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3 Free SEO Tools That Will Supercharge Your Google Search Rankings

Most search optimization experts can agree any online business needs to have a strong SEO campaign in place. One of the most important components of an effective SEO campaign is ensuring your content is search engine friendly. Search engines can determine if content is optimized or relevant for the intent of the search queries by evaluating certain factors, including your keyword density and link structure.

In this roundup, we’ll share four free SEO tools you can use to develop and measure how optimised your website is.

Each tool serves a different purpose, so we’ll discuss how you can use them together to reach your SEO goals.

Seobility

This is one of the best free SEO tools you’ll find online.

Seobility is software that automatically checks your website optimisation. It will crawl through all of the links on your page to find any broken links and other SEO-related red flags that might be causing problems. If links on your site aren’t working or are leading to blank pages, Seobility will alert you about it. The SEO Site Browser will also allow you to analyse each individual webpage and let you know if there are errors or optimization issues with the entire page.

It’s the perfect tool for those who need extra help in interpreting SEO-related data.

How to Use Your Seobility Account

Creating an account is relatively easy. You can sign up with an email address, but if you have accounts with popular social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, you can use those as well.

After you sign up, choose the Basic plan, which is free!

Seobility does offer paid versions, but they’re more suitable for people with more SEO knowledge. As a beginner, you don’t need reports for three separate domains or the ability to crawl websites repeatedly.

Those features will come in handy in the future, but right now, it would be better to focus on your website.

After signing up for the free plan, you can add a project. A project is a folder containing information about your domain’s SEO standing. It tells you how many domains have linked to your website and if there are glaring errors you need to fix.

You need to enter your business website’s URL and a project title to get started. Your project title doesn’t have to be anything fancy. You can enter My Website and proceed to the next step.

Seobility will then crawl your website. It checks every page on your website, so how long crawling takes depends on how big your website is. The handy Project Checklist on the sidebar tells you the average number of links per page, the load time and if your domain has been blacklisted.

Those things may not seem important, but they’re a great starting point for your search engine optimisation strategy.

For example, Google loves websites that load fast, especially on mobile. They love it so much that page speed has even become one of the more significant search engine ranking factors.

Seobility’s recommended page load time is 0.4 seconds. If your page takes longer than that to load, you know there’s room for improvement.

After it finishes crawling your website, it will show you your SEO statistics. They divide the data into three categories:

• Tech and Meta
• Structure
• Content

Each section shows you areas of improvement and includes links to specific web pages. For example, let’s take a look at the screenshot of Seobility’s Tech & Meta section below.

It’s showing us that 46 pages have titles that are in need of improvement. If you click on Show Results, it will show you links to those pages along with explanations.

One page title could be too long which is not good because Google can only show a limited number of characters in search engine results.

Another possibility is that a title repeats words, a possible sign that you tried to use as many keywords as possible in your page title. You get the gist.

Okay. You’ve created a Seobility account and let it crawl through your website.

Now, what?

Use the information Seobility provides you to create a checklist.

• Which tasks can you accomplish in minutes?
• Which tasks will have a bigger impact than the rest?
• Which tasks need to be accomplished over a period of time?

In a nutshell, Seobility gives you a head start when it comes to optimising your website for search engines. It gives you a clear roadmap of the changes you need to make.

Ubersuggest

Keywords are necessary for successful search engine optimisation.

You need to know what keywords potential customers are using, and find ways to rise in the search engine rankings for those keywords.

But deciding which keywords to use isn’t easy. Before we proceed, we need to discuss three types of keywords.

• Short Tail Keywords – These are one-word keywords people use when they’re looking for something more general. For example, if I Google the keyword “sports,” Google will give me the definition of the word along with links to popular sports websites. It’s not going to tell me about one sport in particular.
• Long Tail Keywords – These keywords are usually three words or longer. They’re used by people who’re looking for something specific or already have a purpose in mind. Examples include “high heeled shoes,” “remote getaways in NSW,” and “mountain bike for beginners.”

Ubersuggest is an incredible tool for finding long tail keywords. It shows you:

• how many people search using a keyword.
• how hard it would be to rank for a keyword.
• how much ads for the keyword would cost per click.
• your top competitors for the keyword.
• similar keywords you could use instead.

Ubersuggest does all that for free. Unlike other similar tools online, it doesn’t even require you to sign up for anything or limit the number of times you can use it.

How to Use Ubersuggest

Let’s say you’re selling car insurance in Sydney. You’d like to be the top search result for the keyword “car insurance Sydney.”

You enter that keyword in Ubersuggest. Since you’re targeting people in Sydney, you choose English / Australia as your language and location preference. Once you hit search, it’s going to generate the information you need to decide if you should use the keyword or not.

According to Ubersuggest, the Search Volume or the number of times people use the keyword in a month is 260 which is considered low. If possible, you’d like to rank for a keyword with higher search volume.

The SEO difficulty is Medium. This means that if you do decide to target this keyword, you won’t find it too hard.

If you scroll down a bit, you’ll see a list of alternate keywords you could use along with their search volume and advertising cost per click.

Based on the information Ubersuggest shows you, you might decide to go with “car insurance in Sydney” instead of “car insurance Sydney.” The search volume for “car insurance in Sydney” is a bit higher while the advertising cost-per-click is cheaper by two dollars.

The SEO difficulty for “car insurance in Sydney” is scored at 32. It’s easier to rank for in search engines compared to the 40 given to “car insurance Sydney.”

By going with a different keyword, you would need to exert the same amount of effort to rank, but you’ll potentially reach more people and spend less on advertising.

That’s just one scenario where you could utilise Ubersuggest for your SEO strategy.

In order for this whole process to be more effective, we suggest the following steps:

• Create an Excel file or Google sheet to track the keywords you want to use.
• Include information about their search volume, your competition, SEO difficulty and cost per click.
• Repeat this process until you’ve compiled a list of keywords you’d like to rank for.

Yoast

Now that you’ve selected your keywords, it’s time to create content.

Yoast is a free WordPress plugin that acts as an SEO checker for your web pages.

If you install the plugin, you’ll see a box underneath your blog post where you can enter SEO-related information. This includes:

• your keyword of choice
• your meta description (a short description of your blog post that appears under your title in search engine results)

From your title to the body copy, Yoast scores how SEO-friendly everything is. Green means you’re good to go, orange means there’s room for improvement, while red means you need to make bigger changes.

Yoast doesn’t stop at rating your content, it gives you specific suggestions for improvement. For example, your blog post title could be too long which may result in Google not displaying it all.

Your meta description could also be missing your keyword. It will then recommend you add your keyword since it will look more prominent in Google search results.

The plugin also checks for two more things, keyword density and readability.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is how often you used your keyword in your content. Since Google is against keyword stuffing or using keywords to the extent that you’re sacrificing quality, keyword density is an important thing to keep in mind.

Yoast encourages your keyword density to not exceed 2.5%. If you do so, you’ll see a recommendation to cut down on your keyword use.

Readability

Readability is how easy it is to read your content. This is based on the words you use and how complicated your sentences are.

At this point, you might be wondering how readability is connected to SEO. Isn’t it supposed to be all about keywords?

Google also tracks how long users stay on your page and if they continue reading other pages on your website. The longer users stay on your page, the better Google will think your content is. It takes that into account when ranking your web pages.

So, readability is important, because it makes things easy for users to understand. If a visitor lands on your website and sees blocks of text and lots of difficult words, they’re going to move on to another easier-to-understand website.

Yoast uses the Flesch Reading Ease test to measure readability. If your content scores 60 – 70, that means it’s easily understood by the average 13-15-year-olds. If it scores 90-100, average 11-year-old students can understand it.

Anything below 60 means that your content is difficult to read and requires further editing.

In case you were wondering how the scoring system works, I went ahead and tested this blog post. As of the previous sentence, Yoast gave this blog post a Flesch Reading Ease test score of 67.5.

Overall, Yoast is an incredible tool for people who are creating search engine optimised content but need a guide to get started.

Conclusion

Rising in search engine rankings can generate leads for your business, so you want to use all the tools you have at your disposal.

It’s even better when those tools are free and easy to use.

Seobility acts like a search engine and crawls your website. It spots SEO-related errors and tells you exactly how you can fix them.

Ubersuggest generates data for the keywords you’d like to rank for. It tells you how difficult it would be to rank for keywords and gives alternates that may be better targets.

Yoast makes sure the content you create is SEO-optimised. From readability to how SEO-friendly your meta description is, it rates everything and gives you specific improvement tips.

When used together, all three free SEO tools will give your website’s search engine rankings a boost.

Cornerstone Digital is an SEO agency in Sydney. If you want to rise in Google search engine rankings without breaking a sweat, we’d be glad to help you. Call us on (02) 8211 0668 or email us at info@cornerstone-digital.com.au.

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Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.