You still want to optimize your page but you don’t want to get the paid tools or you want to test some good tools before you buy. Here we shall look at the best free and affordable SEO tool that you need to have successful on-page optimization.
On-page optimization is vital for getting strong domain authority, on top of off-page optimization. Digital marketers continue to rely on tools that can optimize a website’s rank in the searches of visitors and potential customers.
This has become even more crucial for those focusing heavily on content marketing. It’s important to identify the right tools in the flooded market to help in the optimization process.
We have identified several crucial tools for use in the on-page optimization of our pages that are either completely free, offer free and paid versions or may offer the user a trial period of several days
Best Free and Affordable SEO Tools you Should Use
1. Google PageSpeed Insight
Test your site speed for mobile and desktop using the google free tool. PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of a website and then generates suggestions that you can use to make that site faster. It’s completely free with unlimited searches.
You can click on the mobile or desktop buttons to check the different speeds. The page speed colours appear in different colours indicating different speed ranges as follows:
Red – 0-49
Orange/Amber – 50-89
Green – 90-100
Your goal is to ensure that you have a green colour, especially for the mobile platform.
Why not for the desktop platform? so you ask, most of the time when you have good speeds for mobile you will be having even greater speeds for desktop.
Also, I cannot overemphasize the fact that more than 2 billion people used mobile devices in 2020 to access the internet and they might be more than desktop users by 2023. You don’t want to miss that market.
If you scroll down, you will be able to see the summary of your page speed, for your action.
2. Gtmetrix Speed test tool
If you need a more detailed tool, to help you improve your speed, then Gtmetrix is the silver bullet for you. Gtmetrix has both free and paid versions which allow for monitoring and API credits.
The free version is however good enough for manual testing with an offer of 30 weekly on-demand tests,10 daily API credits, 1 monitoring slot and 1-month data retention.
However, you need to learn how to use and interpret the result to have any meaning and use them to your advantage.
Gtmetrix awards a “Gtmetrix grade” and some “Web vitals” metrics. Gtmetrix grade is an assessment of your overall page performance and reflects, both, how fast your page loaded for users, and how well it’s built for performance.
Web vitals on the other hand represent a small set of core metrics that indicate whether you’re delivering a fast and (what Google calls) a delightful experience to your visitors.
Gtmetrix allows you to perform the following
- Select the test server location
- Compare your results with other sites,
- Set up alerts and monitoring
- Create a page-load video to see exactly how your webpage loads
- Download pdf reports
- Select the browser to test from either chrome or firefox
- Select the device to test from i.e. desktop or mobile
- Adblock Plus to evaluate the effects of ads on your site speed
To get higher priority and faster tests create an account though it’s not a must.
3. Google Analytics
This is another free analytics product that is also free from google to use. It provides numerous key performance indicators for any SEO campaign.
There are a lot of things you can manage using Google Analytics, no wonder there are entire courses on the topic online. Google Analytics can help you discover the following aspects of your site, among others.
- The number of people on your site right now -real-time data
- Visitor’s geographic locations,
- The keywords and sites that referred them,
- Which pages they’re viewing – what are the most popular pages
- Conversions as they happen.
- Number of people who visit my website
- Is my website mobile-friendly
- The specific pages that are driving the most organic engagement
- How to improve my website’s speed
- What blog content do my visitors like the most?
- The specific pages that are driving the most organic revenue
What’s more, you can even add a chrome toolbar to show you your site analysis every time you open your site as long as you are logged in.
Seobility
This is an on-page and on-site SEO optimization tool that has been in operation since 2013.
It’s a comprehensive all-in-one SEO checker tool designed for both professionals and beginners.
The biggest advantage of Seobility is the availability of a free basic plan for testing your website for up to 1000 crawls. It’s not a trial version like many others but it’s free with a limitation of 1 crawler per day and some features.
Seobility performs the following activities among others:
Start analysing your site for free here
4. BiQ
This is a new tool that was launched in January 2020. It will allow you to use a free limited version based on the features you will be using and not the days that you will use the software. The smartest feature of BiQ enables users to pay only for what they use and not all features, hence directly reducing your total spending cost. the screenshot below shows my usage of my free version and the remaining numbers. For example, I have used “related keyword searches” 11 times out of the 30 available usages. You can pay for specific functionality and leave the least relevant modules for you.
BiQ consists of three applications, i.e.
a) Keyword Intelligence – used for searching for a rich keyword with related metrics such as related keywords, content ideas, popular questions and trending searches.
b) Content Intelligence – Allows you to analyse page content to optimize it for SEO based on sentiment analysis, line-by-line analysis and word vector analysis.
You can even download your report by clicking Export or adding to the collection.
The best thing with BiQ is that it splits your content into sections and checks for optimization per section. It shows you when you have overstuffed your keyword in one specific area or an area that is very difficult to understand for your readers and even the emotional sentiments created by the content to your readers.
c) Rank Intelligence and Rank Tracking BiQ’s Rank Intelligence module will tell you how to capture valuable position zero spots and identify featured snippet opportunities, ranking opportunities and Quick Search Bar & Advanced Dynamic Filter. You can also track your ranking for specific keywords from different locations
5. Marketmuse
Use Marketmuse to accelerate content creation and optimization so you can win in organic search.
It’s freely available for 1 user, 15 queries per month and 10 projects without any time limit at the time of writing this post and you pay any of the two available packages if your needs exceed the free offer.
Marketmuse performs the following among others
- It analyzes a potential topic to help you decide whether it’s worth your time to write content on it
- Provides clear-cut recommendations on what to write and how to write it
- Provides recommendations on how to optimize existing pages
Marketmuse has three applications for research, creation and optimisation all for analysing your content and giving you a recommendation.
Marketmuse research screenshot showing the current word count and suggested word count based on your topic
Marketmuse “compete” screenshot showing the current word count and suggested word count and your top-ranked competitors.
Unlike BiQ Marketmuse optimizes your page as a whole and shows you the LSI keywords that you should add to your content to make it easy to be understood by the search engine.
Launch marketmuse
6. Google Keyword Planner
This is a free tool that gives you the proposed keywords from your search as well as some metrics concerning your keyword.
The only limiting factor is the use of range instead of exact measurements. for example, it uses a range of 1k-10k instead of an exact number.
However, it does allow you to search for several related keywords at once.
Click on this link to start google keyword planner
- Click the “Go to keyword planner” button
- Select the “Discover new keywords” button at the top
- Type your keyword in the search box
- You can choose to enter a domain to filter unrelated services or products.
- Click get results
7. Plagiarism Checker by Smallseotools
You don’t want to be seen by your visitors and google as if you are copy-pasting content from others, this can lead to being penalized and hence poor ranking. There are several tools available for that but one completely free tool is the smallseotools plagiarism checker.
It has a limit of 1000 words per check but you can split up your post in peace meals to have it checked for plagiarism. If not you can add a WordPress plugin which is a paid version of smallseotools to be checking your test as you type.
It allows you to rephrase the content in case you want to make it more unique.
If you search for small SEO tools on the internet you are likely to get several of them that has different varied services but the one that I tested was smallseotools.com.
Start smallseotools plagiarism checker
8. Grammarly – Writing Assistant
What! how can this help in optimization?
Well, it’s simple you need to use your language of choice correctly to ensure that you are communicating effectively.
Even if you are the most experienced writer fatigue can kick in and it’s likely to affect your writing. You need a tool to assist you to ensure high-quality articles and smooth writing.
While there exist many other writing assistant Softwares out there such as “language tool”, “ginger software” and “white smoke”, I have personally used Grammarly for a long time and I have its effectiveness.
Grammarly is a tool that tests and ensures your document is free from spelling, syntactical, punctuation, and grammar errors, at a basic level all for free. You can, however, get more advanced services such as plagiarism checker for some monthly fee, the lowest plan is $29.95/month.
With Grammarly, you install it on your desktop or mobile. You can as well install it in your browser toolbar to ensure that all text written in your browser is up to the standard.
Install Free Grammarly Chrome Extension
9. Ubersuggest toolbar
A ubersuggest toolbar is a tool designed by a successful marketer in SEO Neil Patel. You should add it to the chrome toolbar and every time you search in the google search engine, it performs the domain analysis on the top 10 ranked sites and gives some suggested keywords.
However, this tool works only when you search using the google search engine and not in any other engine.
10. Rank Math
Rank Math is a new SEO plugin for a WordPress site.
Rank Math is meant to easily be used by newbies in web design as well as advanced users, to perform the following functions among others.
- advanced SEO optimization
- 5 keyword optimization in your post
- rich snippets
- OpenGraph Thumbnail
- Robots Meta
- Breadcrumb Navigation
- External/Internal Link Counter
Read more in-depth detail about Rank Math
Final Thought
While discussing Best Free and Affordable SEO Tools, it’s simple and basic knowledge that free SEO tools are limited compared to paid tools.
That’s not to say that free tools don’t have their place. But the number of keyword ideas and data they give access to will always be slim in comparison to paid tools.
Most Important: free keyword tools are good when starting your SEO journey, but as you grow your site, you’ll need paid tools to keep up with the competition and the large number of searches involved.
