This group of SEO tools helps you create better web pages using white hat SEO tactics for free. For this article, I tried about twenty different free tools and I have to say that many of them weren’t worth making, but these 5 tools definitely are.
For many marketers, SEO is something often thought of as useless in comparison to let’s say influencer marketing or PPC ads. That’s definitely a proponent of the immense amount of information available that will supposedly help you rank your website.
All of these tools are either completely free SEO reporting tools or free + a paid version, but before you bounce back to Google, I want to let you know that these free options are well worth it and completely worth a try. Each of these tools also, do not have a free trial, which is so annoying, right?
I hate it when other marketers tell me about some amazing free tools, only to find out that I get to use it for 7 days. It might take 7 days to just work it into my strategy, so I didn’t include any tools like that here. You’re welcome and enjoy!
SEO Web Page Analyzer – 100% Free
I found this tool yesterday and it’s already one of my favorite tools for SEO analysis. Just plug in a url and get an overview of what they think of it. It also gives you an Alexa rank, meta data, and more. You can do this for your urls or competitors and instantly know how your web pages match up. It’s one of the best seo ranking tools online today.
There are so many good things about this tool that I can’t name them all here, but here are some of the tools you can use.
Header tag checker
One of the biggest issues I see with websites today is their lack of header tags or just using them in a way that isn’t logical. Good on-page SEO signals include a logical heading structure throughout your article. The SEO community knows that putting your keywords within those tags is important, but which words and which header tags should you use. A good rule of thumb is to take the term you want to rank for and put that in the title of the article. Then used related searches to fill in the H2 and H3 tags. This could be a whole article, so I’ll leave it at that and we’ll come back to that topic in a later post.
A great example of a structure I like is this image below from Brian Dean at Backlinko.com …
Internal and external link inspector
I think this tool is better to spy on your competitors, than for yourself, but it’s not a bad idea to use this tool to check for broken links every once in a while.
For spying on your competition, just Google a term that you would like to rank. Then take the top results and plug the urls into SEO Web Page Analyzer. Scroll down to the links section and check out who they are linking to and how many. You’re looking for the quality of the links and the quantity. Once you know who they link to, you will know what kind of links you should use too. What are the domain authorities of these webpages? (To learn where to get information about a site’s domain authority, use another free tool, the Moz tool bar) Also, are the links better than the links you’re using?
Keep in mind that this tool does collect all the links on a web page, so if there is a comment section, there are links created for each comment.
Do your images have alt text?
Check the image section of this tool to also see if your images have alt text, which is an essential ranking factor. This is how Google understands the images you include. Don’t forget to add the most important keywords in this section.
For Local SEO – Whitespark Google Review Link Generator – 100% Free
Are you looking for a way to rank your business with local SEO, but can’t figure out how to get your clients to put a review on Google? Now, you can make it really easy for them by adding a link to your emails, surveys, social media, and more.
One of the biggest ranking factors for local SEO is Google reviews, so use this free Google review link generator and attach the link. It’s vital to put this as part of your sales cycle and remind customers to give back the businesses they love. It helps the business and others who might need that service. Just follow the steps below and get started. When I found this I thought I found the fountain of youth for my local business clients.
Keyword Research – UberSuggest – 100% Free
This is a very powerful SEO keyword research tool for on any topic. It’s a great tool for creating SEO titles, header tags and look for new keywords to go above and beyond, plus it also gives you the opinion of one of the best marketers in the world, Neil Patel.
A good measure of terms within your ranking range is to compare the SD – SEO Difficulty column with your DA – Domain Authority with the Moz Bar. If you’re DA is over the SD, then you can probably rank for it pretty easily if you figure out what you need on your page to leapfrog over your competition. Maybe it’s another image or just a couple hundred words more with some better headers. The tools on this page are more than enough to create an SEO strategy worthy ranking most web pages.
Bonus Tool: Keywords Everywhere Extension for Chrome and Firefox
This is another free tool that I love, because it gives you the volume, CPC, and competition level under the search bar and a big list of related keywords and related search right in the SERP. Talk about convenience. If you’re wondering, I’m also using the Moz bar to find out Page Authorities and Domain Authorities instantly for every website in the SERP too. You could potentially make your SEO titles, headers, and meta descriptions right from this page. It might not be as specific and detailed as you want, but for non-competitive niches, this would be a good tactic to start creating content.
Technical SEO Audit – Screaming Frog – Free and Paid Version
Screaming Frog is a perfect addition for your SEO tool arsenal. Click on the heading of this section and download it your computer today.
Then, enter in a url and Screaming Frog’s SEO spider will crawl your website, similarly to Google. Within the free version of this program, you’ll be able to crawl 500 urls per website, so keep that in mind if you’re going to use this for clients, but even with that limitation, you can see what urls are index-able, status codes, redirects, meta descriptions, and so much more.
This is one of the first things I do when I start working with a new company. You have to start with technical SEO, because your content will not be effective if you don’t have a crawl-able site that Google can understand. Screaming Frog is one of the most reliable and similar SEO spider tools available and with the option of getting all this data for free, it’s a no-brainer to have this on your computer.
Technical SEO Audit – Smush Image Compression – Free and Paid Version
You should be using a lot of images in your content these days. Screenshots are great for explaining concepts, but they can tax the speed of loading your website. Do a quick check of your website url’s page speed with Pingdom tools – another free tool. If you’re not getting a good grade, one of the best ways to speed it up is to compress your images. If you’re not adept with Adobe Photoshop, which many people are not and prefer cheaper methods, try Smush Image Compression Plugin if you have a WordPress. There is a paid version, which is amazing, but the free version is great too.
If you’re not using WordPress, or have something against plugins, try Optimazilla, and awesome SEO image compression tool. Just as good and still free and easy. Below is an image of what happens when you have the Smush Image Compressor activated for your WordPress site. Smush automatically compresses the images for you. Easy, right?
Ultimate SEO Guide by Digital Cartel Media
I hope you enjoy these free SEO tools as much as I have. If you have a moment, leave a comment below and let me know which SEO Tools are your favorite. There are so many these days and it’s hard to try them all, and getting input from you is a great way to take this list from 5 to 50.
When I was researching and trying out this topic I had to narrow my choices down to only a few, and add some bonuses where I thought it was necessary.
For more information about SEO and marketing, you can always check out the Digital Cartel Media blog and search any topic you want. If you’re looking to continue learning about SEO for your business, check out this article, SEO Strategies: 10 Steps to Get on the First Page of Google.
