Short Definition: SEO tools help website owners rank their websites better in search engine results. This helps to optimize the web content by analyzing the content and providing solutions to improve it, keyword analysis, backlink profile analysis, and other elements that makeup SEO.
Today it is very easy to find an enormous number of SEO tools, so many that it is easy to get lost among them. And, there is another important aspect: the vast majority are paid.
That's why I created this little guide, which will help you find the necessary tools for a good and reliable SEO analysis of your website if you don't have extra financial resources.
All the tools you will need in your future SEO efforts can be categorized into the following groups of SEO tools:
- Keyword Analysis
- Technical Audit
- Analysis of Backlinks
- Monitoring results
- Others.
Keyword Analysis
Always, the basis of a well-designed and well-thought-out SEO strategy was a good analysis of the searches performed (keywords and phrases). Here, one of the most useful tools was and has always been the one provided by Google:
It can be easily accessed from your Google Ads account in the menu Tools & Settings -> Planning -> Keyword Planner.
The Keyword Planner is very simple to use: Enter the keywords and/or the URL of the targeted website (yes, you can also spy on the competition here) and Google will give you a list of suggestions – and next to each one – the approximate number of monthly searches.
Moz Keyword Explorer
One of the most famous sites in the SEO world, Moz.com offers some excellent free tools including Keyword Explorer with a credit of 10 free uses per month. It's perfect for getting good keyword suggestions and analyzing what the competition is in a certain niche in Google.
Here the keywords obtained often differ from the Keyword Planner results and in addition to showing relevant results, this tool analyzes the top of the sites in Google for the keywords you are interested in according to their level of difficulty, so it gives an approximate result of how complicated you will have to enter the top.
Keyword Finder offers 5 free daily searches!
Ubersuggest
Another useful tool that has a simple and pleasant interface, Neil Patel's Ubersuggest pulls suggestions from Keyword Planner and Suggest, shows the CPC, and approximates how competitive the keywords are. Although it cannot be used for all countries, it is very good and can be used as a reliable source of inspiration.
Technical Audit
To rank higher in search results, a website has to load as quickly as possible. And here, too, there are a large number of tools of all kinds (especially paid), which analyze the performance of the site. However, depending on your needs, it is possible to find several free tools that provide reliable results.
The most accessible and simple tool is, again, offered by Google itself. He analyzes the loading speed of the site and offers suggestions for its improvement. It has long been no secret that Google penalizes all non-optimized sites that move unusually slowly.
Mobile-Friendly Test
One more thing, known for a long time, is that Google puts a lot of emphasis on the development of the mobile version of the sites, and in 2024 it is extremely important to have a well-optimized mobile version of the site, and this tool can help you serve as a guide of hope.
It provides the ability to perform a page-level audit to see what improvements it needs. As for the architecture of a website, most problems are often valid at the level of the page template: so everything that is not good on a certain page is also valid for others in the same category or subcategory. In addition to purely technical information, Woorank offers a broader feature based on other basic SEO indicators related to popularity and off-page signals.
Another tool that is part of my favorites, Screaming Frog is a crawler – a program that scans all the pages on a website. The result is provided in the form of lists, which can then be exported and presented in an integrated report.
Scanning 500 pages at once is free, so if your site is smaller, you can benefit from a powerful and advanced tool.
This website analysis tool is completely free and provides a comprehensive answer on how optimized the page's loading speed is, identifies all its problems, and provides a report with solutions for each of them.
Backlinks profile analysis
The next step in a proper and complete SEO analysis is backlink analysis. From the advent of the PageRank algorithm to the present day, developing a backlink campaign is essential in SEO. Here again, Moz comes to our aid with its tool: Open Site Explorer.
This is the best free backlink analysis tool. Because it's a globally trusted source, many other tools now calculate page and domain rankings based on the Moz algorithm.
It can also be effectively used to analyze the level of competition in a given niche, and the list of backlinks from competitors can be a source of inspiration for placing your links and/or advertising.
Results analysis
It is also an extremely important part of SEO. In any type of business, the ability to obtain an activity report with accurate metrics and measurements that can be appreciated and analyzed is indispensable. That's how you can understand what your strengths are and where it's worth working on. For this, there are 2 vital tools in any type of online business:
Google Analytics and Search Console
The first provides all the necessary information about your website visitors: where they came from and how they navigated the site. If you know how to use this tool, you get even more information about the effectiveness of any advertising campaign launched.
Search Console is dedicated to organic traffic, meaning your SEO efforts. It shows a detailed statistic about the organic traffic to the site by each keyword, shows what the indexing errors are, provides information about the Meta tags on the site and their correct or incorrect use, shows the backlinks you have, and much more.
Other Tools
Other useful tools have a narrower application but can be extremely useful when needed.
It's a sometimes underappreciated tool, but at the right times, it works wonders. Google Trends is ideal for finding topics of increased interest on Google, even in Moldova. It groups keywords by theme and dynamically shows the volume of searches performed. This tool is ideal for copywriters looking for relevant topics and anyone who wants to increase their organic searches by covering topics of broad interest.
It provides information about the structure of any site and more specifically – what technologies were used to create the site and what extensions were implemented on it. It can help you understand what technologies and metrics your competitors are pursuing, so you can easily outperform them.
Google Structured Data Testing Tool and Markup Helper
These 2 tools will make your work with schema.org much easier. Now you can create microdata in the schema on the site without knowing how to write code.
The first tests the microdata directly from the URL or the entered code, and the second helps to generate the necessary code.
This is, in our opinion, the most useful set needed to get off to a great start in SEO. For smaller sites, free tools can cover most of the information needed and even more. Therefore, we believe that this list will be very useful for many SEO beginners or know-it-alls.