When getting started with a search engine optimization strategy for your website, it can be hard to know what resources to use. There are many comprehensive paid tools out there, but you may not want or need to pay for one right away. Utilizing free tools will help you learn SEO practices and increase traffic for your website while saving you money. Here are 3 free tools that you can use to begin your search engine optimization.
Ubersuggest:
Ubersuggest is a powerful free tool offered by Neil Patel, one of the top names in digital marketing. It is great for auditing competitors’ websites as well as discovering keywords and content ideas. You can enter a competitor’s website domain and it will show you their organic monthly traffic and top-ranking keywords and SEO pages. You will begin to understand your competitor’s SEO strategy and how they are organically driving traffic to their site. Plugging a keyword into the tool, rather than a website, will give you the monthly search volume, alternative keyword suggestions, and display the top-ranking content pages. Utilizing these features together is a beneficial place to start when crafting an SEO strategy.
MozBar:
Moz is a company that makes powerful tools to help with SEO, inbound marketing, link building, content creation. Their free MozBar tool is excellent for uncovering page elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, and the number of backlinks. Title tags and meta descriptions are what appear in search engine result pages (SERPs). Writing a title tag and meta description full of keywords won’t boost you to the top of search results. Instead, their main function is to entice people to click on your page link rather than your competitor’s. By utilizing this tool, you can gain insight into how competitors are branding and describing their pages. Use this information to differentiate your own title tags and meta descriptions in order to drive more clicks which in turn will increase your search ranking.
Answer The Public:
Answer the Public is perfect for discovering keyword and content ideas. The website consolidates organized lists of related search queries based on any keyword that you plugin. To give you an understanding of how to apply this tool to your SEO strategy, I will explain how I used it to help write this blog post. Before I started the post, I typed into Answer the Public the keyword “SEO tools”. I then scrolled through the related queries to understand what people are searching for on this topic and came across the keywords “SEO tools for small business” and “best free SEO tools”. After confirming a fair search volume and a low SEO difficulty through Ubersuggest, I started drafting my content based around these keywords. You may even notice that they are both in the title of this blog post. The trick here is to work backward. First, use Answer the Public to understand what people are searching for and then write content based on the specific keywords that you target. Taking this approach will ensure you are not wasting your time writing content that no one is searching for. While you can find many keywords and content ideas using this tool, it is most important to write about things that will appeal to your target audience.
