Over the 20+ years that I’ve worked in the SEO industry in different roles, I’ve found that there are many tools that promise to simplify and solve SEO once and for all. They give you massive waves of data to process and try to gain insights from. For beginners entering the SEO industry these tools can quickly become overwhelming and drowned out your motivation to continue learning about search engine optimization.
1) Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is Google’s free tool that gives you a view into what Google’s Search Engine currently understands about your website, where it is ranking your website, and what search terms you’re ranking for. It also gives you some additional tecnhnical insights about your website’s performance that can be helpful. All of the data in GSC is what happens BEFORE someone visits your website. Google Analytics on the other hand is everything that happens AFTER someone visits. Taking time to click around inside of GSC is a great way to start your SEO journey so that you start to see your website from Google’s perspective.
2) Google Analytics
After you’ve gained a deeper understanding of Google’s robot brain by playing with Google Search Console, now is the time to get deeper into Google Analytics. Pay attention to what people are doing once they visit your pages that are ranking in Google. You can do this by first looking in Google Search Console to see your pages that get the most clicks from Google Search. Then go to Google Analytics and explore what people did after they visited those pages when they came from the “Organic Search Traffic” channel. Going back and forth between Google Search Console and Google Analytics is a strong foundation for understanding your website’s performance with both the people searching for you, and the people that visited your website.
3) Page Speed Insights
Google for Developers built a tool that analyzes all the website performance metrics that matter most. This tools gets into the technical weeds, but can reveal big problems with how your website is built. You’ll probably need a web developer to help you improve the scores in this tool. Being fast is not the most important factor, but it can make the difference between you and your competition ranking in the top results in some cases.
4) SEMRush Free SEO Tools
Lots of data to give you a birds-eye view of your website’s performance in search. Sometimes it can be overwhelming as they build out more and more features to be the one-stop-shop for everything SEO related. After understanding Google Search Console and Google Analytics deeply, SEMRush can help you get organized and make progress. The main downside is just how broad the tool is, and it doesn’t give you a sense of priority about which tasks are truly most important.
- Website Authority Checker
- Keyword Rank Checker
- SERP Checker
- Keyword Search Volume Checker
- Backlink Checker (coming soon…)
- Plagiarism Checker (coming soon…)
5) AHRefs Free SEO Tools:
AHRefs has an easier to digest user interface, but with a lot of info. It’s another high level view of your website from a broad perspective to get you familiar with what matters in the SEO world.
- Free Keyword Generator
- Keyword Difficulty Checker
- YouTube Keyword Tool
- Amazon Keyword Tool
- Bing Keyword Tool
- Backlink Checker
- Broken Link Checker
- Website Authority Checker
- Website Traffic Checker
- SERP Checker
- Keyword Rank Checker
- Ahrefs SEO WordPress Plugin
- Ahrefs SEO Toolbar
- AI Writing Tools
6) Market Brew Free SEO Tools
If the other tools are floodlights that give you broad visibility into your website, Market Brew is the laser. It helps you focus on what matters most right now. It get’s deep into the specifics of why your website is or isn’t ranking where you want it to rank. The free tools are just the tip of the iceberg. Market Brew is by far one of my favorite SEO tools because of its Predictive SEO angle. It has Rank Forecasting Tool that helps you see where you will rank in Google if you make certain changes to your website. It also gives you clear priorities about which tasks will impact your search rankings the most to get the fastest results from your SEO efforts.
- AI Overviews Visualizer
- Spotlight Entity Visualizer
- SEO Similarity Matrix
- Link Spotter
Welcome to the SEO world!
Spend time with all the free tools Google gives you first to build your foundation on the fundamentals of how the search-driven parts of the internet works. Experiment with making changes and measuring the results of those changes. Then expand into the higher level tools once you’ve hit a wall that the basics can’t get you through.
Feel free to contact me directly if you have questions, or would like help with your website’s SEO performance.
Resources
- Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console/about
- Google Analytics: https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/
- Page Speed Insights: https://pagespeed.web.dev/
- SEMRush Free SEO Tools: https://www.semrush.com/free-tools/
- AHRefs Free SEO Tools: https://ahrefs.com/free-seo-tools
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