Tools maketh the man, right?
Well, no not really actually. But, when it comes to SEO and staying one step ahead of your competitors, you’re going to need some great SEO tools to match that SEO expertise.
A major concern for many organisations looking to optimise their content and sites is that they’ll have to invest in expensive software and tools to get the best results: again, not really true.
Whilst there are a whole host of great tools that require you to part with your much-loved cash, there are also many powerful alternatives that just happen to be free. In this blog, we’ll be pulling together our top four recommendations. After all, what you’re after is results, not bragging rights for using the most expensive tools.
So, in no specific order, here’s our list of four awesome SEO freebies:
The Moz SEO Toolbar:
When you need basic information about a domain, the Moz toolbar is a God-send. For instance, let’s imagine you’ve discovered that a site has linked to some of your awesome content and you’re curious to know more about this unknown site. In such cases, the Moz toolbar comes to the rescue, providing information about the site including the domain authority and Moz Rank.
This allows you to assess the authority of the site and therefore, the value of the backlinks. Remember, the higher the domain authority and Moz Rank, the more authoritative the site. The tool also helps you to discover the spam score for a given domain, so you can be extra vigilant against those spammy sites linking back to your content and ruining your hard-earned authority.
Website Grader:
Effective SEO often requires analysis of your own site and content and for this purpose, Website Grader is a great tool. Powered by our partners, HubSpot, the tool takes your URL and analyses your site based on performance, mobile, SEO and security. It then provides you with an overall percentage so you can gauge areas for improvement.
Naturally with tools like these, there’s always going to be a level of vagueness and we recommend that the results be taken with a pinch of salt. However, this free grader is definitely useful when it comes to uncovering downfalls and strengths in your SEO that might otherwise have been missed.
SEO Surgeon Meta Length Tool:
Although a very simple tool, the aptly named meta length tool is great for helping you create optimised meta descriptions and titles that do not exceed the recommended character length. All you have to do is type copy into the provided spaces and the tool will count your characters for you. Then, once you’re satisfied with what you’ve written, it’s just a simple copy and paste job. Sorted.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool:
Lastly, we recommended the Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool (and no, this isn’t just because of the awesome name).
Screaming Frog is a free website crawler that is designed specifically for SEO. All you need to access the crawler is download the software and enter your domain. Once you do this, you’ll have access to information regarding every URL on your site.
Breaking this information down so that it is easily understandable, Screaming Frog is perfect for when you need a quick overview of a site and is also useful as a means of cross-referencing to find and confirm issues you’ve discovered through use of other tools.
Although it is free, Screaming Frog is a truly powerful tool and we recommended you take the time to download it and explore its full functionality – it’s definitely worth it.
Of course, this is just a small selection of the free tools you can use to boost your SEO – there are way too many alternatives to cover in one blog post alone.
Remember, though the tools are important, they don’t maketh the man: expertise and experience do. Therefore, we suggest you get in touch with experts that actually know what they’re doing when it comes to content marketing, SEO and web design.