With over 1.2 trillion searches per year conducted on Google Worldwide, optimizing your website for search just makes sense, doesn’t it?
If done right, your search optimization efforts could bring in a constant stream of traffic. Devise a plan to engage with incoming visitors using proper sales funnels, and this can help you generate leads, make your phone go ringing off the hook and bring in revenue (and profits).
SEO, however, can take a huge amount of time, resources, and money. As a business, you’d have to think of Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing, long-term effort that pays off dividends in the long-term (expect nothing for the short-term).
While Search Optimization Strategies and implementation take time, you don’t have to waste time searching for the best free SEO tools.
Here’s a complete list of free SEO tools you should have in your toolkit.
- Pagespeed Insights
- Google Keyword Planner
- Ubersuggest
- Keywordtool.io
- Mozbar
- Moz Keyword Explorer
- Yoast SEO Plugin
Let’s look at these tools in more detail.
Note: Our Attract. Engage. Profit webinar is just the thing you’d need to learn how to ensure that your SEO efforts pay off in the long-run.
Pagespeed Insights
You already have a website. You have some content on the website. Maybe you are also blogging regularly and trying to optimize for search. Before you go looking for keyword research tools or free SEO tools, the first call of the day is to do a quick semi-audit of your website.
Does your website load fast enough? (Page speed now matters more than ever for better search ranking)? What are some of the design-related, technology-related, or specific website-related issues you could have? Are there any issues related to SEO right now? Is your website mobile-friendly?
A quick answer to all those questions (and a nice way to self-audit your website) is to use Page Speed Insights by Google (originally built for developers).
Your goal is simple: try to score as high as possible.
Google Keyword Planner
Free SEO Tools
Google Keyword Planner comes straight from Google and If you had to just pick one free SEO tool from this entire list, this would be it. Basically, Google has tons of data about keywords that is used to search for everything under the sun.
If you have a Google AdWords account (you can use your existing Google account to signup, if you don’t), log into the AdWords console, go to the keyword planner, type in the keyword(s) that your business represents and Google will dig out an entire list of keywords and keyword groups that people are actually typing for — along with other data such as keyword volume, possible cost per click (the amount that advertisers are willing to pay for that keyword), and more.
Search, organize the most relevant keywords for your business, create a content marketing strategy around those keywords, and you are all set to go.
Ubersuggest
Free SEO Tools
Neil Patel now owns Ubersuggest and it’s a web-based tool that’s free and incredibly easy to use.
Instead of you having to log in to Google AdWords and use the Google Keyword Planner (which is still clunky and slow, by the way), Ubersuggest allows you to look for variants of your main keyword quickly, easily, and on the web.
Instead of complicating your keyword research with data that you won’t know what to do with, Ubersuggest only lists out keywords, search volume, and a competitive index ratio for each keyword (to show you how competitive that particular keyword is).
Keywordtool.io
Free SEO Tools
Wouldn’t you love it if you could just put in a single keyword that relates to your business and you get at least 700+ ideas off a single tool?
Keywordtool.io allows you to do just that. But it doesn’t stop there.
Instead of just showing you what kind of keywords are popular on Google, you can also do a parallel search for keywords people use on other search engines (there are others, even if some are Google-owned) such as Youtube, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and App store.
Keyword tool is also one of the rare ones on this list that also incorporates the best from Google Suggest, Google Trends, and Google Autocomplete. Now, that’s powerful.
Mozbar
Free SEO Tools
Toolbars are passe, to be honest. But Mozbar is something else (although it’s still a toolbar). While it sits on your browser, it’s a free, all-inclusive, and very handy toolbar to check on SERP (Search Engine Results Page) listings, DA (Domain Authority), and PA (page authority) of any site (including yours).
While using the Mozbar, you could do custom searches (specific locations, by search engines, etc.); quickly glance at only the metrics that matter; find and highlight keywords on any page by the link type (follow, nofollow, etc.); get insights on page overlay (such as whether or not the page is https://, general attributes of the page, markup, etc.; and finally, you can export data into excel sheets for further analysis.
For a toolbar, that’s a lot of value packed into a free SEO too, eh?
Moz Keyword Explorer
Free SEO Tools
Yet another one from the Moz stable, The Moz keyword Explorer helps you discover and target precise keywords (explore by domain, subdomain, root domain, or by keywords) that you could use for a comprehensive content marketing strategy.
The first step is to enter your own URL into Keyword explorer to check for the specific keywords you are already ranking for — this immediately tells you the pages you need to work on to rank better.
Using the “compare sites” feature of Moz Keyword Explorer, you can quickly check to see how well you are doing against your competition and get tons of keyword suggestions that your competition is ranking for. You can then work on those keywords to create more content to rank for.
Yoast SEO Plugin
Free SEO Tools
If you are using WordPress, you can just forget about the rest of the list and only use Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
Simply put, this plugin is all that you’d ever need to optimize your WordPress site for SEO. Work on your page titles, optimize each blog post for SEO (and don’t publish until the plugin gives you the “green” signal).
The plugin will automatically ask you to pick a primary keyword that you want to optimize a page or a blog post for. Depending on that, it actually monitors your content for title tags, meta information, keyword density, URL structure, and many other parameters that are crucial for the page (or post) to rank well on SERPs.
While either redundant, non-existent, or maybe paid, we know that there are many more tools available for SEO. What are your favorites?
Free SEO Tool Kit
Today’s GSDdaily is episode 92 and we’re going to talk about a free SEO tool kit that you can use for your website. There’s a blog post that we’re going to kind of riff off of today, free SEO tools.
Anyway, so yesterday we talked about SEO. We introduced this idea of search engine optimization and how everything that happens previously, like backlinks and keyword stuffing and all of that stuff, basically is shit anymore. That isn’t going to help you rank at all. And the new thing that really, really matters is high-quality backlinks, consistent posting, consistent material that you were putting on a website, social indicators, page likes, shares, and that kind of stuff.
More than anything, just high-quality content. Having high-quality content is the thing that separates everybody else from you. And also, if it can be multimedia and if it can be hosted on YouTube, then that is important too. For those of you who don’t know, my name is Jason Drohn. I’m the founder of DoneForYou.com. And we specialize in creating offers, building sales automation, and basically building sales funnels to help people sell more online.
The thing about SEO as it currently sits is Google controls so much of the ecosystem. Google controls the internet. Now think about all of the different free SEO tool kits in ways that Google has, that they can peer into your search, or the computer into your websites and your stats and everything.
Google SEO Tool Kit
Search engine – lists all websites in the world
Analytics – powers the analytics for pretty much every website
Webmaster Tools or Search Console – gives you the ability to see how your website is ranking, which keyword phrases it’s ranking for, where it’s showing up in search, and the search index
Voice – for problems with page issues, if there are page errors and stuff, which is text messaging and phone calls, and they transcribe all the text messages. So forever, they’ve been using Google Voice to train their algorithms to text, to get, to have speech recognition, which they then put in play inside YouTube
There are all kinds of ways. This isn’t like a conspiracy thing, but there are all kinds of ways that Google has a free SEO tool kit and platforms and things where they end up influencing each other. It’s a smart business.
They’re really, really good at what they do. They have, I mean, it’s free SEO tool kit. They make money off of ads. All of those things allow them to generate more revenue and thus create more free shit that we then can use to help better our business. It’s important to understand that because when you know that putting a video on YouTube, it’s probably going to give you some search bonus points. And when you post, when you embed that YouTube video on a blog post, that’s important.
Today we’re going to talk about some free SEO tool kits that you can use in your business. Now, let me just, there we go. So there’s a lot of different kinds of free tools that we use. There are seven that we use all the time. So the first is page speed insights. It’s important to understand how quickly the page loads. When you understand how quickly the page loads or when you’re able to optimize that page, then you can get a pretty good idea of it, it’s going to definitely increase conversion and it’s going to increase how it’s going to increase your ranks.
Pingdom tools
There’s a couple of things, a couple of ways to find it. There are page speed insights, which is good. We use Pingdom tools as a quick page speed test, too. So Pingdom tools are here, and then we’re just going to look at them for you. I haven’t. Last I saw, it was like .8 seconds. We’re going to see where it is now. It might, it has, it does seem like it’s been loading slower. It might just be because of more traffic, I’m not sure. But we have caches and all that other stuff up. So it looks like it’s running the test now. We’re at 1.9, 928 milliseconds is the page load time. And we have a D as a performance grade.
W3 total cache plugin
I think that’s pretty damn good if it’s under a second. Do you know what I mean? It looks like we’ve got a bunch of F’s, so we might need to fix that. But anyway, so how we do that, how we get a sub one second page load time is we use the W3 total cache plugin. We talked about this yesterday, but we use the W3 total cache plugin. And then we also combined that with Cloudflare’s free CDN. Cloudflare is also how we end up assigning AWS IP addresses, like for our software and stuff too. So W3 total cache has a free WordPress plugin. You can install Cloudflare as the CDN. So all of your images and your bigger files, your kind of static stuff, gets stored in Cloudflare.
And then you can end up, with minimal tweaking, you can have a pretty quick load speed. So 928 milliseconds is definitely not bad. There are some pages that are not that good.
Google Keyword Planner
We went through Google Keyword Planner in yesterday’s daily. Super important to use for you, whenever you create any kind of customer-facing content, you need to do the keyword research for it. You should look it up. You look up which keyword phrases somebody is typing in. A great example is this. So I used to think that all of our material needed to be written for digital marketing or whatever. Come to find out that many, many, many, many business owners type in advertising. They don’t think of it as marketing. They think of what they do as advertising.
If you are an agency, you need to optimize for the keyword phrase, advertising, not marketing. It’s just that it’s a subtle difference, but it’s how, it’s the context people approach, you wonder. That’s how you have to think when you’re looking for keyword research when you’re creating content for your website, how are people approaching you and your business? And then, how do you rank for that keyword phrase, or how do you advertise for that keyword phrase?
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is another great free SEO tool kit. This is a great free SEO tool kit for figuring out what kind of content to write. So, here we have a keyword overview of woodworking. The search volume, this is Neil Patel’s, the search volume is 60,500, SEO difficulty, 74, paid difficulty, 82, cost per click, 105. It just gives you a very high-level view of what a particular keyword phrase is. Then we have some keyword ideas. Woodworking tools, woodworking projects, supplies, woodworking near me, plans. Now, yesterday we talked about buyer intent. So when you’re doing your keyword research, you don’t want just woodworking.
If you were to advertise for the keyword phrase woodworking, most likely it’s going to be a shit keyword phrase because everybody and their brother who wants to learn woodworking, who wants to find free SEO tool kit for woodworking, who wants to, all the generic stuff, free woodworking plans, they’re going to be typing in woodworking. Not a keyword phrase that you want. However, woodworking projects, if you have a database of projects you sell, then that might be a good one. Woodworking supplies might be a good one, woodworking plans. So what we try to find is long, long-tail keyword phrases, so four words, five words, six words.
Like I said yesterday, now, so many search queries are sentence-based. So how many people, because they’re asking their Google Home and they’re asking their Siri and Alexa, they’re asking them full-sentence questions. And that is their search. So understanding that ranking for those things is way easier than ranking for a keyword phrase, like woodworking, is important. Let’s see, the next.
Keywordtool.io
Keywordtool.io is another really good one, too. One of the reasons I love Keywordtool.io is it’s not just Google. Of course, you have Google, so you can type a keyword like woodworking.
And then, this is Cloudflare, BTW. These people are using Cloudflare, too. So you can see the woodworking free SEO tool kit, and then this is a, it’s a tool, as like any other, so you can pay to upgrade. Woodworking mask, woodworking supplies, clamps, aprons. So if you sell woodworking aprons, you’ll be able to see how much, but from a research standpoint, having this list of keyword tools is important. I also like to go through and understand that YouTube is a huge search engine. Amazon, I think, is the number three search engine. Bing as the number two search engine. Google is the number one search engine.
So each of these outlets treats you differently and you might be able to find some inspiration on one that you can bring to another. On YouTube, the woodworking bench, woodworking tools, are all trending. Now, if we go to Amazon, let’s look at Amazon’s woodworking and see what happens there. We have eBay placed or Instagram, too. That’s taking a minute to load. That’s all right. Just pulling it.
MozBar
MozBar is another one. There’s a lot of different SEO keyword research toolbars. MozBar is a good one. It lets you basically quickly glance at the metrics that matter when you’re doing keyword research and when you’re looking at stuff.
There’s also the Moz Keyword Explorer, which is part of the Moz toolkit, in terms of SEO. But one of the nice things about MozBar is it lets you compare sites. And then we have the Yoast SEO plugin, which we talked about yesterday. We talked about going through and using Yoast for you, using Yoast just to go through and optimize your webpages. And if we look at this page, so let me just let’s do this. I’m going to log in to Done For You, and then we’re going to look at how that particular page is optimized real quick here.
Yoast plugin
All right. I’m logging into the backend of Done For You. And then we’re going to look at how this page is optimized. So let me just do this. Okay. We’re going to go and edit the post. (silence) All right. So if we scroll all the way down. So this particular keyword post, the one that we were just looking at is 1099 words. Once we get this video transcribed and added, it’s going to be in the neighborhood of 5000 words, 4000 words, 5000 words. And this is how it is currently SEO’d inside the Yoast plugin. The Yoast plugin has some things.
So basically, free SEO tools are the focus keyword phrase. That is the keyword phrase we’re trying to rank for. And then if we look at the Google preview, we will see that we are using a free SEO tool kit. That isn’t good. We’re using free SEO tool kit in the, as the blog post title, free SEO tools here. So a quick way of just fixing this is we go up and we edit the free SEO toolkit. All right, let me see what else here, tool. That’s probably going to need a little bit of work because as we’re updating it, we’re kind of going through.
It gives us all of the things that, all the problems, all the things that we need to do differently for the keyword phrase, free SEO toolkit. So first of all, the key phrase needs to be in the introduction, so your key phrase or its synonyms do not appear in the first paragraph. This is always the case on all of our stuff because there’s a YouTube video at the top. So that YouTube video, takes up space for that first keyword phrase, which isn’t a big deal. You don’t have to get all of them in there.
The keyword phrase density. So this keyword phrase, free SEO tools, was found three times. It needs to be in there four times. There needs to be a keyword phrase in a subheading. So a sub-headline needs to have a keyword phrase, and then the SEO title is also wide. So these are all of our reds. This is all of our problems, all the things that we need to fix. Then we have improvements. So your meta description length, your image attributes, and then your key phrase in the title. Basically, as you do these things, it just checks them off. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And then your little toolbar up here goes from red to yellow to green. And then here we have the green. So outbound links, internal links, key phrase length, and key phrase meta description. These are all the things we did well.
That is how Yoast SEO keeps you honest with your searches. And now, the most important thing is just writing content. It’s just keeping up a trend writing content so that you can get that content ranked in Google. And how we do it, we record these dailies, send them off to a transcriptionist and then they, the transcriptionist goes through, transcribes the content, and then we post it up on a blog post.
We optimize it, we throw the content, we do all that stuff, send it off to podcasts, and so on and so forth. That’s just how we create content. It takes 45 minutes or 50, 45 minutes or so of my time. It takes about an hour of VA time. It’s nice, from a keyword research and optimization stuff standpoint, it’s nice and simple and it’s easy, it works well. We’ve done it for 92 episodes.
We have 92 total blog posts that we’ve either edited or created new in the last three and a half months. And it has been multimedia content and a lot of other stuff. If you would like more information on how we do it, on putting together a podcast, or this kind of a content marketing system in your business, go to DoneForYou.com/start. Sign up for an Action Plan Call with us. We’ll be happy to get on the phone and kind of layout a strategy for you. For all of the tools that we talked about here, just go to free SEO tools. Let me just drop the link one more time. Maybe it’ll go out through Facebook. I don’t think it went through Facebook the first time.