Our Favorite Free SEO Tools for 2018
Search engine optimization should be an ongoing effort to improve your website’s organic search ranking and find new avenues to create content to expand your reach in meaningful ways. Free traffic? Who doesn’t want that?
Many people talk about SEO as if it is its own thing, siloed from their digital marketing strategy. Often we hear from new clients looking to improve their SEO when migrating websites or starting a new site altogether. The problem is, if you are just now starting to talk about SEO at these points, you have waited too long. If you are not continually monitoring your website, you are bound to make mistakes or let opportunities fall through the cracks.
So that is why we have complied a list of free SEO tools and organized them into the different use cases for each of them. Despite new tools, paid and free, that come out every year, we take our time to get to a know a tool and resist the urge to promote the *newest* and *shiniest* if we haven’t been convinced of its value.
This post isn’t just for SEO professionals. We did a survey last year about what roles the readers of this post played in their organizations. Over half of our respondents indicated they’re responsible for more than just SEO for their companies, with many splitting their time between Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search, and Analytics. Does that sound like you? Knowing what to tools to use and when can keep your schedule manageable so you can tackle that list of tasks that all fall to you.
The most valuable SEO data is that which helps you better understand your visitors and how they interact with your site. No free tool quite delivers that data like Google Analytics and does a better job providing data that helps you understand the number that matters most – the bottom line.
Many people talk about SEO as if it is its own thing, siloed from their digital marketing strategy. Often we hear from new clients looking to improve their SEO when migrating websites or starting a new site altogether. The problem is, if you are just now starting to talk about SEO at these points, you have waited too long. If you are not continually monitoring your website, you are bound to make mistakes or let opportunities fall through the cracks.
So that is why we have complied a list of free SEO tools and organized them into the different use cases for each of them. Despite new tools, paid and free, that come out every year, we take our time to get to a know a tool and resist the urge to promote the *newest* and *shiniest* if we haven’t been convinced of its value.
This post isn’t just for SEO professionals. We did a survey last year about what roles the readers of this post played in their organizations. Over half of our respondents indicated they’re responsible for more than just SEO for their companies, with many splitting their time between Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search, and Analytics. Does that sound like you? Knowing what to tools to use and when can keep your schedule manageable so you can tackle that list of tasks that all fall to you.
The most valuable SEO data is that which helps you better understand your visitors and how they interact with your site. No free tool quite delivers that data like Google Analytics and does a better job providing data that helps you understand the number that matters most – the bottom line.
Google Analytics is the best tool to understand your organic traffic. You can use it to monitor your organic traffic performance and allows you to compare to past performance. Once you notice any major differences to your traffic, you will most likely want to move on to another tool to find out what is causing the changes.
On-page Optimization
The objective of on-page optimization is to select phrases that anticipate the questions and needs of your target audience. Then, incorporate those phrases into your website in a manner that indicates to search engines and users the relevance and importance of those terms on the page.
The SEO Spider Tool is an awesome website crawler. With it, you can get critical data on every URL. Download it and take it on a spin. You can use the Spider Tool to crawl up to 500 pages with the free version. It will let you know things like which pages have duplicate title tags and where you are missing important tags that will help indicate to crawl bots the content of your page.
Correctly predicting the future moves of your opponent in chess is essential for victory. The same can be said for marketers in their industry. Knowing where your market is heading gives marketers a huge advantage. Here, Google Trends can lend you a helping hand.
Google Trends shows changes in search volume for different topics, search terms, and entities. Mastering this tool can keep your content current and one step ahead of the competition. For search marketing, it just makes good sense to analyze changes in search query behavior. Even everyday bloggers can improve their results by understanding which topics are trending.
Google Keyword Planner is the creme de la creme of keyword research tools. Simply give it a seed word, and keyword suggestions will start pouring in, along with estimates of average monthly searches. The tool provides many synonyms or similar searches to the seed keywords you provide.
Authority and Link Building
Every website is has a hidden authority element that is used for determining how trustworthy and reputable a domain is. Moz has created a ranking score called Domain Authority which tries to predict how well a site will rank on search engine results pages. Authority generally improves by increasing the number of links to your website from other reputable sources, as well as having a proper internal linking structure.
MozBar is a browser toolbar that lets you quickly get at Moz’s key features for the page you’re on. The SERP Overlay (the image above) is part of the Mozbar and shows Open Site Explorer metrics on individual search results.
No comments