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PR power tools: 2018’s most useful free SEO gear

by | Aug 15, 2018 | Analysis, Public Relations

It’s hard to attract visitors to your website without using the right online marketing strategies. Search engine optimization (SEO) tools, whether paid or free, are invaluable for helping you with your search marketing efforts. Here we have rounded up the most helpful free SEO tools to give you the best chance of finding success.

PR power tools: 2018’s most useful free SEO gear

Google Search Console

Google Search Console offers critical information about essential elements of your site, including data relating to the number and type of users you have secured. It alerts you to issues with the site and offers recommendations on how you fix them. The primary purpose of GSC is to ensure that your site meets Google’s standards. It will let you know if and how it does not.

GSC is a portal through which you can ask for Google to “reconsider” if your site has been slapped with a penalty. It offers guidelines that you can follow to keep your site compliant. If you are using GSC correctly, there should be no reason for you to incur any penalties and have your site dropped from Google’s rankings.

PR power tools: 2018’s most useful free SEO gear

Google Keyword Planner

Arguably the most important element in any SEO strategy is keyword targeting. If you get this task wrong, your campaign will be ineffective at best. With Google’s Keyword Planner, you can simply plug in your website’s URL and be provided with a long list of suggested keywords. You can then review those keywords and incorporates the ones that relate to your products or services in your website’s content. Most searches today occur in the form of a question, so it is recommended that you treat your keywords as answers to those questions.

PR power tools: 2018’s most useful free SEO gear

Google Optimize

When it comes to SEO, your Google rankings are not the only thing that must be considered. It is important that you find the right balance between content that is optimized for search and content that is engaging / is more likely to drive conversions. You can acquire all of the visitors you want, but if they are not buying your product or service, you are most likely wasting money. Google Optimize more or less “tests” the content on your site. You can compare two pages or specific elements. This process will help you understand what is working and what is not.

PR power tools: 2018’s most useful free SEO gear

SEO Workers Analysis Tool

This SEO Analysis Tool will help you evaluate and determine the ranking potential of your site’s pages. Not only will it examine the meta tags of your pages; it replicates to the crawling technology as the search engines. Recently, SEO Workers released a Firefox SEO extension that can be used to test a site’s pages with only a single click.

PR power tools: 2018’s most useful free SEO gear

Live Keyword Analysis

As mentioned above, keywords may be the most important element in any SEO campaign. You absolutely must use them correctly to make your strategy a success. Live Keyword Analysis can help you determine the right balance between using too much and too little optimized content on your site. You can copy and past your content into the analyzer and it will instantly return results, helping you publish content that that is more legible and features better keyword density. This tool is especially useful for copywriters.

PR power tools: 2018’s most useful free SEO gear

BuzzSumo

While social media is not always a necessary part of an SEO strategy, it is still a valuable tool for attracting visitors to your site. BuzzSumo helps you track how much social media interest exists in relation to your content. Simply submit a URL in BuzzSumo and it will provide you with that page’s likes and shares on platforms such as Linkedin, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. You can then see what type of content generates the most interest and tailor your strategy accordingly. Social media has a lot of power to get people interested in your brand online.

PR power tools: 2018’s most useful free SEO gear

MozBar

SEO is not often a simple strategy. There are many factors at play and it can be difficult to decipher how successful a certain site will be. MozBar can give better insights into your SEO strategy. It will provide your site with a score that will essentially measure how effective your SEO is. The tool essentially tells you whether or not your content has a chance of ranking, and what the competition level is. It provides a deep level of data relating to the components of your site, including your title tags, headings and the number of characters you use.

PR power tools: 2018’s most useful free SEO gear

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO, a WordPress plugin, will help you evaluate your onsite content for its SEO effectiveness. It employs graphics to help you understand whether the content you have published is search-friendly. In addition, it provides a list of suggestions to help you improve it. If you are not using WordPress, you can still use the tool by inputting the URL into the Real-time Content Analysis section. It will then provide you with suggestions.

PR power tools: 2018’s most useful free SEO gear

Online Broken Link Checker

Search engines consider links as votes for a website’s quality. Links to your site and links within it can influence where your brand ranks in search results. As a result of this, it is worthwhile to either eliminate or update broken links. One Broken Link Checker, a link reporting tool, scrutinizes your entire site and alerts you to the internal and external links which need to be fixed. With Online Broken Link Checker, you can find links that do not work, as well as missing images and redirects.

PR power tools: 2018’s most useful free SEO gear

SEOQuake

SEOQuake is a tool developed by SEMRush. It has acquired millions of users around the world. WIth it you can monitor several search engine parameters simultaneously. You can save those parameters and compare them to the other projects and parameters. Some of the information it provides can seem convoluted, but for experienced SEO users, it provides details that are not otherwise available.

SEOQuake not only allows you to track the number of visitors to your site; it tells you where they are coming from. The tool provides all of its information via easy-to-use graphs and other visual representations. It collects data and features buttons for your Google index update, your SEMRush ranking, your search engine presence, and your Facebook likes. The diagnostic page can help you address any potential problems.

PR power tools: 2018’s most useful free SEO gear

Ahrefs

One of the more difficult objectives in any SEO campaign is to acquire backlinks. Ahrefs is perhaps the most popular backlink checker in the industry. It provides detailed competitor research, including all of the backlinks that lead to a specific site. It will extract the anchor text and other information from those backlinks.

Although the paid version of Ahrefs offers almost everything needed to perform a deep analysis of a site’s backlinks, the free version is still useful. You can quickly and easily see how much SEO juice a site has, allowing you to decide whether you would like to use it as a backlink source. To save time, it will provide you with a list of suggested sites to pursue backlinks from.

There is almost no way that you can run a comprehensive and effective SEO strategy without the use of tools. Beyond what is listed above, there are many more online SEO services that you can take advantage of. The key is to understand how to put the information you acquire into action. All of these tools can act as guides and show you what can be improved and what you are doing well. Use that information wisely and you will almost certainly see results.

Marc Holt
Marc Holt is director of search engine optimization for DigitalParc, a Minnesota-based Internet marketing company. He has overseen the development and execution of holistic SEO strategies on behalf DigitalParc and its clients since 2014.

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