7 Best Free SEO Tools for 2020 (+ How to Use Them)
Seven free SEO tools that can help you rank number one
in Google. So, instead of me just firing a list of tools at you, I'm actually
going to show you how to use each of these free SEO tools. because SEO tool
number four and five are two that I use every single day. So the first free SEO
tool you should be using is Screaming Frog SEO Spider, and I simply
could not live without this tool, because it's fundamental to performing
effective SEO audits. Now let me take you to my computer, and I'll show you a
few things that it can do. Okay so I'm inside Screaming Frog SEO Spider, and
this is by far one of my favorite SEO tools, and I use it pretty much on a
daily basis to perform SEO audits, to analyze competitors, to analyze my own
website, it just really has so many capabilities, and but I'll show you some of
the high impact stuff that this tool can do for you. So the first thing I
recommend you doing is connecting the APIs, so I recommend at least connecting
Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and if you're paying for any of
these tools, go ahead and connect them. So in this case, I'm gonna connect Google
Analytics and Ahrefs.
So then for this segment, I usually just select organic
traffic, but you can mess around and use some of these other settings, but for
the most part, we're just concentrating on the SEO execution, so I would choose
natural traffic. So once you have the Google Analytics and API set up and the Ahrefs,
or whatever link tool you're using set up, just go ahead and enter the domain
that you wanna crawl, so in this case, we'll do GotchaSEO.com What I wanna do is I wanna show you how to
find thin content, because thin content is one of the biggest issues that
you'll encounter on a website. And so, Screaming Frog makes it super easy
to find this particular issue. So while you're on this internal tab, just go
ahead and scroll over. So once you see this Word Count column, you can do a lot
of stuff just from here alone. But what I like to do is I like to export,
because then you can filter through these pages to see if there are any issues
regarding Word Counts. Okay so I've added all the data from the Screaming Frog
SEO Spider . so I just wanna show you how I would go about this, and kinda
my thought process. So the first thing you wanna do, you can collapse most of
the columns that Screaming Frog is going to supply, so I collapsed the
majority of them, and I only kept some of the most important columns, so I kept
the Word Count column, which I'll go ahead and just highlight so you have an
idea here. Word count column, and we wanna have GA Sessions which is how much
traffic is going to these pages on your website, so we'll go ahead and
highlight that in green. And then we also wanna have the Total Referring
Domains from Ahrefs. So from here we can audit each individual page and
determine if that page needs to be upgraded, it needs more words, it needs to
be better, because, typically, if a page has a low Word Count, it doesn't have
traffic and it doesn't have links, then there's probably some sort of issue
going on here. Now in the case of my website, I don't have many instances of
that because I'm pretty strict with the amount of pages that I publish, and
also, if I do publish a page, I'm gonna try to acquire links to it, But in this
case we wouldn't want this page to be indexed. I would much rather have this
page and the login page not indexed because it's not something that people are
going to be searching for, and it's very, very unlikely. Now, there are some
cases where I might try some branded type of search or some navigational
search.
Someone may search something like, Gotcha SEO
Academy Login Page or something like that if they were a member, but that's
pretty unlikely and that would be a very small amount of people, so it would be
much better just to no index these pages. But now on the other hand let's look
at this page, this SEO Case Studies page. So when you look at this page, it's
obviously very thin, I haven't really dedicated any time or effort to this page
at all, so this would be a page that is a candidate to upgrade and improve,
because then we could actually be able to compete for this primary phrase which
is SEO Case Studies. And so in this case, this is a perfect situation where
we can go through, add a bunch of unique value to this page, and hopefully
attract more organic search traffic to this page by doing so. So then you just
wanna keep going through, page by page by page, and look for opportunities to
make your pages better. And so Screaming Frog makes it really easy for
you because right away we can see we have 14 pages here that have less than
1,000 words. So we could go through these pages and beef them up, add more
content, make them better, improve the design, anything that's gonna make these
pages substantially different than what's already out there, is gonna be a
valuable use of time and effort, and so that should always be the focus when
you're trying to improve your SEO performance is focusing on your pages first, and
once you've really done well there, then you can start to do other things such
as promoting your site and acquiring links, but improving your existing pages
and optimizing your existing pages is the best thing that you can do.
So then one other thing you should look at is look at
pages that don't have many links. So typically there's gonna be a correlation
between low link counts and traffic performance and organic search performance.
So when you look at this, you know, these pages have very little links, like I
just published this 404 errors blog post, and it has a couple links. And
typically websites are scraping my contents, so whenever I publish something
new it immediately gets, like, a couple links just because people scrape my
content and put it on their website and then they link back to my site, and
actually in some cases, they're not actually linking back to my site as a
source, it's just because I have internal links in my blog posts, so it
actually ends up giving me a backlink to these new posts. In any case, in any
case, these pages don't generally have genuine connections. In this way, any
page here you can see, it has low connection tally, and it has low traffic. So
typically those two things are pretty correlated. Now, the opposite is true as
well. If we look at pages that have a lot of links, they have a lot of traffic.
And so it's pretty systematic in that way, and you also notice that pages that
have a high Word Count and lots of links have a lot of traffic. So there is a
direct correlation there, now obviously, like, my homepage and my blog get a
good amount of traffic, but that's all through branded search. So that's much,
much different, but, typically, you're gonna see a direct correlation between
Word Count and the total links that you're getting. So typically if you want to
acquire more links, you need to create more in depth content. So this is just
one use case for Screaming Frog. There are so many things you can do. I
use it to really analyze content on a website, and try to figure how we can
draw more organic search traffic to that content, but you can also use it for
just pure technical SEO too. And so I won't get into that here, but I just
wanted to show you a real quick example of how you can leverage this tool, and
just play around with it, it's really an amazing tool, it's truly one of my
favorite tools, and there's just unlimited capabilities for improving your SEO
performance, and really if you just had this tool and no other tools.
You could improve your SEO performance and get more
traffic. The second free SEO tool you should be using is Ubersuggest
because it can help you find key words to target for your SEO campaign. So
here's how to do it. Okay so I am at the Ubersuggest website, and so this tool
was bought out by Neil Patel, and this is still a really great tool, and
there's a lot of great stuff that Neil has added to this tool that has made it
much better, and so I'm gonna show you how to use it. But there are two primary
ways to use this tool. You can either search by keyword phrase, or you can
search using a competitor's domain. So let's start with a competitor's domain,
and I'll show you kinda how that works. So we'll look at Neil Patel's website.
So once the analysis is complete you can get some overview information of how
your competitor is doing, and so you can tell that Neil has a ton of traffic,
which is great, and it certainly helps that he has a million backlinks. But as
we go down, the part that's really helpful, is you can actually see the key
words that they're ranking for. And so, it's quite generous that Neil is
allowing this data for free, this is very, very valuable data that you usually
have to pay for. But you can go through each of these key words and see if
they're worth going after. So one thing that Neil has done is he's developed this
SEO difficulty metric, and it's a pretty good metric overall.
But obviously, you need to do your own manual
qualification. But this is definitely extremely valuable for a free tool. So
you can just go through here and see all the key words that have low SEO
difficulty, and then you can go after those key words. Now, keep in mind, just
because it has low SEO difficulty doesn't mean that it's gonna be a cakewalk to
rank for, but use this tool to analyze your competitor's key words, and then
you won't even really have to key word research, you can just extract ideas
from your competitors. So this tool makes it a lot easier. So the next you can
do, is you can actually just enter a key word. So I just entered SEO and this
is gonna show you the SEO difficulty, the paid difficulty, and even the cost
per click along the search volume. But what you wanna do is you wanna keep
searching for key words that are easier to rank for. So in this case SEO is a
little tough, so let's try something like anchor text. So clearly the SEO
trouble is a lot simpler for a term this way. And the cost per click is lower
as well because it's probably not as valuable as a key word to rank for, for
the companies that are going to advertise. So this tool alone can give you a
ton of really great intel about what key words to go after, but like I said,
this is more of just the preliminary process, you need to also do some manual
key word qualification. And I'll talk about that in another video. But for now
take advantage of this tool. It's 100% free, at least for now, and you can get
a ton of great information from it.
The third free SEO apparatus you ought to utilize is AnswerThePublic,
in light of the fact that it will assist you with discovering thoughts for
organizing your SEO content. Here's how to use it. Okay so I'm at AnswerThePublic
and this is by far one of my favorite SEO tools and one of my favorite key word
research tools. And I use this tool for every piece of SEO content I create
because it's so incredibly powerful, and the best part is that it's free. So go
in here and just enter your primary key word phrase. So then once the analysis
is complete, click on the data tab, and then you're gonna be able to see all of
these questions that are being asked about your primary phrase. And so you need
to go through these, and then copy the ones that are relevant to whatever your
content asset is, and this is extremely powerful because you're gonna be able
to capture a ton of long tail traffic by answering these particular questions
about your primary phrase. And so some are not gonna be relevant but some are,
and so this tool just gives you all the intel that you need to be able to
answer the right questions for your content. And one other thing you can do, is
you can actually take a key word phrase like this and then run it through again
and see if there are even more long tail phrases. So that way you can just keep
stacking long tails into your content, but the most important part is make sure
that the long tail key word phrase is hyper relevant to your primary key word
phrase. The fourth free SEO tool you need to be using in Hemingway
Editor. Now this may not seem like an SEO tool on the surface, but it's
extremely powerful for creating incredible content. In fact, you can be a
subpar writer, and still create incredibly engaging and readable content just
by using this tool. Let me show you how it works. Okay so I'm in Hemingway
Editor, and this might be the weirdest tool that I share, but this is what I
would call my secret weapon for creating great content. For SEO purposes, yet
simply extraordinary online substance as a rule. And so if you don't consider
yourself to be a great writer this tool alone can make you 10 times better at
writing because it is so incredibly powerful. And I use this tool for every
single piece of content that I create, because it helps me create better
content. So one thing that I like to do is, obviously I'll write my draft, and
then I'll put the draft in here to fix all the issues. But one thing you can
do, is you can actually just go to your site and then copy a block of text, and
see if that block of text is written well. So we'll just copy this one here on
my homepage. We'll put it in here, and it looks like I have a sentence that's a
little hard to read, so I could go through and fix the sentence. So now let's
go here and do another one.
Typically I will do expert, depending on what it is of
course. This will depend greatly on the business itself. We'll do informal, and
we're gonna do inform. Then we'll do done. And then what Grammarly's gonna do
is it's gonna scan through this content, and you're gonna be able to see issues
related to the copy itself. And so we'll click on this one and see what is
says, and so I took an article from NeilPatel.com, but I just wanted to show
you what this was like. So, in this sentence it says, and with the search
rankings feature, you can automatically track how your rankings are changing on
a daily basis. So, Grammarly's saying that it would make more sense just to
eliminate this phrase and just use daily. And so what Grammarly's gonna do,
it's gonna make your writing way more efficient, and you're gonna be able to
eliminate a lot of grammar issues, a lot of spelling issues, and then when you
stack Grammarly with Hemingway, it is so powerful. So I recommend editing first
in Hemingway, and then bringing that content over and putting it in Grammarly.
And just by using those two tools alone, your content will be 10 times better.
The sixth free SEO tool you have to use is AM Institute's Headline Tester. So
here's how it works. Okay so now I'm gonna show you AM Institute's Headline
Tester, and so every single time you create a piece of content, you need to
test your headlines in this tool, because your headline is pretty much the most
important part of your content, believe it or not, because 80% of people don't
even read past the headlines. So you need to do your best to create really
captivating headlines and persuasive headlines. And so this tool can help you
do that really, really well. So, what you need to do is select whatever
category you're in, so in this case I'm going to choose Business. So I've
already tested this headline so it's probably going to get a good score, so
we'll submit it for analysis, and so it got an 80%. And so what they claim is
that most professional copywriter's headlines will have between 30% to 40% in
their headlines, while the most gifted copywriters will have 50% to 75% in
their headlines. And so one thing I've realized about this tool is shorter
headlines tend to get better scores. But what I recommend doing is just keep
creating new headlines until you at least get into this 50% range. You don't
need to get as high as 80%, but just keep creating new headlines over and over
and over until you get one that's really good, and then use that as your title
for your blog post, or title for your homepage or whatever copy you're writing.
And so, this tool, I can't live without it, I use it all the time, and I highly
recommend you use it if you're trying to create more captivating headlines. So
the seventh and final free SEO tool you need to take advantage of is Neil
Patel's backlink analyzer. Now while I do recommend in investing in a tool like
Ahrefs, Neil's tool can help you get a lot accomplished. Let me show you how to
use it. Okay so I'm here at Neil Patel's new backlink analysis tool. And so
this is an excellent free SEO tool, now of course I recommend investing in a
really high quality tool like Ahrefs, but if you're strapped for cash right now
and you're a startup, you don't have a ton of money to invest in an expensive
tool, then this can do the job. So simply enter your URL and start the
investigation. So this tool is very simple, it's just gonna show you who is
linking to your competitor. So one thing that I like to do is just do one link
per domain, so make sure that's selected, and then click follow. So then you
can see right away all of the follow links that they have. And then what you
can do is you can go through and see if you can actually get the same links as
them.
So let's say we wanted to get a link from NameCheap
like Neil Patel did, so what you wanna do is you wanna look at what Neil
produced. And so he created a blog post about the Science of Social Timing, and
so he has a bunch of data, it's a good post here. And so what we'd wanna do is
we wanna try to create something that's substantially different and better than
this. So then what we have to do is just copy this URL, and then what we're
gonna do is we're just gonna reach out to any website that has linked to this
particular page. So you can actually just paste that URL in here, and then
you're gonna see all of the websites that are linking to Neil Patel's blog post
about the Science of Social Timing. And then your objective is to create an
asset that is different and far superior than what he created. Now, that would
be very challenging, in this case, 'cause he did a very good job, but there are
certainly opportunities for you to come from a different angle, or maybe have
more unique data. There's a lot of opportunity there for you to do that, but
this tool alone can help you identify topics that are highly linkable because,
at the end of the day, you have to secure connects to your substance in light
of the fact that the objective ought to be to manufacture your site authority,
and furthermore, rank for the terms they are following. So this is an awesome
free SEO tool, and I highly recommend you use it if you don't want to invest in
an amazing tool like Ahrefs, even though I recommend that you do. So those are
the seven free SEO tools you should be using to increase your Google rankings.
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