Thirty FREE Tools That Help You Rank Higher in Search Engines
So you got your first quote from an SEO expert for your small business website and you’re in sticker shock… well, you’ve come to the right place.
Search Engine Optimization success can be broken down into 3 key categories:
Links
Keywords
Site performance and speed
There are a few adjustments you can make to improve your website’s SEO in these areas with an afternoon set aside and leveraging a few tools.
Disclaimer: While using free tools may not catapult you into the next dimension of web existence and have you raking in higher profits overnight (we wish), they CAN and DO help your ranking in search engines like Google.
Links
With the help of a free link checker, you can easily find and fix broken links that might be hurting your rankings. Here are five tools to get you started:
1. W3C Link Checker – This open source tool helps you quickly find broken links on your website.
2. Screaming Frog – With this tool, you can spider your website and uncover any broken or redirected links.
3. Xenu Link Sleuth – This free program helps to detect problems in the links of your website.
4. Dead Link Checker – This online tool can be used to check the status of all the hyperlinks on your website and quickly find any broken links.
5. Integrity – This Mac-only tool helps to scan your entire website for broken links.
Keywords
Finding the right keywords for your website can be a laborious task, but there are free tools available to help automate and improve SEO discoverability. Here are five free keyword tools that can help you boost your website's visibility in search engines:
1. Google Adwords Keyword Planner – This free tool from Google allows you to enter in words or phrases and get back hundreds of related keywords and their search volumes.
2. AnswerThePublic – This free visual keyword tool brings insights from Google Autocomplete to the surface. It helps you uncover long-tail questions and queries that you might not have thought of before.
3. Ubersuggest – Using the free version of this tool, you can type in a keyword and get back a list of related keywords. It can also provide data on the CPC (cost per click) and PPC (pay-per-click) of each keyword.
4. Keyword Tool – This free tool uses Google Autocomplete to generate hundreds of related keywords from just one search. It can also help you understand the competition level of each keyword so you can prioritize and strategize accordingly.
5. Moz Keyword Explorer – This free tool helps you browse keyword ideas, research SERP (Search Engine Result Page) features and analyze the strength of each keyword. It also provides valuable insights into keyword difficulty and other useful data.
Site performance and speed
We all know that website speed is essential for SEO and user experience. You can help boost your rankings and help make sure visitors have a great time interacting with your site by using these 20 free tools to help you with website performance and speed.
1. Google PageSpeed Insights: Get the handy insights from Google on how quickly your site loads and what you can do to speed it up.
2. GTmetrix: Analyze the performance of your website with this great tool, then get detailed reports about what you can do to optimize it for better speed.
3. Pingdom Website Speed Test: Quickly test how well-optimized a URL is and get recommendations for improvements.
4. WebPageTest: Test the performance of a website from various locations with this great tool and compare metrics side by side.
5. Lighthouse: A powerful automated auditing tool from Google to help you find opportunities to improve your speed and SEO rankings.
6. Dareboost: Get an in-depth analysis of your website's performance, including detailed recommendations on how to optimize.
7. Pagespeed Monitor: Keep an eye on the performance and speed of your site with this free tool from Google.
8. WebPage Analyzer: Test the loading time and size of a page, then get suggestions for improving its performance.
9. Varvy Pagespeed Optimization: A comprehensive tool that tests the speed, validity and accessibility of a website and gives recommendations for improvement.
10. PageSpeed Insights Chrome Extension: Instantly measure the performance of your website directly from Google Chrome with this powerful extension.
11. GTmetrix Waterfall Viewer: Get detailed information about how your resources are loaded with this helpful tool.
12. YSlow: Discover ways to help speed up page load times with this free analysis tool from Yahoo!.
13. PageSpeed Insights Edge Extension: Measure the performance of a website directly from the Microsoft Edge browser with this extension.
14. Dareboost Site Comparator: Compare two website's performance metrics and get insights into how to improve both.
15. WebPagetest API: Automate the testing of a page's speed with this powerful API from Google.
16. Website Speed Test Tool by Dotcom-Monitor: This free tool tests your website performance from over 50 locations around the world.
17. WP Performance Score Booster: Analyze and help improve your WordPress website speed with this helpful tool.
18. Website Speed Test by Uptrends/website-speed-test: Quickly test a website's loading times from over 30 locations across the globe with this great tool.
19. Dareboost Real User Monitoring: Monitor the performance of your website from real user’s perspective with this powerful tool.
20. Test My Site: Get insights into how quickly your site loads on different devices with this free analysis tool from Google.
Get started now and help boost the performance of your website! If you found this content helpful, you’ll love our Digital Vault on our Circle Community. We have plenty of templates for social media, content planning, and business guides. Can’t wait to see you there!
Happy optimizing! :)
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