My 9 Favorite Free SEO Tools
– In this video, I'm gonna
show you my favorite SEO tools. The best part, every
single tool in this list is 100% free. I'm Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, the place where marketers turn for high rankings and more traffic. And if you're looking for tools that will help you get
higher Google rankings, you'll love this video, keep watching. The first tool on this list
is called seedkeywords.com. Most keyword research tools
work the exact same way, enter a seed keyword into a tool and get a list of suggestions. The problem with this approach is this, everyone types the same
exact seed keywords into these tools. No wonder most keywords
are super competitive. That's where Seed Keywords comes in. It helps you sidestep this problem. Instead of pulling seed
keywords out of thin air, you actually ask customers
how they'd finds you online. Then you use those seed keywords in a traditional keyword research tool. For example, let's say that you run an online flower delivery e-commerce site. Well, you'd use Seed Keywords to create what's called a scenario.
Basically, you ask people how they would search for what you sell, then send that scenario to people and if you're like me, you'll be surprised at the
responses that you get. Finally, put the terms that you find into your favorite keyword tool and you'll find some untapped keywords that your competitors
don't know about yet. Which leads us to our second
free SEO tool, SERPerator. Now I didn't include
SERPerator on this list, just because it has a name that kind of sounds like terminator.
Although, that didn't hurt. With that, here is how this tool works. As you probably know, the search results change dramatically, depending on where you are and
the device that you're using. And this some tool helps you
check out the search results across different locations and devices. All you need to do is specify
your device and location and you'll see exactly
how the results will look for someone searching from that
location, using that device. Pretty cool and now it's time for our third SEO tool, Exploding Topics. You probably already know that
finding new trending keywords is an SEO goldmine and it's simple math. If you target an old keyword, they're gonna be more blog
posts, articles, YouTube videos and content in general, that
you have to compete with.
But when you target new
keywords that are trending up, you get in early before the search results get super competitive. For example, a while back, I wrote a post optimized around the keyword, Mobile SEO. Back when that keyword was relatively new. Even though that keyword didn't
have a ton of searches yet, I knew that Google had
been rolling out updates that penalize sites that
weren't mobile optimized, which meant that searches for that keyword were primed to explode. And because I got in super early, I was able to carve
out a top three ranking for this growing term, a ranking that I still hold to this day.
The question is, how do you
find these new trending terms? Well, you could use Google Trends but the issue with Google Trends is that you already need to
know what you're looking for. In other words, Google Trends is great for confirming a trend on a keyword that you already know about, but it's not really helpful for coming up with new trends and topics. Enter Exploding Topics. With exploding topics, you get a list of new trending keywords presented to you on a silver platter. And the tool has a database of trending topics across
several different industries, including health, fitness,
marketing, fashion, consumer products and more. Moving right along, our next free SEO tool is called LSI Graph. You've probably heard
of LSI keywords before. They're basically words and phrases that are closely related
to your main keyword and when you include these
terms in your content, Google sees your content as comprehensive, which can give you a nice
little rankings boost.
For example, let's say your
target keyword is "Star Wars." LSI keywords for "Star
Wars" would be things like, Luke Skywalker, Jedi, Princess Leia and the Millennium Falcon. So, how do you find LSI keywords? A very cool free tool called LSI Graph. Just enter your target
keyword into the tool and you'll get a list of LSI keywords that you can sprinkle into your content. Pretty cool, with that, it's time for tool number five, TubeBuddy.
TubeBuddy is a free Chrome extension that helps you optimize
your YouTube videos for SEO. For example, let's say that you wanna use some of the same tags that
another video is using. Well, you can use TubeBuddy
to easily see those tags and use them in your video. Or let's say you're looking for a keyword to optimize your video around. You can use TubeBuddy to
see the competition level on YouTube's the first
page for that keyword, which leads us a tool number
six, Wordtracker Scout. Wordtracker Scout takes
kind of a unique approach to keyword research. Instead of entering a keyword into a tool, Wordtracker scans a page and finds keywords that
show up over and over again. That way, you can go over to
one of your competitor's pages and grab the keywords
that they're already using in their content. You can even sort the list
of keywords by opportunity, which are terms that have the best ratio of search volume and competition.
And now it's time for
SEO tool number seven, the Google Search Console. No list of SEO tools would be complete without talking about Search Console, why? Well, if you take a step back, Search Console is actually
a pretty feature-rich piece of SEO software. And unlike almost every
other tool in the market, the data that you get
comes straight from Google, so you know it's legit. For example, you can
use the Search Console as a rank tracker to check your
site's ranking in the SERPs. You can also use it to get a feel for your site's backlink profile. Now, this isn't nearly as good as a paid tool like Ahrefs,
but it's not terrible. Last but not least, you
can see all of the pages that your site has indexed in Google and if you have any technical SEO problems that's holding your site back.
Which leads us to tool number
eight, Answer The Public. Most keyword research tools get their data from the same exact place,
the Google Keyword Planner. Answer The Public is a
little bit different. This tool focuses on
questions that people ask on forums, Quora, Reddit,
blogs and on social media and it turns those questions
into awesome keywords. My favorite feature inside
of Answer The Public is that they have a section
dedicated to versus keywords. So, why is this helpful? In my experience versus
keywords are great for SEO, that's because versus keywords usually aren't super competitive and the people that
search for versus keywords tend to be pretty advanced, which means they're usually
close to buying something.
For example, I recently
published this post that compared Ahrefs to SEMrush. Even though this keyword
doesn't get a ton of searches, the people that do search for this keyword are pretty advanced. Remember, these aren't newbies that are looking up what
SEO is or how it works, they're comparing two
different paid tools. And these are the exact type of people that I wanna get in front of, which is why I published that versus post. And like I said, versus keywords aren't usually really competitive, which is why I was able
to rank in the top three within a few weeks.
And now it's time for our last tool, SEO tool number nine, Animalz Revive. Animalz Revive helps you find
older content on your site that needs an update and upgrade, or both. Before this tool came along, you had to manually find these
pages in Google Analytics and it was a huge pain. But with this tool, you get a list of pages
that need some TLC. It even shows you how many
visitors you're losing by not updating your old content. So, before we end this video, I've got a quick bonus
tool for you, Siteliner. Siteliner is a free technical SEO tool that scans your site for SEO problems like blocked pages, messed up redirects, duplicate content and broken links. You can even drill down
into each page on your site to see if the tool found any issues.
You can also compare your site's loading speed and page size, to other sites in Siteliner's database, which is helpful for benchmarking. So, that's my list of my
nine favorite free SEO tools. If you liked this video, make sure to subscribe to my
YouTube channel right now. Just click on the subscribe
button below this video. Also, if you want exclusive
SEO and traffic techniques that I only share with subscribers, head over to backlinko.com and hop on the newsletter, it's free. Now, I wanna turn it over to you, which tool from today's video
are you gonna try first? Are you gonna find trending
keywords using Exploding Topics or optimize your videos with TubeBuddy? Lemme know by leaving a
comment below, right now.
(upbeat music).
