This is particularly true for those who are doing most of the legwork themselves, and don’t have a lot of money to invest in hiring an SEO expert. There’s a lot of SEO tools out there – some more complicated to use than others.
However, there are tons of free and effective tools available that don’t require a university degree to figure out how they work.
1. Broken Link Detectors – These helpful tools, such as the one provided by Internet Marketing Ninjas, will scan through your website and highlight errors such as broken internal or external links. Broken links are not good for your rankings, so be sure you don’t have any on your website.
2. Trunk.ly – This is a simple application that works in conjunction with your social media accounts and will display a timeline of the links you (or your friends) have shared. This helps to measure the impact a particular social media account has on clicks/rankings.
3. Google’s PageSpeed Insights – It’s a well known fact that page speed directly affects your search engine rankings on Google. Simply by entering a URL, this tool will test the loading time and performance of your website for both desktop and mobile, and identify opportunities to improve.
4. Browseo – This tool will display your website to you the way search spiders see it. This can be helpful to see the hierarchy you’ve given to particular elements on your website so you can make changes accordingly, if needed.
5. SimilarWeb – Interested to see how you measure up to your competitors? This clever tool compares traffic between websites.
6. Keywordtool.io – This keyword tool will provide you with new keyword alternatives and suggestions based on a single keyword that you provide.
7. Google Keyword Planner – By entering in keywords, this tool will return helpful stats to guide your keyword strategy, including monthly search volume and competition, and will even suggest terms you may not have considered.
8. Quick Sprout Website Analyzer – This will give you a complete analysis on just about everything, including SEO optimization, social media, internal/external links, speed, tags, keywords, and competitor comparisons.
You can find dozens more SEO tools at https://moz.com/blog/100-free-seo-tools
