Small business owners and entrepreneurs often struggle with how to get started with SEO. It can be a daunting task, made more difficult by the constant changes that Google makes to its search engine algorithms.

However, there are a number of free SEO tools that can help you to get started. In this blog post, we will look at some of the most popular tools and provide instructions on how to use them.

Need help with your SEO?  Take a look at our professional SEO services.

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of improving the ranking of a website on search engines. The higher a website ranks, the more likely people are to find it.

SEO involves improving the content, structure, and technical aspects of a website in order to increase its visibility and authority.

In order to improve their visibility online and attract more visitors, businesses use a variety of marketing strategies. One popular method is search engine optimization (SEO).

Essentially, SEO is the process of improving the ranking of a website on search engines. This can be done through optimizing the website content, structure, and on-page elements like titles, metatags, and anchor text.

When done correctly, SEO can help a website achieve higher web traffic levels and increased ROI.  Learn the basics of SEO with our Complete Guide to SEO.

Why use SEO tools?

There is no question that SEO is a complex and ever-changing field. The algorithms used by Google and other search engines are constantly evolving, making it difficult for webmasters to keep up.

This is where SEO tools come in. These tools help webmasters track their site’s performance, identify potential ranking factors, and make changes to their website so that they can rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

By using these tools, webmasters can save time and money while improving their website’s organic rankings.

SEO is focused on creating organic value for your website/business.  So using FREE SEO tools makes your SEO strategy a little more cost effective.

10 free SEO tools you will love

Anyone who has ever tried to improve their website’s search engine ranking knows how important it is to have the right tools. While there are many paid SEO tools out there, there are also a number of great free options.

Here is a list of some of the best free SEO tools on the web.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a fantastic tool for analyzing your search traffic and identifying new keyword opportunities. If you’re looking to rank higher on Google, increase monthly site visitors, or just get started with SEO for the first time, this tool is definitely worth checking out!

Using the Google Keyword Planner is a great way to analyze your website’s search traffic and identify new keyword opportunities.

Google is still the most dominant search engine globally, handling 65% of all searches. So, any effective SEO strategy should be based on high-quality content targeting relevant keywords. This will improve your chances of ranking higher in SERPs and help you optimize website conversion rates!

Whether you’re looking to rank higher on Google, increase monthly site visitors, or get started with SEO for the first time, this tool can be very helpful.

To use Google Keyword Planner, simply enter the keyword you want to analyze. The tool will then generate a variety of relevant data points.

• What is the estimated search volume for the given keyword?
• How competitive is the keyword, and is it possible to rank on Google for this term?
• The number of results from competing websites on specific SERPs allows you to analyze how much traffic would come in if you ranked higher in Google!
• What is the average cost-per-click (CPC) for your chosen keyword?

What is great about Google Keyword Planner is that it can also help you find profitable long-tail keywords.

By inputting a short keyword and defining its “maximum monthly search,” Google Keyword Planner will generate a list of longer phrases that are easier to rank for, but still relevant from a business perspective.

This is ideal for when you have limited resources and want to target niche markets with high-quality content – definitely one of the most useful free SEO tools available.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful free SEO tool that provides nearly all the data needed to identify how potential customers navigate your website and where they go after reading one of your blog posts (or not).

The best part is that once you have this information, you can easily optimize your website and content to better meet the needs of your visitors.

Google Analytics can help you keep track of the following data:

• How did your potential customers find your website? (e.g., keyword they used on Google, links from other sites, etc.)
• What was the most popular content on your site? (e.g., which pages they spend the most time on or which blog posts were getting shared the most?)
• Who were your most loyal users? (e.g., how often they visited your website, and what type of content they were looking for)
• How did your users behave on your site? (e.g., how long they stayed on each page and where they scrolled to)

Google Analytics provides some great features for tracking your website traffic and analysts for free. The “Acquisition” feature allows you to see how many visitors come from different sources, such as search engines or social media platforms.

This can be really helpful in seeing what drives the most traffic to your site.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free SEO tool that allows you to keep track of your site’s performance on Google search. It can also help you fix errors that could be impacting your website’s ranking.

For example, you can use this tool to remove spam from your site or block malicious users. This not only improves the experience for people who visit your site, but also helps you achieve higher rankings on Google.

Google Search Console has lots of great features, but one of the most useful is “Fetch as Google.” This feature lets you see how Google sees and interprets specific

Google Search Console can help you improve your website’s ranking in search results by alerting you to errors and providing tools to test and fix structured data.

The HTML Improvements report lets you identify and fix issues such as poor meta descriptions, tags, and non-indexable content.

Google Search Console can be most helpful in a variety of areas, including providing detailed Search Analytics reports, data on linking to your site (with keywords), internal linking, international targeting, mobile usability, index status, content keywords, blocked resources, crawl stats and errors, and robots.txt testing.

Additionally, Google Search Console can also be used to check sitemaps and security issues.

GooglePage Speed Insights

You might not know it, but Google has a speed test page. And you really should use it. How fast your website loads is quickly becoming a key ranking signal for Google and improving your score can help your SEO efforts.

PageSpeed Insights, a tool launched in 2008 by Google, is a free online service that helps you optimize your website for speed. Page Speed evaluates the performance of your website and provides suggestions for improvement.

The service has two components: the PageSpeed Insights tool and the Mobile Site Speed Test tool. The PageSpeed Insights tool evaluates the overall performance of your website, while the Mobile Site Speed Test tool evaluates the performance of your website on mobile devices.

One of the features I like best is “Lighthouse“, an auditing platform built into the browser that lets you track your progress as you make changes to your website. It provides detailed information about any errors found on your pages, as well as suggestions on how to fix them.

The latest version of Lighthouse provides developers with more advanced features, including video tutorials. Google PageSpeed Insights is simple and versatile, and provides everything you need to understand your website’s performance.

GTMetrix

GTMetrix is a popular and free tool used to evaluate the PageSpeed and YSlow scores of web pages. It provides detailed analysis of the page’s components, identifying opportunities for improvement to help you optimize your website speed.

By routinely running pages through GTMetrix, you can track the changes in performance and see how the optimizations affect your PageSpeed and YSlow scores.

Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast is a plugin for WordPress that has many great features for SEO. It is one of the most popular SEO plugins, and for good reason – it offers users a lot of control over their site’s SEO. In this blog post, we will discuss some of the key features of Yoast and how they can help improve your site’s SEO.

Since Yoast is a FREE plugin, it has a wide variety of users, including bloggers, business owners, and website developers.

A few of Yoast’s unique features include the ability to:

• Analyze your content for readability and keyword optimization
• Generate sitemaps and XML breadcrumbs
• Control indexing with robots.txt files
• Configure canonical URLs

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools has long been a great free tool for SEOs. Although it doesn’t get as much attention as Google Search Console, it’s still packed with features that can help you improve your website’s visibility in Bing search results.

We like to use Bing Webmaster tools in addition to Google Search Console, as it’s always great to have a second set of “eyes” looking at our clients’ websites.

Bing Webmaster tools has recently been upgraded and redesigned and offers a modern looking and feeling console.

Microsoft Clarity

If you’re running a website, then you know that search engine optimization (SEO) is important for bringing in traffic. But it can be difficult to track how well your efforts are paying off, since you can’t see how people are using your site. That’s where Microsoft Clarity comes in.

Clarity is a new tool from Microsoft that helps you analyze how people use your website. It shows you things like where they came from, what they clicked on.

When it comes to search engine optimization, understanding both user behavior and the customer journey is crucial for success. Microsoft Clarity’s heatmaps and user interaction data helps you to fine tune a website for maximum user-experience.

SEO Today, Tomorrow and into the Future

Search engine optimization (SEO) has evolved over the years as search engines have become more sophisticated. While the basics of SEO will always be important, in order to remain competitive, website owners and marketers must keep up with the latest trends and changes in how search engines rank websites.

Some of the most important SEO trends for 2022 include: increased use of chatbots, voice search, and rich snippets; increased focus on user experience; and greater emphasis on backlinks. Sing up for our Digital Marketing blog to stay ahead of the curve.