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Free SEO Tools to Get To the Top of Google

Looking for more free SEO insight to build your brand and rank better on Google?

Be sure to to get a free site audit performed by our team of SEO professionals!

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Why Use SEO Tools?

seo case studies

Deesse Media is a full-service digital marketing agency that builds custom websites and ensures those websites are driving sales. Over the years, we’ve conducted many case studies for our clients to determine if their SEO strategies were effective. Unfortunately, many of these case studies have revealed unsuccessful SEO strategies that cause problems with site discoverability, traffic, and sales conversions. Using SEO tools to build an effective strategy can make all the difference in how well your website works for your brand.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools help you earn the most coveted top spots on search engine results pages (SERPs). Research shows that higher-ranking websites and pages have a greater chance of being clicked by someone searching for a product or service. Further, a lack of SEO can mean big players like Google are hesitant to display or index your website at all. In other words, SEO tools are a critical path to making your website visible and gaining traffic and sales.

Keyword RESEARCH TOOLS

Why You Need It: Keyword research tools can be used to hone in on relevant keywords associated with your business, so they can be incorporated into your site content. Building a semantic core strategy helps you garner web traffic from people most interested in your services or product. 

2. Google Keyword Planner

The Google Keyword Planner is the go-to free keyword planning tool for website developers. You can get insights into how certain words and related phrases are performing, as well as how much competition there is for certain terms. 

2. Moz Keyword Explorer

The Moz Keyword Explorer gives you up to 1,000 keyword suggestions for free. You can enter either keywords or a URL to find out which keywords would be best for you to target to support traffic to your site.

3. Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator

The Ahrefs Keyword Generator helps you find thousands of potential keywords to use on your website in seconds. Simply enter words or phrases you suspect are good for your industry and get access to keyword reports to help you decide what to use. 

Indexing/Crawling Tools

Why You Need It: Indexing and crawling tools help Google discover your site, so you get the most out of your crawl budget. 

1. Google Search Console

Use the Google Search Console to check the indexing status of your site and optimize overall visibility. You can also measure the performance of your website and see which search queries specifically are leading traffic to your site. 

2. Ryte Robots.txt Generator

The Robots.txt Generator determines which parts of your domains are easily crawled and which are not. 

3. Sitemap – Yoast

A well-designed sitemap helps search engines crawl your website and know how to navigate to it. Yoast offers the Sitemap tool to help you create individual sitemaps that are perfectly built for proper indexing. 

4. Structured Data

Hosted by Schema, this tool allows you to test the structured data on your website. By doing so, you can make sure all metrics are appropriately tagged and labeled so the site is properly crawled and indexed. 

5. Rich Snippets Results Test

The Rich Results Test shows you how your site is crawled according to “rich results,” which are items like context elements and content. 

competitor research

Why You Need Them: The more you know about what your competitors are doing online, the more you get a step ahead of them and rank better. The following tools can get you instant insight into websites that are similar to your own. 

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  • Screaming Frog – Screaming Frog crawls websites and URLs to determine several things, such as issues with duplicate content, what metadata is being used, and more. By using this tool on similar websites to your own, you can get valuable insight into what your competitors are doing that is making a difference in SERPs. 
  • SimilarWeb – SimilarWeb automatically yields information about websites that are similar to your own and what their monthly ranks look like. You can also get insight into competitor bounce rates, average ranks, and how many pages the average customer visits. 
  • Wayback Machine – The Wayback Machine is a huge Internet Archive that acts as a digital library for historical web pages and sites. You can search through more than 600 billion web pages to get a glimpse at how your competitors have changed their websites over time. This can be incredibly valuable if a site has recently made changes that pushed you lower on SERP pages. 

analytics Tools

Why You Need It: Analytics tools help you analyze your web pages in terms of SEO, make adjustments where needed, and improve. Using these tools periodically helps ensure your site remains capable of both attracting and converting traffic. 

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics allows you to track site traffic, find out what content works best and does not work at all, and get a look at traffic conversions (i.e. how many visitors bought a product or requested an estimate). 

2. Google Tag Manager

The Google Tag Manager allows you to further track traffic conversions based on various metrics. This allows you to update website tags to boost traffic conversion performance. 

Analytics tools

local seo TOOLS

Why You Need It: Local SEO builds your web presence among the people in your geographic vicinity that are most likely to be searching for your products or services. Ensuring local search visibility on SERPs drives people to your website that are most likely to become paying customers. 

1. Google Business Profile

Listing your business on Google is totally free, and doing so is extremely important to building your online presence. You simply create a profile, add business information, upload photos, and easily connect with anyone searching for your business on Google. 

2. Google My Business Link Generator

Gathering Google reviews is a great way to build your brand reputation. Whitespark offers a free Google Review Link Generator that you can use to guide customers to your Google Business profile to leave a review. You can also create a unique QR code that can be included on business cards and printed materials. 

3. Moz Local Check Business Listing

Moz’s Local Business Listing Checker helps you see how your business appears in the most important commerce directories across the internet. Moz will check numerous attributes, such as if your citations are showing up on Google Maps, Bing, and otherwise, and offer recommendations to optimize your listing. 

site speed / performance tools

Why You Need It: Page load times and site performance are critical to SEO. Google will purposefully not include slow or unresponsive websites or pages on SERPs. The following tools can give you an idea of how quickly your website and its pages are loading. For reverence, the highest conversion rates occur when pages load between 0 and 2 seconds. 

1. Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse is an automated analysis tool that helps assess web page quality according to several metrics. After plugging in your URL, Lighthouse discloses an overall performance rating, speed index of the page, and time to interactive capability. 

2. Page Speed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is a simple, free-to-use tool that gives you a Core Web Vitals Assessment. This gives you a good insight into what each visitor experiences when they try to visit a certain page. For example, you can find out how long it takes before the page becomes fully interactive and the overall speed index. 

3. Pingdom

Pingdom by Solarwinds offers a number of useful site analysis tools, one of which is page speed monitoring. Sign up for a free trial, and you get access to a comprehensive page load test that shows you the load time, performance grade, and more. 

4. GTMetrix

On GTMetrix, you can simply plug in a page URL and get instant feedback regarding everything from load time to the load time of certain elements on the page. For example, GTMetrix will tell you if the largest content elements are loading too slowly or how quickly the layout shift happens.  

 

content Marketing Tools

Why You Need It: Content marketing tools can be used to analyze and build the content on your site to ensure it supports healthy traffic flow and visitor impressions. Good site content builds ever-important engagement with your brand and brand trust. 

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  • Also Asked – Also Asked is an invaluable tool that allows you to get insight into the most-asked questions surrounding your chosen keywords. For example, if you are looking to learn what customers ask about “garage conversion” or “gold coins,” simply plug in those terms and get a full collection of questions that could be beneficial to work into your website pages to see better SERP ranks. 
  • Google Trends – Google Trends offers key information regarding how much people are searching for certain relative terms and where those searches are coming from regionally. You can also get insight into related queries and search topics. Look at trends from the last 12 months and compare the activity of certain words and phrases compared to others. 
  • Copyscape Comparison Tool – If the content on your website is identical to another page, this lowers your trustworthiness to visitors and can mean your SERP ranks take a hit. Copyscape allows you to analyze the content you have on your pages to content on other sites. If there is a lot of matching text, you can easily rework the content on your pages to make it more unique.

mobile SEO Tools

Why You Need It: Over half of all web traffic occurs from a mobile device. If your website is not optimized for mobile functionality, you could be inadvertently leaving over half of the prospective site visitors essentially blocked from interactive access. 

1. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool

The Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool offered by Google is perhaps one of the most straightforward and valuable options for evaluating mobile site translation. You can plug in the page URL or website code you are using and get a quick rundown of if the page is mobile-accessible.  

2. GTMetrix

GTMetrix can help you analyze your site to determine how well it is functioning when accessed from a mobile device. You get insights into everything from speed index rating on mobile devices to content load times and quality.