As a freelancer, you’re working in a competitive industry. You need to stay on top of SEO trends and make sure your website is always optimized for search engines. This can be a challenge, but it’s not impossible! In this article, we’ll talk about the best SEO tools for freelancers and how to use them to grow your business.
What Are the Best SEO Tools for Freelancers?
There are lots of different types of SEO tools out there, but some are more useful than others. Here are some of the most important ones:
Keyword Research Tools : Keyword research is an important part of any SEO strategy because it helps you determine which words or phrases people are using when they search for what you’re selling. This allows you to optimize both your site and your ads for those terms so that more people will see them when they search online and buy what you have in stock!
Analytics Tools : Analytics track how often people visit your site and where they came from (such as Google), so that you can see what parts of your marketing strategy are working best right now and improve them accordingly over time (i.e., by focusing on those areas more heavily while cutting back on others).
Seo Tools For Freelancers
Companies normally leave this job to specialists who have both the time and the expertise to create a successful SEO strategy. Others will employ an SEO freelancer for the job as they are bound to charge less and offer a more nuanced approach.
Even though they may be experts in their field, freelance SEO specialists can’t always do the same amount of work of a multi-employee agency (even though they may want to!) In fact, the most successful professionals in the SEO industry rely on several different apps, tools, software and other resources that help craft the best work experience possible.
So, if you’re trying to automate parts of your freelance business — or are just trying to make digital marketing more affordable by doing it yourself — take a look at the list of SEO tools below and boost your efficiency.
What Are SEO Tools Used For?
- Track activities on the website
- Search target keywords
- Monitor the activities of competitors
- Measure and analyze the success of the SEO strategy and efforts
Here are some of the best SEO tools that are worth trying this year. They have been categorized into classes where they fit most, though some can fit into multiple categories.
Keyword Research Tools
Keyword Planner
A strong keyword tool is a must-have for any freelance SEO specialist. Keyword Planner from google may be the best – it provides useful keyword word data, such as competition, search volume and average cost for advertisers. You can also gain insight into variants of your main keywords and niche-specific keywords to help with targeting.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is an excellent alternative to Google’s Keyword Planner. It provides more data than Planner does, and it’s possible to arrange the suggestions to your preferences, like search volume, seasonality or cost per click data. The best part, is it’s completely free!
SEObooks’s Rank Checker
SEObook’s Rank Checker allows you to identify and export target search terms as they’re ranked in Google and Yahoo.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics seems to fall into all categories, providing data on keyword strength, social impact and competitive research. It guarantees quality results.
Long Tail Pro
Long Tail Pro is probably the most popular SEO tool among SEO specialists beyond Keyword Planner. This tool provides keyword data such as search traffic, and helps judge the performance of your competitor websites by offering information on their page/domain authority (PA/DA).
Keywordtool.io
Keywordtool.io is similar to Ubersuggest. A keyword search reveals more than 700 content ideas relevant to the keyword.
SEO Performance Analysis Tools
SEOPressor
This tool scores the SEO strength of a website and offers a guideline on how to improve its performance. It provides notifications on the specific pages that need to be optimized and provides tips on how to achieve optimization.
Open Site Explorer
Open Site Explorer finds opportunities that can be exploited online to increase your backlink profile. It researches backlinks, analyzes social activity and anchor text, as well as identifies relevant top pages across industries.
Monitor Backlinks
Monitor Backlinks is both an SEO monitoring tool and a competitor research tool. It provides a daily summary of changes in your website’s backlink status. It also helps monitor keyword rankings as well as track competitor actions for new links.
Majestic
Majestic is a useful SEO tool for off-page optimization, which is mainly focused on linkbuilding.
Xenu Link Sleuth
Xenu Link Sleuth is a software that checks and validates text links, frames, local image maps and backgrounds. It can also find broken links on websites.
Google Search Console
Search Console – formerly Webmaster Tools – is probably the most used SEO tool besides Google Analytics. It gives a visual impression of how the website appears on a search engine, providing tips on how to improve its visibility. You can gain insights into the amount of clicks you receive on specific keywords, as well as your average position over a period of time. Search Console also reveals site errors and accessibility problems.
Wayback Machine
An archive on the Wayback Machine brings back memories of any website that once existed on the web. It comes in handy if a new strategy seems to fail – simply check with the Wayback machine to find out what the previous web page looked like.
Competitor SEO Tools
SEMRush
SEMRush is a comprehensive SEO tool, providing comprehensive reports on the performance of your website and competitors’ websites. It’s also useful at analyzing the performance of search terms used in an SEO strategy.
Rival IQ
Rival IQ is purely a competitor research platform. It accepts competitor domains and then crawls the websites to find out the number of backlinks in the domains, their authority, SEO titles, organic search traffic and much more. This feature has made it an excellent tool for performing SEO audits.
Similar Web
Similar Web is used for comparing the amount of traffic on two different websites. It has become a valuable competitor research tool.
Content Optimization Tools
Impactana
Impactana helps locate the best content related to a website or keyword. It shows the number of times a piece of content was shared, as well as the number of links it obtained from across the internet. Impactana is a useful tool for content marketing freelancers who are unsure if their content will attract enough backlinks.
AnswerThePublic
Most people probably use this for keyword search. However, this excellent SEO tool goes well beyond offering high-performance keywords, also proposing content ideas for you to take advantage of. AnswerThePublic is essential for building relevant content, a practice that will support and improve your organic search efforts.
Copyscape
Copyscape enables you to find related website content to your own across the web. It also helps in avoiding the use of plagiarized material on your or a client’s website – you don’t want your site to get hit with duplicate content penalties!
Local SEO Tools
Moz Local
Moz offers a local SEO tool for the management of local SEO efforts. You can use Moz Local to claim and verify local listing submissions, as well as identify harmful errors that can derail your SEO strategy. Pinpoint and track local keywords and analyze your website against the data so you can get more traffic within proximity to your location.
The Whitespark Local Citation Finder
Whitespark offers more advanced features than Moz Local does. It provides information on where you can list the business for better rankings. It can also be used for collecting customer reviews and online feedback.
Looking for more help with your online business operations? Read our post: Best Website Audit Tools
Choose Your SEO Tool Wisely…
With so many SEO tools available to today’s freelancer, it can feel overwhelming to know which one is best for your needs. The best advice when using an SEO tool is to experiment with a few different ones until you find one that meets a specific service you offer, such as keyword analysis, content optimization, linkbuilding, competitor research or local listings, for example.
seo tools for digital marketing
- 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.”
Conclusion
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