Anyone who has had to manage their website will know how fierce and competitive Search Engine Optimisation is. Getting SEO right can be the difference between thousands of users visiting your site each week versus none at all. There is no secret there is no one thing a webmaster can do to improve their rankings in Google or Bing, there are over 300+ factors that contribute to the organic visibility of a domain.
Sometimes the optimisation work can be done by hand. Sometimes, it has to be done automatically with an SEO tool. Sites like e-commerce stores can have hundreds of thousands of pages for products, categories and sub-categories. Asking someone to manually tweak a title tag or place a redirect single handily is an impossible and thankless task. With that in mind, we’ve put together our ten most favourite and free SEO tools that can help you improve your organic search.
Aleyda’s Hreflang Tag Generator
Aleyda Solis is a very prominent SEO thought leader who very kindly created an easy to use tool that converts a CSV of URLs into the correct hreflang tag. This can save hours of fiddling about in Excel and with so many sites now needing to think about a global SEO strategy, this has never been so important.
https://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/
Disavow.it
This online app lets you upload your backlink profile research (typically a .txt file with lines of URLs) to create a very quick Google-ready disavow file without worrying about structure and formatting.
Browseo
Browseo is very handy for understanding just how a search engine spider crawls your site and what they see. This browser basically strips back any URL to just the elements that search engines can see. This is particularly useful if you’re trying to teach someone to understand that an image-heavy website design isn’t always the best way to go.
WooRank
A pretty cool Google Chrome extension that provides you with a quick topline analysis of any site you visit in your browser. It’s not going to be able to conduct a full technical audit but it can identify common problems such as mobile compatibility, site speed, title tag length. It’s a great tool for undertaking quick competitor research across a few domains.https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/seo-website-analysis/hlngmmdolgbdnnimbmblfhhndibdipaf?hl=en
Google Analytics Referrer Spam Tool
Everybody has seen referrer spam mess up and contaminate their data. Referrer Spam Tool lets you very quickly add filters across your Google Analytics account that stops spam infiltrating your GA results.
https://www.adwordsrobot.com/en/tools/ga-referrer-spam-killer
Penalty Comparison
Spotted a big dip in traffic and want to check if it aligns to Google updates or penalties.
This tool uses SEMrush traffic data and overlays recent Google updates.
Be warned, however, SEMRush data isn’t particularly accurate, so you may just want to use it to see if your site has been hit.
https://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator
Google Mobile Friendly Test
his is actually a really brilliant free tool that any SEOer worth their salt should be 100% familiar with. In Google’s bid to ensure everyone is thinking mobile-first, they created this great page that lets webmasters test their site to see if it comes into accordance with Google’s best practice. If it doesn’t, Google are even kind enough to supply information on what’s wrong and how to fix it.
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
Local SERP Changer
As you would expect, this does what it says on the tin. From SERPs.com, it lets you view the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) for a local area so that you can check rankings and see what’s listed locally without having to mess about with proxy settings.
https://serps.com/tools/google-search-location/
Keyword Finder
This tool is a lifesaver when you’re struggling for keyword inspiration and don’t want to spend hours trawling through Keyword Planner. Quite simply, you input your keyword and select “Level 3” and it will identify any long tail keywords in relation to this. Very comprehensive and easy to use.
https://tools.seochat.com/tools/related-keywords-tool/
MozBar
MozBar is an extension Google Chrome users can use to spy on their competitors to gain important insight into the metrics behind the website and how well it ranks on Google.
The paid version has many features, but as we are talking gratis here, the free version is still a very useful tool.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mozbar/eakacpaijcpapndcfffdgphdiccmpknp?hl=en
Summary
As you can see, there’s often little need to pay for expensive SEO tools and subscriptions with so many clever and free web apps out there to use. Yes, some of these tools are incredibly niche but if it’s the difference between generating hreflang tags in a full day vs. 10 minutes, or if you need to compare documents easily, then it’s incredibly cost-effective. Let us know in the comments below if you have any suggestions or preferred free tools that you think can help a fellow SEO’er out.
