Are you searching for the best SEO tools for keyword research, content ideas, backlink analysis, and everything that can help you improve your rankings? There are so many SEO tools available and most of them are actually free to use. Before we dive in deeper, let’s have a quick overview of SEO tools.
SEO tools are the best assistants you can get to improve your website performance.
A good SEO tool can do everything that you need to increase your website clicks and traffic. It can help you with everything from keyword research to competition analysis.
This article will discuss the best SEO tools available, that if used efficiently can make your blogs and website popular.
So, let’s start understanding various free SEO Tools that are there in the market. And most importantly, some of these SEO tools are absolutely free to use.
Ahrefs
You can call Ahrefs one of the best backlinks and SEO analysis tools that can review your website. After its launch in 2011, it has been completely transformed into a fully-featured SEO tool.
Ahrefs has the best tools to help your website rank higher in search engines and get more traffic.
In the features, it contains tools for link building, keyword research, competitor analysis, site audits, and rank tracking.
It is very common among bloggers and SEO professionals.
The most popular feature of Ahrefs is its backlink checker because it is free.
Some of the most amazing features of Ahrefs SEO tool
- Site Explorer: With Site Explorer, you can get an inside look into your webpage and see what pages are connected. This feature helps in finding out all positive & negative links along with the ones which have no impact at all on your website’s ranking.
- Position Tracker: This is what measures your page’s success. this feature analyzes this information and tells you how well your page is doing based on your keywords.
- Content Explorer: This feature provides you with the information about the most shared content for any topic with the max. Share on social media platforms.
- Keyword Explorer: The major job of any SEO tool is to know the keywords that will rank you on the top. And this tool provides the best keyword ideas and traffic estimations.
- Site Audit: Site audit is your site’s best friend. This feature keeps a check on your SEO health over time.
- Webmaster tools: This tool is the new free tool by Ahrefs. It keeps a check on your SEO health. This tool combines various actionable metrics to measure the potential of your site such as search volume, traffic value, keyword difficulty, etc.
SEMrush
SEMrush started in 2008 to make online competition transparent and fair.
In the next decade, it grew in such a way that it became one of the most preferred tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, and much more.
It helps in detecting new growth opportunities and ideas to optimize content to bring more traffic from search engines.
SEMrush is famous for its keyword research feature.
Below are few features out of many which we would like to highlight.
- Find issues and suggest improvements for the website
- Monitors Website’s performance
- Beautiful Interface
- Find and suggest fixes to SEO issues
- Can track the success of social media
The magical attributes of SEMrush SEO tool
- Keyword magic tool: It helps you with keyword research and can find you tons of related keywords according to their search performance.
- Position tracking tool: This feature tracks the daily rankings of your domain and competitors on the results pages for this target keyword list. The keyword feature allows 10 free searches per day. If 10 searches are not enough for you per day. You can upgrade it to pro, guru, or business level for tracking more keywords.
- Pro-level gives 250 keywords
- Guru level 1000 keywords
- Business level 5000 keywords
- Project: This tool allows you to create and manage one project as a free user. Each project consists of 12 individual tools. For more projects, you can upgrade them to the next level.
- Pro-level provides 5 projects.
- Guru provides 15 projects.
- Business provides 40 projects.
- Site audit: This feature is responsible for checking the overall health of your website. For free users, site audit has a limit of 100 crawled pages. and if you are a paid subscriber then
- Site audit feature is not available for pro users.
- Guru users have a limit of 20000 crawled pages.
- Business users get upto 20000 crawled pages.
Checkout more SEMrush premium features
Moz
Started as a blog called SEOmoz in 2004 by Sarah Bird, it was for experts to share their research and ideas.
Later in about 2013, it got re-branded as Moz and started focusing on SEO Services.
Important features of Moz
- Site audit: It detects your SEO issues and recommends ways to improve them.
- Rank tracking: Track your website’s performance in all the search engines.
- Backlink analysis: It provides backlink analysis with 10 free searches a month. Enter any site and get their backlink profile with all the do-follow and no-follow domains that are pointing to the website. Along with that, you will get the PA, DA, and spam score of the backlinks.
- Keyword research: It Discovers thousands of keywords to target along with Keyword Difficulty scores, competitor research, and SERP analysis.
Moz offers two main products
1. Moz Pro
It’s an all-in-one tool that helps users manage numerous aspects of their SEO campaigns like audience analysis, site rankings, and crawling/auditing. You have to purchase their premium plan if you want to enjoy its benefits.
2. Moz Local
It mainly focuses on helping local businesses optimize their listing. Here you have both free and paid options. You can choose from the two packages below to help your business grow.
- Moz local for Small Businesses
- Moz local for Enterprises
There is also a free Chrome extension Mozbar to analyse the PA, DA, and spam score of the website.
Ubersuggest
Created by Neil Patel, Ubersuggest is one of the best and easiest SEO analysis tools for getting abundant keyword suggestions.
It’s an online tool that gives us all the important details about a website like Domain overview, Top ranking pages, Keyword suggestions, content ideas, Backlink data, Site Audit, and more.
Earlier this tool was completely free but after gaining enough users they started paid membership.
A couple of features of Ubersuggest SEO tool
- Keyword suggestion: This feature is the primary function of Ubersuggest that will help you to quickly find keywords in your target niche which people are searching for.
- Domain Overview: It is a newly added feature to Ubersuggest that provides you all the required information about a particular domain under one console. It provides the overall SEO health of your website in terms of metrics. It gives information about organic keywords, monthly traffic, domain score, and backlinks.
- Content Ideas: This feature is similar to Buzzsumo (content searching tool) and is 100% free. It provides you information about what others in your field are writing about. You just need to enter the keyword and get the most popular blog posts that contain them.
- Backlink Analysis: Ubersuggest offers free backlink analysis for 3 searches a day. You can check the backlink profile of your own or your competitor’s website just by entering the domain in the search box.
Ubersuggest also has a free chrome extension that can be used for SEO analysis right from Chrome browser.
SEOptimer
Like many other tools we have talked about, SEOptimer is also a website analysis tool.
It can help you audit your website and suggest improvements to make your website more user-friendly.
It’s easy to use as you just need to type your URL and you will have the audit report in a few seconds.
It can generate 3 free audit reports in a day. For more reports and customization features, you have to purchase its premium plan.
In the list of features, SEOptimer include:
- Website Audit: SEOptimer checks all the required factors keeping search engines in mind and provides its users with gaps that they can cover to enhance their website’s capabilities.
- DIY SEO: This feature comes in handy when the business is new, and the owners are having relatively less knowledge on how they can attract traffic and improve ranking. It crawls through the website checking thousands of features simultaneously. This is a premium feature with 14 days free trial.
- Customization Options: You can customize the audit reports the way you want as it provides numerous customization options. You can change color, fonts, logo according to your desire. The SEO reports are available in different languages like Spanish, German, and French and a lot more. For this, you have to purchase the premium plan.
- SEO Tools: Apart from what we have discussed, it provides other numerous SEO tools which are crucial in enhancing website SEO. In the list of free SEO tools, SEOptimer provides Meta Tag Generator, Keyword Generator, Robots.txt Generator, .htaccess File Generator, XML Sitemap Generator.
- Embedded SEO audit tool: With this, you can embed the audit tool in your website and offer and generate audit reports straight from your website.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console, previously known as Webmaster Tools, is a collection of tools to help make sure your website is properly indexed in the Google search engine without any errors.
It monitors and maintains your site’s presence in the google search result.
GSC is completely free and any website, regardless of the platform it is built on, can use it.
Important features of GSC that webmasters should know about
- Performance: In the performance tab, it shows the number of clicks and impressions your website is getting. It also shows the average position of the website of the search engine. You can check the keywords your website is ranking for along with other data like countries, devices, search appearance, etc.
- URL Inspection: The URL inspection tool is used to analyze the webpage and submit it to the Google search index. It fetches the information of the webpage after submitting the page’s URL and shows information present in the database. It covers if the page is indexed or not, Coverage, Mobile Usability, Structured data present on the web page (if any) like FAQs, Breadcrumbs, and if the page is AMP optimized.
- Index Coverage: It shows the number of webpages that are indexed by Google and those that are not. It also shows if there are any errors or warnings that are preventing the webpage from indexing properly.
- Links: The Links tab provides information about the linking profile of the website. It shows both internal links and external links. The report includes top linking sites your webpages are linked from, linked pages, and anchor texts that are used.
- Core Web Vitals: This tab provides the Core Web Vital report of your website like CLS, LCP, FID FCP. It shows the number of webpages that are performing good, poor, and need improvement along with the areas that need improvement.
- Page Experience Report: The Page Experience Report combines the CWV data along with other metrics like security and usability reports to form an overall user experience report of your website. It shows the percentage of webpages with good page experience and the overall impressions they are getting from organic Google search. You can checkout individual pages and what improvements they need.
- Sitemap Index: The tab provides the feature to submit the link to your website’s sitemap. An XML Sitemap provides a structured layout of your website. It helps the crawlers to easily crawl through your website and index the updated version to Google from time to time automatically.
Google Analytics
You can call it a service offered by Google which tracks and reports the website and blog traffic.
The main use of Google Analytics is to study the analytical information to improve your products, services, and of course website. It is considered the best tool to get website metrics.
The standard free version of google analytics has enough features for small and medium-sized businesses. But if you are looking for more, the paid version has a wide range of additional features.
The best features of Google Analytics standard version
The standard version too offers a variety of tools with some limitations. Some of them are:
- Real-Time Data
- Custom Reporting
- Advanced Segmentation
- Flow Visualization
- Social Reporting
- Conversion Reporting
- Mobile Device & App Tracking
- Video Performance Measurement
- Multi-Channel Reporting
- Integration with AdWords, AdSense, Search Console, and DoubleClick Ad Exchange
- Data export and tracking API
Advanced features to choose Google Analytics Premium version
The premium version has some amazing additional features that will lure you to buy this paid version.
The paid version extends your data capacity from 10 million hits per month to 500 million hits per month. It guarantees you 99.9% data accuracy.
The premium improves your custom data collection and provides you with 50 custom variables and 200 custom dimensions and metrics based on these variables.
A few reasons why one should use Google Analytics
- Can create customizable reports
- Can track the traffic of the entire website
- At last, but not least, it’s easy to use and free of cost
Google Page Speed Insights
Google Page Speed Insights is a free online tool provided by Google to determine the Core Web Vitals and page speed score of your website.
You just need to put the URL of our website on this online tool and it will analyse your website in few seconds.
It provides the details for potential improvement through the red (which we should work on), orange (just met the criteria), and green (perfectly fine) spots.
It emphasizes on 4 most important areas of user experience.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time it takes to load the largest element on the website.
- First Input Delay (FID) analyses the time it takes for the website to become interactive for a normal user.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) reports how visually stable the website is.
- First Contentful Paint (FCP) calculates the time it took to render the first element.
Alexa Rank Checker
Update: As of May 1, 2022, Amazon retired the Alexa ranking system. It will no longer be available for any competitive analysis, keyword research, content research, website ranking, or any other purposes.
It’s a free SEO tool like many others to check Alexa inbound links.
Alexa is the subsidiary company of Amazon and Alexa Rank is the measure of website popularity. Higher the rank, the popular your website is.
Estimated & visitor traffic over the past three months plays a major role in providing your website an Alexa Rank.
To check where your website stands online, it is very important to check the Alexa rank.
In this way, you can analyze your competition and start working towards generating the desired traffic on your website.
Alexa rank checker provides the following data
- Global rank: Rank of the website in the world as compared to other websites.
- Reach: Number of different people visiting the website.
- Country rank: Rank of the website in the country.
- Change: Whether the website is improving or lagging.
Alexa has a free rank checker chrome extension that you can use to check Alexa Traffic Rank of any website.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a trend search-free feature that shows how popular a search term is in Google.
It’s very useful in observing whether a trend is on the rise or declining.
Mostly used for e-commerce websites as it helps you identify the trending products one can sell online.
Important points one should know about Google Trends.
- Most commonly used to find niche products.
- Find relevant product categories in related topics as it has segregated stuff to make it easy.
- You can use it for Keyword research too like many others.
- Use it to promote your online store ahead of seasonal trends.
- Compare your brand position with other competitors.
- It helps you with content ideas about the latest trends.
Conclusion
These are the most common tools that SEOs use, though these are not the only ones. You can find many other SEO tools by searching on Google.
An effective SEO tool can be a game-changer for your website’s traffic. If you really want to improve your website, consider opting for a premium SEO tool.
Most of them offer the same features in their premium plans. You can choose the best option according to your requirements.
Which of the listed SEO tools are your favourite?
