Which Are The Best Seo Tools For A Beginner SEO tools come in all shapes and sizes. There are some that are completely free, some that require a paid license, and others that you can use for free for a limited period of time.
The best SEO tools for beginners are ones that are easy to use and are relevant to the type of work people do.
This is because if you don’t know how to use them properly, then they’re just going to waste your time and money.
In this post I’m going to share with you my top picks for the best SEO tools for beginners.
These tools will give you everything you need without having to spend thousands of dollars on training programs or hiring someone else to do it for you.
Can Which Are The Best Seo Tools For A Beginner Job
Transcript: SEO tools can make or break your strategy.
Not using them is like…trying to build a house with only your bare hands — probably possible, but certainly not ideal. If you’re just getting started with search engine optimization (SEO), I have 19 SEO tools for beginners you’ll want to stick around for. Since this is an SEO beginner-focused video, I’ll stick with mostly free SEO marketing tools. I’m going to break these tools down by what part of the SEO process they’re suited for. Let’s go!
The first professional SEO tool you need
SEO tools in this section
WebFX SEO Checker
Whenever you’re starting with SEO, you should always do an SEO audit of your website. This will help you understand which areas of your site need the most help. You can find a number of free SEO analysis tools online, but I’m going to suggest the WebFX SEO Checker. I know it seems a bit biased since it’s our tool, but it’s free, and it gives you a bunch of insights you can use as a basis for your SEO strategy.
Just plug your information into the form to see an analysis of your site speed, content optimization, links, security, and much more. I’ve included a link to the tool in the video description if you’d like to use it. After you have a basis for your SEO strategy, you can get started with on-page SEO.
CTA
How is your website’s SEO?
Use our free tool to calculate your score in under 60 seconds.
http://yourwebsite.com
Calculate Now! Arrow Right
On-page SEO tools for beginners
On-page SEO tools in this section
Google Trends
FAQFox
KeywordsFX
Moz Keyword Explorer
LSI Graph
Keywordtool.io
On-page SEO is a great place to begin when you’re ready to work on your website. Basically, this type of SEO focuses on elements you can directly control on your site. These elements are things like your content, keywords, title tags, alt text, and URLs.
So when you create content, it’s important that you research what topics are trending, and which keywords resonate best with your audience. A great place to start is Google Trends, which lets you see what topics are trending over a period of time. Google Trends Our FAQFox tool can also help generate topic ideas by crawling other websites and creating a list of things your audience is talking about online. Once you have your ideas, you should narrow them down to specific keywords. Our KeywordsFX tool offers a list of keyword suggestions based on a starting keyword you provide. KeywordsFX For more detailed keyword metrics, like search volume or trend data, try tools like Moz’s Keyword Explorer, LSI Graph or Keywordtool.io. All of these tools provide a limited amount of data on their free plans, so if you like them, they might be worth an investment. Now that I’ve covered several on-page SEO tools, I’ll move into some off-page professional SEO tools.
Off-page SEO tools for beginners
Off-page SEO tools in this section
Ahrefs Backlink Checker
Moz Link Explorer
Hunter.io
BuzzSumo
Off-page SEO focuses on working with other websites besides your own to help your optimization. A lot of this strategy comes down to links and mentions from those other websites. As a result, the off-page SEO tools you need are focused on reading the links pointing to or from different websites. Ahrefs is known for its backlink-checking abilities, and for good reason.
Its free Backlink Checker tool lets you see the top 100 backlinks pointing to a page, as well as other valuable off-page SEO information. Moz’s Link Explorer also offers information on backlinks pointing to a page, just with a limited amount of queries on its free plan. Ahrefs Backlink Checker Another part of on-page SEO is reaching out to other websites to see if they’ll link to yours. We call this outreach. You might be able to find someone’s contact information by sleuthing a little on your own, but there are tools that make this process a lot easier. Hunter.io can help you find people’s emails with only a small amount of information provided.
Hunter The free version offers a limited number of inquiries, but it can save you a lot of time searching for people to contact. It might not be right every time, but it’s certainly worth a try. Finding people to pitch your website to can also take up a lot of your time. You can search for relevant websites using Google, sure.
But BuzzSumo is a great starter tool when it comes to the best SEO software for beginners. BuzzSumo With BuzzSumo, you can research influencers in specific topic areas, see their followers or subscribers, and figure out how to reach them. Like the other tools I’ve mentioned, you have some limits on the free plan. But don’t let that stop you from creating your free account. So we’ve covered on-page and off-page SEO tools for beginners.
Let’s dive into something a bit more complex: Technical SEO.
Technical SEO tools for beginners
Technical SEO tools in this section
Screaming Frog
PageSpeed Insights
Mobile-Friendly Test tool
Web Vitals extension
Technical SEO is definitely not the easiest part of SEO when you’re a newbie, but I’ll mention some helpful tools you can use when you’re ready. If you aren’t sure what it is, technical SEO focuses on making sure your website works well for users and can be crawled and indexed easily by search engines. Crawling and indexing are how search engines understand what’s on your pages, so they can add them to their huge database of sites. Technical SEO relies a lot on updating the backend of your website, so elements that play a part in this strategy include mobile-friendliness, broken links, site security, speed, robots.txt, and XML sitemaps.
Screaming Frog will be your best friend when it comes to technical SEO. Screaming Frog This tool crawls your website and tells you if you have broken links, errors, and duplicate content. It reads your page’s metadata, so things like title tags and meta descriptions.
It can even generate XML sitemaps, which help search engine crawlers find all the pages on your website. The free version does have a crawl limit, but it’s pretty generous. Two great tools from Google are the PageSpeed Insights tool and the Mobile-Friendly Test tool. PageSpeed Insights tells you how fast your pages are and what you need to do to fix them. PageSpeed Insights This is especially important with Google’s rollout of its Core Web Vitals standards, which aims to make a user’s web experience as seamless and quick as possible (and impacts your site’s search engine performance).
If you want to focus only on Core Web Vitals and no other pieces of data, you might want to try installing the free Web Vitals extension for Chrome that tells you if your site is hitting the most important metrics. As it says in its name, the Mobile-Friendly Test tool tells you if your site is mobile-friendly and shows you how it appears on a mobile device. Mobile Friendly Test It also links you to Google Search Console for more detailed metrics. And this is where I transition to speaking about Google’s flagship tools.
Google’s SEO marketing tools
Google SEO tools in this section (+ a bonus tool from Ahrefs)
Google Search Console
Google Analytics
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
You may have noticed I skipped over several popular SEO tools from Google. That’s because I wanted to talk about them all at once. Plus, they might be a bit advanced for you if you don’t have a lot of SEO experience yet.
First, there’s Google Search Console. Google Search Console This SEO tool has many facets. It tells you if your pages are mobile-friendly, how many pages meet the Core Web Vitals benchmarks, if you’re creating an overall great page experience, lets you update your sitemaps, checks which URLs are broken, and shows some data on your search results performance.
You can also view these metrics by individual URLs. That’s a lot all wrapped into one free tool. Next up is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics Analytics helps you track the results of your optimization efforts. You can see how much traffic your pages are getting, how people are finding your pages, how long people are staying on your pages, if people are taking action on your site, and so much more that I’d encourage you to explore on your own. Like Search Console, Analytics is free. With both tools, you just need to verify your website to use them.
Ahrefs has also released their own version of Search Console if you wanted to check that out. Their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools has a free and paid version that can help give you even more information on top of what you already get from Google’s tools. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools And that pretty much wraps up this video on SEO tools for beginners. I hope you have a better understanding of what tools work best for your SEO strategy and how they relate to each different aspect of SEO.
This is far from an exhaustive list of tools. You might find others not mentioned in this video that work better for you, and that’s okay. Tell us your favorite tools so far in the comments!
If you learned something from this video, give us a thumbs up and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We also have an awesome email newsletter called Revenue Weekly that brings digital marketing advice right to your inbox. You can find the link to subscribe in the video description.
best seo for small business
To be successful with search engine optimization (SEO), you must use the right tools.
It’s simply impossible to conduct keyword research, analyze competitors, track rankings, track traffic and conversion trends, identify technical problems, and implement effective content marketing without the proper tools.
Yet with so many tools on the market, how do you know which to choose?
Here is a roundup of the top 13 SEO tools for small businesses.
- Google Analytics
google-analytics
^image via
Google Analytics is a powerful and completely free website analytics tool. Once installed properly on your website, you’ll be able to report on which marketing tactics drive the most traffic, which marketing tactics drive the most leads and sales conversions, how visitors use your site, which content they prefer, and so much more.
- Google Search Console
Google-search-console
Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) is Google’s free SEO tool. Once you set up your account, you’ll get alerts if Google finds errors on your website and you’ll be able to view key stats like keyword rankings, number of clicks per keyword, number of times your website showed up in the search results per keyword, and your click through rate when your website showed up in the search results.
Plus, you can link Search Console to Analytics to unlock even more reporting tools in your Analytics account. For example, once you’ve linked these two tools, then in Analytics you’ll be able to review keyword rankings, click through rates, impressions, and the landing pages that are ranking in Google.
- AgencyAnalytics
AgencyAnalytics
AgencyAnalytics is our go-to platform for reporting. AgencyAnalytics offers automated reporting, client visible/shareable dashboards, as well as a clean interface for teams to review performance for various different services. We use AgencyAnalytics to report on and review metrics for Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Ads, Facebook, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, Yelp, LinkedIn, and many others. Whether it’s sending out reports each month in a timely manner or drilling into metrics to review client performance, AgencyAnalytics is one of our most widely used tools and we can’t recommend it enough.
- Rank Ranger
rankranger logo
Rank Ranger is a robust, all-around SEO analysis tool. But before you get lost in the data, focus on what Rank Ranger does best: tracking your keyword rankings. You’ll be able to track your website’s organic rankings over time in the major search engines, plus your local rankings in the “map” results. This will help you identify trends up or down in your rankings so you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Rank Ranger also offers automated SEO reporting, competitor analysis tools, and many other helpful features for analyzing the performance of your SEO campaigns.
- Screaming Frog
screaming frog
Screaming Frog is another SEO tool with lots of bells and whistles. What sets it apart is the free SEO Spider tool that you can use to quickly conduct a technical SEO audit of your website. After downloading the tool, all you need to do to get started is type in your website’s domain name, and click Start.
The best part is that this tool is free (for crawling up to 500 URLs per website.) After downloading the tool, all you need to do is enter the website’s domain name, and click Start.
In just a couple of minutes, you will see a detailed audit of all of your webpages. From meta tags to error status codes, you can spot problems without taking the time to manually audit each and every one of your website’s pages.
- Ahrefs
ahrefs logo
Ahrefs is our favorite tool for analyzing backlinks, SEO content opportunities, and SEO keyword research.
The main tool we love at Ahrefs is the Site Explorer tool. Ahrefs is probably best known for the backlink analysis functions within their Site Explorer tool. This tool is very helpful for identifying the different types of websites that are already linking to your website. You can also view trends in the growth of your backlinks over time. In addition, you can use the Site Explorer tool to analyze backlinks to competitors and find new link-building opportunities.
In our experience, the Site Explorer tool is also incredibly valuable for analyzing top-performing SEO content on your website. You can use this tool to identify what pages and keywords are already ranking well in Google and driving traffic to your website. For example, you can see what pages are driving the most SEO traffic, and which particular keywords the pages are ranking for in Google.
And then, you can also use the Site Explorer tool to identify what pages and keywords are working best for your competitors, and then apply those lessons to your own SEO strategy. For example, if you see some competitors have certain types of SEO landing pages that you don’t have, and they are generating traffic on some keywords that you aren’t focused on, you may want to incorporate those types of content ideas into your SEO plan.
In addition to Site Explorer, we also love Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer tool. It provides a fast, easy way to generate dozens of new keyword ideas for SEO content creation.
- Moz
Moz logo
MozPro (including Link Explorer)
Moz is one of the most popular SEO software suites and we use their tools regularly. Moz is probably best known for their ‘Domain Authority’ (DA) metric. DA predicts how likely a website is to rank in Google, with a range from 0 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater likelihood of ranking. The main factor with DA is the quality and quantity of links.
Moz Pro is a suite that includes many tools, including Link Explorer, a backlink analysis tool. Unfortunately, no tool is 100% accurate when it comes to finding all of your backlinks or the backlinks of your competitors. That’s why we recommend using multiple tools (Ahrefs, Moz, among others) to get the full picture.
MozBar
MozBar is a simple tool but saves a tremendous amount of time when reviewing websites. It’s a Google Chrome extension that allows you to quickly and easily view a site’s Domain Authority, Page Authority, backlink information, and spam score. At the click of a button, you can also view a Moz page analysis, as well as followed and no-followed links on a page.
MozLocal
One of the biggest factors in your local “map” rankings is citations. A citation is simply a mention of your name, address, and phone number (NAP) on another website online. The most common citations are business directories like Yelp, Bing Local, and even Facebook business pages.
Moz Local is one of the best tools available to quickly audit your citations. You’ll see if your information is consistent across all directories, if you’re missing any important directories, and if you have duplicate listings that could be dragging down your rankings.
- SpyFu
SpyFu logo
SpyFu is an amazing tool that allows you to see how your competitors are performing with SEO (as well as Google Ads). By using this tool, you’ll be able to find out:
The keywords your competitors are ranking for in Google organically
Which pages are generating SEO traffic
What types of inbound links they have
SEO traffic estimates and trends in SEO traffic
Plus, SpyFu is our go-to tool for Google Ads competitor intelligence. With SpyFu, you can see competitor Google Ads data such as:
Which of their keywords are performing the best.
How long their ads ran or have run for certain keywords.
The clicks and impressions they received from their ads.
The best performing ads.
Your competitors’ ad copy.
Your competitors’ monthly ad spend on campaigns.
So if you’re managing SEO as well as Google Ads campaigns, we definitely recommend using SpyFu to analyze your competitors.
- SEMrush
SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the most complete all-in-one SEO software packages.
This platform pretty much does it all, including:
Competitor research
Keyword research
Backlink analysis
Automated On-page SEO audits
And much more
Our favorite feature with SEMrush is the toxic backlink audit feature. In our view, their backlink audit tool is the best option for quickly analyzing potentially toxic backlinks to disavow via Search Console.
- WhiteSpark
whitespark logo
Citations (directory listings with your business name and contact info) are important for ranking high in Google’s local “map” results. But how do you find citations?
That’s where WhiteSpark comes in…
Citation Finder is one of our favorite tools offered by WhiteSpark. In a simple interface, Citation Finder allows you to add a business alongside some priority keywords. Once you’ve added the business info, the tool will start running and after a few minutes, Citation Finder will present you with a list of citation opportunities that competitors have. At this point, you also have the ability to add additional competitors. Once the list of competitors is set, you can review citations the business you added already has, you can review opportunities in a single list, and finally, you can review opportunities in comparison to the full list of competitors. In particular, we’re big fans of the ability to export these findings as a CSV.
Plus, WhiteSpark also provides the option to pay them to set up the citations to save you time.
- BrightLocal
brightlocal-
BrightLocal is yet another citation building tool that is similar to WhiteSpark. In our experience, these tools will uncover different citation opportunities so using both can ensure you get the most exposure. Plus, BrightLocal has the same option to pay them to create the citations for you.
- SEO Quake
SEO Quake is an all-in-one SEO toolbox that comes in the form of a browser plugin. Essentially, it’s a very handy quick reference tool for evaluating both your own site as well as the competition. Quick and easy SEO metrics for individual pages or a full SEO Audit function which instantly evaluates the quality of a site’s on-page and off-page SEO.
- ImportXML
connector-google-sheets-logo
OK, this one isn’t exactly a tool, it’s a formula that is available in Google Spreadsheets. If you’re comfortable with spreadsheets, but you’re not familiar with ImportXML, then you’re going to love this!
Although it can be used to pull any type of data into a Google sheet, from sources as diverse as XML, HTML, CSV, TSV, and RSS feeds, it is particularly useful for businesses trying to organize SEO webpage data. For example, you can pull the current title tag, meta description, and even headers of a webpage into a single sheet, so you can review and document edits. Here’s a quick primer on using ImportXML for SEO.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
Check out other publications to gain access to more digital resources if you are just starting out with Flux Resource.
Also contact us today to optimize your business(s)/Brand(s) for Search Engines