Top 13 FREE SEO Tools to Rank #1 on Google
– In this video I'll share with you the top 13 free SEO tools that will help you improve
rankings on Google. These are the tools that
I use every single day, and I couldn't do SEO without them. If we haven't been introduced
before, I'm Matt Diggity. I've been doing SEO since 2009, and I now run multiple
seven figure SEO companies. No matter the size of your SEO operation, I can guarantee there isn't
a single SEO success story that doesn't rest on the solid
foundation of free tools. In this video, we're gonna
review all the free SEO tools that my team and I use throughout every area
of our SEO processes. Some of these free
tools are quite popular, and you've likely heard of them. Others aren't as well known, and I'll be happy to introduce 'em to you.
Either way, I'm excited to
be sharing my complete list of the best free SEO tools that you can also add to your tool kit. There are two types of
free SEO tools out there. First, we have freemium tools. Freemium tools give you
limited functionality for free and then you can pay more to get the rest. Freemium tools are awesome, because you typically
get a better built tool. You can often bank on the fact that companies offering freemium models are constantly improving
their tools and innovating, since they're paid tiers allow them to grow and scale continuously. It won't be a scrappy side hustle project that has long been gathering digital dust. So be sure to pay attention
when I share my top picks that use a freemium model. Then we have truly free tools that will likely remain free forever, but don't let their freeness fool you into thinking they're not effective.
The free tools I'm about to share with you are absolute powerhouses
in their own right. Let's start right now by looking at the best, truly free tools. The first on my list is the
100% free YouTube like button, which can activated for the low cost of $0 by giving it a gentle
smashing, just kidding. But in all seriousness, it
helps my channel out a lot, and it helps the YouTube algorithm know what kind of videos you like. Now, if you're doing
SEO, and you don't have any free browser
extensions in your toolkit, you're seriously missing out. So let's start out with these bad boys. There are tons of SEO
extensions out there, but here are my top picks. Hands down, my favorite tool
in this list is Keyword Surfer. Keyword Surfer lets you gather
keyword ideas and SEO metrics while you're searching Google. It's super handy when
you're hunting around for low competition keywords
to add to your content plan. Using the sidebar feature, you can build a list of
keywords related to your search. And then, with just one click,
you can export that list along with the monthly
search volume metrics too.
You can also gather metrics
for different countries without interrupting your workflow. Keyword research is such a
critical task for SEO success, and it can be so easy to get
slowed down by clunky tools. That's why I love how
intuitive Keyword Surfer is. So after you watch this video, check out the link in
the description below and take it out for a spin. Next on the list of free SEO
extensions, we got SEO Minion. Have you ever been researching on Google and wanted to extract data
about the top ranking pages directly from the search results page? For example, you could
scrape the top 20 titles from the search result to get good ideas for your own title optimization, or you could do some
fancy-pants topic research by scraping the 'People also ask' results.
I'll show you how to do that in a sec. Well, SEO Minion is the guy
that gets that job done. My favorite application
of this powerful extension is how it makes light work of exporting all the 'People also ask' data. With a few button clicks, you can download every
'People also ask' question related to your search query. This is great for plugging
any gaps in your content. Content gaps happen when there's a topic that's relevant to your niche, but your website isn't really
covering it completely, (dramatic music) and that's no good! If you're a visual thinker, you can also get a neat tree diagram of how these FAQs relate to each other. Seriously, most SEOs I know
have SEO Minion installed. The next free tool on my list helped me build my very
first outreach link, and I still recommend it to this day. It's called GMASS and like
the other tools so far, it's also a free browser extension.
If outreach link building is a core part of your SEO process, GMASS will help with managing cold outreach campaigns directly from Gmail for free. It drips out emails to your outreach list and also schedules follow-up emails. A nice benefit is that
GMASS's deliverability is also damn good. Email deliverability
algorithms often don't like it when you use an additional tool layer and GMASS helps you avoid that, because it's a lightweight
add-on to Gmail. If you're new to SEO or just
wanna get started for free, then go for GMASS. The final free browser extension
I wanted to share with you is the Detailed SEO extension. Detailed gives you a one
click bird's-eye-view of the on-page and technical specs of any public page on the internet. I like using it in our Q and A process to make sure that my content uploader has implemented the
right heading structure, image alt text and used
all the HTML tags necessary for a good foundation for on-page SEO.
You can also use it when
auditing a client's website or performing a detailed, no pun intended, analysis of a competitor's content. What you see on a page can
be a very different story from what's reflected in the code. The next few tools I'm gonna recommend are must haves for your
site's overall SEO health. The best data you can get often comes directly from search engines, and you'd be a dumb-dumb
not to tap into it, not to mention Google search console is hands down the most popular
free SEO tool out there, so let's take a look at it. GSC does a bunch (beep). By using Google Search Console
you can submit your site map directly to Google to get crawled. You can also troubleshoot
technical SEO problems related to how Google's bots
crawl and index your content. Google Search Console is
also the best tool to turn to when you need your content
indexed as soon as possible. You can force indexing on new content and pages you made significant edits to, that is when it's not broken.
You can also get insight into what keywords your
website is ranking for and your website's overall
organic performance in Google search. This data is an absolute treasure trove. Forget gold, it's worth
its weight in Bitcoin. Since we're already talking about powerful data we
can gather from Google, there's a bunch of other
free tools that Google offers which can level up your SEO. These include the Google free search bar, Google analytics, tag
manager, Google trends keyword planner, Google
sheets and the NLP API. These tools have all played a crucial part in my SEO success so far, and I know many other SEO pros out there who also agree with me on this. But a lesser known search engine tool that can also give you powerful data is Bing Webmaster Tools, and with it, you can also access Microsoft
Clarity heat map software for free too, how do you like that? Compared with Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools has a
lot of the same functionality, plus a few additional features.
Not many people know this,
but in Bing Webmaster Tools you can check out their SEO section and get reports on back links,
new keyword opportunities, and you can even run technical audit. If you're just getting started with SEO, you don't have to pay a penny to access all this valuable information. And to sweeten the deal,
Bing is much more generous with the data it offers
to SEO professionals compared with Google. As mentioned earlier, Bing
also who gets you free access to Microsoft Clarity, which
is a heat mapping tool. If you're not using a heat mapping tool, (dramatic music) stop, just stop. But in saying this, both Google Search Console
and Bing Webmaster Tools don't really get into the
super detailed technical items we need to fine tune our optimization. For anyone interested in taking their technical SEO skills up a notch, I suggest you look into the
following free schema tools. Schema's like a translator between what we understand as humans to concepts that a search
engine can understand too. Now remember, no matter how
smart Google seems like it is, it still can't read and understand content as well as us humans can.
Schema helps you tell
Google that your article is about a review of a network router, instead of forcing them to guess. If you're looking for free tools to help create schema, most SEO plugins will already do a basic
level of it for you, but their output schema is
often generic and basic. So if you want a competitive edge, I'd suggest starting with
Merkel's free schema generator, which walks you through how to create different types of schema. Combine it with the free schema validator offered by schema.org, and you can handcraft
your own custom schema, whether that be for e-commerce websites, review websites or service websites. This alone is a competitive
edge over your competition that relies on SEO plugins to
auto-generate their schema.
Besides, you get a nice boost
on people clicking through to your site if you implement
things like review ratings that stand out on the search results page. And while we're looking at
tools for technical SEO, Screaming Frog deserves a mention here. Screaming Frog has long been a staple tool used for technical audits by
SEO nerds all over the world. Technically, it's on a
freemium pricing model, but if you have a site
with less than 500 URLs, you unlock a decent amount of
essential functions for free. Screaming Frog is great to use in combination with Google Search Console, and it's fairly easy to operate, and it also offers a
butt-ton more technical data than search console does. We use it to gather the following data: pages with no internal
links pointing to them, slow loading pages, the index
ability status of all pages, checking all pages with
missing on-page elements, such as heading tags, meta
titles and descriptions, and a bunch of other nerdy (beep). It makes large scale auditing
so much more efficient since you gather all your data
in bulk with only two clicks.
Here's some more freemium SEO
tools that I find very helpful for improving rankings and traffic. Let's kick these off with AHREFS. Many people know AHREFS for their Swiss army knife SEO solution that powers many SEO
professionals around the world, including myself. Most people know AHREFS as a paid tool. What's not as well known is that AHREFS also has a stack of free tools available, most noteworthy AHREFS Webmaster Tools.
It's like a cross between
Google Search Console and Screaming Frog, a
similar level of data but in a much more
user-friendly experience. You can also get access
to the same version of AHREFS Site Explorer
and site auditing tools that paid members access. The only drawback is you can't
use these on competitor sites on their free tier, just the
ones you verify ownership of, but that's an insane amount
of value anyways, for free. You can also leverage
all of these free tools by AHREFS as well. I'll add a link to the page
in the description below.
The next freemium SEO
tool we're checking out is Answer the Public. Answer the Public made
waves in the SEO community by its ability to expand
a topic and visualize it. Not only can it give you ideas for subheadings in your content, but you can also go one level beyond that and extract ideas for keyword research, so you make sure you aren't leaving any gaps in your content plan. On the free tier, you have
limited usage for data, but for most people it's
still decent enough. If you want next-level tips on how to use tools like
this to create a topical map, check out the interview I did with Cory after you watch this video.
Stick with me though. The next few tools I'll be
sharing are freemium tools that you can plug into your
topical mapping process too. Ubersuggests is a decent tool
for most people starting out since it has similar
functionality to AHREFS. You can do keyword research,
basic competitor research and access your website's
SEO performance stats. The level of data isn't as
great as AHREFS by a mile, but if you're looking for a
free tool to start learning with Ubersuggests is a good one to go with. As far as implementing
essential SEO optimizations on your website, Rankmath
is a damn good SEO plugin.
It's a freemium WordPress plugin that allows you to update
your key on-page SEO items such as title, tags and descriptions. Keep in mind, it's not a detailed
on-page optimization tool like Surfer SEO. You can also set up an
automatically generated site map but where Rankmath stands out is its support for different
schema types, natively. It's gonna be the closest you can get to manually creating your own schema through a generator like Merkel. Another great freemium
tool to add your toolkit is Keyword Hero. Ever want to unlock those
not provided keywords in Google analytics, who doesn't? With Keyword Hero, you can unlock those
values to get more insights into how people are actually
finding your content.
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