SEO News

Breaking news, updates, trends, and the latest info you need to know about SEO, Google and other search engines, top PPC platforms, and popular social media networks.

You don’t have to pay to boost your website’s Google rankings with these free SEO tools. Whether you want to see who’s backlinking to your site or dive deep into keyword research, these are the best free SEO tools for the thrifty, digital entrepreneur.

Yoast SEO
Yoast is a popular Wordpress plugin that gives you all the basic information you need when optimizing on-page SEO. The free version of Yoast has the following important capabilities.

Choose One Keyword per Piece of Content: Yoast will tell you your keyword density, distribution, and whether or not you’re conflicting with preexisting content. This is crucial for virtually anyone with a website.

Check Readability: Though most search engine optimization discussions involve ranking for Google, it’s important to remember that how your viewers engage with your content will ultimately decide where search engines rank it.

That’s why Yoast integrated the Flesch Reading Ease Score to determine how easy is it to read your content. This goes along with the top SEO marketing trends in 2019: Content quality, not just quantity, matters for Google and readers.

Avoid Duplicate Content: Creating duplicate content is a sure way to confuse Google’s algorithms. That’s why Yoast creates canonical URLs in its free plugin.

A Favorite Plugin Among Paid and Free SEO Tools: Though the free version of Yoast offers some incredible capabilities, Yoast Premium has several features for added optimization. These include:

A Redirect Manager to avoid 404s

Internal Linking suggestions to boost your internal optimization

Keyword optimization for multiple keywords

However, a recent update tells you less, not more, about your keyword optimization. For instance, instead of listing exactly what percentage of your text contains the keyword, it only lets you know whether that percentage is too high, or too low.

Related: 7 Reasons Why SEO Matters for Every Startup

Google Analytics
Applicable to Wordpress, Shopify, or even Tumblr blogs, Google Analytics is one of the best free SEO tools due to its versatility. Once you’ve hooked your free account up to your websites, you can do the following:

Set Goals: These can be how many people sign up for your newsletter, track your product or any metric you think would benefit your website.

View Live Site Traffic: How many people are on your site right now? Are they on a desktop or mobile? Where are they coming from? Google Analytics will tell you all this in real time.

Create Audience Overview Reports: Google Analytics will create free reports for you on data including:

Sessions

Pageviews

Users

Bounce rates

Average session duration

Want to know the nitty-gritty, like which states your users are coming from, which browsers they use, their screen resolutions and their operating systems? This is one of the best free SEO tools for accessing everything you need to know about your traffic.

Paid Google Analytics for 10 Million+ Hits
If you get more than 10 million hits per month, you’re required to pay for Google Analytics 360, which costs $150,000 per year. On the upside, this comes with additional services like Google Drive Integration and 24/7 support.