THESE WEBMASTER TOOLS HELP GIVE YOU A TASTE OF WHAT THE TOP SEARCH ENGINES THINK OF YOUR SITE. IT’S HELPFUL TO SEE ANY BUGS,ALERTS AND INDEXING ISSUES
10 FREE GOOGLE SEO TOOLS EVERYONE SHOULD USE
WRITTEN BY LUKE TOWNSEND - MARKETING DIRECTOR
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Whether you define yourself as an online marketer, a purveyor of SEO services or a content marketer, our industry often has a love/hate relationship with Google. However, no matter how you personally regard the big G, there are a selection of free tools they provide with potentially helpful data. Using these can really help pump-up your digital marketing efforts.
Back in 2009 the ever-informative Tad Chef took a look for us at the most helpful tools out there. Unfortunately, Google has a habit of retiring many of its tools, or starting to charge for them (Google Shopping anyone?), so it was high time for an update.
So, here’s our revised list of ten free Google tools you should consider; You’ll know many, no doubt regularly use a few, but, in this industry, there’s always something new to try.
If you only make use of one tool from this list, Google Search Console (formally known as Webmaster Tools) is the plum choice. Just as the logo demonstrates it’s intent with a spanner, using Search Console is akin to giving your site a regular service; use it to keep everything running smoothly, and spot bigger issues quickly.
Find out if your site has a manual penalty, identify crawling issues and broken links, see how many pages are indexed, download links, test your robots.txt file or structured data, and plenty more, all for free. It’s a peek into how Google regards elements of your site.
Oh, and while you’re at it, check out Bing Webmaster Tools; as Sam points out, there’s lots to be gained from this free tool as well!
Ok, we all know about the frustration of (not provided) keyword data, taking away some of our most helpful analysis. But, there’s still a HUGE advantage is having analytics data for your site in order to analyse content, user experience, the success of campaigns and more. In fact, if you’re not using analytics in your digital marketing, you’re behind the competition, no matter what.
Google Analytics remains a popular, and constantly evolving tool, though there is increasing competition from alternatives such as Clicky, Open Web Analytics, WebTrends, Omniture and more. Want some extra help? Check out the Solutions Gallery for great ways to slice your data, and the URL builder to add custom tracking to your links.
Another tool that’s been through significant, and often much-lamented, change in the last year, the Adwords Keyword Planner remains the de-facto source for many when it comes to ascertaining keyword volumes (though don’t rely on it for exact numbers), even if other tools are used for generating seed lists.
It feels that the new Planner is much more PPC focussed than the Keyword Tool it superseded, and the suggested keywords are often so broad as to be useless initially. However, there are ways to still use the Keyword Planner to get excellent data – this article by Dan Shure is a superb place to start.
And whilst we are on the topic of keywords and topics for your website, Google Trends is still a great tool for comparing traffic for different search terms, including historic, geographic and related terms (in Google’s mind) data. Understanding if a term is a rising or falling element of your topic’s vocabulary is highly valuable for creating enticing content, and available for free!
There’s extra data within the Google Zeitgeist section, detailing 2013’s most popular searches. Also worth checking out is the Hot Trends list, to see the most popular searches right now, perfect inspiration for timely content.
We all know that understanding our audience is key to making a great website that serves their needs. Whilst surveys can cost a lot of money, Google’s Consumer Surveys have a free option for measuring site satisfaction – you can’t deviate from the four default questions without paying, but you can still get valuable data on how users perceive your site and their experience of it. This can be especially helpful when testing a new site design or content category.
Back in 2010 Google announced that site speed had become a signal in their search ranking algorithms. Subsequent studies have also shown that site speed does have an effect on your site’s visibility.
Fortunately, there is a way to create a list of suggestions for your client or development team without having to be an expert coder (though that never hurts). Google’s PageSpeed Tools includes a PageSpeed Insights broswer extension for Chrome and Firefox (as an extension to Firebug), and an in-browser version that offers even further detail. Either option will give you some actionable data to get your site literally up to speed.
What was known as Google’s Website Optimizer has evolved into Google Analytics Content Experiments. As the name suggests, it now lives within Google Analytics rather than as a stand-alone product, but still offers an excellent, and free, way to test, measure and optimise your site.
Content Experiments ties in with the goals you have created in Google Analytics, and lets you show several different variations of a page to users. This means you can test layouts, headlines, content, colours and more to find the optimum layout. As conversion rate optimisation becomes a more common part of the digital marketing landscape, this is a great way to dip your toes in the water before making an investment in an agency or ine of the range of potent user testing tools, all while getting actionable results.
Want another free method for extra search visibility that’s been shown to generate traffic? Get yourself a local listings result by using Google’s Local facilities, Places for Business and Google+ Local. Multiple tools? Well, yes, somewhat confusingly, there’s two different ways to claim a local presence.
Essentially, your Google Places listing gives you control over the information that is shown in Google’s Maps, which local results make use of. Google+ Business pages look similar, but allow you to engage with other local businesses, post news and so on.
Which one should you go for first? Google Places for Business – as this article by local search expert David Mihm points out, it has a superior interface, and it controls the listing that appears in Google Maps, and thus most relevant search results. The differences between the two, and how to combine them are detailed by Amanda DiSilvestro. To get you going here are some excellent reads on getting started with Places for Business and local search ranking factors.
Ah, good old Google Alerts. Whilst it’s reliability has been called into question in recent times, there’s no doubt this still holds an important place in many online marketer and content creator’s hearts.
Using Google Alerts you can keep an eye on a topic of your choice with regular updates from Google themselves on the latest index updates. Common uses include finding non-linking citations of your brand, or to keep an eye on the latest news on a topic or company of interest.
Ross Hudgens shows some of the inventive ways to use the service here. A great function of Google Alerts is the option to it as an RSS feed, perfect for keeping tabs on multiple alerts and combining with other sources. While Google Reader has sadly departed, there are plenty of other RSS readers out there that can do a great job in its place.
Whilst on the topic, there are some good alternatives to Google Alerts for monitoring brand mentions, such as Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer and the appropriately named Mention (which has a free option).
One of the most common frustrations in digital marketing can be the delay caused by waiting in a queue for development time. Google’s Tag Manager neatly gets round this, letting you update many of the most common site tags without having to ask for dev support.
This is a more advanced tool, but the benefits can be outsize. Once the code is installed on the site, a decent array of common marketing tags can be edited without a further code update. There’s support for URL, referrer and event based tags, custom macros and more, plus a debug console. There’s also planned further integration with third party tools to even more flexibility, and it’s possible to use tags from third-party tools such as Optimizely now.
Wrap-up
So, that’s it – ten tools you can use for free from Google, from keyword research to on-page optimisation and content creation. While Google’s attitude to online marketers is increasingly questioned, there’s still plenty we can do with these free pieces of kit.
Purpose: Website Analysis
Perhaps the best way to understand the way Google sees your site is to ask Google. Google's Webmaster Tools are novice-friendly resources that explain the fundamentals of Google search.
For example, Google's Fetch as Google tool allows you to see a particular URL as Google sees it, which is critical when troubleshooting for poor SEO performance. The information returned can help you modify the page in question for better results, and can even help you isolate problematic code when you believe your site's been hacked.
Another great feature of Google Webmaster Tools is PageSpeed Insights. This SEO tool measures the performance of both your desktop and mobile site in terms of speed. With mobile search queries surpassing desktop searches, page speed is becoming increasingly important to businesses that want to hold on to their visitors.
"PageSpeed Insights evaluates how well a page follows common performance best practices and computes a score from 1-100 that estimates its performance headroom," according to Google Developers. That score can be Good, as in 80 or above; Medium, as in 60 to 79; or Low, as in 0 to 59.
2. Ahrefs
Cost: $99/mo for Lite Plan
Purpose: Keyword Research
Ahrefs is an advanced SEO resource that examines your website property and produces keyword, link, and ranking profiles to help you make better decisions on your content. Three of its main tools are:
- Site Explorer, which shows you the performance of specific webpages on your website.
- Content Explorer, which allows you to search high-performing webpages under specific keywords and topics.
- Keywords Explorer, which generates the monthly search volume and click-through rates of specific keywords.
When using the Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs will also produce the "parent topic" of the keyword you looked up, as you can see in the screenshot above, underneath the Keyword Difficulty meter. A keyword's parent topic is a broader keyword with higher search volume than your intended keyword, but likely has the same audience and ranking potential -- giving you more a valuable SEO opportunity when optimizing a particular blog post or webpage.
3. HubSpot's Website Grader
Cost: Free
Purpose: Website Analysis
Back in 2007, HubSpot released a tool called Website Grader that helped businesses uncover search engine optimization opportunities. Because a lot has changed since then, the company has released a new and improved version of the tool.
Website Grader is an online tool that generates personalized reports based on the following key metrics:
- Performance. The tool will analyze your site's page size, requests, speed, and similar key SEO metrics.
- Mobile Readiness. The tool will see if your website is mobile-friendly in terms of responsiveness and viewport settings.
- SEO. The tool will determine if your website is easy to find -- both by humans and bots. This determination will take factors like page titles and meta descriptions into consideration.
- Security. The tool will look for things like an SSL certificate. This serves as a way to prove to visitors that your site is both authentic and safe for contact information submissions.
All you need is your website URL and an email address to get started. Simply plug in your information and you can expect a score (1-100) as well as a detailed report in a matter of seconds.
Aside from Website Grader, HubSpot also has a handful of paid SEO tools to help you better direct your efforts.
For example, within the HubSpot Blogging App, users will find as-you-type SEO suggestions. This helpful inclusion serves as a checklist for content creators of all skill levels. HubSpot customers also have access to the Page Performance App, Sources Report,and the Keyword App. The HubSpot Marketing Platform will provide you with the tools you need to research keywords, monitor their performance, track organic search growth, and diagnose pages that may not be fully optimized.
4. Check My Links
Cost: Free
Purpose: Link Optimization
To ensure that your links on a webpage -- whether external or internal -- actually work, consider Check My Links.
This broken-link checker makes it easy for a publisher or editor to make corrections before a page is live. Think about a site like Wikipedia, for example. The Wikipedia page for the term "marketing" contains a whopping 711 links. Not only was Check My Links able to detect this number in a matter of seconds, but it also found (and highlighted) seven broken links.
The tool highlights all the good links in green, and those that are broken in red, making it easy to spot the ones that don't work or are no longer active.
5. BuzzStream
Cost: Free 14-day trial, then paid plans from $24/mo
Purpose: Link Building
BuzzStream might be the most inexpensive way to manage your outreach to the people who can provide inbound links to your website.
Although backlinks to your website are critical to ranking well on Google, the outreach you do while link building can feel a lot like cold calling. BuzzStream makes it easy to research the appropriate people, come up with effective email messages, and track who's accepted each link request. Your link building queue looks like this:
Image via BuzzStream
BuzzStream helps you identify candidates for outreach based on their industry and how engaged they are across various social networks -- so you know who will be most receptive to your backlink request and boost your ranking on Google.
6. Moz's Pro Tools
Cost: Free 30-day trial, then paid plans from $99/mo
Purpose: Website Analysis
The Moz Pro subscription serves as an all-in-one tool for increasing your business' search ranking. Moz's collection of research tools provides subscribers with the resources they need to identify SEO opportunities, track growth, build reports, and optimize their overall efforts.
For example, the Crawl Test tool employs Moz's own web crawler, RogerBot, to analyze up to 3,000 links on a given URL. Once completed, users then receive an email report that details the data for each page the site links to.
Image via Moz
This is super helpful if you're looking to identify "crawlability" factors, such as duplicate content and redirects that could be influencing your SEO performance.
7. UpCity's SEO Report Card
Cost: Free
Purpose: Share of Voice
SEO Report Card by UpCity lets you analyze your website to determine how it stacks up against your competitors.
In exchange for a bit of your contact information, SEO Report Card will serve up a report that covers the following:
- Rank Analysis. A snapshot of where your website ranks on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Your ranking is based on the main keyword you select when putting information in to build the report.
- Link Building. A detailed account of the number of websites that link back to your site.
- On-Site Analysis. A look at how successful you were in incorporating your main keyword throughout your site.
- Website Accessibility. A section focused on your site's load time and ease of accessibility for crawlers.
- Trust Metrics. An overview of your site's level of trust or authority.
- Current Indexing. An indication of how many of your site pages have been indexed.
8. Woorank
Cost: Free 14-day trial, then $49/mo for a Pro Plan or $149/mo for a Premium Plan
Purpose: Website Analysis
Woorank's in-depth site analysis helps marketers reveal opportunities for optimization and improvement. This analysis takes into account the performance of existing SEO initiatives, social media, usability, and more.
Each report is divided into eight sections:
- Marketing Checklist
- SEO
- Mobile
- Usability
- Technologies
- Social
- Local
- Visitors
Spanning 70+ metrics, it would be hard -- if not impossible -- to notuncover opportunities for improvement.
As a bonus, Woorank makes it easy for users to download their reviews as branded PDFs. This makes company-wide distribution and presentation more streamlined than ever.
9. SEMrush
Cost: Free
Purpose: Keyword Research
SEMrush is a super elaborate dashboard that reports on the performance of domains as a whole and their specific pages. The website offers numerous toolkits, one of which is an SEO toolkit.
Below is one of the toolkit's flagship features, allowing you to plug in a website page to see for what keywords it's ranking, what the page's rank is for that keyword, the keyword's monthly search volume, and more.
The rest of the SEO toolkit allows you to compare your page performance to competition, analyze backlinks from other websites to your site (also known as link building), research appropriate keywords, and take advantage of similar on-page SEO opportunities.
10. Screaming Frog's SEO Spider
Cost: The LITE version is free (with limitations*), and the paid plan is $160/year
Purpose: Website Analysis
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a search marketer's best friend.
Designed specifically for the SEO-minded, this program crawls the websites you specify, examining the URLs for common SEO issues. This program simplifies and expedites an otherwise time-consuming process -- especially for larger websites. It could take hours or days to manually evaluate the same URLs.
Take a closer look at how it works:
The Java program is fairly intuitive, with easy-to-navigate tabs. Additionally, you can export any or all of the data into Excel for further analysis. So say you're using Optify, Moz, or RavenSEO to monitor your links or rankings for specific keywords -- you could simply create a .csv file from your spreadsheet, make a few adjustments for the proper formatting, and upload it to those tools.
*Pricing limitations include: You can only scan 500 URLs per website, and you don't have full access to configuration options and source code features. To remove these limitations, users can purchase a 12-month license for around $160/year.
11. Found's SEO Audit Tool
Cost: Free
Purpose: Website Analysis
Want to rise above your competitors on search engine results pages?
(Who doesn't?)
The SEO Audit Tool by Found is an easy-to-use tool for marketers looking to identify (and solve) common SEO errors on a website.
Simply enter your URL and receive an instant automated SEO audit of your site. Found's SEO Audit Tool is broken down into three main parts:
- Technical issues. This reports on factors like domain canonicalization and XML sitemaps.
- Content issues. This focuses on influential factors like keywords and meta data.
- External link analysis. This aims to evaluate the quantity and quality of external links.
Similar to Woorank, once you run a report, the tool makes it easy for you to download the results as a PDF to be easily shared within your organization.
12. Remove'em
Cost: $249 per domain or a subscription option starting at $99/mo
Purpose: Link Building
Have you ever purchased links? Spammed the comments section on a string of blogs using the same message and link? If so, we'll forgive your bad judgment just this once ... but Google won't.
Artificial or unnatural links have the potential to seriously hurt your search ranking. To clean them up, check out Remove'em:
This helpful tool scans your backlink profile and turns up a list of contact information for the links and domains you'll need to reach out to for removal. Alternatively, the tool also allows you to export the list if you wish to disavow them using Google's tool.(Essentially, this tool tells Google not to take these links into account when crawling your site.)
13. Varvy's SEO Overview Tool
Cost: Free
Purpose: Website Analysis
This SEO auditing tool provides users with information regarding their domain strength, links, image SEO, social counts and mentions, page/technical SEO, page speed, and more.
The comprehensive report is prepared in less than a minute, and dives deep into different aspects of your website's performance. You'll notice that the tool employs green checks, red Xs, and yellow exclamation points to denote the severity of the issue.
One the our favorite features is the detailed image overview:
This section of the report focuses on the strength of the images your website employs by analyzing the alt text. If you're using too many words, missing alt text, or the alt text appears weak, the tool will notify you so that you can make any necessary changes.
You'll never get a look behind the Google curtain to learn everything they know (or don't know) about your site. But by leveraging SEO best practices and getting the most out of tools like those listed here, you can greatly increase the chances that your website will show up in response to the right search queries.
24 Simple and Free SEO Tools to Instantly Improve Your Marketing
Whenever I dream up a home improvement project for my place, I end up working smartest and fastest when I have the right tools at my disposal. It’s amazing the difference a good toolcan make – and the extra time it takes to get work done without a helpful tool.
Fast-forward to online marketing. How can you work smarter and faster with SEO?
It starts with having the right tools.
I’ve collected a big sampling of the best free SEO tools on the market—tools with a wide variety of uses and covering a number of common needs. These tools are fast, free, and easy-to-use. I hope you find one or two (or twenty) you can put to good use, today.
24 Free and Easy SEO Tools
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
Check the speed and usability of your site on multiple devices
Enter a URL, and this tool will test the loading time and performance for desktop and for mobile, plus identify opportunities to improve (and pat you on the back for what you’re doing well). The mobile results also come with a user experience score, grading areas like tap targets and font sizes.
Alternatives: Pingdom, WebPageTest, and GTmetrix
2. Moz Local Listing Score
See how your local business looks online
Moz crunches data from more than 15 different sources—including Google, Foursquare, and Facebook—to score your brick-and-mortar business on how it looks online. Results come complete with actionable fixes for inconsistent or incomplete listings.
3. Keywordtool.io
700+ keyword ideas based on a single keyword
Enter a keyword, and the Keyword Tool provides a huge handful of long-tail keyword opportunities, organized alphabetically.
Alternative: Übersuggest
4. Google Analytics
Complete web stats and search insights
In addition to tracking pretty much every bit of traffic you could imagine on your website, Analytics also surfaces many keyword insights as to which terms people use to land on your pages.
Alternative: Piwik
5. Google Webmaster Tools + Bing Webmaster Tools
Constant website analysis, alerts, and error reports
These webmaster tools help give you a taste of what the two top search engines think of your site. It’s helpful to see any bugs, alerts, and indexing issues.
Pro tip: Each of these two tools requires a bit of installation on your site. If you’ve got a WordPress website, you can add the webmaster code automatically through a plugin like Jetpack or Yoast.
6. Open Site Explorer
Comprehensive link analysis
The free version of Open Site Explorer gives you a quick look a full range of link analysis, including a look at the most impactful links coming your way and your most linked-to pages.
7. Google Keyword Planner
Know what people search for
Enter a keyword or group of keywords into the tool, and Google will return all sorts of helpful stats to guide your keyword strategy: monthly search volume, competition, and even suggested terms you might not have considered.
8. Google.com in an Incognito Window
Discover auto-fill opportunities
Searching Google.com in an incognito window will bring up that all-familiar list of autofill options, many of which can help guide your keyword research. The incognito ensures that any customized search data Google stores when you’re signed in gets left out. Incognito may also be helpful to see where you truly rank on a results page for a certain term.
9. Google Trends
Changes in search volume for key terms
A quick browse or search through Google Trends can show you the hockey-stick rise of potential terms and SEO opportunities for your content.
10. QuickSprout Website Analyzer
Full analysis of your website
The QuickSprout tool does a comprehensive look at just about everything: SEO optimization, speed, tags, keywords, social, links, and even competitor comparisons.
11. Schema Creator
Uber-customize the way your search results appear
Create custom code so that your reviews, events, organizations, and people are displayed the way you want on search pages. Once you’ve created your schema code, copy and paste to your website, or try the free WordPress plugin for an even easier implementation.
Here’s an example of schema in action:
12. SimilarWeb
View site stats for any domain
Use this tool to compare traffic between two websites, a helpful tool for competitor research.
13. SERPs Rank Checker
See where your site ranks for certain terms
You can run Rank Checker one of two ways: Input your keyword and your website and see where you land, or leave the website field blank to view the top-to-bottom list of results for a keyword.
14. XML Sitemaps
Build a sitemap
Simply enter your site’s URL and some optional parameters, and XML Sitemaps will create a sitemap that you can upload to Google Webmaster Tools.
15. Browseo
See your website the way a search engine sees it
Enter your site, and this tool will strip out everything but the guts, revealing your website the way search spiders see it. This particular view can be helpful to see the hierarchy you’ve given particular elements (maybe without realizing it!).
16. SEO Site Checkup
Audit and score for your website
Site Checkup runs through a fast audit of your site, checking for proper tags and surfacing any errors that might come up.
17. Searchmetrics Website Analyzer
Performance dashboard for search and social rankings
The free version of the Searchmetrics report shows you a taste of how your website ranks in search and social, along with a preview of top terms.
18. Find Broken Links
Discover errors on your site
The link report from Ninja Internet Marketers combs through your whole site and highlights a number of link insights, including the internal and external links that need fixing.
19. Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and Backlink Checker
Complete overview of your website, pages, and links
A free (and substantial) sampling of what ahrefs offers, the dashboards for referring pages and inbound links are rich and informative.
20. Copyscape
Check for duplicate content
Enter a URL for a blogpost or website, and Copyscape can tell you where else that content exists online. You might find results that you’ll need to follow-up with to help get your SEO in order.
21. Moz toolbar
I’ve shied away from referencing any toolbars thus far, but the Moz toolbar is just too good to pass up. Once installed, the Moz toolbar can show you SEO insights from within Google search results pages and at any particular website.
22. Robots.txt Generator
Robots.txt files let the web robots know what to do with a website’s pages. When a page is disallowed in robots.txt, that’s instructions telling the robots to completely skip over those web pages. There are some exceptions in which case a robots.txt might be ignored, most notably malware robots that are looking for security issues.
23. Structured Data Testing Tool
Structured data helps to provide context to the information on your page. This tool from Google uses live data to validate the structured data for any web page, or you can copy/paste code to test it.
24. Microsoft Free SEO Toolkit
The Microsoft SEO Toolkit combines quite a few different tools into one. Used together, it can analyze your site and provide recommendations on how to make your site’s content more SEO-friendly, including tweaks to your sitemap and robots.txt. Sorry to all of the Apple folks, this one seems to be Windows-only!
Further resources
Putting together a list of free SEO tools can be a daunting task. There are hundreds out there! I aimed to grab the ones that we’ve found valuable here at Buffer and the ones you can use via the web within minutes to get some amazing insights.
If you’re interested in even more tools—like, hundreds!—here are a few places to start:
- 100 Best SEO Tools and Resources – an interactive tools list, curated by Moz
- Annie Cushing’s Must-Have SEO Tools – a comprehensive spreadsheet of tools categorized to over 300 common tasks
- SEO and Marketing Tools – a collection by Saijo George
- The Complete Beginner’s Guide to SEO – an overview of what you might be able to do with these tools
Which SEO tools are your favorite? Do you prefer web tools like these or browser plugins and spreadsheets?
I’d love to hear any tips you’re willing to share in the comments!
Editors Note: This post was originally published on Aug 25, 2014 – we’ve made some updates to this post to highlight some new tools that have entered the SEO scene. Are we missing your favorite tool? Let us know in the comments below 
Image credits: Schema Creator, Startup Stock Photos, Mozbar
