Wondering where to start with search engine optimization (SEO)?
These 5 free tools provide insight into your business’ website by analyzing different SEO metrics and providing the information necessary to establish or grow your SEO strategy.
Google Analytics is a comprehensive tool that pulls data from your business’ website, marketing, products, etc. all in one place. The tool allows you to analyze the performance of your online activity and provide powerful insights on how to improve your business. There are numerous ways you can use Google Analytics to measure and enhance your SEO strategies. A few examples include:
- View how much traffic is coming to your site from Organic Search. Navigate to Acquisitions → Overview to see an overview of traffic based on different channels.
- View the keywords that are driving traffic to your site by navigating to Search Engine Optimization → Queries. This provides a breakdown of what keywords your website is ranking for, the number of clicks or impressions, time spent on the pages, etc.
- View the performance of individual landing pages (Search Engine Optimization → Landing Pages), and view a report with a variety of metrics including top pages, average position, clicks, etc.
Google Search Console provides reports specific to SEO and offers a platform to directly fix or improve the performance, while in contrast, Google Analytics is a tool that runs reports primarily based on user interaction. Search Console allows you to submit content to Google for crawling, such as sitemaps, or to receive notifications when Google has identified potential issues with your site, such as broken URLs. Overall, Search Console is a tool that allows you to communicate with the search engine to provide, review, or edit what content is helping or hindering your SEO performance.
3. SEMrush (Free Version)
While SEMrush offers robust paid accounts, the free version still offers beneficial SEO reporting to get you started and familiar with the tool. Some of the free version limitations include 10 searches per day with 10 results per search, 10 keywords available for tracking, one PDF report, etc. Although you are still able to run a domain overview to see the domain’s top organic keywords, competitors, position changes, etc. You can also run a backlink analysis to view the type of links, key anchor terms, link attributes, etc. to understand where and how your site is backlinks. The free version also allows you to search for keywords to view the search volume, keyword difficulty, related keywords, etc. to determine what keywords can/are useful for your content.
While the free version does have it’s limitations, it still offers important and in-depth information for building your SEO strategy, just remember each search you run counts toward your 10 per day limit.
4. SEOquake
SEOquake is a browser extension that provides quick SEO insights for any webpage. You can quickly view a page’s social media shares or likes, search engine index, backlinks, etc. through the extension. For more in-depth metrics on a page, such as keyword rankings or an SEO audit, you can view the summary report. SEOquake makes accessing a quick SEO glimpse to running a full SEO audit quick and easy so you can check-in on your own site, analyze competitor’s webpages, or browse industry sites for inspiration.
5. MozBar
MozBar is a browser extension that provides a quick and convenient insight into a page’s SEO. When you click the ‘Page Analysis Icon’ the dropdown bar provides information for on-page elements, general attributes, link metrics, markup, and HTTP status, and each option provides further insight into the page’s SEO performance.
While Moz offers paid accounts with more in-depth data, the free extension offers useful information for analyzing and comparing other sites to generate ideas, create plans, and implement changes that will benefit your business’ site.
These are just a few free SEO tools to start gaining an understanding on how well your website’s SEO is performing, analyzing areas that need improvement, and creating a strategic plan for optimizing your website.
