Do-It-Yourself SEO
Most business owners will understand that it takes a thorough understanding of their market, competitors, and customers to generate a sustainable income consistently and maintain an edge in the race to be on top.
With thousands of companies working on their marketing strategies and websites daily, competition on Google’s first page is fierce, and the market is often saturated, making it more difficult to reach your customers, attract new business and sell more of your products.
Not only do you have to ensure your appearance and rank, but once you’re there, you must convince customers to choose you over your competitors; suddenly, taking on your digital marketing might seem overwhelming and much like a full-time job (which it is – and hence why we’ve built a business out of it).
That said, we understand that if your marketing budgets are tight and you cannot pay for marketing or SEO packages, doing something is better than doing nothing. To save you a pretty penny on expensive tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, we’ve rounded up a list of our favourite free tools that can help you start achieving the basic principles of SEO.
Free SEO tools to get started with
The following tools can help you analyse data and research trends, providing valuable insights into your target market. Tech review sites like Trustpilot rank these SEO tools highly, and many of them boast free plans forever or offer better ones with free trials.
Serpple
- 14-day free trial (no contracts or long-term commitments)
- $19 monthly fee (beginner plan)
This tool can prevent you from missing important keywords exclusive to your niche. Serpple is a keyword-tracking tool that also periodically analyzes your website and presents you with suggestions for improvement. The platform also uses an AI competitor tracking tool to track your competitors’ organic changes so you can compare them against yours.
Google Trends
- Completely free
Google Trends is a free tool that analyses the popularity of search queries within Google Search. Here, you can find search volume trends and related and breakout keywords, which can help you create trendy and on-topic content.
Google Search Console
- Completely free
Take advantage of Google Search Console tools and reports, which can help you measure your site’s search traffic and performance within Google Search. They can also help you fix issues identified by Google and make your site healthy and unproblematic for users. The tool is particularly helpful to troubleshoot your site’s presence within search results, where you can see what pages have been indexed and which haven’t and for what reasons.
Google Analytics (GA4)
- Completely free
Measure your organic traffic, referral traffic, direct traffic and advert traffic all in one place, where you can track the number of visits, pageviews, bounce rate, time on page and conversions across your site’s pages. Google Analytics is particularly helpful in showcasing which source/medium of traffic results in the most conversions and identifies which pages convert the most. Integrate it with Google Tag Manager to make the most out of Google Analytics. We’re experts in this area, so contact us if you need help setting up tags and events, which can be tricky for beginners.
Rankwatch
- Free trial (£20 per month thereafter)
A decent tool that monitors your rankings and movements so you can identify whether your optimisation is working. The tool also provides additional data regarding your backlinks, competitors and opportunities to take advantage of to improve your website’s ranking.
Other tools to use:
- Moz Keyword Explorer (3 free searches per day)
- Keyword Surfer
- Keysearch
- Ubersuggest (3 free searches per day)
- Majestic (3 free searches per day)
Ultimately, you might choose to stick with one or use a combination of the tools, depending on which works best for you and your unique goals. Whatever your decision, using tools like this is an integral part of ranking highly, as researching the customers you’re serving is a fundamental factor for success. Cutting corners will ensure you never stand out or make it to the first page.
