determine which keywords your site can rank for right now. Just input your URL and MOZ sends an in depth report straight to your email address outlining high ranking keywords, competitor keyword analysis and more. Easy as that!
Link Explorers
MOZ Link Explorer
This link explorer helps you determine which links on your site are not working correctly. Just input your website and MOZ sends an in depth report straight to your email address outlining helpful fixes like, broken links, competitor backlinks, and top performing content. Easy as that!
Browser Extensions and Plugins
WooRank SEO and Website Analysis Tool
This is a very convenient Chrome extension that gives you an overall SEO score for any page you are on. The tool also shows you exactly how to improve your site’s on-page and off-page SEO by giving you a checklist of items that need improvements.
YOAST WordPress Plugin
If your site runs on WordPress you’ll need to install the Yoast App. It’s the most robust SEO plugin on the market and works on every page of your site.
RankMath
RankMath is a WordPress plugin that helps with on-page and technical SEO by offering on-page suggestions on how to improve your SEO.
Keywords Everywhere
Keywords everywhere is another browser extension for Chrome or Firefox that pulls keywords from every area of your site and shows you related keyword searches.
Keyword Surfer
Keyword surfer is a 100% free extension that allows you to see search volumes, CPC, keyword suggestions, related terms, visibility metrics and on-page data for every google search you input.
Page Speed Tools
PageSpeed Insight Tool
Speed me up, Scotty! Our very own PageSpeed Insight tool analyzes your URLs and tells you how fast they load. It gives you insight into both mobile and desktop versions of your site and indicates areas of optimization.
Lighthouse
This is a chrome extension that runs a series of audits against a specific URL. that gives you a sidebar report. These reports include rank scores such as performance, accessibility, best practices and overall score along with suggestions on how to enhance your URL’s performance.
Website Crawlers
SEObility
This tool crawls your website to let you know about search engine optimization errors like: Slow loading pages, blocked pages, sitemap problems, technical SEO issues, and a lot more. This is the type of stuff you usually have to pay for including a free content report that also points out things like thin content, missing meta titles, keyword stuffing, and duplicate content.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
In light of Google’s new Mobile-First Indexing, this tool is a great way to test whether or not your site is optimized for mobile, according to Google.
Google Search Console
Google offers a free tool that helps you monitor and troubleshoot how your website shows up in their search results.
Use it to find and fix technical errors, submit sitemaps, see structured data issues, and more.
Check out our how to beginners guide here!
Bing Webmaster Tool
Bing also offers a free webmaster tool that allows you to manage many websites at once and provides information about each including clicks, impressions, pages indexed, and pages crawled.
Screaming Frog
One of our personal favourites, Screaming Frog is an industry leading website crawler for all platforms. It helps you improve SEO by scanning web pages and extracting data for common SEO issues. This includes broken links, metadata and descriptions, duplicate data, redirects, sitemaps and more.
MOZ Domain Analysis
MOZ Domain Analysis is also an all encompassing tool that crawls your entire website. This tool highlights SEO data like top pages by link, top linking domains, discovered and lost links and keywords by estimated clicks.
Let this article outline just how much we can get done for such little money. Google – arguably the most powerful free SEO tool there is, sets the gold standard in SEO, so don’t forget to take advantage of things like Google My Business and Google Analytics as well.
Did we miss any of your favourite SEO tools? Let us know on Twitter.
