Working with SEO requires different tools for research and analysis.
We need to understand website performance, market trends, user behavior, competitor activity and the efforts necessary to achieve our goals.
While premium tools offer many useful features, several free tools can significantly improve your SEO efforts.
If you’re a freelancer just starting out or working in-house with a small budget to spend on tools and software, the following can give you (almost) everything you need.
1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is probably the best free tool available. It is a powerful website crawler that allows you to analyze your website’s SEO performance in different ways.
The free version allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs, making it ideal for small to medium-sized websites. It helps identify technical issues and analyze elements on the page, such as page titles and metadata.
2. Also asked
AlsoAsked is a great tool for understanding the questions people are asking about your target keywords. It aggregates data from Google’s “People Also Ask” feature, which provides a visual representation of how questions are related.
This is a great website to use to identify topics to write about, especially for blog posts. You search based on a specific topic and the results will give you a wide range of ideas.
While Ahrefs is predominantly a paid tool, its Webmaster Tools are available for free. This suite includes tools to check your site’s health, analyze backlinks, and perform keyword research.
Ahrefs’ extensive backlink database and keyword analysis make it a must-have for any SEO professional.
Dig deeper: 5 Free SEO Tools and Plugins to Try
4. Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is a free user behavior analysis tool that provides deep insight into how users interact with your website. It offers heatmaps, session recordings and comprehensive dashboards to help you understand user behavior and identify areas for improvement.
Clarity is especially useful for improving user experience and conversion rates. To give you a real life example, if you have a website with a lot of functionality that slows down the website, you can see if users are using it.
5. SEOquake
SEOquake is one of my personal favorite browser extensions. It provides a wealth of SEO metrics, including an on-page SEO audit, keyword density analysis, and social metrics.
SEOquake can be integrated with Google Search Console and Google Analytics, making it a versatile tool for quick SEO checks and analysis.
6. AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic is an excellent tool for content ideas and keyword research. Similar to AlsoAsked, it’s a great resource for understanding the longer tail phrases people are searching for related to a specific topic.
It visualizes search queries in a unique and intuitive way, showing questions, prepositions and comparisons related to your chosen keywords. It can also help you understand user intent.
7. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is an essential tool for any SEO professional. It provides comprehensive data about your site’s performance in Google Search, including search traffic, indexing status, and any issues affecting your site.
Search Console is invaluable for monitoring your site’s health and identifying opportunities for improvement. It also identifies key phrases that a site is ranking for that you may not have previously been aware of.
8. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking and analyzing website traffic. It provides detailed insight into user behavior, traffic sources and conversion tracking. By understanding how visitors interact with your site, you can make data-driven decisions to improve your SEO strategy.
You can use it with tools like Looker Studio to pull and manipulate data so you can drill down to the information you need. Although much data is now hidden, it is still an important tool.
9. Keyword Surfer
Keyword Surfer is a browser extension that provides keyword volumes directly in Google search results. It also offers related keyword suggestions and traffic estimates at the domain level.
This tool is incredibly handy, and while it’s not designed for more in-depth work, it’s incredibly useful as a way to provide a high-level overview.
10. GTmetrix
GTmetrix is ​​a free tool that analyzes your website’s speed and performance. It provides detailed reports on how fast your site loads, identifies issues that are slowing it down, and provides recommendations for improvement.
Page speed is a critical factor for user experience and therefore SEO, making GTmetrix an invaluable tool for optimizing website performance.
11th Rank Math
Rank Math is a free SEO plugin for WordPress that simplifies website optimization. It offers a set of tools to improve on-page SEO, including schema markup, keyword tracking, and content analysis.
Rank Math’s easy-to-use interface and detailed recommendations make it an excellent choice for WordPress users, and it is quickly catching up with similar plugins.
With thanks to the Women in Tech SEO community for their input on this article.
Dig deeper: Leave your SEO toolkit for 2024 with AI
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