Free website positioning instruments could also be restricted, however you may nonetheless use them to do website positioning. You simply want the fitting ones to cowl your use circumstances.
Add these 36 free website positioning instruments to your website positioning toolkit.
Monitor your web site’s website positioning well being, see who’s linking to you, and study what your web site is rating for on Google.
Ahrefs Webmaster Instruments (AWT) scans your web site for over 100 frequent website positioning points that may very well be hurting your rankings. It additionally tells you what key phrases you’re rating for, who’s linking to you and from the place.
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AWT doesn’t simply let you know what issues your website has. It additionally tells you why they’re an issue and how one can repair them.
Discover as much as 100 key phrase concepts about any matter.
Key phrase Generator exhibits you the highest 100 key phrase concepts for any key phrase or phrase you enter. It additionally offers you essential key phrase information, resembling search quantity and Keyword Difficulty.
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Toggle Questions to see “informational” queries you can create content about.
Find keyword ideas from Google’s keyword research tool.
Google Keyword Planner (GKP) is Google’s keyword research tool for Google Ads. But you can use it for SEO, too. It’s especially useful for finding trending or seasonal keywords.
Sidenote.
One limitation of GKP is that it doesn’t show absolute search volumes, only a range.
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Most keyword research tools show you ideas based on your seed keyword. For example, if you enter “coffee,” you’ll get ideas like “coffee bean,” “keurig coffee maker,” and “coffee shops.”
GKP can show you relevant keywords based on semantics. For example, GKP suggests keywords like “nespresso pods,” “espresso,” “french press,” and “breville barista express” even though they don’t contain the word “coffee.”
Find questions that appear under Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ SERP feature.
People Also Ask is a SERP feature that shows popular questions related to your search query. AlsoAsked pulls these questions and shows you all PAA questions related to your topic.
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Use these to find subtopics and questions that may be worth answering in your content. For example, if you’re writing about “how to clean coffee maker,” you may want to answer these questions:
Find topics people are discussing on Reddit.
Keyworddit extracts keywords from Reddit communities, which is a great way to find topics your audience is interested in.
For example, here are some keywords from the r/bigseo subreddit:
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Keyworddit also shows you the context where the keyword appeared:
Find trending topics to cover.
Google Trends shows the popularity of a topic over time. You can use it to find and capitalize on trending topics and avoid creating content about those with waning interest.
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Google Trends also shows you related topics and queries that are rising in popularity:
Cover these topics before other sites do.
See how hard it will be to get into the top 10 search results for any keyword.
Keyword Difficulty Checker shows how difficult it would be to rank for a particular keyword, as measured by Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty (KD) score. This score is on a 100-point scale with zero being the easiest and 100 being the hardest.
For example, the keyword “link building” has a score of 88, which is super hard:
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Keyword Difficulty Checker shows you an estimate of how many backlinks from unique websites you need to rank in the top 10 for your target keyword. This is useful for getting a rough idea of how much work it might take to rank for a topic.
Improve your WordPress site’s SEO.
Sidenote.
Yoast is a competitor and a go-to for many website owners, but I personally prefer RankMath.
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RankMath has a comprehensive schema markup library that you can add to your posts:
Check that your page looks as intended in the search results.
This SERP Snippet Optimization tool shows how your webpage will potentially look in Google search results. Just enter your proposed title, meta description, and URL.
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Check the pixel counts to make sure your title, URL, and meta description fit the maximum pixel lengths:
Create structured data markup in the JSON-LD format.
Merkle’s Schema Generator generates local business, FAQ, product, and other types of schema markup for you. This helps search engines better understand your content. Just select the type of markup you want, fill in the form, then copy and paste onto your site.
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Click on the “G” logo to send the code to Schema.org’s Markup Validator or Google’s Wealthy Outcomes Check software to verify its validity.
Detect on-page website positioning points as you browse the net.
Ahrefs’ website positioning toolbar exhibits website positioning information for any webpage you go to. These embrace the next:
- Web page’s title
- Meta description
- Dates when web page was revealed and modified
- Phrase depend
- Headings
- Hreflang tags
- Canonicals
- OG tags
- Structured information
- Alt textual content
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Our toolbar additionally checks for outgoing hyperlinks:
Discover backlink alternatives to any web site or web page.
Our free backlink checker exhibits you the highest 100 backlinks pointing to any web site or webpage. That is helpful for locating opponents’ hyperlinks that you just could possibly replicate. Simply enter a competing web site or webpage’s URL.
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Backlink Checker additionally exhibits you the anchor textual content for the hyperlink. This helps you perceive how a hyperlink was earned and will help you see alternatives simply.
Discover e mail addresses for hyperlink outreach.
Hunter.io means that you can discover anybody’s skilled e mail tackle. Simply enter the area of the e-mail tackle you’re searching for, and the software will present you the record of e mail addresses it has discovered:
This can be a huge time saver for link outreach.
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If you’re doing link building at scale, you can use Hunter.io’s bulk email finder to find and verify email addresses in one shot.
Monitor and troubleshoot your website’s search performance.
Google Search Console helps you find and fix technical errors on your website, submit sitemaps, check your Core Web Vitals, and more.
If you’re interested in doing everything above but for Bing, use Bing Webmaster Tools as an alternative.
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The URL Inspection software offers details about Google’s listed model of a particular web page. Enter any URL and see if there are points with it:
Velocity up your web site with a free CDN.
Cloudflare is a content material supply community (CDN) that helps pace up your web site and defend it from malicious assaults. It really works by caching your web site throughout its world servers so guests can load its content material from a location nearer to them, which is quicker.
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Cloudflare robotically offers a free SSL certificate in your web site. That is essential as a result of HTTPS protects your website and is a small Google rating issue.
Consider the efficiency of your webpage.
Developed by Google, Pagespeed Insights assess your pages for Core Net Vitals like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Enter Delay (FID), and Cumulative Format Shift (CLS).
Simply enter your URL and Pagespeed Insights will present you the evaluation rating:
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Pagespeed Insights will let you know what the difficulty is and easy methods to repair it:
Optimize your photos.
Shortpixel compresses, optimizes, and resizes photos in your website audotmatically. That is helpful as a result of giant photos (by way of file sizes) can take an extended time to load and due to this fact affect your web page pace.
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Use the majority optimization characteristic to, properly, optimize photos in bulk.
Create a correctly formatted robots.txt file.
Robotic.txt generator creates a robots.txt file for you, which tells serps the place they’ll and may’t go in your website. It’s greatest apply for each web site to have one in every of these.
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Select “Customise” to create particular person guidelines for numerous bots, subdirectories, and so on.:
Generate hreflang tags to specify the language and geographical focusing on of a webpage.
Hreflang tags inform serps like Google about a number of variations of the identical web page in several languages and helps them to serve the proper model to their customers. This software generates these tags for you. Simply add your required URLs, choose your goal nation and language, then click on “Generate.”
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This isn’t a characteristic of this software, however when you’ve generated and applied your hreflang tags, you should use Merkle’s hreflang Tags Testing Tool to see should you’ve added it correctly.
Generate sitemaps and assist Google discover your pages.
A sitemap is an XML file itemizing all of the essential content material in your web site. Any web page or file that you just need to present up in serps must be in your sitemap. This software creates one for you.
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Click on on Extra choices to customise your sitemap:
See how the browser renders a web page.
View Rendered Supply exhibits you ways the browser has rendered a web page’s authentic HTML into the DOM, together with modifications made by JavaScript. It’s a terrific software for many who must audit or troubleshoot JavaScript points.
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View Rendered Supply exhibits the variations between the uncooked model of your code and what’s rendered.
See the highest 10 rating pages for any key phrase.
SERP Checker pulls unpersonalized Google search outcomes for any nation. Use it to see correct real-time outcomes unaffected by components resembling location, language, and search historical past.
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For the primary three search outcomes, you’ll additionally see essential website positioning metrics just like the variety of backlinks and referring domains, estimated search site visitors, Area Ranking (DR), and so on.
That is useful for assessing the top-ranking pages and understanding why these pages are rating the place they are.
See search outcomes from any location.
BrightLocal’s Native SERP Checker pulls much more granular search outcomes—proper right down to the town, city, and even ZIP degree. That is helpful for native website positioning.
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You possibly can even choose Google Maps as your search engine to see the place you’re rating:
Inform your advertising technique with essential advertising information and analytics.
Google Analytics is a free software that provides you an entire vary of knowledge in your web site. You possibly can parse and dissect this in some ways to enhance your advertising.
Not many individuals like Google Analytics 4—the present model—however Google Analytics remains to be doubtless the most-used analytics software.
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Quite than cookies, Google Analytics 4 makes use of machine studying. This permits it to introduce predictive analytics, which assist determine customers and actions that will result in a purchase order.
Create interactive dashboards and stories.
Google Information Studio helps make reporting simpler. It’s a terrific software for SEOs working in-house or in an company that must create stories for purchasers, managers, and managers.
It additionally integrates with Google’s suite of instruments, so it’s comparatively simple to merge information from locations like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and so on.
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Mix and join information from SEO tools like Ahrefs to present a comprehensive report for clients or upper management.
Generate search-optimized titles.
Our free AI title generator writes title tags for you. (Big time saver.)
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You can select your preferred tone of voice to generate titles:
Generate SEO-friendly meta descriptions.
Our free AI meta description generator writes meta descriptions for you. (An even bigger time saver!)
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Like our title generator, you can select your preferred tone of voice.
Run a content audit of your website.
Our free WordPress plugin runs a content audit to find underperforming pages. It also suggests a course of action to improve rankings, such as rewriting or updating the post.
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Click the suggestions to see detailed recommended actions on what to do next.
Manage how your local business appears on Google Search and Maps.
According to BrightLocal’s survey, 32% of SEOs assume a Google Enterprise Profile is a very powerful rating issue for the map pack. And 9% consider that it’s essential for the “common” natural outcomes. This software helps you handle and arrange your profile
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A Google Enterprise Profile means that you can submit common updates, which seems within the SERPs:
Generate a novel Google evaluation hyperlink.
WhiteSpark’s software helps you get extra evaluations in your Google Enterprise Profile by producing a novel evaluation hyperlink. That is essential as, in response to the identical BrightLocal survey as above, 16% of SEOs assume evaluations are a very powerful rating issue for the map pack.
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This software even generates a QR code for straightforward reviewing:
See how pages regarded like within the previous.
The Wayback Machine takes historic screenshots of pages and shops them in its database. You possibly can then enter any URL to see these webpages’ earlier variations (even at the moment damaged ones).
That is helpful for a wide range of duties. For instance, should you’re doing broken link building, it is helpful to see what was originally on the dead page so that you can replicate it.
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Click on Changes to see when major changes have been made to the page. The darker the color, the larger the change:
Monitor mentions of your name or business online.
Google Alerts will send you an email when pages mention terms you’re tracking. This is useful for monitoring brand and competitor mentions.
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You can customize your alerts. Choose:
- How often you want Google to send you alerts
- Which sources (e.g., news, blogs, video, books, etc.)
- Language
- Location
And more.
Generate content briefs, outlines, articles, titles, meta descriptions, code, and more
Do I need to explain ChatGPT? You, alongside thousands of students, marketers, programmers, data scientists, are probably using ChatGPT in your work and daily life.
The beauty of ChatGPT is that you can prompt it to do almost anything: answer questions, plan your itinerary, summarize content, create content, pretend to be someone else, generate code, fix your code, and more.
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Use ChatGPT to generate titles and meta descriptions:
Check for online plagiarism.
Copyscape makes checking for plagiarism easy: Enter your URL and see if the content has been copied from or used elsewhere. This is super useful if you’ve worked with freelance writers as there’s always a chance they sent you plagiarized content from AI or other people.
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You can also compare two articles or webpages and see how they match up:
Create human-sounding drafts with an AI chatbot.
A competitor to ChatGPT, Claude is an AI chatbot from Anthropic, an AI company started by former OpenAI employees. Whatever you do with ChatGPT, you can do with Claude too.
Then, why Claude over ChatGPT? The reason is simple: Each chatbot (ChatGPT, Bard, Claude) is trained on different large language models (LLMs). So, their output will differ.
If your goal is to get the best out of AI tools, there’s nothing better than giving them the same prompts and checking to see which tool’s output is better.
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According to digital marketer Giorgio Barillà, Claude is healthier than ChatGPT at creating human-sounding drafts:
World’s most used search engine.
It might not current itself as one, however Google is arguably probably the most highly effective website positioning software.
You should use Google to finish a wide range of website positioning duties. For instance, if you wish to work out search intent, you’ll have to take a look at the SERPs.
If we take a look at the question “greatest french press”, searchers need to study, not purchase. Particularly, they need to see comparisons of probably the most up-to-date ones:
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You should use Google search operators to search out visitor submit alternatives, inside linking alternatives, hyperlink prospects, and extra.
Find out about some highly effective methods to make use of Google for website positioning in our intensive information to Google search operators.
Ultimate ideas
Nonetheless searching for extra website positioning instruments? Take a look at these articles:
