One of the benefits that SEO has over Paid Search is that, apart from taking a lot of time and expertise, much of it can be done using free tools. Also, while with Paid Media you’re renting the advertising space, with SEO you’re building an asset, you own your website, and any content you produce can be repurposed and can add value for prospective customers who are still researching alternatives.
There are plenty of paid tools out there that offer an outstanding amount of insight into how you can further improve your SEO efforts, and if you’re an SEO specialist, many of them are worth paying for (as an agency, we subscribe to quite a few!). We have included a few paid tools that we believe are worth paying for (if you require more insights and data), however if you’re starting out with implementing SEO, paid tools aren’t essential!
This guide is designed for those business owners and marketing teams that are making a start on improving their website’s SEO. These are our genuine opinions from over 17 years of practice as an agency, we haven’t been paid to list any of these tools.
Best Free Tools for Finding Keywords
1. Google Trends – This tool allows you to input a seed keyword and find similar search terms that people might be searching for. It takes advantage of Google’s vast amount of historic data, allowing you to find keywords that have risen in popularity recently, such as different ways of searching for your product or service.
Using Google Trends for strategy:
Google Trends is also incredibly useful for planning business strategy, as you can identify topics, products, people and products that have risen or fallen in popularity. Got an idea for a new business? Validate whether there’s a market for your idea by viewing it’s search volume in Google Trends. You can also view where that search term is most popular, and who is searching for it, helping you to segment your product idea!
2. Answer The Public – Whilst this tool doesn’t necessarily give you as far-fetched or data-driven keywords as other tools, Answer The Public is great for blog ideas as it gives commonly searched questions based around a topic. Appealing to the questions that customers are asking around your product or industry is a great way of enticing potential customers onto your site as well as potentially featuring in the “People also ask” section on Google’s results page.
3. WordStream – Although slightly more tailored towards Google Ads than SEO, WordStream’s keyword tool is excellent for generating new keyword ideas, providing insight into how competitive and difficult certain keywords are to rank. The trick is to find keywords that are relevant to your business that have a high search volume, but relatively low competition.
4. KWFinder – An incredibly easy to use tool that provides secondary keywords based on a seed keyword. This tool will tell you the search volume, difficulty to rank and even how much it would cost to bid on that keyword if you were to do Google Ads. KWFinder also helps with providing you with ‘autocomplete’ examples for a keyword, giving you an insight into other searches that someone might make based around your seed keyword.
Paid Tools for Finding Keywords
Ahrefs Keyword Explorer – The industry standard tool for keyword discovery (no we weren’t paid to say that). In fact, if your team can afford the full Ahrefs SEO package, the wide range of metrics makes it well worth it, so long as you take the time to understand how to interpret each metric (there’s a lot to look at in Ahrefs!).
We use Ahrefs at Key Principles, as we find it provides much more accurate information than its competitors. The huge range of tools within Ahrefs also gives us insights into how we can leverage new backlinks, create data-informed content ideas that users are searching for, monitor client and competitor rankings and keep an eye on the low competition, high search volume keywords for our clients.
Disadvantages of Ahrefs
Whilst Ahrefs is an excellent tool, it’s fairly expensive and requires years of experience to get the most out of it. Otherwise, you can easily misinterpret the numerous metrics and make decisions that can negatively affect your SEO.
If you want to learn the best practices for using these tools, a great option is to undertake SEO Training with a Digital Marketing Agency. We are currently offering a Free Consultation, to help you put an SEO strategy together and start training up your team to maximized your website’s performance, with help from our team of experts with over 17 years of experience.
With SEO being so time intensive, it often works out more suitable to hire an SEO Agency, with the peace of mind knowing that the best SEO practices are being followed for your business.
Best Free Tools for SEO Competitor Analysis
5. Similar Web – This free tool gives you a vast range of metrics for any website you enter into their search engine. A good way to use this tool is to analyse the competitors that rank higher than you on the keywords that you want to target. You can then compare metrics that are likely to impact their SEO, such as visit duration, pages per visit, outgoing links and even their competitors. From this, you can gauge what you need to improve on your site in order to outrank them.
Best Free Tools for User Experience
To be honest, if you’re using a reputable website builder (such as WordPress) and follow the best practices for building a landing page, you probably don’t need a specific UX tool for SEO alone. However, if you have plenty of website visitors and want to use data to optimise for conversions on your site, Microsoft Clarity is an excellent tool.
6. Microsoft Clarity – A free tool that will really surprise you that it’s free! It may be more setup for optimising your website’s user experience for conversions, but the user experience is one of the more important factors for SEO, according to a Senior Columnist at Search Engine Land. Clarity has data that can measure the amount of ‘excessive scrolls’, ‘rage clicks’ and popular areas of your website pages to optimise for, using ‘heatmapping’ features.
7. GT Metrix – A free state-of-the-art speed testing site, that provides you with actionable information on how to improve your website speed, such as improving page composition, large images, big lumps of code slowing down your site and more!
As well as the user experience, page speed is one of the most important SEO factors, so this free tool is a must for people wanting to implement better SEO practices. If your site is below a grade C in GT Metrix, consider requesting a Free Website Audit – We’ll provide you with the specific areas for improving your website structure for page speed and SEO!
8. ShortPixel – A great tool for compressing your images to help your site to load faster. As well as providing a better user experience, page speed is a ranking factor for search engines.
Best Free Analytics Tools
9. Google Analytics – Ensuring that Google Analytics is set up is usually the first thing we do for all of our clients, as it really is one of the best analytics tools and helps us to measure the success of our SEO campaigns.
10. Google Search Console – This is another tool that we always ensure our clients have setup before we undertake any SEO work. It’s the platform where you’re able to submit a sitemap to Google, detailing the pages you want Google to crawl, and the pages you don’t want crawling. As well as this, Search Console provides insight into your referring domains, mobile site performance, search terms that your site appears for the most and how your site appears in search results, helping to inform your SEO activities with data on what works.
Conclusion
We hope this article has helped you in finding the best free SEO tools to help get your website onto page 1! Whilst there are a lot of excellent free tools out there that can transform your website performance if used strategically, some of them can appear overwhelming at first and they often require years of experience to get the most out of them. We would definitely recommend undertaking some form of SEO training if you are planning on using these tools in-house.
With over 17 years of experience in SEO, we are currently offering a Free SEO Training Consultation, helping you to understand what SEO activities you should prioritise for the strongest impact.
Don’t fancy setting up all the tools in-house?
Perhaps you’ve made a start on your SEO in-house but want the best practices of data analysis, on page and technical implementation? We’re offering a Free SEO Audit to help you recognise areas for improvement within your digital marketing, with insights from a Google Partner agency.
