A Quick Guide to SEO Tools

If you’ve now understood some basics on how to do SEO marketing, you might be wondering what tools are available to help you out with the numerous aspects of SEO.

Fear not, we’ve collated some of the best (and even free!) tools that are easy to implement. They’ll give you a hand with technical SEO such as page speed, content creation, as well as monitoring backlinks and domain authority.

Google Search Console

Google is ubiquitous with search engines and is where the most online searches are conducted. What better way to get started than using their free Search Console to analyze your website performance.

From a digital marketing perspective, Search Console will help to monitor your website traffic, you can access information like your best-performing pages and click-through rates. This can help to shape how you optimize content and rankings for your pages.

Search Console also offers information on errors and mobile useability to guide your technical actions for your website.

Plus, Google Search Console links up to other Google tools like Analytics, Google Trends, and Google Ads. Here’s what each of them do:

  • Google Analytics: analyze the visitors on your website, from what devices they use to keywords they employ in search.
  • Google Trends: shows trending topics in being searched for now, this can serve as inspiration for content or indicate a need to allocate budget for certain keywords.
  • Google Ads: an advertising system in which advertisers bid on keywords to have their ads appear in Google’s search results.

Having your website linked across Google’s tools means your various marketing campaigns and activities can be comprehensively monitored.

BuzzSumo

Buzzsumo Feeds Page

Buzzsumo works in a similar way to a search engine. When you search keywords or topics, it shows you different content and levels of engagement on various social platforms. Whether you’re looking for high-performing content for inspiration, low competition topics, or to identify influencers, Buzzsumo is a helpful tool. Though it is not free, they do offer a free trial.

Keyword Surfer

Keyword Surfer is an easy to install Google Chrome Extension, it is offered by Surfer which offers other paid SEO services as well.

Example of Related Search Terms

It is completely free and is easily viewed every time you perform a Google search. The tool displays search volume and cost-per-click for the search term, as well as related search terms and their volume.

Though it involves manual search, it’s a good way to get an idea of how competitive certain search terms are and you might find interesting related keywords.

MozBar

Example of MozBar metrics

MozBar is another free Chrome Extension that is easily installed and appears on pages that you visit. It shows link metrics for pages and domains as you go, displaying domain/page authority and number of backlinks for sites.

It is also possible to examine link details on a page – for example, if they are followed or nofollowed, internal or external.

Plus you can create search profiles while using the toolbar, maybe you want to see results from a different search engine or even a different country or city.

We hope this gives you some ideas to get started! Once you’re familiar, you may consider more advanced SEO tools that require a higher investment but deliver more comprehensive services.