Working on SEO requires a variety of research and analysis tools.
You need to understand your website’s performance, market trends, user behavior, competitor activities, and the efforts required to reach your goals.
While premium tools offer many useful features, some free tools can significantly boost your SEO efforts.
Whether you're just starting out as a freelancer, or you work in-house and have little to no budget for tools and software, the following products will give you (almost) everything you need.
1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is probably the best free tool available. It is a powerful website crawler that can analyze your website’s SEO performance in a variety of ways.
The free version allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs, making it ideal for small to medium-sized websites. It helps you identify technical issues and analyze on-page elements such as page titles and metadata.
2. More questions
AlsoAsked is a great tool for understanding the questions people are asking related to your target keywords. It aggregates data from Google's “People Also Ask” feature and provides a visual display of the relevance of questions.
This is a great website to identify topics specifically for blog posts. When you search based on a specific topic, the results will give you a variety of ideas.
Ahrefs is primarily a paid tool, but its Webmaster Tools are available for free. This suite includes tools for checking the health of your website, analyzing backlinks, conducting keyword research, and more.
Ahrefs’ extensive backlink database and keyword analysis features make it a must-have tool for SEO professionals.
Learn more: 5 Free SEO Tools and Plugins Worth Trying
4. Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is a free user behavior analytics tool that gives you detailed information about how users interact with your website. It provides heatmaps, session recordings, and a comprehensive dashboard to help you understand user behavior and identify areas for improvement.
Clarity is especially useful for improving user experience and conversion rates. To give a real-life example, if you have a website with many features that slow down your website, you can see if users are using those features or not.
5. SEOquake
SEOquake is one of my personal favorite browser extensions. It offers a wealth of SEO metrics, including on-page SEO audits, keyword density analysis, social metrics, and more.
SEOquake can be integrated with Google Search Console and Google Analytics, making it a versatile tool for quick SEO checks and analysis.
6. Respondents
AnswerThePublic is a great tool for content ideation and keyword research, and like AlsoAsked, it's a great resource for understanding the long-tail phrases people are searching for related to a particular topic.
It visualizes search queries in a unique and intuitive way, displaying questions, prepositions, and comparisons related to your selected keywords, and helps you understand user intent.
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7. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is an essential tool for SEO professionals, providing comprehensive data about your website's performance in Google Search, including search traffic, indexing status, and issues affecting your site.
Search Console is extremely useful for monitoring the health of your site and identifying opportunities for improvement. It also identifies keyphrases for which your website ranks that you may not have been aware of before.
8. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking and analyzing website traffic. It provides detailed insights into user behavior, traffic sources, and conversion tracking. Understanding how visitors interact with your site allows you to make data-driven decisions and improve your SEO strategy.
Used in conjunction with tools like Looker Studio, you can retrieve and manipulate data to drill down to the information you need. While a lot of data is hidden today, it's still an important tool.
9. Keyword Surfer
Keyword Surfer is a browser extension that displays the search volume for keywords directly in Google search results, and also provides related keyword suggestions and domain level traffic estimates.
This tool is very useful and although it is not designed for more detailed work, it can be very helpful as a way to provide an overview.
10. GT Metrics
GTmetrix is ​​a free website speed and performance analysis tool that provides a detailed report on your site's loading speed, identifies issues slowing it down, and gives recommendations for improvement.
Because page speed is a key factor for user experience and therefore SEO, GTmetrix can be a valuable tool for optimizing your site’s performance.
11. Rank Math
Rank Math is a free SEO plugin for WordPress that simplifies website optimization. It provides a set of tools to improve your on-page SEO, including schema markup, keyword tracking, and content analysis.
Rank Math’s user-friendly interface and detailed recommendations make it a great choice for WordPress users and it’s quickly catching up with similar plugins.
Thanks to the Women in Tech SEO community for providing input into this article.
Learn more: Strengthening Your SEO Tool Stack with AI for 2024
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