There are many SEO tools out there. You can find them on Google, but they don’t always tell you which one is best. The only way to find out is to try it yourself! I’ve used every SEO tool that exists, and here’s my list of the top 10 SEO tools for bloggers in 2019.

What makes a good SEO tool? Well, it depends on what you’re looking for. Some people want something that will show them how much traffic their blog gets from search engines like Google. Others might prefer an app that helps them analyze keywords or optimize their content so that it ranks higher in searches. Either way, there are many options available today!

Brian Dean Seo Tools

The route to success in nearly everything requires the use of the correct tools – from repairing an iPhone screen to software development. And this statement couldn’t be truer in the world of SEO.

Every well-executed SEO campaign needs to begin with the very best tools – ones that allow valuable discovery information through keyword research, link building techniques, competitive analysis, and in-depth reporting.

Search engine algorithms are constantly changing, creating an ever-shifting environment for SEOs as they attempt to improve organic rankings and site authority. So the better the tools, the more effective the results.

Most of the tools that I am going to highlight here are tools that I’ve used to perform SEO, but there are some I haven’t. I’ve polled SEO professionals from around the industry to get insight into what they are using as well and they even provided reviews.

The following list of tools are a must for optimization of any website, from technical aspects like 404 errors and the quality of other sites linking to you to theme-related keywords when building out content.

Google Tools
SEMrush
Screaming Frog
Haro
Moz
Yoast
GTmetrix
Ahrefs
Merkle Schema Markup Tool
Bing
AnswerThePublic
Ubersuggest
Fatrank
Marketmuse
Mangools
Zapier
Buzzsumo
Surfer
SEOJet
Accuranker
Text Optimizer
Keywords Everywhere
Brightlocal
Hunter.io
Sanity Check
Internet Marketing Ninjas Rich Snippets
Dashword
Nortcutt Tools
Social Planner
INK
Canva
Rytr
SEO Tools You or Your Agency Should Be Using
Google tools
The Google Suite
Google has many free tools as part of its tool suite that allows you to perform your SEO strategy flawlessly. I think it’s best if I highlight the Google tools that I like to use daily:

Google Analytics/Tag Manager
Google Analytics is a must for reporting purposes. It allows you to get insight into historical and real-time data on your audience which you can filter and segment into more granular metrics. Personally, I like to implement Google Analytics through Tag Manager which basically keeps all of your tags in one container. It’s more organized. To me, it is also easier to set up goals and events, like tracking every time someone clicks your click-to-call button on your website. Check out Google Tag Manager is you are not using it!

Google Search Console
Google Search Console provides the truest organic search data. You can’t get true keyword data right from Google Analytics anymore. Most of the traffic data associated with keywords filters into the “not set” bucket. Search Console, on the other hand, allows you to see your organic keyword data. It allows you to see what keywords a page is ranking for and how that page or its keywords are performing in terms of clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position. Outside of performance, Search Console is also a great tool for submitting your sitemap and monitoring index status, monitoring site errors, and to use the new enhancement features like checking page speed and mobile usability.

Google My Business
If any aspect of your business is somewhat local, you need a Google My Business. Your GMB should be optimized with what type of business you have, the correct name, address, and phone number, a description of your business, and posts, offers, or products. A majority of organic searches today populate map listings. You need to ensure you show up in them. Also, don’t forget to leverage reviews from happy customers by creating a short name link to share!

Google Keyword Planner
Even though this tool is a part of the Google Ads platform, this is one of the best keyword research tools for SEO. You can type up to 10 keywords into the tool and it will spit back average monthly search volume, competition level, and then additional semantic keywords or keyword ideas.

Google Data Studio
This tool excites me. It’s become a staple of our reporting here at LSEO. It gives a sense of ease to reporting as it is all dynamic. You set up the metrics that you want to track and it will automatically populate the data for the time frame you have chosen and compare it to whatever comparison period you choose. We like to use month over month and year over year. Data Studio allows for so many different connectors that you can basically pull in any type of data you can imagine, even from other tools we will highlight in this article.

Chrome Developer Tools
Not a lot of people know about this tool, but you should get to. This tool is a part of your Chrome browser and can be useful for looking into what can be causing loading issues or errors on your site. It will allow you to debug CSS and javascript issues. You can view the Chrome developer tools by visiting a site and clicking cmd+shift+C on a Mac or control+shirt+C on a PC.

Google Structured Data Testing Tool
There are many types of structured data and some of it needs to be on your site. This tool allows you to see if you are utilizing it on your site. It is worth the test as many themes and platforms bake it into their web builds today. Structured data allows you to make your organic search results richer by pulling through information like star ratings, price, address, and more. This can help you gain a click over your competition.

Google Pagespeed Insights
Speed is important. Google Page Speed Insights allows you to get a high-level overview of how your site is performing on both a desktop and mobile device. It will give you insight into what is slowing your site down and how to fix it. You want to keep users on your site, not make them bounce.

Google Suggested Keywords
In addition to keyword planner, you can also use Google’s suggested keywords as a keyword generation tool. Once you start typing a term into Google, it will provide suggestions as to what are the most popular terms associated with what you start typing. This is a great way to get specific keywords to use for your SEO campaign.

semrush logo
SEMrush
SEMrush has multiple uses, but its primary role for LSEO is finding keywords and keyword phrases. The database has over 20 billion keywords and keyword phrases available, which can help set search results apart from the competition. It’s the largest database of its kind.

The tool shows keyword/keyword phrase monthly volume; KD (how difficult it would be to rank for); CPC (average cost per click for PPC use); Com. (competitive density); Results (how many websites rank for it); Trend (the keywords trends over the past 12 months); and SERP (snapshot of the keyword results page).

SEMrush can also help you discover technical issues through its audit feature, monitor your website’s rankings, and provide an insight into what competitors are doing. Kuri Khailo, SEO Supervisor at Best Price Nutrition, told us, “We have the paid version and I am glad we do because we can run monthly or weekly site audits to make sure we didn’t miss any errors and be mindful of the warnings to catch them before they turn into errors! It’s one of my favorite things to do because it’s somewhat like a checklist and you feel great when it’s all done.”

SEMrush has many new awesome features to check out as well, like their topic suggestion tool, writing assistant (which I used to write this article), and keyword magic feature.

Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is my favorite SEO spider tool. It’s my go-to when kicking off an SEO account and also to do periodic health checks. You can set the user-agent to crawl as Google and gain a look into what Google will come across when they crawled your site. It allows you to easily locate errors, mixed protocols, where your pages need optimization. It’s not very expensive either as you will only pay an annual fee.

Jeff Romero, a 12 year SEO veteran and founder of Octiv Digital uses Screaming Frog and said, “This tool seeks to mimic how a website is crawled by Google, reporting on all technical SEO factors like titles, headings, crawl traps, server response codes and more. It’s free up to 500 URLs (which covers most small business websites) and there is a paid option for larger e-commerce sites.”

HARO
HARO has been a game-changer for me and LSEO. It’s one of the best tools to sign up for and it’s completely free. You get pitches sent to you 3 times a day. These pitches are from other websites looking for you to contribute to their content. You just need to make sure you have the staff in place to filter through the queries and to respond if one fits you or your client’s niche.

It’s free, so sign up!

Moz
Moz is an SEO software tool that allows you to do a variety of things, and also features loads of education on everything within the digital marketing space.

Moz provides four different products: Moz Pro, which is for boosting online visibility; Moz Local, which is for increasing online visibility for local searches and citation consistency; Moz Content, which is meant to increase content strategy; and, finally, Followerwonk, which is a way to optimize your social media presence.

Almost anyone can use Moz – it’s meant for beginners and experts at SEO. Alina Krivopalova, the marketing manager at Flippingbook, uses Moz and said this about the tool, “Moz helps to increase traffic, rankings, and visibility across search engine results and has helped me take Flippingbook’s organic results to the next level.”

Yoast
Yoast is twofold – it offers an amazing WordPress tool that LSEO recommends to everyone on the WordPress platform, and also has an audit/review tool that takes a deep look at websites. It’s so easy to generate and maintain a sitemap and edit your robots.txt file with Yoast.

With Yoast, you have a variety of options for SEO website reviews you can choose from. These options change in price and what level of how much you want Yoast to do for you. The cheapest option is $699 for the Silver SEO Review; with this review, you will have insights on how to improve your SEO; optimize content; optimize code; and improve site speed.

Aside from the cheapest option, the most expensive package is the Diamond SEO Review. With Diamond SEO Review, you get the platinum review, and three Yoast SEO books included. All of the website reviews cover six weeks of support.

GTmetrix page speed logo
GTmetrix
GTmetrix is a great tool to use to analyze page speed outside of Google Page Speed Insights and Lighthouse. Web developers will understand and be able to use this tool a little better than SEOs.

GTmetrix scores the speed of your site, but in particular, it does a very good job of auditing almost every element of your site. If you’re looking to watch videos of how your site loads, how the core web vitals are performing, and to see the waterfall of how every element loads loads on your site and the timing, this tool will show you all of that.

This is definitely my favorite page speed tool out there.

Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a “do it all” SEO tool. One of it’s best features is the backlink portion of the tool. It can help you find broken links to fix, discover unlinked mentions, and really just audit your backlink portfolio.

It does much more than that though. Ahrefs can also perform keyword tracking, generate new keyword ideas, audit a website, and much more. It’s a direct competitor to SEMrush, but they still both have their own unique features which is why we here at LSEO have a subscription to both.

James Both uses Ahrefs to perform SEO on One Hour Smart Home and he had this to say about it, “In 2020 one of the most useful tools I use is Ahrefs. Ahrefs allows me to check backlinks and traffic to my own site but will also give me analytical data on competitor’s sites and provide me with Google keyword data for them. I use Ahrefs on a daily basis for planning keywords in posts and making decisions on what content searchers are interested in. It’s a tool packed with features that provide valuable information to enhance your search presence in an easy to use format.

Shaan Patel, Founder and CEO of Prep Expert, also added, “We often use Ahrefs as a part of our marketing and SEO analytics. The best thing to use Ahrefs for is keyword and domain tracking. We use this data for our backlink strategy, where we can get an idea of how many new domains are linking to our site. We also use it to see which keywords can help bring in a greater volume of traffic.”

Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator
I talk about tools in this article that will help you test if your structured data is set up properly or set up at all. What do you do if it’s not? I like to use Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator tool. It’s super easy to use and has so many types of structured data to choose from, all the way from local businesses to how-to or FAQ structured data.

Bing Webmaster Tools & Bing Places
Since Google is so popular, I think SEO professionals forget about Bing and the other search engines. Bing has some of the same types of products as Google in Bing Webmaster Tools and Bing Places. Even though a majority of users use Google, there are still users who will utilize Bing, so why not create a Bing Webmaster Tools profile and monitor data, submit your sitemap, and submit URLs to be indexed.

Likewise, if you are local, take advantage of Bing’s local results and create or claim your Bing Places listing. When someone searches a “near me” search in Bing, you better show up. Even if the search volume is limited in Bing, go get more visitors!

AnswerThePublic
Calling all you SEOs and content marketers. This is a phenomenal tool for researching and finding the top questions users are typing into search engines. These are topics you should be centering your content around and answering these important questions for users. It’s one of the best ways to gain new traffic to your site if you hit on the right subject and get something to stick.

Anthony Bianco operates The Travel Tart, a content site centered around traveling. By utilizing Answer the Public, he helped grow his traffic to over 12,000 visitors per month. I think this is a good example of utilizing this tool’s capabilities.

Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is Neil Patel’s take on SEMrush. It has recently been updated and revamped and you can immediately see the similarities. The difference is that Ubersuggest is a free tool. It’s a great way to see what your domain is ranking for, but also to generate new keyword ideas. It can even do some backlink digging for you. If you are looking for a cost-effective way to do keyword research, Ubersuggest should be the route you go.

Ronald D’souza, a professional at Angel Jackets, told us, “Ubersuggest is one of the best all in one SEO tools, it has everything including competitors backlink research, content ideas, keywords data, traffic analyzer, site audit, and so many other features for free.”

Fatrank
Fatrank is an awesome Google Chrome browser extension from the company FATJOE. When you are on a site, you can load the Fatrank extension and type a keyword into it. It will then tell you where that site ranks for that keyword and what associated page ranks for it. This takes manual research out of the equation.

Tonya Davis of ThoughtLab said this about Fatrank, “This is a simple plugin that you can install for Chrome. This tool is purely about convenience. It makes it very easy to quickly see where a site ranks for various keywords.”

MarketMuse
MarketMuse is said to be one of the best content marketing tools out there. It helps you with all things from content research and strategy to creation and optimization. If you are looking to scale through content marketing, then you should look into MarketMuse.

Madison Smith is an SEO and content marketing specialist at Best Company. She uses MarketMuse and it has been a true game-changer for her. “I have struggled in the past spending hours mining through keyword data on Ahrefs or Spyfu to craft my own content. MarketMuse simplified this process. It analyzes all those keyword opportunities for you and gives you content suggestions that are predicted to be popular. MarketMuse can even create outlines of content, such as blog posts so that you can truly maximize every point that you are trying to make.”

Mangools
Mangools is another cost-effective tool that comes with a powerful cloud-based tool suite. Those tools include KWFinder, SERPChecker, SERPWatcher, LinkMiner, and SiteProfiler. SEO thought leaders like Brian Dean even approve of tools like KWFinder.

Check it out if you are in the market for a cheaper all-in-one SEO tool.

Zapier
Zapier is a workflow that connects over 1,500 web apps. It’s an easy solution for all of your different apps to work together. For instance if you use Slack and Google Calendar, Zapier can get them working together. That is just one example out of a thousand. In the business world, it can help you stay organized and make your life a lot easier, especially if you are doing search engine optimization where there are so many moving parts.

Alfredo Bernal, Head of Acquisition at SamBoat.com, who manages Yacht charters all around the world said about Zapier, “A must-use tool is Zapier. To maximize efficiency, we automate as many daily processes as possible. It is really easy to use and you can automate processes on pretty much every platform.”

BuzzSumo
At most, Buzzsumo is not particularly an SEO tool, but rather a social media tool. BuzzSumo is best to spark ideas for creating content. It also is a perfect tool to analyze what headlines are working for stuff to go viral. It will give you insight into what type of content is going to perform the best in the SERPs.

“Buzzsumo is my go-to tool to find the trending articles in a niche and see who shared a similar article to the one I am trying to promote. With that information, I can reach out to the sharers and see if they like my article too,” said Tarun Jain of Distill.io who has been doing SEO for over 5 years and uses Buzzsumo on the daily.

SurferSEO
Surfer is another all-in-one SEO tool that can handle tasks like SERP analysis, content editing, keyword research, and more. It’s said that this tool can look at over 500+ ranking factors in one sweep of a website.

Paul Strobel of eRideHero has more experience using this tool than I do, and he said, “The new hot name on the block in terms of on-page SEO is SurferSEO. It’s an excellent tool that’ll help you perfect your on-page by comparing it with the top rankers for your desired search phrase. With very little effort, I’ve been able to land some awesome keywords and rich snippets just by using Surfer. It isn’t all that expensive, either. They have a content creation tool as well that’ll allow you to export strict guidelines for your writers which saves me a ton of time on a daily basis.”

SEOJet
SEOJet is a backlink SEO software that gives you insight into competitor’s backlink profiles. specific page scoring, and even helps with anchor text generation.

We spoke directly to the founder of SEOJet, Adam White. He had this to say about his tool, “Because Ahrefs integrates with SEOJet I am able to use their data to build out awesome backlink plans for the pages I am trying to rank in Google. SEOJet lets me do a deep dive into the backlink profiles of the top ten ranked pages for any of my main key phrases. With that data, I can see who I should be trying to mimic and what I need to do to catch and surpass them in the search results. It makes it super convenient when I am deciding on which key phrases are worth targeting when doing long-form blog posts.”

If you are also a user of Ahrefs, check out Adam and SEOJet.

Accuranker
This tool is deemed “the world’s fastest keyword rank tracking tool.” It’s capable of giving you on-demand updates on keyword rankings. Something other tools are incapable of doing. Sometimes it takes other tools a period of time to update true rankings.

Colin Ma of Digital Software Products who has been doing SEO for over 6 years uses Accuranker. He said, “Accuranker is a ranking monitoring tool that is easy to use and extremely accurate since it updates every 24 hours. You simply plugin the website you want to track and enter the keywords you want Accuranker to gauge.”

Text Optimizer
Text Optimizer is a great tool as it uses semantic analysis to generate keywords and questions that you should be answering in your content. It’s a great tool to use to avoid duplicate content on multiple pages as you will always be answering different questions.

Brian Robben, the founder of Robben Media, is an avid fan of Text Optimizer. He had this glaring review, “After recently discovering this, I’m obsessed with the SEO tool Text Optimizer. This semantic analysis tool analyzes a page to better improve the content for Google and searchers. Text Optimizer shows you which search snippets are included in your page and what ones you’d be wise to add to optimize the text. I’ve seen this do serious damage in improving my organic keyword rankings.”

Keywords Everywhere Browser Extension
This is another awesome Chrome browser extension that all SEO’s should add. Keywords Everywhere pulls data like CPC, search volume, and competition levels into different keyword analyzer tools like right into the SERPs or Google Search Console.

Niles Koenigsberg, a digital marketing specialist at FiG Advertising, said, “One of the most essential tools that every SEO professional should use is the Keywords Everywhere browser extension. This add-on quickly reveals key stats on your search terms, like the average volume of searches per month, the competition for the phrase, and the cost-per-click. While this tool is no longer free, the data is well worth the cost. With this tool, you’ll quickly understand which keywords you should be targeting on your site and which ones you should avoid. It speeds up your keyword research and makes your SEO planning much easier.”

Brightlocal
Brightlocal is one of the most powerful local SEO tools out there. It handles tasks like citation building, citation audits, review building, and multi-location reporting. If you specialize in local SEO, Brightlocal should be on your radar.

Patrick Garde of ExaWeb Solutions said, “With BrightLocal, you can track local SEO performance, create and build citations, monitor online reputation, track rankings and run SEO audits. This is an important tool for local SEOs if you want to improve your client’s local search performance.”

Hunter.io
Hunter.io is a great tool if you are doing anything related to sales in a digital marketing agency or for SEO link building. Hunter will allow you to find contacts associated with a domain for you to ultimately do cold outreach and gain them as a prospect.

Joshua Joseph, SEO and Content Manager at Motivosity, said, “When I need to find someone’s email, I use hunter.io It’s an awesome web crawler that helps you find virtually anyways email address. If it can’t find an address it’ll give you an estimate with a probability score.”

Sanity Check
Sanity Check takes Google Search Console data and turns it into actionable tasks to complete. It will help you improve your click-through rate (CTR) for keywords and pages, and also help you avoid keyword cannibalization. It will also give automated reports.

Sam Hurley, Technical SEO Expert and Co-founder of NOVOS, said, “Sanity Check is good for quick and easy a/b testing of SEO page titles. It will give you a bird’s eye view if your change will improve your CTR for the page(s) you want to change the title on.”

Internet Marketing Ninjas Featured Snippet Tool
Since I love technical SEO, this tool is for me. This tool allows you to put a domain into the tool and it will give you insight into what phrases you are ranking for also contain a rich snippet, like an answer box. With this information, you can see what it is going to take for you to compete for that snippet.

Lee Savery, Content Executive at Ricemedia, had this to say about the featured snippet tool from Internet Marketing Ninjas, “Featured snippets (or Google Answer Boxes) are goldust to content marketers and this tool helps you find the low-hanging fruit for quick wins. Simply pop your domain into the tool and it will deliver a report detailing the snippets you can target. It displays the current snippet and can even help you optimize your content.”

Dashword tool logo
Dashword
Dashword is a startup content software company. Dashword’s powerful software helps SEO teams write content with a better chance of ranking.

We worked directly with Thoms Petracco the co-founder of Dashword. He told us, “We know that content research is challenging and time-consuming, so we created a tool that tells you exactly what you should be writing about.”

Dashword uses machine learning much like Google’s algorithm to analyze top ranking web pages. This will take your content and rankings to the next level.

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Northcutt
A Chicago-based SEO agency. One of the coolest things about Northcutt is that they offer a ton of free tools on their site. They have link tools, keyword tools, search engine tools, rank checkers, header tag tools, IP tools, and more.

I highly recommend trying their nofollow finder, keyword extractor, link analyzer, and search engine saturation checker.

The best part is these tools are FREE! Check them out and they’ll quickly become some of your favorite SEO tools to use.

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Social Planner
SocialPlanner is an all-in-one content marketing & social media scheduling tool designed to help brands and businesses find, plan and publish engaging content, resulting in “off-the-charts” brand exposure!

The Social Planner tool has three core features.

Content Discovery
Users can discover red hot trending content on social media and from around the web, the type of content that generates high engagement from their fans and followers.

Content Planning
Users can plan all of their content across all their social media accounts in one place with our easy-to-use, visual drag & drop calendar.

Content Publishing
Users can automatically schedule and publish their social media posts to all their social channels right inside SocialPlanner with our social media scheduling tool.

There is a lot more features packed into their tool that you should check out for yourself!

INK content tool logo
INK
INK is an AI-powered content editor. It will be sure to have you generating higher-quality content that will drive more qualified leads.

INK will automatically find the top results for what you want to rank for and use that as a gauge. Their AI then scores your content and predicts the chances you have of rankings amongst the top results.

Seriously, check out INK. It will save you from wasting time and writing worthless content.

Canva design tool logo
Canva
This isn’t really an SEO tool, but Canva can definitely help take your digital marketing to the next level. Canva can be used to design pretty much anything. From logos and flyers to social media posts and website banners.

At LSEO we use Canva to create case studies, open graph images for our pages, ads for social media and display, and even to create images to insert into our landing pages and content.

Canva has a free option, but it will limit you to the templates and graphics you can use. For a cheap monthly fee, you can unlock Canva’s full potential. I’ve used many design platforms like this and Canva has been the best I ever used. It comes highly recommended.

Rytr Hand Logo
Rytr
I have tested many AI writers out over the course of 2021, but Rytr has become my favorite and the choice internally for LSEO. It just seemed to produce the best results.

Rytr can produce so many different content types with its AI functionality. It can help you craft blog outlines, write entire blog articles through its blog section writing, help you develop SEO meta tags and paid/social ad copy, and even help you optimize your personal bios and YouTube channel.

Not all of these AI writers are perfect by any means and will make mistakes if not used properly, including Rytr, but based on testing the many AI writers on the market Rytr wins in my book. You can test it out for yourself with their free plan that allows you to test with 5,000 characters per month. If you want to increase to 50,000 characters per month, it’s only $9 per month! An effective tool at a very cost-effective price!

Best free seo tools

When creating content online, it’s important to have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy alongside your content strategy. Doing so will ensure your posts are as optimized as possible. SEO tools can help you identify ways to improve the discoverability of your site.

SEO can seem daunting to novices, but there are several free SEO tools are are just as powerful as their paid counterparts.

Here’s a breakdown of 10 of the best free SEO tools and software.

Best free on-page optimization tools
Rank Math Plugin
Rank Math is a WordPress plugin that helps you optimize your website content. It lets you add meta titles, descriptions and structure your data more easily. Simply download and install this plugin to your WordPress website to begin using it.

Benefits

Rank Math gives your content an SEO score for each page. When you indicate what keyword you’re targeting, this plugin suggests ways to increase your ranking for that keyword. You can also identify and fix dead links on your site and redirect URLs to new pages.

Screenshot of the Rank Math WordPress plugin
Yoast SEO Plugin
The Yoast SEO plugin makes it easy to optimize your WordPress site and identify gaps in your content. If your site runs on WordPress, install and activate the Yoast plugin to begin.

Benefits

The Yoast plugin allows you to improve and modify your content in three ways: SEO, readability and social. With Yoast, you can set meta descriptions, titles, canonical URL, and label index/no-index pages and other backend settings on your site. This plugin will assign every post a readability score by measuring sentence and paragraph length and other criteria. And Yoast also has excellent features to help you improve the shareability of your posts on social media.

Screenshot of Yoast SEO WordPress plugin
Best free keyword research tools
Google Trends
As the name suggests, Google Trends helps you track the popularity of topics and trends in your industry over time. Use this tool to identify current trends and use that information to craft a timely and relevant content marketing strategy.

Benefits

Google Trends gives you a clear picture of how specific trends change over time and how people’s searching patterns around it change. To use Google Trends, start by typing in a keyword. You’ll see the interest in that topic over time, which regions show the most interest, and other keywords people are searching for related to that query. This tool works best when combined with other keywords to show comparisons of trends over time.

Screenshot of Google Trends dashboard for they keywork “football” and its trend ranking over time and by U.S. region
Ahrefs Keyword Generator
Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator is a lite version of Ahrefs full tool and will show you the top 100 related keyword ideas when searching a keyword or phrase. To use this free tool, enter up to 100 keywords or phrases in the search bar. You’ll see a list of the top 100 keywords related to your search as well as their search volume from when the data for that keyword was last updated, and keyword difficulties for the first 10 keywords on the list.

Benefits

This tool gives users a taste of what Ahrefs’ full tool can do and is perfect for people who want to explore some industry keywords. In addition to the keywords, you can also see the top 50 questions related to that keyword.

Screenshot of Ahrefs Keyword Generator and results for the keyword “social media”
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a free SEO tool that helps users generate new keywords and content ideas. This tool will give you a high-level overview of the keyword you’re searching for. It’s a great tool to use when looking for new ways to fill your social media or content calendar because the tool also shows you related long-tail keywords and suggests content ideas based on the keyword.

Benefits

When you do your keyword search, you’ll see the monthly keyword search volume, how competitive it is to rank for, and the average cost per click. The tool will also provide you the average number of backlinks that a site should have to rank for that keyword.

Screenshot of Ubersuggest keyword tool for the keyword “yoga”
Best free SEO tools for analytics
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC), previously known as Google Webmasters, helps you understand how Google crawls and indexes your site. To use the Google Search Console, create an account and add your website as a property within the account. Once you’ve added your domain, verify you’re the site owner before you can access all of its features.

Benefits

There are several features to highlight about Google Search Console, one of which is that it can help you diagnose technical errors on your website. It can also help you understand what keywords or content are ranking for your site.

Screenshot of Google Console dashboard
Bing Webmaster Tools
An often overlooked tool, Bing Webmaster also has a full suite of analytics to help you analyze your website and search analytics. Create your free Bing Webmaster Tools account, add your website and verify your ownership of the site. Then create or upload your sitemaps. Once complete, you’re able to start optimizing your site and its content using Bing Webmaster Tools’ features and suggestions.

Benefits

Bing Webmaster Tools can provide useful keyword research, reporting, and can crawl your website to identify issues. It’s a good way to get a virtual second opinion on your site or find any new information that Google Search Console didn’t reveal.

Screenshot of Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard
Google Analytics
To know if your SEO efforts are working, you need to analyze your site’s findability to see where your traffic is coming from. You may notice a spike in traffic after making post optimizations, but that traffic could be coming from another source like social media. Google Analytics provides you with in-depth details about your website visitors, as well as real-time activity.

With an existing Google account, sign into Google Analytics and connect with your website. To get the most helpful SEO information, pair it with your Google Console account. When you link the two tools, you’ll be able to see the keywords people are using to find your site, identify your click-through-rates on those keywords and more.

Benefits

Google Analytics lets you see how people interact with your website. Using Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see how many people are visiting your site, where your traffic is coming from, how long people are spending on the page and so much more.

Screenshot of Google Analytics
Best free tools for link building
Ahrefs Backlink Checker
Like their Keyword Research tool, Ahrefs Backlink Checker is a free version of their full tool that shows you the top 100 backlinks to any website you search. To use this tool, enter a URL into their search bar and you’ll see the site’s domain rating, the number of backlinks, and the number of referring domains.

Benefits

This free tool is great for some light backlink checking as well as analyzing your competitors. Even though you’re limited to viewing 100 links, it’s still a great place to start. You’ll see the total number of backlinks, links from referring domains, the site’s Domain Rating, and its URL rating.

Screenshot of Ahrefs Backlink Checker homepage
SEM Rush
Similar to the other tools mentioned above, SEM Rush has a free version of their robust tool. Not just for link building, SEM Rush can provide help with keyword research, on-page SEO audits, content optimizations, rank tracking and much more. Create a free account and access these features.

Benefits

The SEM Rush’s Backlink Analysis and Link Building Tool provides you an in-depth look at your backlink profile. The free version limits you to 100 domains in the Link Building Tool but you’ll be able to identify your referring domains and backlinks overtime, including gains and losses, and your backlink authority score. The tool helps you identify areas to improve your link building efforts or where you can gain more visibility online.

Screenshot of SEM Rush’s backlink analytics tool
Final thoughts on free SEO tools
While SEO is a crucial part of the content process, it works best when combined with other marketing strategies like content and social media marketing. You’ll get the most out of your optimizations when using both SEO and social monitoring software together. And these free SEO tools help you build a foundation to these strategies.

Throw in some social media keyword search tools and you’ll be able to cast an even broader net to learn more about what your audience wants. For more on how to marry your social media and SEO strategies, check our post on how SEO can inform social media marketing and vice versa.

Conclusion

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