SEO software tools help you optimize your website for search engines. They help you with keyword research, competitor analysis, understanding website data and tracking progress and helping you to fix problems that hold your website back from improving web traffic and rankings.
Some tools are free, some premium products have free versions. It’s easy to waste a lot of time and money on the wrong product so it’s definitely worth assessing what is available on the market and what products match your objectives and aspirations.
What are your objectives?
Your choice of SEO software tools depends on the nature of your business and what actions you want visitors to take. These are your objectives and can include the following:
Local or National web traffic – Are you interested web traffic from specific locations – do you trade locally, nationally or internationally or a combination of all three. For example a new e-commerce shop probably won’t be interested in people knowing their location but a cleaning services company will want to attract local web traffic.
What actions do you want your visitors to take – these are calls to action. Do you want them to call you, email you or purchase a product directly online.
What is your competition doing – be aware of your competition and their web presence. Are they active on search engines and is it useful to know where they rank and track it in comparison to your website.
Spend time reviewing your business and objectives relating to your business online presence and that will help you work out what will help you boost your business.
Free SEO software tools
There are essential and thankfully free SEO software tools that you need setup and working on your website or monitoring your website.
Google Analytics
While there are alternatives available either through your web server such as AWStats https://sourceforge.net/projects/awstats/ or 3rd party services – 11 of the Best Web Analytics Tools , the classic tool for analysing your website is Google Analytics.
To install Google Analytics on your website you need to first sign up here https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/ and select ‘Get started here’.
You will need a Google account. Once signed in you can add an account for your website.
This will generate a code snippet that should be added to your website. You might need to engage the services of a web developer to ensure this is placed in the code correctly. Some Content Management Systems like WordPress have plugins that can assist with installation.
Once the tracking code is installed and active it will monitor users that come to your website and monitor their behaviour.
You can get the following information:
- Active users for the specific period such as 7 days, 14 days, past year and custom periods.
- Most popular pages.
- Location of visitors drilling down into town.
- Time and date of visitors such as most visited days etc.
- And much more.
We will do an expanded post describing Google Analytics and its features.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. It builds on the information provided by Google Analytics but is specifically aimed at search results. See our recent post – Why you should use Google Search Console.
Screaming Frog SEO software
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that helps you improve onsite SEO by auditing for common SEO issues.
You can download & crawl 500 URLs for free, or buy an SEO Spider licence for €239 Per Year to remove the limit & access advanced features.
Google Page Speed Insights
Google’s Page Speed Insights provides over and detailed information on how quickly your website displays for desktop and mobile users https://pagespeed.web.dev/
Google Lighthouse
Google Lighthouse is one of the most-used free SEO tools by webmasters.
It’s a browser extension that gives you detailed reports about your site’s SEO performance and actionable tips on how to improve it.
You just need to add the extension to Chrome and then open it when you’re on the page you want to analyze.
Then, click ‘Generate Report’.
Google Looker Studio
Looker Studio is a no-cost tool that turns your data into informative, easy to read, easy to share, and fully customizable dashboards and reports.
It enables you to query Google Analytics data to create reports easily such as traffic by days of the week, hours etc. This used to be available in Google Analytics pre GA4 but that’s progress apparently!
Try it here: https://lookerstudio.google.com/
SEOQuake
SEOquake is another free SEO browser extension that can be added to Chrome or Opera.
It allows you to analyze lots of different search engine metrics in real-time such as:
- Backlinks
- Google index updates
- Semrush ranking
- Bing index
- Facebook likes
- Web archive page
- Pinterest pin count
Schema.org
Schema markup is incredibly important for your site.
It provides structured data that helps search engines understand the content and context of your page.
It also provides the opportunity for a snippet of your website to appear as a rich snippet.
This could potentially increase your click-through rates by enticing users to click on your link.
All you need to do is fill in your information, copy the code and insert it directly into your web pages.
Seobility
SEObility crawls your entire site and lets you know about search engine optimization issues like:
- Slow loading pages
- Blocked pages
- Sitemap problems
- Technical SEO issues
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest has a lot of features that are usually only found in premium SEO tools.
But it’s 100% free.
To use it, type in a keyword that you want to rank for (or a competing website that you want to rank above).
This has been a sample of useful free tools available. There are more and covered in more details here: 41 Best SEO Tools (Free & Paid)
Get in touch with Dinesh on 07941 686113 or contact us if you need help on web design, web hosting, SEO services or domain names.
