When was the last time you typed a full URL into the address bar? That way of browsing died with www dot. Now, search engines are the internet, search engine optimization is as important as it ever has been. If you want your website to rank at the top of Google, here are some SEO tools available online.
Top SEO Tools Available Online
1. Google Search Console (GSC) – Best for Starters
Obviously, we were going to start with the Mothership. And we suggest you do too. If you’re completely new to SEO, this is the top resource out there for you to get started. Like everything that Google does, the GSC is extremely user-friendly and full of useful tools whatever the size of your project.
It ensures that Google can crawl your site, monitors how Google indexes your site, let’s you know how to make small improvements to improve your SEO score (e.g. if there’s a spammy backlink), and generally makes sure that your site and Google remain friends.
Pricing: Free. Isn’t that music to our ears?
2. Ubersuggest – Best for Keyword Research
SEO guru, Neil Patel, describes the latest incarnation of his SEO tool Ubersuggest 3.0 as “The Ultimate SEO Tool.” It’s certainly an impressive resource, particularly when it comes to keyword research.
Type any keyword into the search bar and instantly find key statistics such as the search volume of the term, a rating for how difficult it is to rank highly with that search term, and cost per click. You can also assess the URLs that are ranking highly with that keyword, and scope out your competitors.
Alternatively, you can type any domain in the search bar and find out which keywords they are using. Again, this helps with competitor research. Find which keywords they are using and identify opportunities for your own business.
If you want to get your claws into SEO and really understand it, with a monthly subscription you’ll have access to top SEO training and resources, a site audit, backlink data
Pricing: There’s a daily cap on the free version. If you’re planning on just dipping your toe into keyword research for your own website, you can probably get away with spreading your keyword research over several days. But it’s worth the relatively small $30/month subscription for the extra tools and resources so you can really master SEO.
Its price tag is a fraction of the price of Ubersuggest’s main competitors SEMRush and Ahrefs which are more geared towards marketing agencies managing multiple sites, and not business owners looking to do SEO in-house.
3. Yoast SEO – Best WordPress Plugin
Next on our list of top SEO tools available online is an absolute must for WordPress website owners. We could wax lyrical about Yoast all day, but let’s just say if Yoast were toast it would be golden and dripping in butter.
Yoast has a free and a paid version. If you’re on a tight budget the free version still works wonders and it’s a great place to really get to grips with what “page optimization” entails.
Yoast’s free version allows you to run 10 related keyphrase queries a day so you can find the right keywords for each page. Once you’ve decided on a keyword, enter it into the plugin and Yoast assesses your page for keyword optimization and allows you to manually change your meta descriptions and titles such that they are optimized for Google.
It’s also a great tool for content marketing, assessing the readability of your page, and making sure you include outbound and internal links.
Pricing: The free version is great when used in combination with other SEO tools. An upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium will set you back $89 for one website. The premium version includes
- A keyword research tool powered by SEMRush,
- The keyword optimization checker takes into account plurals and synonyms so that you can write content more naturally,
- Reminders to refresh outdated content on your main pages every 6 months
- Advanced content insights.
If you can afford the price tag, Yoast Premium is a comprehensive service that will save you from having to use multiple SEO tools.
4. Siteliner – Best for Scanning for Duplicate Content
Nobody likes a copycat, least of all Google. In the early days of content marketing, black hat SEO companies would steal content from other websites and claim it as their own. Sneaky, sneaky. Google caught onto them quickly and penalizes sites that have too much duplicate content.
But there’s no need to panic. There is a misconception that Google hunts down every snippet, every quotation, every excerpt on your website, and uses it against you. This isn’t so. As long as you’re not plagiarising large swathes of content, you won’t be on Google’s naughty list.
If you’re outsourcing your content, you can run it through a free plagiarism checker online such as plagiarismdetector.net. If you want to check the content that is already on your site, siteliner.com is your guy. This free tool will help you see how much of your content is duplicated.
Pricing: Totally free.
All of these resources are user-friendly and will give you a great introduction to SEO. We hope we’ve inspired you to tackle SEO on your own website yourself.
Want to keep reading about SEO? Don’t hire a Local SEO Expert before you try these DIY strategy tips.
