Welcome to our blog! In this article, we’ll be talking about free SEO tools for digital marketing.
We’ve all heard the saying “you get what you pay for,” but in reality, sometimes the most useful things are free. When it comes to digital marketing, that’s especially true. If you’re just starting out with your own business and haven’t yet made a big investment in tools or training, here are some of our favorites:
Table of Contents
Free Seo Tools For Digital Marketing Best
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.
google seo tools
Free Google SEO Tools to Consider
Choosing the right SEO tools for your strategy can be overwhelming. With so much variety in features and price ranges, where do you begin? Google’s SEO tools are a great place to start.
Since the search engine currently accounts for 70% of all searches, their SEO tools harness the most accurate and comprehensive source of data.
The best part of using these tools is that they’re absolutely free and generally unlimited. Here are 13 SEO tools built by Google you should consider adding to your wheelhouse.
1. Google Lighthouse
Google Lighthouse is designed to improve your website’s UX and performance. Auditing four different components, Google Lighthouse examines accessibility, Progressive Web Apps, performance, and SEO.
The results of these audits will give you a clear picture of the overall performance of your desktop site, web app, or mobile site.
Site speed is different for every user. Some people might have access to superfast 5g while others might only have unreliable 3g available. Google Lighthouse tells you exactly how each of these users will experience your site.
It will indicate if any of your web pages feel sluggish. As we all know slow or unresponsive web pages result in fewer conversions. This tool is perfect for getting your site up to speed.
Alternatives: Dareboost, WebsiteSpeedchecker.com
2. Google Search Console
With Google Search Console, you can identify broken links, crawling issues, see how many pages are indexed, and find out if your site has been penalised.
This is a great tool for seeing how Google views the technical elements of your site from a ranking perspective. Google Search Console will find all those blockers that are stopping your web properties from ranking well on search engines.
On top of identifying technical issues, you can also use the platform to identify the exact search queries users enter into Google to find your web pages.
Within the ‘Search Queries’ report, explore the analytics for each query, to see which pages need an SEO boost. These pages are generally those with high impressions and low CTR.
Alternatively, the platform can tell you if you might want to reconsider your keyword strategy if your site has lots of pages with low impressions and low position.
3. Google Analytics
Once you’ve got a solid SEO strategy in place, you’ll want to know if it’s helping to bring you more organic traffic. This is where analytical tools come into play.
If you care about making page 1 on Google search results, it’s best to stick to Google Analytics which uses all of its own data.
Other analytical tools usually just piggyback off Google’s data anyway, so you may as well use Google Analytics which is both free and accurate – a win-win situation.
Google Analytics tracks every minute piece of data related to your site’s visitors and traffic. Uncover keyword insights to find which search terms people use to land on your page so you know which elements of your keyword strategy are working.
Carrying out a successful and thorough SEO strategy is challenging if not impossible without performing regular analysis of your site. To stay ahead of the curve and competition, use Google Analytics to help you formulate a successful SEO strategy.
Alternatives: Matomo, FoxMetrics
4. Google Data Studio
Find Google Analytics and its vast data overwhelming? Google Data Studio is a free data visualisation tool which presents the data in visual, easy to read reports, and dashboards to help you interpret all the relevant information correctly.
View graphics like colour-coded maps showing the top countries by sessions or graphs to show you how site sessions are trending.
It integrates with other SEO tools from Google, such as Google Search Console to ensure your reports are as detailed as possible.
5. Google Keyword Planner
When it comes to putting together a strong keyword strategy, you’ll need a clear idea of some essential stats to guide your strategy.
While Google Adwords Keyword Planner was originally designed for PPC, it’s still an excellent Google SEO tool for harnessing keyword data for increasing your organic traffic.
Enter a seed keyword and find out the monthly search volume, competition and up to 300 suggested keywords. Using these metrics, you’ll quickly find out which keywords are better to include and which you can leave out.
It’s also easy to export and save data so you can easily refer back to the keywords when you’re planning your content strategy.
While this Google SEO tool provides plenty of essential keyword metrics, don’t confuse it with being the best or most varied keyword generator. You’ll be better off with more specific keyword research tools.
6. Google My Business
Google My Business is a pretty essential SEO tool if you run a local business with area-specific services or products.
This Google SEO tool allows you to claim your business on Google Maps so potential customers can easily find and locate your business.
Once you’ve claimed your business and it’s appearing on Google Maps, you can add photos and offers to your profile to draw in your target audience.
Google My Business basically gives you control over how you want your business to appear in its listing after appearing in a search.
The set up also allows you to add multiple ways for potential customers to contact you by messaging or calling your business directly.
Relevant statistics give you an accurate indication of how your customers connect with the business. View the total number of searches for your business, the number of calls and how many views your business received.
7. Google Alerts
Want to know any time someone mentions you or your business online? Or do you want to spy on your competitors’ mentions?
Google Alerts is a pretty simple tool to use. Anytime there’s a mention of the exact phrase you want alerts for, Google sends you an alert via email.
While it’s nice to know when you or your business receive a mention, it’s actually essential information when it comes to identifying link building opportunities, or potential brand collaborations. You can use your competitors’ mentions to help guide your strategy.
Alternatives: Mention, Ahrefs Alerts
8. Tag Manager
Waiting around for website updates and long development timelines is undoubtedly frustrating.
Google Tag Manager is a tool that allows you to easily update measurement codes and related code fragments known as tags on your website or app meaning you don’t need to rely on a web developer to do it for you which will ultimately save you time and your marketing budget.
As a more advanced technical Google SEO tool, it can take some time to get your head around some of the concepts. However, once code is installed on your site, you can then edit lots of the common marketing tags without further code updates.
9. Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Having a mobile optimised site is essential for ensuring you reach more customers quickly. A clear, easy to use and mobile-friendly site will ensure your site looks up to date and relevant. If your site is easy to navigate on a smartphone, it will increase customer satisfaction resulting in higher traffic and more conversions.
This tool tests how easily a user can access and navigate your site’s pages from a mobile device. One essential step is to ensure all web pages look good in a vertical format. There should also be larger CTA buttons so that users can take the action they want to without clicking elsewhere by accident.
These aesthetic and navigation issues are all features the platform will analyse to ensure your users are having the best possible mobile experience.
It will also dive deep into technical issues like text that’s too small or plugins that don’t work to ensure your whole site is compatible with a mobile browser.
10. Google Trends
Google Trends is a useful tool for comparing popular search terms over a given time.
View whether a trend is increasing or declining in popularity. This data is especially useful for showing seasonal variations in search popularity.
If you’re in eCommerce or shipping this can be helpful for understanding the seasonal popularity of items. For example, if you sell sunglasses, you’ll be able to see during which months there’s a spike in popularity and when in others there’s a dip.
You can also use this data to inform when you might want to revamp old content that needs a refresh or when you want to increase your output of original content around seasonal trends.
Having access to this data is key for planning when you might want to run PPC, invest more in your SEO strategy or spend time planning your content strategy.
11. Page Speed Insights
Unsurprisingly, page speed plays a big part in how your web pages perform in search results.
Choose to use the Page Speeds Insights tool within a web browser or as a browser extension for Firefox or Google Chrome.
Simply enter your web pages’ URLs and the platform will test your pages’ performance and loading time on both desktop and mobile. It will then show you how to speed up your web pages and identify opportunities for improvement.
The mobile results also give you a user experience score, assessing things like font size and CTAs.
Alternatives: Pingdom, KeyCDN Site Speed Test
12. Google Consumer Surveys
When users enjoy navigating your site you’ll naturally have higher levels of customer satisfaction, resulting in consistent engagement and higher rankings.
Understanding what your consumer wants and needs from your site is key to unlocking satisfaction.
Performing surveys is often the best way to gauge how your users feel about your site.
These Consumer Surveys are free if you stick to the four default questions. If you want to dig deeper you’ll have to pay more but you can still get valuable insights into how users experience your site.
This Google SEO tool is particularly useful if you’re trying out a new design, layout or content strategy.
13. Google.com in an Incognito Window
Perhaps the simplest Google SEO tool of them all, Google incognito mode can provide plenty of valuable insights.
When you open Google in an incognito window and start searching for different terms, a list of autofill options will begin to pop up. These automatic suggestions can help guide your initial keyword research and show you which phrases and queries are most commonly searched for.
Incognito mode is essential as it means that any customised search data that Google would otherwise include gets left out. You can also go incognito to find out where your site truly ranks.
Summary of Google’s SEO Tools
So there you have it – 13 Google SEO tools you can experiment with for free. Whether you want to analyse data you already have or get started with keyword research there’s a lot you can achieve with these tools.
As there are increasingly more SEO tools on the market, sometimes it’s good to keep it simple and use those directly created by Google.
Conclusion
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