SEO tools are an essential part of any SEO strategy. They allow you to understand what works for your website and what doesn’t, so that you can make adjustments and improve your search presence.
SEO tools help you with keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, content creation and more. There’s a wide range of tools out there to choose from, but not all of them are worth your time or money. In this article we’ll look at some of the best free SEO tools around and how they can help you improve your site’s performance.
Table of Contents
Offline Seo Tools
Moz: The SEO Monolith
What it is: Moz is a leader in the SEO world, with a robust blog and a suite of free and paid products. Initially an SEO consulting company, Moz has morphed into one of the go-to resources for all things SEO.
How retailers can use it: Technically speaking, Moz is really multiple SEO tools, not just one. And each tool has distinct offerings and benefits for retailers:
- Moz Pro: Moz Pro will help your website content, improving your rankings and visibility, as well as provide a ton of actionable and insightful data along the way.
- Keyword explorer: This is a great place to start if you have some keywords in mind for which you’d like to rank. Receive a full analysis, including difficulty to rank and related keywords to explore. This is a feature of Moz Pro, but the two free queries each day make it valuable even if you don’t subscribe to Pro.
- Moz Local: Especially helpful for retailers with brick-and-mortar locations, Moz Local will make sure “that your business listings are correct, consistent, and visible across the web.” This is important for making your location discoverable! You need to make it as easy as possible for web users to find out your physical, real-life location, and this is one way to do that across multiple databases.
Google.com: The Legend
What it is: Although this search engine likely doesn’t need an introduction, Google is the place where most search queries happen (approximately 66%, compared to Bing’s 33%).
How retailers can use it: While users turn to Google to perform searches, retailers can use it as a source of information. Notice how, as you search, Google offers predicted text? This is based on similar searches to your own, indicating that these are related phrases to your content.
Let’s say you sell fanny packs. Type “fanny packs” in the Google search bar. Notice the predicted searches.
Now scroll to the bottom, and see what else Google suggests.
Google’s recommended searches indicate that these are the similar phrases people are searching on Google. This can help you determine what you should be saying online.
For example, maybe you refer to your fanny packs as cute and fashionable. You’ll also want to highlight any pink fanny packs and men’s fanny packs that you have for sale.
If you want to dig even further, type in one of those related terms (manually, so you get the predicted search again) and see what that tells you.
“Fanny pack pink” reveals interest in neon pink, cheap, free and sale fanny packs. If it’s relevant to your brand and products, make sure there is content on your site related to those keywords. To attract in-store traffic, host an event where you have pink fanny packs on sale — along with a free gift for qualified purchases.
Majestic: Backlink Breakdown
What it is: In a few words, Majestic tells you if other websites are linking to yours. But it does more than identification: You’ll also see URL anchor text, backlink types, quality of backlinks, backlink history and more. It’s everything you need to find out what and how other sites are directing their users to yours.
How retailers can use it: When you know how and from where consumers are coming to your site, you can get better insight into who they are. This allows you to serve their needs better, both by offering products they’ll buy and content they’ll want.
If you see another local business linking to your site, share the link love, and then consider whether a partnership or collaboration makes sense. This can create opportunities you wouldn’t have known otherwise.
PageSpeed Insights: Page Load Police
What it is: When it comes to SEO, Google cares a lot about your site content, but it also considers how long it takes for a user to load your page. As Google continues to improve the experience for users, it will serve pages that also provide a good experience. And if your page takes too long to load, that’s not a great experience.
PageSpeed Insights is a product by Google that will tell you how fast your pages load, as well as provide suggestions for improvement.
How retailers can use it: The answer here is pretty straightforward. Plug in your URL, then pass the insights along to your developer. Though it seems simple, it’s becoming increasingly important.
One habit you should adopt that can help with this issue is making sure any images on your site are optimized for the web. This includes any images of your store on your site, as well as all your product images.
Check out these 10 image optimization tips, and you can also use our free and simple image resizer.
Ahrefs: Search, Backlinks and Social
What it is: Ahrefs is a tool that wears many hats. It originally launched as a backlink profiler, similar to Majestic, but has since expanded its offerings to include social shares and both organic and paid search insights.
How retailers can use it: Ahrefs has a vast offering of features, providing a number of possibilities for retailers. Use the backlink profiler as you would Majestic, identify which pages are the most-shared on social networks, and determine which pages perform the best in organic search (and for which terms).
Taking a holistic approach to each of these categories can reveal common themes and user behavior. Look for who’s sharing your most-shared content and what they’re saying about it. Direct quotes from consumers offer the best qualitative insights that you can distribute to your sales, product, support and other teams.
SEMrush: Competitive Analysis (and Then Some)
What it is: Though SEMrush hangs its hat on its promise for customers to “benefit from your competitors,” it does a lot more than provide a detailed analysis on your competitors’ SEO and paid ads:
- Display ad opportunities
- Backlink analysis
- Video ad research
- SEO and PPC keyword research
- Product ads
- Site audit
- Brand monitoring
- Social media listening and management
How retailers can use it: Though all the features are valuable, some of the most value for retailers lies in the product ads.
With this, you can identify which ads you’re competing against, and compare your ads to theirs. From this information, you’ll be able to determine how to beat out your competition and sell more products.
Keyword Tool: Keyword Planner Successor
What it is: Especially valuable since the discontinuation of Google’s Keyword Planner, Keyword Tool identifies search opportunities, related keywords, CPC, search volume and AdWords competition. You can also see related keywords that are phrased as questions, as well as search Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, and the App Store.
How retailers can use it: How you use Keyword Tool depends largely on your individual needs. Retailers who sell on Amazon, for example, can learn a lot about their competition and which phrases they should target in their product descriptions.
Type in “fanny packs,” and you’ll see a list of more than 100 related keywords on Amazon. “Fanny packs pink” shows up again, reiterating the demand for pink fanny packs. So if you don’t already have a pink fanny pack in your collection, it might be time to add one.
Google Fight: The Tie-Breaker
What it is: Google Fight is pretty much as simple as an SEO tool can get. You enter two keywords, and Google Fight will tell you which one “wins the fight” — meaning, this is the one you should target.
How retailers can use it: If you need a suggestion for an article on your blog on the fly, this is a good tool to help you decide between two you’re thinking.
Copy and Paste Keyword Density Tool: Simple Yet Effective
What it is: The Copy and Paste Keyword Density Tool is another simple, straightforward option, but it provides even more value. With it, you plug in up to three keywords or phrases, as well as site copy, to find out what your keyword density is. The tool recommends aiming for 1.6%–4% keyword density.
How retailers can use it: When you’re writing content for your website, whether it’s your homepage, product description page or an article on your blog, it’s always good to have keywords in mind for which you want to rank.
After you’ve identified those keywords and written your content, put it all into this tool to find out how your optimization efforts are. You can also edit within the tool and receive real-time updates on the keyword density. Make sure you put those keywords in URLs, meta data and alt tags, too!
seo optimization tools
- Ahrefs: SEO Keyword Tool
Ahref – SEO Keyword Tool
Ahrefs is one of the most recommended SEO tools online. It’s only second to Google when it comes to being the largest website crawlers. SEO experts can’t get enough of Ahrefs’ Site Audit feature as it’s the best SEO analysis tool around. The tool highlights what parts of your website need improvements to rank better in search engines. From a competitor analysis perspective, you’ll likely use Ahrefs to determine your competitor’s backlinks to use them as a starting point for your own brand. You can also use this SEO tool to find the most linked to content within your niche, check and fix broken links on your website,and get an overview of your best-performing pages (so you can see what information is drawing in the visitors).
Syed Irfan Ajmal
Syed Irfan Ajmal, a Growth Marketing Manager at Ridester, loves the SEO keyword tool Ahrefs. He shares, “Ahrefs is surely our most favorite tool when it comes to various facets of SEO such as keyword research, rank tracking, competitor research, SEO audit, viral content research and much more. We add our site and those of our competitors to it. The tool then shows us the sites which have backlinked to our competitors but not us. This helps us find great link opportunities. But this wouldn’t have been so easy if Ahrefs didn’t have the largest database of backlinks. Ahrefs has been instrumental in getting our site ranked for several major keywords, and getting us to 350,000 visitors per month.”
- Google Search Console: Top SEO Tool
Best seo tools
Offered for free to everyone with a website, Google Search Console lets you monitor and report on your website’s presence in Google SERP. All you need to do is verify your website by adding a code to your website or going through Google Analytics and you can submit your sitemap for indexing. Although you don’t need a Search Console account to appear in Google’s search results, you can control what gets indexed and how your website is represented with this account. As an SEO checker tool, Search Console can help you understand how Google and its users view your website and allow you to optimize for better performance in Google search results. It’s especially useful for new websites as it lets site owners submit web pages for search indexing. - SEMRush: Marketing SEO Tools
SEMRush – Marketing SEO Tools
Marketing SEO tools like SEMRush tend to be fan favorites in the SEO community. Experts love that they let you easily assess your rankings as well as identify changes and new ranking opportunities. One of the most popular features of this SEO tool is the Domain Vs Domain analysis, which allows you to easily compare your website to your competitors. If you’re looking for analytics reports to help you better understand your website’s search data, traffic, or even your competitors, you’ll be able to compare keywords and domains. The On-Page SEO Checker tool allows you to easily monitor your rankings and find some recommendations on how to improve your website’s performance.
Liraz Postan – SEO Experts
Liraz Postan, Senior SEO & Content Manager at Outbrain, recommends SEMRush as one of the best SEO tools. She says, “My favorite SEO tool is SEMrush with the feature of “organic traffic insights”. This feature lets me see all my leading articles with one dashboard, along with related keywords, social shares and word count. This gives me a quick overview of what’s working and where to optimize. I generally use SEMrush on my daily work, love this tool, and love using its site audit to optimize our site health. We improved our site health by 100% more since we started using SEMrush, and we increased conversions by 15% more from our content pages.”
- KWFinder: SEO Keyword Tool
KWFinder – SEO Keyword Tool
An SEO keyword tool like KWFinder helps you find long-tail keywords that have a lower level of competition. The experts use this SEO tool to find the best keywords and run analysis reports on backlinks and SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Their Rank Tracker tool helps you easily determine your ranking while tracking your improvement based on one key metric. Plus, if that’s not enough, you’ll get a ton of new keyword ideas to help you rank your website even higher.
George PerryGeorge Perry, an SEM Specialist at Bandwidth, raves about KWFinder. “I like that not only does it show me information on the keyword that I was searching for, but pulls in good suggestions for related terms, and how they compare (volume, CPC, difficulty, etc.) to the term I originally looked at. I’ve been able to help my clients target not only those big, pie in the sky vanity terms, but to better target those terms that are lower in the funnel and more likely to convert, allowing me to target them through focused content that answers the questions they’re actually asking.”
- Moz Pro: SEO Software
Moz Pro SEO software
SEO software Moz Pro keeps popping up as one of the best SEO tools that experts actually use. Some specialists raved about how Moz was always up to date despite Google’s regular algorithm changes. Others praised Moz’s chat portal that allows them always to get an insightful response to every question asked. Whether you’re looking for keyword recommendations or a site crawl, Moz is a full-service powerhouse. You can get great insights into how your website is performing but also how to improve it. They also have a free MozBar toolbar that you can download to see your website’s metrics while browsing any page. If you’re looking to learn more about SEO, you should also consider checking out MozCon, their annual conference.
Keri Lindenmuth
Keri Lindenmuth’s, Marketing Manager at Kyle David Group, go-to SEO tool is none other than Moz Pro. She says, “My favorite feature of the tool is its ‘page optimization feature.’ It tells you exactly what steps you can take to improve the SEO of every single page on your website. For example, it will tell you to ‘Include your keyword in this page title’ or ‘Add an image with a keyword alt tag.’ This tool has substantially improved our client’s business simply by the fact that it gives increased transparency. We can compare their site’s traffic and optimization to that of their competitors. We can see which pages and search terms their competitors perform well in and alter our web practices to compete against theirs. Without a tool like Moz, SEO really becomes a guessing game. You have no idea where you’re doing well and where you can use improvement.”
- Ubersuggest: Keyword Tracking Tool
Ubersuggest: Keyword Tracking Tool
Ubersuggest, developed by Neil Patel, is a free keyword finder tool that helps you identify keywords and also the search intent behind them by showing the top ranking SERPsFrom short to long-tail phrases, you can find the right terms to use on your website with hundreds of suggestions from this free great keyword tool. Metrics Ubersuggest includes in its reports are keyword volume, competition, CPC, and seasonal trends. Great for both organic SEO and paid PPC, this tool can help you determine if a keyword is worth targeting and how competitive it is.
- Answer The Public: Free SEO Tools
Answer The Public – Free SEO Tools
Free SEO tools like Answer The Public allow you to easily find topics to write about for your blog. I’ve used this tool in the past to create content around specific keywords to better rank online. Say you’re in the ‘fitness’ niche. You can use this free SEO tool to create content around keywords like fitness, yoga, running, Crossfit, exercise and cover the entire spectrum. It’s great for finding featured snippet opportunities. Say you hire a freelancer to create content for you, all you need to do is download this list and send it over to them. And it would only take you five minutes, making it one of the most efficient ways to come up with SEO topics for new websites.
Matt Jackson
Matt Jackson, Head of Content at Wild Shark, loves free SEO tools like AnswerThePublic. He shares, “One of my favorite tools when compiling SEO content for a site is AnswerThePublic.com. The best feature of the tool is that it presents a list of the questions that web users are asking about a particular keyword. If I’m running out of genuinely useful content ideas, or if I’m compiling an FAQ page, it provides invaluable guidance as to what, exactly, people are searching for. It is not only useful for SEO content, it means that our clients can answer questions on their site, minimizing the number of customer service calls they receive and giving greater authority to a page and the overall business. And here’s a quick tip: prevent neckache by hitting the Data button, rather than straining to read the question wheel.”
- SpyFu: Free SEO Tools
SpyFu – Free SEO Tools
While SpyFu has an amazing premium version, many of our experts raved about its free features. If you’re just starting out, you can easily grow into the paid features as you start succeeding. You can easily view the number of times a keyword gets searched each month while easily determining the ranking difficulty for that keyword. You can also do some research on your competitors to determine which keywords they use. Additionally, you can search your competitor’s, or your own, website to easily see how many organic keywords they have, how many monthly clicks they get, who their paid and organic competitors are, the campaigns they’re running with Google Ads, and more. It’s one of the most detailed SEO analysis tools on the market.
Adele Stewart
Adele Stewart, Senior Project Manager at Sparq Designs, can’t get enough of SEO software SpyFu. She shares, “I have used SEMrush and Agency Analytics in the past, but SpyFu has the one-up on my client’s competitors. All of SpyFu’s features are great, but my absolute favorite is the SEO Research feature. You’re able to plug in a competitor’s domain and pull up information on their own SEO strategy. You can see what keywords they pay for vs. their organic standings, review their core keywords, and even assess their keyword groups. Using SpyFu has been integral to my client’s SEO successes. There’s so much more to track and report on, plus I don’t have to put in as much effort in research as I did with other SEO software. SpyFu pulls the information I need and organizes reports in a way that is presentable and understandable to my clients. I’ve already seen increases in indexing and rank for keywords that we didn’t even think of.”
- Woorank: SEO Ranking Tool
woorank seo ranking tool
As a top SEO analysis tool, Woorank offers free and paid options to track and report your marketing data. You can plug in your competitors to discover which keywords they are targeting so you can overlap with theirs. Try understanding how keywords perform over time to optimize for users and search engines in the best way possible. And most importantly, understand the things your website is lacking from both a technical and content perspective. Woorank can help you identify duplicate content, downtime, and security issues and provide guidelines on how to fix them. - Majestic: Marketing SEO Tools
Majestic: Marketing SEO Tools
Majestic is one of the best marketing SEO tools according to experts. It has countless useful features like The Majestic Million which lets you see the ranking of the top million websites. Did your website make the cut? The Site Explorer feature allows you to easily see a general overview of your site and the number of backlinks you have. It also works as an SEO keyword tool to find the best keywords to target while also having features geared to site comparisons and tracking your rank.
Ryan Scollon
Ryan Scollon, SEO Consultant at RyanScollon.co.uk recommends the SEO tool Majestic. He says, “My favorite SEO tool is Majestic, with its main feature allowing you to check the backlinks of a website that you specify. My favorite feature is the ability to add your own client’s site and a bunch of competitors, allowing you to easily compare a variety of SEO metrics such as trust flow, referring domain count, and external backlinks count. Not only does it help us understand the [client’s optimization] weaknesses, but it also provides a simple table that we share with our clients, so they too can understand the problems and how they stack up to their competitors. We also use Majestic to audit competitors’ backlinks, as we can sometimes find a handful of easy opportunities to tackle before moving onto other link building tactics.”
- Google Trends: SEO Checker Tool
Google Trends Wireless Phone Charger
Google Trends has been around for years but has been underutilized. Not only does it give you information regarding a keyword but it offers great insight into trends around the topic, which can be invaluable at any stage of a business’s growth. Search for keywords in any country and receive information around it like top queries, rising queries, interest over time, and geographical locations depending on interest. If you are unsure which trends are the ones for you, this is the best SEO tool to use. - SEOQuake: Free SEO Tools
SEOQuake – Free SEO Tools
SEOQuake is considered one of the best free SEO tools. This Chrome extension acts as an SEO checker tool that performs on-page site audits, assesses both your internal and external links, and also does website comparisons to determine how you perform against your competitors. Other features of this SEO analysis tool include keyword analysis such as keyword density, an easy to read SEO dashboard, and an export feature that allows you to easily download and send data to key people on your team.
Brin Chartier
Brin Chartier, an expert digital marketer, and SEO content creator, loves the free SEO tool SEOQuake. She says, “I love a good browser extension, and SEOquake is the best free SEO tool for instant SEO metrics on any website or SERP. I can instantly pull an on-page SEO audit for myself or competitors, and the SERP overlay feature is an awesome visualization of key page metrics that I can export to CSV & share with my team. This tool saves me hours of manual work that I can use to actually move the needle creating SEO optimized content instead.”
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