SEO is a marketing tactic that is essential to the success of any business with an online presence. SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” and it’s the process of making your website visible in search results on Google, Bing, and other search engines.
So how do you optimize your site for search engines? Easy—you use a tool like ours!
Our tool analyzes your website and finds ways for you to improve your SEO. Try it today: it’s free!
Href Seo Tools
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
Check the speed and usability of your site on multiple devices
Limitations: None
Enter a URL and this tool will test the loading time and performance for that URL on desktop and mobile. It then grades your site’s performance on a score from 0 – 100. It tells you exactly how fast it takes to load the site according to different metrics, and also suggests areas for improvements.
Alternatives:Pingdom, WebPageTest, and GTMetrix
2. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
Run a technical audit of your site
Limitations: 5,000 crawl credits per project per month
Sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, verify your website and you’ll be able to audit your website for over 100+ technical SEO issues. The tool also gives suggestions on how to fix them.
After running an audit, it also suggests areas where you can improve your internal linking, which is helpful in boosting your rankings in search engines.
This tool also allows you to see your site’s organic keyword rankings as well as who’s linking to you.
Alternatives:Screaming Frog (audit), Beam Us Up (audit)
3. Answer the Public
Hundreds of keyword ideas based on a single keyword
Limitations: Two free searches per day
Enter any relevant keyword, and Answer the Public will provide a huge list of long-tail keyword opportunities, plus common questions asked.
Alternatives: KeywordTool.io, UberSuggest, Keyword Sheeter, Keyword Generator
4. Google Analytics
Complete web stats and search insights
Limitations: No limitations for its usage, but queries that are sending you organic traffic are hidden
Quite possibly the most powerful free analytics tool available, Google Analytics tracks pretty much every bit of traffic you can imagine on your website—where it comes from, which page is receiving it and so on.
While it’s not purely for SEO, it’s still a helpful tool to track if you’re getting traffic from organic search.
However, Google Analytics has since stopped showing which keywords are sending you those traffic. You’ll have to pair it with a tool like Keyword Hero to uncover what’s behind “(not provided).”
Alternatives:Matomo, Open Web Analytics, and Clicky
5. Google Search Console
Constant website analysis, alerts, and error reports
Limitations: Only shows a handful of technical SEO issues, the top 1,000 backlinks and top 1,000 organic keywords
Google Search Console gives you a taste of what the most used search engine thinks of your website. You can use it to check and fix technical issues on your website, see important SEO data like clicks, impressions and average ranking position, submit sitemaps and more.
If ranking in search engines like Bing and Yandex are important to you, then take note that they have their own “search console” too.
Alternatives:Bing Webmaster Tools, Yandex Webmaster Tools
6. Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker
Comprehensive link analysis
Limitations: Free for the top 100 backlinks
The free version of Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker shows the top 100 backlinks to any website or URL, along with the total number of backlinks and referring domains (links from unique sites), Domain Rating (DR), and URL Rating (UR) where applicable.
A great way to use this tool is to paste your competitor’s website and find potential link building opportunities.
Alternatives: Moz Link Explorer
7. Google Ads Keyword Planner
Know what people search for
Limitations: You’ll need to run an ad campaign to see exact search volumes
Enter a keyword or group of keywords into the tool, and Google Keyword Planner will return all sorts of helpful stats to guide your keyword strategy: monthly search volume, competition, and even suggested terms you might not have considered.
Alternatives:Bing Keyword Planner
8. SERPSim
Preview how your web pages will look in Google’s search results
Limitations: None
See how your meta title and description will appear in the search results before you even publish your web page. Works for desktop and mobile.
Check for truncation issues and fix them instantly.
Alternatives: Portent’s SERP Preview Tool
9. Google Trends
See the relative search popularity of topics
Limitations: None
Google Trends shows the popular search terms over time, which is useful for uncovering seasonal variations in search popularity amongst other things. Compare multiple terms to see the relative popularity.
10. Ahrefs’ SEO toolbar
Check the broken links, redirect chains, nofollow links and on-page elements for any webpage
Limitations: Technical and on-page SEO features are free, but you’ll need an Ahrefs account to see SEO metrics within the SERPs
The Ahrefs SEO toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension that allows you to check for broken links, trace redirect chains and highlight nofollow links for any webpage. It also generates an on-page SEO report that includes the webpage’s:
- Title
- Meta description
- Word count
- Headers
- Hreflang tags
- Canonicals
- OG tags
This makes analyzing any page much easier and faster.
If you have access to a paid Ahrefs account, you’ll also be able to see important keyword metrics like search volume, CPC and keyword difficulty within the SERPs.
Alternatives:Detailed SEO Extension, SEO Minion, LinkMiner (broken links), Ayima Redirect Path (redirect tracing)
11. Moz Local Listing Score
See how your local business looks online
Limitations: Data is only available for three countries: US, Canada & UK
Moz crunches data from more than 10 different sources—including Google, Yelp, and Facebook—to score your brick-and-mortar business on how it looks online. Results come complete with actionable fixes for inconsistent or incomplete listings.
12. Yoast SEO
Optimize your blog posts for search engines
Limitations: Some data limitations, which you can unlock via a premium account
Enter the main keyword for your blog post and Yoast SEO will suggest how to tweak your blog post to optimize it for search engines.
Alternatives: Rank Math, All in One SEO Pack, The SEO Framework
13. JSON-LD Schema Generator For SEO
Customize how your web pages appear in the search results
Limitations: NoneBROUGHT TO YOU BY
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Create custom code so that your reviews, events, organizations, and people are displayed the way you want in Google’s search results. Once you’ve created your schema code, copy and paste into your website.
Then, use the next tool to check if the implementation has been done correctly.
Alternatives:Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator
14. Classy Schema Structured Data Viewer
Check if your structured data was implemented correctly
Limitations: None
Always double check to make sure you’re implementing the technical aspects of SEO right. Use this tool to see if your structured data/schema markup was done correctly.
Alternatives: Google Structured Data Testing Tool (deprecating soon), Google’s Rich Results Test (currently does not test for all possible schema markups)
15. SimilarWeb
View site stats for any domain
Limitations: You’ll need a paid account to see every data point, but the free version is good enough to get a snapshot of your competitor’s activity
Use this tool to estimate how much traffic a website gets. See a breakdown of traffic sources, locations, and more. A helpful tool for competitor research.
16. SERP Robot
See your ranking position for up to five keywords
Limitations: None
Enter any website or web page and up to five keywords to see where you rank for each of them. Check your competitors’ rankings too.
17. XML Sitemaps
Create a sitemap
Limitations: Free up to 500 pages
Simply enter your site’s URL and some optional parameters, and XML Sitemaps will create a sitemap that you can upload to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
18. Robots.txt Generator
Generate a robots.txt for your site
Limitations: None
Robots.txt files let the web robots know what to do with a website’s pages. When a page is disallowed in robots.txt, that’s instructions telling the robots to completely skip over those web pages.
Alternatives: YellowPipe’s Robots.txt Generator
19. Copyscape
Check for duplicate content
Limitations: Only the top 10 results are shown
Enter a URL for a blog post or website, and Copyscape can tell you where else that content exists online. You might find results that you’ll need to follow-up with to help get your SEO in order.
20. Google Alerts
Get alerted of any online mentions of your brand, product or company
Limitations: None
Enter your brand, company or product name and Google will send you an email if it finds any webpage mentioning those terms.
seo tools for excel hreflang
The Hreflang testing tool now has a new feature that many SEOs needed, especially those who work on large websites with thousands of URLs — exporting test results to an Excel file.
When you analyze a large number of errors, it’s not always easy to present all the information in a digestible format. I’m under no illusion that the web UI is great. It’s functional, and is best suited to see a long list of “All OK” results. But if there are errors — and especially if there are a large number of hreflang links per page, thereby increasing the likelihood of at least some errors — the web UI fails to deliver the results in a way that the user can actually do something about.
So the Export to Excel feature will be very useful. Here’s what you can expect in the Excel file, along with screenshots from a real Excel file generated when testing 110 Expedia pages for Hreflang errors. There are 3 worksheets in the Excel file:
1. Hreflang-Map
This worksheet contains a list of all URLs submitted for testing, and (almost) all Hreflang links found on those URLs. There is no information about which pages have problems and which ones are implemented correctly.
Say your website is primarily in English and translations are available in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Arabic. You submit your English sitemap for analysis to Hreflang.org. All your English URLs will be listed in Column A. Column B contains the self-reported language(+region/script) code for that page. So if http://www.example.com/page1.html includes an hreflang link pointing to itself (which it should), and that link specifies hreflang=”en” then we understand that this page is in English. So “en” is what you will find in Column B. If the page does not self-reference itself in its Hreflang tags, Column B will remain blank.
Columns C, D and so on are for URLs that contain different language versions of the main (submitted) URL listed in Column A. So in our example, you will have columns for ar, de, es, fr, it, and pt. They are arranged alphabetically by language code.
Here’s an example from the Expedia test:
2. Return-Tag-Errors
The most common Hreflang implementation error is the “No Return Tag Found” error, and it can be a bear to troubleshoot. This worksheet will help make that much easier.
The correct way to implement Hreflang tags is to use the same set of tags on all pages that have the same content. I like to use the terms ring, ringleader and ringmember to conceptualize this.
Ring: A set of pages that have the same content, but in different languages. These pages are supposed to link to each other (and themselves) using hreflang tags.
Ringleader: One member of the ring that was submitted by the user for testing. The tool finds other ring-members by looking at the Hreflang tags found on the ringleader.
Ringmembers: All pages found in the Hreflang s of the ringleader. They must also be all crawled and verified.
So we start with the submitted page (the ringleader), note all the Hreflang tags found on that page, and then crawl all those pages (ringmembers) and expect to find the same set of Hreflang tags on them. There are 3 possible errors when comparing the set of hreflang tags found on a ringmember with those on a ringleader:
- Missing Tags: Some tags found on the ringleader may be missing on the ringmember page.
- Extra Tags: Some tags found on the ringmember page may be missing on the ringleader page.
- Mismatched Tags: When the language code matches (say hreflang=”it”) but the ringleader points to a different page than the ringmember for the same language code.
The Return-Tag-Errors worksheet lists all such errors for all ringmembers, along with the URL of the ringleader that was used to compare.
Here’s an example from the Expedia test (click to view larger image):
Why a Separate Worksheet?
The next worksheet (All-Other-Errors) also lists URLs and the errors/warnings found on them. Then why do we need a separate worksheet for Return Tag errors? And why do we list the ringleader URL in the last column? It’s because a ringmember may belong to more than one ring. This only a problem when when there are errors in Hreflang implementation, but we all know that’s pretty common. By listing the ringleader and the ringmember, we establish a reference point. If one of the ringleaders is incorrect, you’ll know which errors to ignore. [This is a complicated issue and my explanation here is too short to fully address all the complexities. Let me know if you’d like an elaboration.]
3. All-Other-Errors
This is probably the easiest sheet to understand. All errors and warnings found on all pages are listed here. Pages without warnings or errors are not included. If there are >1 errors, they are listed as bullet points. But you’ll have to format Column B (select the whole Column by clicking on the column header (B), then click Wrap Text) to see all the bullet points in new lines.
Here’s an example:
Conclusion
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