If your wanting to learn more about SEO on your website and improving your search engine presence on a tight budget, here are our top 10 free SEO tools for 2019.
1. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a fundamental tool to start understanding more about SEO, you can verify easily if you already have a Google Analytics account. Alternatively you can verify by adding a meta tag to the homepage of your site or uploading a HTML file.
Once this is set-up, you can analyse the following:
- Crawl errors – 404s, 500s etc
- How your site is being indexed and if there are any problems Google is having
- Search Analytics – providing knowledge of where your keyword clicks are coming from
- Backlink and internal linking data
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
2. Screaming Frog
If you have a site with less than 500 URLs, you can register with Screaming Frog for free. This is a fantastic crawling tool which will allow you to quickly identify all sorts of key onsite elements which are missing, duplicating or highlight that you need adding. This includes title tags, meta descriptions, h1 tags, h2 tags, canonicals, ALT images, 404 errors and any 301 redirects. If you also have a small site, you can create your own XML sitemap straight from Screaming Frog. There are tons of features this tool has, we suggest you check it out – https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk
3. Page Speed
Page Speed has been a really important part of SEO for the last couple of years, particularly after the announcement of the mobile speed algorithm update in July 2018. It’s important therefore to at least have a grasp of page speed to see how your site is performing. There are quite a few free tools including – Google Developers Page Speed Insight, Test My Site with Google (mobile site speed), GT Metrix and Pingdom. We suggest as a starting point looking at the Google Developers Page Speed Insight, this gives you a score out of 100 to tell you how your site is performing along with recommendations directly from Googles web quality page reporting data. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
4. Google Keyword Planner
To start doing some basic keyword research and understanding the market for your website, the Google Keyword planner is a fundamental piece of your SEO toolkit. This allows you to find search volumes of keywords along with identifying any key seasonal trends. Any insights from this will help you with optimising your onsite content. https://ads.google.com/intl/en_uk/home/tools/keyword-planner/
5. Answer the Public
Answer the public is another a great free keyword research tool. This is particularly useful if your looking to frame the structure of one content piece or look for key questions/topics to create multiple pieces. Any data from here can also be plugged into Google Keyword Tool so your able to see volumes for terms. https://answerthepublic.com/
6. Google Trends
Google Trends allows you to look at keyword/topic trends so you can understand it’s popularity or seasonal peak. This can help create content plans or even sales pushes on a particular product if there is a high peak months. https://trends.google.com/trends/
7. AHREFS Backlinks
AHREFS offer a free service if you want to take a look at where your getting backlinks from to your site. Although this is limited, it does provide you with useful details such as the number of referring domains, backlinks and dofollowed backlinks. Another alternative is to use Majestic SEO. https://ahrefs.com and https://majestic.com/
8. SERPRobot
If you want to check Google rankings quickly without paying for software, SERPRobot is a good option. This allows you to update 50 keywords every hour (server permitting). Another alternative is to download your Google Search Console keyword rankings from Search Analytics weekly or monthly. https://www.serprobot.com/serp-check.php
9. Structured Data Testing Tool (Schema Mark-up Checker)
If you know there is Schema mark-up on your site but your unsure exactly what there is and if it’s correct. The free Structured Data Testing tool from Google is a helpful piece of kit. You can test by placing in a page URL or alternatively dump the source code in from the page. The latter is extremely handy if your testing for a staging site. https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/
10. Wayback Machine
Wayback machine is a complete archive of the whole net. Why would it be useful to you? Well if your site has seen some negative traffic changes over time, you can use the Wayback machine to look at what has changed on your website. For example, your organic traffic has dropped year on year and you don’t know why but using Wayback you can see content that was there the previous year has now disappeared! https://archive.org/web/
Hopefully this top 10 list has helped you, feel free to get in contact with our SEO team if you want to find out more!