It’s 2019, and it’s time to get your site in order and take advantage of whatever tools are going to help you do that. Data, analytics, visibility- there are plenty of tools online for you to improve your SEO. And while we’re at it, let’s focus on what’s going to bring us the biggest bang for the littlest buck. To help you do that, we’ve compiled a list of 5 free and effective SEO tools to bring your website metrics up a few notches in the new year.
1. Google Analytics:
Google Analytics allows you to really get down and into who your customers and visitors are. By making an account and registering your site, Google Analytics brings you real, hard data that helps you gauge what content your users are engaging with, and which content they aren’t. With data-driven information, users are able to share their data with collaborators, find areas of weakness, and receive technical support all in an effort to improve their site. This free resource provides anyone with access to Google the ability to effectively improve their website rankings, quickly and efficiently.
2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider:
Sounding a bit like its name, this site is free to users looking to crawl data from across under 500 URLS. Services for Screaming Frog SEO Spider including finding broken links and errors, analyzing page titles and metadata, discovering duplicate pages, site visualizations, auditing hreflang attributes, and generating XML sitemaps. They have a version available for purchase, and it offers a number of other services, but for a free service, you can still make quite a bit of headway in evaluating your data to boost your visibility.
3. Yoast SEO:
A bit like Screaming Frog, Yoast SEO has both a for-purchase version and a simpler, free version to help bring up your site metrics. Yoast allows you to complete a readability check for your copy, it allows you to preview your page on Google, it let’s users track their breadcrumbs and set categories for their posts and pages, and allows for keyword optimization. Yoast also improves your readability by checking for duplicated content, site links, and best of all, optimizes your content by using Google’s algorithm to keep it updated, which happens every two weeks.
4. LinkMiner
Available on Google Chrome, LinkMiner checks web pages and sites for any broken links embedded within. It also analyzes the metrics on those links to provide you with some concrete data to help you take your links to the next level. Use the link data to help you determine which links need to be updated or replaced, and what’s actually working for you instead of against you.
5. KW Finder
Keywords and their effectiveness in optimization have become trickier and trickier to improve your website statistics. It’s not about plugging in the words and overusing them abundantly. KW Finder helps you by plugging in your keyword or key phrase and giving some site analytics on that word as well, including its site visibility. Concrete site data regarding your keyword include the level of competition in PPC in Google Adwords, as well as the average cost itself per click, SEO Difficulty, and the average monthly search volume of that keyword within the last 12 months. Spot trends and update your content based on the information it provides you with for your selected SEO keywords. Trends like search volume and interest over time are also available on their site.