Nowadays there are so many SEO tools available to help improve your website’s organic ranking it’ difficult to know where to begin. Most of these online tools come with a hefty price tag and require long-term commitment, and the ones which don’t are not always worthwhile. If you’re new to SEO and looking for some free SEO tools to get you started in online marketing, we’ve put together a list of some of our favourites and how to use them.

Google Analytics

With 90% of desktop searches being made on Google, one of the main tools to start looking at traffic and how it reacts on your page is Google Analytics. There is so much key information you can gain about your web traffic including:

• How visitors arrived on your website; e.g. social media, email, organic search, referrals.
• Where your visitors came from and their demographics
• How visitors interacted with your page: Bounce rate, conversion rate and links clicked.

How to set up Google Analytics

Google analytics works by entering a small piece of code into your website which then displays results in the platform. First of all you’ll need to create a google analytics account and follow the steps to add the code to your website and then you can start using the tool to optimise your traffic.

Keyword Hero

When using Google Analytics, you’ll realise there is a lot of data which Google does not provide such as which keywords were used to arrive on your website from Google search results. There’s a reason for that, they don’t want to give away their game! However, Keyword hero is a plug-in which you can implement into your google analytics account in order to reveal those hidden keywords. It’s very easy to setup and use, even for newbies!

How to set up Keyword hero

Sign up to keyword hero by logging into their website with the google account connected to your Google Analytics. It will take a day or so for the data to start appearing in your google analytics account but then you’ll be able to get important insights on keywords!

Screaming Frog

Screaming frog is a web crawling tool which can help you to easily find things like keywords, broken pages, meta descriptions and more. They call themselves the SEO spider (although they named themselves the frog) as it quickly crawls and scans all the pages on your website in seconds.

How to set up Screaming Frog

Simply download the screaming frog application (no need to create an account) and then enter your URL in the search bar at the top and you’ll be able to view all the relevant data for your website. Note the free version only scans 500 pages but that should be plenty for a beginner.

Ahrefs keyword generator

If you’re looking for an easy way to find keywords to use in your SEO content, this is one of the best ways to get new ideas and search volume. Simply enter your target keyword, choose your country/language and Ahrefs Keyword Generator will bring up hundreds of keyword ideas for you to use. With the free version of Ahrefs Keyword Generator Tool you can see the keyword difficulty for the top 10 keywords (how hard it will be to rank for) and the search volume for up to 100 keywords! There’s no setup needed for the keyword tool, just type your keyword into the Ahrefs Keyword Generator to get started.

Sometimes one of the easiest ways to check the SEO ranking for your website is to simply type your business name or target keywords into google and analyse where your page ranks.

If you have any questions regarding the free tools or would like Zink Marketing to help you to improve your company SEO, don’t hesitate to get in touch.