Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for any website owner who wants to have their content spotlighted on Google. SEO is a constantly evolving field that requires knowledge of algorithms, keywords, keyword stuffing, and even link-building tactics.
With so much involved in SEO, it can be hard to know where to start. That’s why having the right set of SEO tools can help you optimize your site for the best possible search engine ranking.
Knowing which SEO tools are best for your needs can save you hours of time and effort trying out different methods or programs only to find they do not give you sufficient results. To make it easier for website owners, we have compiled a list of the top SEO tools available and their key features. Let's see!
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a must-have SEO tool that you should always set up and use for your website. It's a free tool provided by Google that allows you to monitor and optimize your website's performance in search engine results. It provides valuable insights and data about how your website is being indexed and displayed in Google's search results, allowing you to make informed decisions to improve your website's visibility and ranking.
Google Search Console has a lot of important features, such as:
- Search Performance: provides detailed information about how your website is performing in Google search results. It shows the number of impressions, clicks, and average position of your website's pages, allowing you to analyze and optimize your content accordingly.
- Index Coverage: shows you which pages of your website have been indexed by Google and if there are any issues preventing certain pages from being indexed. It helps you identify and fix indexing errors, ensuring that your website is fully visible to search engines.
- URL Inspection: allows you to inspect individual URLs on your website to see how Google sees them.
- Sitemaps: allows you to submit your website's sitemap, which helps Google understand the structure and organization of your website. This ensures that all your pages are properly indexed and included in search results.
- Mobile Usability: checks your website's mobile-friendliness and highlights any issues that may affect the user experience on mobile devices. It is essential for optimizing your website for mobile search, as mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor for Google.
- Rich Results: provides insights into the performance of rich results (structured data) on your website. It helps you optimize your website's appearance in search results, making it more visually appealing and engaging for users.
If you haven't set up Google Search Console for your website, do it now!
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most essential free SEO tools for any marketer or SEO specialist because it can give you valuable insight into website performance.
With Google Analytics, you can gain a more holistic view of your visitors and their behavior while they’re on your site. It can track visit times, pages visited, time spent on each webpage, referring domain traffic sources, and even audience demographics such as countries of origin. This will instantly provide you with useful data that helps inform decisions about SEO tactics so you can easily target your efforts to yield successful results.
This tool will enable you to have a better understanding of your visitors and the way they interact on the website. Moreover, there are numerous resources from Google itself that will help you to learn using Google Analytics. It is impossible to ignore Google Analytics from any SEO tool list. All the vital data about traffic, site visitors are provided by this source.
However, Google Analytics might be too complicated if you only need a basic website analytics tool. If that's your case, consider switching to an alternative to have a better experience.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is another free SEO tool from Google. While there are many keyword research tools on the market, this is still the most reliable way to research keywords.
Google Keyword Planner gives you an estimation of keyword volume, e.g. the number of searches for a specific keyword in a month, and keyword difficulty. As the data comes from Google search, it's the most reliable resource for all of us to create an SEO strategy to climb up the SERP ranking.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a powerful tool that allows users to explore the popularity and trends of various search queries on Google. With Google Trends, users can gain valuable insights into what people are searching for, when and where they are searching, and how search interest changes over time.
The best thing about Google Trends is that it allows you to compare the search volume of multiple terms or topics in real-time to identify patterns, trends, and correlations.
As the data also comes from Google, this is a reliable way to understand your audience and your competitors.
Moz
Moz is a collection of marketing tools that provide all the important information in a nutshell. There are some free SEO tools that are quite useful like the Link Explorer which is a backlink analysis tool that provides helpful metrics similar to link equity. Another useful tool is the MozBar which is basically an SEO extension for Google Chrome that brings all the key features of Moz to the present page. MozBar will display all the right sets of information that too at a glance.
Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT)
Bing Webmaster Tools is a similar tool to Google Search Console but comes from the Bing search engine, which has approximately 20% of the total Internet traffic.
Bing Webmaster Tools is not only exclusive to Bing as it offers valuable information for SEO such as indexation, crawling, and on-page keyword optimization. You can use this information to optimize your website for Bing and other search engines as well.
Keyword Tool
Keywordtool.io is a free yet powerful keyword research tool that helps you find the best keywords for your website or online content. In a very quick manner, the tool will provide you with a variety of keyword ideas, including long-tail keywords, related keywords, and even keywords specific to different platforms like Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, and more.
It also provides you with search volume data, which indicates how often a keyword is searched for in a specific period. This information helps you prioritize your keywords and focus on the ones with higher search volumes. Additionally, it provides cost-per-click (CPC) data, which is crucial for planning your advertising budget.
You can filter and sort keywords based on search volume, competition, or other parameters. And of course, you can export and save keywords to Excel or CSV for further analysis.
The best thing about Keyword Tool is the database is continuously updated to ensure that you have access to the latest and most relevant keyword suggestions.
PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a tool developed by Google that helps you analyze the performance and speed of your web pages. By entering a URL, Pagespeed Insights provides a detailed report with suggestions on how to optimize the loading time and overall user experience.
One important thing is that this tool provides details about Core Web Vitals, which includes LCP, FID, CLS, and more. These metrics are crucial for a good user experience and thus, should be optimized.
Woorank
WooRank is a powerful SEO tool that provides in-depth analysis and insights to help optimize your website and improve its search engine rankings. This tool provides free website analysis and provides a detailed analysis of its performance, identifying areas for improvement and optimization.
Analyzing a website and generating a report can be done in a matter of a few seconds. One outstanding feature that makes this tool great is the mobile section. Only a few free SEO tools will cater to such a level of perspective and data. Keeping in mind the current marketing trend this feature of mobile optimization is a critical one.
Ahrefs Backlink Checker
Ahrefs Backlink Checker is a free backlink tool from the very popular SEO service Ahrefs. As you might know, Ahrefs is the leading service in tracking backlinks and keywords for SEO. Apart from their premium services, they also have a free tool for checking backlinks of any website.
With this tool, you can easily monitor and track the backlinks that are pointing to your website, allowing you to understand your website's link profile and improve your link building strategy.
The free version allows you to see the top 100 backlinks for any domain or URL with anchor text + context. If you want more details or more links, you should upgrade to a premium plan.
Bonus: Free WordPress SEO plugins
Using SEO tools is not enough if you want to have high rankings on search engines. You should have extraordinary content and optimize it for search engines. It is on-page SEO, which plays an important role in the success of your business.
If you're using WordPress, you should know that WordPress is the most SEO-friendly CMS available for free. Using WordPress, you can install a great free SEO plugin to optimize your SEO title, meta description, generate XML sitemap and optimize schema markup.
With the help of a WordPress SEO plugin, your work will be greatly reduced and you can focus more on your SEO management.
Conclusion
These free SEO tools provide different features for your daily SEO work, from analyzing websites to monitoring performance, and keyword research. So, you should use them together to get the most benefits from them.
Remember that some free tools are limited (such as Ahrefs Backlink Checker). If you need more data, consider subscribing to a paid plan to use all of their power.
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