Utilize limited, free SEO tools effectively. Choose the right ones for your needs. Add these tools to your SEO toolkit:
Use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) to track your website’s SEO health, identify linking sites, and discover your Google rankings. AWT scans for 100+ common SEO issues affecting your rankings, providing insights on keywords, backlinks, and their sources.
Use Keyword Generator to discover 100 keyword ideas on any topic. It provides the top 100 keyword suggestions for your entered keyword or phrase, along with essential data like search volume and Keyword Difficulty.
Utilize Google Keyword Planner (GKP) as Google’s keyword research tool, originally designed for Google Ads but beneficial for SEO. It helps identify trending or seasonal keywords. Note that GKP provides a search volume range, not absolute values.
Explore AlsoAsked to discover questions under Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ SERP feature. It retrieves and displays all questions from ‘People Also Ask’ related to your search query.
Utilize Keyworddit to identify topics discussed on Reddit. It extracts keywords from Reddit communities, providing insights into subjects that interest your audience. For instance, it extracts keywords from the r/bigseo subreddit.
Utilize Google Trends to discover trending topics. It displays the popularity of a topic over time, helping you identify trends to capitalize on and avoid creating content on topics with declining interest.
Use Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty Checker to assess the challenge of reaching the top 10 search results for any keyword. It provides Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty (KD) score on a 100-point scale, where zero is the easiest, and 100 is the most challenging.
Enhance your WordPress site’s SEO with RankMath. Easily add title tags, meta descriptions, OG tags, and other meta tags to your pages and posts without dealing with code. RankMath also aids in technical aspects such as URL redirects and identifying/fixing dead links on your site.
Note: While Yoast is a popular choice among website owners, I personally favor RankMath.
Use HigherVisibility’s Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool to ensure your page appears as intended in search results. Simply input your title, meta description, and URL to preview how your webpage may look on Google.
Utilize Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator to create structured data markup in the JSON-LD format. This tool generates schema markup for various types, including local business, FAQ, and product. Enhance search engine understanding of your content by selecting the desired markup type, filling in the form, and copying the generated code onto your site.
Leverage Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar to identify on-page SEO issues while browsing the web. This toolbar provides SEO data for any webpage you visit, including the page’s title, meta description, publication and modification dates, word count, headings, hreflang tags, canonicals, OG tags, structured data, and alt text.
Utilize Ahrefs’ Free Backlink Checker to discover backlink opportunities for any website or page. The tool displays the top 100 backlinks pointing to a given website or webpage, helping you identify competitors’ links that you may replicate. Simply enter the URL of a competing website or webpage.
Use Hunter.io‘s email finder to locate professional email addresses for link outreach. Enter the domain of the email address you’re seeking, and the tool will provide a list of discovered email addresses.
Utilize Google Search Console to monitor and troubleshoot your website’s search performance. This tool assists in finding and fixing technical errors, submitting sitemaps, checking Core Web Vitals, and more. For similar functions on Bing, consider using Bing Webmaster Tools.
Accelerate your website’s speed and enhance security with Cloudflare, a free Content Delivery Network (CDN). Cloudflare caches your website globally, enabling faster loading times by allowing visitors to access content from a server closer to their location.
Use Pagespeed Insights, a tool by Google, to evaluate your webpage’s performance. This tool assesses pages for Core Web Vitals such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Simply enter your URL, and Pagespeed Insights will provide the assessment score.
Optimize your website’s images with ShortPixel. ShortPixel’s automatic image compression tool compresses, optimizes, and resizes images on your site automatically. This is particularly beneficial as large image file sizes can slow down page loading times, impacting overall page speed.
Generate a properly formatted robots.txt file with the Robots.txt Generator. This tool creates a robots.txt file that instructs search engines on where they can and cannot go on your site. Having a robots.txt file is considered best practice for every website.
Use the Hreflang Tag Generator to create hreflang tags, specifying the language and geographical targeting of a webpage. These tags inform search engines, such as Google, about multiple versions of the same page in different languages, ensuring the correct version is served to users. Simply add your desired URLs, select your target country and language, then click “Generate.”
Create sitemaps to assist Google in finding your pages with the XML Sitemaps Generator. A sitemap is an XML file that lists all the crucial content on your website. To ensure pages or files appear in search engines, they should be included in your sitemap. This tool generates a sitemap for you.
Use View Rendered Source to observe how the browser renders a page. This tool displays the page’s original HTML transformed into the DOM, including any modifications made by JavaScript. It is particularly useful for auditing or troubleshooting JavaScript issues.
Use Ahrefs’ SERP Checker to view the top 10 ranking pages for any keyword. This tool provides unpersonalized Google search results for any country, offering accurate real-time results unaffected by factors like location, language, and search history.
Utilize BrightLocal’s Local SERP Checker to observe search results from any location. This tool provides even more granular results, down to the city, town, or ZIP code level, making it valuable for local SEO efforts.
Enhance your marketing strategy with valuable data and analytics using Google Analytics. This free tool provides a comprehensive range of data for your website, allowing you to analyze and interpret it in various ways to enhance your marketing efforts. Despite mixed opinions on Google Analytics 4, the current version, it remains one of the most widely used analytics tools.
Simplify reporting by creating interactive dashboards and reports with Google Data Studio. This tool is ideal for SEO professionals in-house or in agencies who need to generate reports for clients, managers, and executives. It seamlessly integrates with Google’s suite of tools, facilitating the merging of data from sources like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Save time by using Ahrefs’ free AI Title Generator to generate search-optimized titles. This tool automatically creates title tags for you, streamlining the process.
Boost efficiency by using Ahrefs’ free AI Meta Description Generator to produce SEO-friendly meta descriptions. This tool automatically generates meta descriptions, providing an even more significant time-saving solution.
Conduct a content audit of your website with Ahrefs’ SEO WordPress Plugin. This free plugin identifies underperforming pages and recommends actions, such as rewriting or updating the post, to enhance rankings.
Effectively manage how your local business appears on Google Search and Maps with the Google Business Profile Manager. As per BrightLocal’s survey, 32% of SEOs consider a Google Business Profile the most crucial ranking factor for the map pack, with 9% emphasizing its importance for “regular” organic results. This tool assists you in setting up and managing your business profile.
Increase reviews on your Google Business Profile with WhiteSpark’s Google Review Link Generator. This tool generates a unique review link to encourage more reviews. According to the BrightLocal survey mentioned earlier, 16% of SEOs believe reviews are the most important ranking factor for the map pack, highlighting the significance of this tool.
Examine past versions of web pages with the Wayback Machine. This tool captures historical screenshots of pages and stores them in its database. By entering a URL, you can view previous versions of webpages, even those currently broken. This functionality is particularly useful for tasks like broken link building, where it helps to see the original content on a dead page for replication.
Monitor online mentions of your name or business with Google Alerts. This tool sends email notifications when pages mention terms you are tracking, facilitating the monitoring of brand and competitor mentions.
Leverage ChatGPT for various tasks such as generating content briefs, outlines, articles, titles, meta descriptions, code, and more. This versatile tool is utilized by students, marketers, programmers, and data scientists for tasks ranging from answering questions to code generation and content creation. Its flexibility allows it to be prompted for a wide array of functions in work and daily life.
Effortlessly check for online plagiarism with Copyscape. Simply enter your URL to determine if the content has been copied or used elsewhere. This tool is particularly valuable when working with freelance writers, providing a convenient way to identify potential plagiarism from AI or other sources.
Create human-sounding drafts with Claude, an AI chatbot by Anthropic. As a competitor to ChatGPT, Claude offers similar capabilities, allowing you to accomplish various tasks. Both ChatGPT and Claude are trained on different large language models (LLMs), resulting in distinct outputs. To determine the best tool for your needs, consider testing them with the same prompts and evaluating the quality of their output.
Utilize Google, the world’s most used search engine, as a powerful SEO tool. It may not present itself explicitly as such, but Google plays a crucial role in various SEO tasks. For instance, examining the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) on Google is essential for understanding search intent.