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17 Important Free Tools for SEO

In this digital world, it has become very difficult to rank 1 on search engine, even ranking your website has become equally tough. Hence every marketer strongly relies on SEO tools as those are the main keys to boost up the rank of your website. Search Engine Optimization are the best way to ensures your website’s traffic and confirms better ranking in search engine results organically. But with the availability of so many well-performing SEO tools, it has become confusing to choose some of the best SEO tools for marketers.

What Are SEO Tools?

SEO tools are software that help you with your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. They can help with so many tasks like keyword research, link building, monitor search performance, track website traffic, SEO Audit and competitor analysis.

So here we have introduced the top 20 free SEO tools as well as some paid tools that are going to rule the world of digital marketing in 2024. If you’re a digital marketer or SEO expert, you need to be using the latest SEO tools to stay ahead of the competition. In 2024, the top SEO tools you should be using are:

1. Google Analytics

2. Google Search Console

3. Google Keyword Planner

4. Google Tag Manager

5. ScreamingFrog

6. GTMetrix:

7. Looker Studio

8. Ubersuggest

9. Structured Data Testing Tool

10. Schema Markup Generator

11. Google Page Speed Insights

12. SEOSiteCheckup

13. SEOquake

14. Google Trends

15. SimilarWeb

16. Google My Business

17. AnswerThePublic

1. Google Analytics:

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that track your website traffic, sessions, average session duration, engagement rate, leads, sale, etc. This is one of the best tools which is used by most website owners to track their website traffic.

It helps to understand if your SEO efforts are working well or not. It collects data from your websites and apps to create reports that provide insights into your business. As it is easy to use and gives results with great accuracy this is a popular tool. Google Analytic collects data of organic, paid, social, direct as well as referral. Google Analytics can help businesses understand the user experience after visiting their website.

2. Google Search Console:

It is one of the best free SEO tools offered by Google that track your website errors and calculates its performance. It monitors your website Clicks, Impressions, Click-Through Rate(CTR), keyword performance, website technical issues, backlinks, and makes your website shine in Google Search results. You can also add your XML sitemap in Google Search Console. It gives index and non-index pages’ data of your website. Google search console also provide data of all technical errors like 404 pages, soft 404 pages, 403 forbidden errors & more.

3. Google Keyword Planner:

Google Keyword Planner is a keyword research tool for any marketer. It provides top trending keyword ideas with their search volume, competition, and CPC. You can also check historical data of keywords for a particular country/state/city or worldwide.

Using Google Keyword Planner, you can search keywords for SEO as well as PPC purpose. This is another easy-to-use tool offered by Google. It can even show you the keywords your competitors are targeting.

4. Google Tag Manager:

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tag management system (TMS) tools offered by Google that allows you to add and update tags. It helps to innovate tag ideas. It has various other functionalities too. With the help of this tool, you can track scrolling. It helps to conduct surveys as well. Tracking downloading activities seems easier for this free SEO tool. This tool helps to monitor people’s appearance & engagement on your website too.

5. Screaming Frog:

For any On-Page SEO and technical errors, Screaming Frog is a very trusted tool as it helps to find missing meta tags, H1 Tags, broken links, blocked URLs, multi heading tags, image alt text, 404 errors, wrong redirects to duplicate pages. To check server errors this SEO tool is simply irreplaceable. Screaming Frog is one of the favorite tool for SEO Expert for SEO Audit.

6. GT Metrix:

To monitor website performance and loading time this is a mandatory tool. It helps to resolve performance failure. It also ensures an increase in site speed. To get an accurate idea of the page size and page loading speed you can use this tool. It helps to find Core Web Vitals errors like LCP, INP & CLS.

7. Looker Studio:

Looker Studio turns your data into fully customizable informative reports and dashboards that are easy to read and share. Looker Studio can automate reporting, saving you time on manual tasks. Looker Studio helps you transform complex data into accessible and understandable forms.

8. Ubersuggest:

One of the best keyword tools is Ubersuggest like Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush. It helps to generate keywords and related keywords along with their search volumes. It works with great proficiency. In fact, for long-tail keyword ideas also this works great as it generates questions, prepositions, and even comparisons.

9. Structured Data Testing Tool:

This is also a free tool offered by google for testing your structured data to see which Google rich results can be generated by the structured data on your page. It helps to find the missing Schema of your website or errors in schema code. In this tool, you simply have to enter the URL or the code snippet and then analyze it to find if any errors are there.

10. Schema Markup Generator:

Schema markup generator is a tool that helps you add structured data to your website. It helps to generate all types of schema. It is implemented using JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa. JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is the most popular and recommended format. To generate schema markup, you typically need to know what type of content you are marking up (e.g., a website, article, product, Breadcrumb, organization event, etc.).

11. Google Page Speed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is also a tools offered by Google. PageSpeed Insights check the performance of your page on both mobile and desktop and give solutions for resolving the issues. PageSpeed Insights provides data on how quickly your page loads also offers suggestions on how to make your pages better.

12. SEOSiteCheckup

SEO Site Checkup offers an easy-to-understand and comprehensive set of SEO tools to help you understand your website from a search engine’s perspective. For any beginner, this is one of those SEO Audit tools that can generate lists of website issues like a great guide. To help find the website issues.

13. SEOquake

SEOquake is one of those free SEO tools that get be really useful for any beginners and even for small businesses as well. It provides organic search data and also analyses the major metrics. It calculates keyword difficulty and does a complete SEO analysis that helps in examining the external and internal links to your website. It troubleshoots the optimization issues which affect the SEO of your site.

14. Google Trends

Google trends is also a free tool by google through which you can find the latest trends of market. We can also find the trends of keywords on daily, monthly or yearly basis. Marketers prefer this tool a lot as it monitors the seasonality of a topic. You can check how a topic is performing with time. For more similar questions, also you can use it.

15. SimilarWeb

It shows an overview of site trafficking, traffic sources, and market strategies. Though you can only get five results in the free version and a basic idea of an idea, it is a very popular tool.

16. Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a free tool that helps businesses manage their online presence on Google. It is best tool for local business to get online presence across Google, including search results and Google Maps. By setting up and optimizing your Google Business Profile, you can significantly increase your visibility in local search results, helping potential customers find your business more easily.

Read this blog to know more about GBP- A Step-by-Step Guide to Local SEO

17. AnswerThePublic

It helps to analyze the searched questions and the autocompleted questions in the search cloud. For any website owner, it is extremely useful. It indirectly allows analyzing the volume of related keywords. In fact, to create long-tail keywords this tool is very helpful.

Paid SEO Tools

1. SEMrush

SEMrush is a popular SEO marketing tool that specializes in keyword research, competitor analysis, SEO Audit and Google Ad campaign optimization. Review your site’s current authority score, check how much organic traffic is coming to your site, View how many organic and paid keywords your site is ranking for, Keep track of your referring domains and backlinks. Following dashboard SEMrush have:

Position Tracking

Site Audit

On-Page SEO Checker

Backlink Audit

Traffic Analytics

Keywords Research & Analysis

2. AHREFS

Ahrefs is known primarily as a backlink authority checker, but it is much more than that. Ahrefs is a Domain Rating generator that shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile compared to the others in our database on a 100-point scale. Following checklist that ahrefs give:

SEO Audit

Keyword Research

Backlinks Audit

Traffic Analytics

3. MOZ

MOZ is free tools before but now it is paid. MOZ is an SEO company that focuses solely on helping people run successful SEO campaigns. MOZ provide Domain Authority, Spam Score, and Page Authority of your website. Moz is one of the best tool for backlinks audit.

4. Rankwatch

RankWatch can help you with track your SERP rank, keyword research, analyze your backlinks, & competitors.

SEO chrome extension Tools that helps in digital markers to find out SEO checklist.

SEOquake Extension: SEOquake is an extension that provides you with key metrics for your website

SEO META in 1 Click: Displays all meta data and main SEO information for the best SEO.

Keyword Surfer: SEO extension that helps you curate an in-SERP keyword list

MOZ Bar: MozBar shows link metrics for pages and domains as you search, displaying the Domain Authority, Page Authority, Spam Score, and number of backlinks for site.

As you can see, we have discussed many free SEO tools here. These are all single-stop SEO tools that can help you rank your website higher in the search engine results.

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YouTube SEO - Tips to Increase Views and Engagement

YouTube being the second largest search engines, it is thus relevant to wonder how you could leverage your SEO opportunities on that platform. YouTube is also one of the most engaging social media with a great popularity and reach.

With millions of videos watched every day, YouTube has become a massive force in the digital world, making it pertinent to familiarize oneself on how to attract more views using SEO for YouTube. It is a great place for businesses and creative content creators to grow and make money.

Visibility is a challenge due to the platform’s vastness, and SEO for YouTube is your companion to gain increased visibility.

When you take the time to create engaging video content, you want to ensure it reaches the maximum possible audience. The best way to do that is by optimizing your videos with YouTube SEO.

To learn more about how to properly optimize video content for your YouTube channel, read through our guide below with 15 tips to help your videos rank.

What is YouTube SEO?

YouTube SEO encompasses optimizing your channel, video playlists, meta data, video description and the videos themselves. You can optimize your YouTube videos for search both within and outside of YouTube.

The Logic Behind the YouTube Algorithm

Unlike Google, that uses backlinks and other parameters to evaluate the quality of content, YouTube has no such luxury so you have to rely on audience retention.

Five important YouTube ranking factors are:

Video comments

Number of subscribers after watching the video

Number of shares on the social media platform

Click-through rate (CTR)

Video length

Audience engagement is one of several ranking signals that YouTube uses in its algorithm.

How to Rank Your YouTube Videos with YouTube SEO?

1. Keyword Research for YouTube Content: The process begins with the first step of generating a big list of potential keywords. The next step, find the best keyword from your list. How? Let’s understand this.

Learn More About Keywords Research Read - Why Keyword Research Important

YouTube Search

The easiest way to do this is to use YouTube’s search suggest feature. All you have to do is just type a word or phrase in YouTube’s search bar and YouTube will provide you a cluster of keywords related to what you typed in. How do you know if these keywords are most popular?

Be sure of this as these are the terms that people have actually typed into YouTube. So, there is no need to doubt if they are popular or not, just relax. If YouTube has recommended this list to you, they are 1000% popular.

Video Tags

Alternatively, an easy tip is to look for a popular video in your niche and use the same keywords this video is optimized around. Pay attention to the keywords used in its title, description, and video tags. Easy right?

YouTube Traffic Source

YouTube search reports can also help you find some excellent keywords from your YouTube Traffic Source.

This report shows all the keywords that YouTube users have searched for to find your videos, this makes it an excellent source. You may find that you know most of the keywords already, however, you may also get to know a lot of keywords that you were not aware of earlier.

The second obvious step is finding the best keyword from the list created. It is advised to target low-competition keywords.

This strategy works best for a channel that does not have many subscribers because going after competitive keywords in this case will bury your video in search results. Hence, a better strategy would be to go for keywords that do not have much competition.

Most views on YouTube videos come from the YouTube platform only, but you can get 3–5 times more views in Google if you optimize your YouTube videos around the keywords that already have video results in Google.

2. YouTube Video Optimization

The simple tip is if YouTube understands that you reference your target keyword in your videos, they will “notice” it.

And because you are actually mentioning the keyword that your video is optimized around, YouTube will easily comprehend that your video is regarding that term.

Your video title should be a minimum of 5 words, try including your keywords without stuffing. Your video description helps YouTube and Google understand the context of your videos and helps rank your videos higher.

Some easy tips for video description:

Include your keywords in the first 25 words of the video description

Make the video description at minimum of 200 words

Include your keyword at least 2–4 times without stuffing

Tags may not be super important but do not ignore tags.

Some easy tips to use tags for your videos:

Keep the first tag an exact target keyword

Include different variations of your keyword or phrase

Make the few tags other topics that your video covers

3. Focus on Your Video Quality

HD videos will rank higher upon low-quality videos. YouTube rewards HD videos in its search results to offer a better user experience. Users don’t want to look at cheap quality videos. Poor quality videos will just lower your brand awareness and your credibility.

4. Design an Eye-Catching Thumbnail

Thumbnails can also have an impact on your SEO. Maybe not directly, but they certainly impact your clicks, which indirectly means better YouTube SEO.

Using the custom thumbnail feature for videos and annotations can help increase video CTR, views and shares. You can choose your own thumbnail for each video (640 x 360 pixels minimum, 16:9 aspect ratio). This custom one should be appealing. Using annotations allow you to add text in a video. From CTA to notes or links, there are different ways to use them. YouTube recently added the Cards feature to expend annotations.

5. Subtitles and closed captions

You can add closed captions to videos. This feature then opens your content to a wider audience including deaf viewers or whose not speaking the language of the video. Those captions are crawlable by search engines which means more opportunities to rank your content. YouTube offers an automatic captions feature but which is in most cases not efficient, you will have to make corrections.

6. Build Links to Your YouTube Channel

Keep in mind that for the best results for YouTube SEO you need to get links to both your YouTube channel and your individual videos.

These inbound channel links help YouTube identify that you are an authority in your niche.

7. Promote Your YouTube Channel

To improve your YouTube video rankings, engagement metrics like views, likes, shares, and links play a significant role. So, it's important to promote your content across various platforms. Share your videos on your social media profiles, embed them on your website, post them on bookmarking sites, and consider including them in your email signature if it makes sense for your audience. You should also reach out to relevant websites to help increase visibility.

Since YouTube is a social platform, sharing your videos on other social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Quora can drive more traffic and enhance your video’s SEO. On Facebook, for instance, crafting an engaging post with the right keywords can help your video reach a wider audience. Cross-posting your videos across multiple platforms is an effective strategy for boosting your video’s visibility and SEO.

8. Optimizing Video Titles and Descriptions

The title and description of your video are essential for YouTube SEO. They ought to contain your main keywords and be concise and descriptive.

A compelling title can increase click-through rates and generate interest, and a thorough description makes your content easier for YouTube’s algorithm to comprehend and classify, making it easier for users to find.

9. Use YouTube for Keyword Research

Google is a great tool for finding keywords, but YouTube is also an excellent platform to discover popular search terms. One effective method is to use YouTube's search bar. When you start typing a phrase, like "What is SEO," the search box will automatically suggest related keywords. These suggestions reflect the exact phrases people are searching for, making them valuable for your own video content. By incorporating these keywords into your video titles, descriptions, and tags, you can improve your chances of being discovered by users searching for those terms.

10. Increase Your YouTube Video Watch Time

Watch time is an important YouTube metric. When your video watch time is higher, this means that people are liking what you are showing.

This lets YouTube’s algorithm know that you’re producing high-quality videos, giving the platform a bigger incentive to show your content to a wider audience.

11. Add hashtags to increase reach

Adding hashtags to your YouTube videos is another effective way to increase their reach and visibility. Hashtags help categorize your content and make it easier for users to find videos related to specific topics.

12. Try timestamps

Timestamps mark different sections of your videos. They make it easy for your audience to find the content they’re looking for within each video. If your video is long, then defiantly use timestamps that can improve retention and user experience because it sets expectations.  

Wrapping It Up

Video marketing is crucial for businesses and creators. No matter what SEO tip or tool you start with, a successful YouTube channel begins with good content. Optimizing your YouTube SEO can help attract more views and build brand — and lead to more conversions and sales.