5 Absolutely Free SEO Tools I Use Daily

in the latest episode of hack my growth i'm going to share with you five of my favorite absolutely free seo tools and these are tools that we use every single day here at our agency i'm going to tell you a little bit about each tool and how we use it to get the best results we can for our clients hey thanks for checking out this video if this is your first time watching or maybe been watching a while and you haven't yet subscribed to our community please do so now we create new content each week to help you get the most out of your digital marketing activities so as i said in the opener we're gonna be talking about five free seo tools now these are tools like i said that we use every single day i'm gonna help you peek under the hood of each of these tools and how maybe you could start using them to get the results you're looking for what's up in this video we're gonna be looking at five absolutely free seo tools that i use on a pretty much daily basis now some of these tools do have features that you can obviously add on and buy but the basic versions of them and to get started they're absolutely free and they can really help make your work go much faster and make sure that you're really structured correctly and targeting the right things and getting the results you want to see all right so let's check out these tools so here's a list that we're going to look at and i've got a list of five tools here now some of them you you may already be using or maybe you don't even consider them a tool but i definitely do and they're things that i use on a daily basis the first is search console it's more than just data it's a great tool that has a lot of other things inside of it and when used properly can really help you grow your visibility google sheets i've done a couple videos on google sheets lately it's a tool that we use all the time it's super simple but it's very very powerful the detailed browser extension this is one of the browser extensions i featured in another video this tool is awesome use it all the time it allows us to peek under the hood very quickly and see some really great insights then we've got seoquake which is also a browser extension that we've talked about a little bit before but this is a great tool to get data right from the serps themselves and finally our one of our favorite tools probably a tool that i use more than any other tool is screaming frog it does have a paid version but you can get started with the free one and this is an all-around workhorse it will really help change the game so the first one is google search console and it's a web service it's by google and it lets webmasters you know check indexing and optimizer sites that's that's pulled from their knowledge panel what i use it for i use it for analytics you know to get data i use it for indexing um page optimization links and a whole lot more so let's go quickly and take a look at search console and i'll walk you through a few of the things that i'll do using this tool so when you log into search console you'll typically see something like this i use a pretty large screen so i can see well because i'm old and my eyes don't work so we're going to go ahead and zoom in a little bit and as you can see here you know we can see performance metrics we can see you know how many clicks that we're getting uh the different search engines or maybe google discover it gives you an overview of your coverage issues and page experience so right here we can see a few things that we need to fix and you can actually log in or go a little bit deeper into some of these and to figure out what's causing these issues again like unparsable structured data this is probably because it's taking like a quote from a blog article and it's messed up some of the article markup that's typically the error we see here are or the amp issues that we need to go and tweak and fix and so it's telling us these things you know that we can go and make changes with so again let's say i wanted to fix this unparsable structured data i could click on it right here and it's going to say like i said thank you google um it's going to show me i've got 12 issues right now and saying there's a parsing error so i can look at one of these sites here like oversimplification and it's going to pull this up and there you go inside the description it's actually pulled in this description with quotes and that's what's causing this to break so i actually need to go back to this page remove those quotes because i can't have another set of quotes here with inside the description because that's going to screw up the json so that's something i can go and fix and thanks to search console giving me that that information here and telling me exactly where it is in the line of code this is not just a tool that you would use to look at clicks and um you know impressions and keywords down a little bit lower though we've also got the session you know which says legacy tools and reports and you've got links this is a new section that i think is pretty good it's relatively new i guess speaking in the world of search console and you can see the top pages from an external link standpoint you can see the top linking sites to your site you can see what the top anchor text is with people linking to your site and you can see the internal links and i use this quite a bit for internal linking if i want to figure out you know maybe there's a page that i want to improve the internal linking on i can look at these target links and then i can figure out um okay which pages are missing which pages should i maybe improve the links on here so like this page has got a lot of internal links some of that's coming from navigation search console doesn't break that out for you but at least it is a pretty good tool to really understand the linking structure of your website as well so search console's got a lot of things that you can do um you know under the more features would be these legacy tools uh things like url parameters and the web tools and um you know if you've had any issues with links you know maybe the disavow tool all of these are under the umbrella of search console and they can be very useful to people who want to know how their website is doing what are some of the things they need to do as far as page experience or core vitals or mobile usability or you know we can get into the enhancements with our structured data and how we're performing in the serps as well as you know some information on you know how our site's being targeted and even going into links so search console is a really good tool it's a free tool you just have to sign up for a google account and you've got access to this and you can really start to understand how google understands your site and your pages the next tool that i use on a daily basis is google sheets it's a spreadsheet program it's part of their google docs suite and it's something that that i use all the time i use it for keyword research i use it for serp analysis i use it for data aggregation i use it to build strategies and i do a lot more with it and years ago i was not somebody that would use even excel or anything like that i was kind of like scared of those programs i didn't feel like i was like you know good enough with all the you know the the different functions and stuff that you had to do but as i slowed it down and i took time to learn these these programs they become extremely useful and sheets is one of those programs that's extremely useful so let me show you a little bit of how i use sheets and i do have two other videos that go very in-depth like how to actually perform a serp audit i highly recommend you check that out and you check out the functions that seos need to know because that will help you really take your sheets game to a whole new level so google sheets is a spreadsheet tool it's simple to use and you can use it any way you want i like it a lot better than excel nowadays just because of some of the other built-in functions uh specifically one like we we use all the time when we're building like trend graphs you know we get the trend data from sem rush and we want to strip it out you know you can use sparkline uh which is pretty cool uh it makes quick graphs for you but you can do it everything from graph visualization to doing like you know bi to actually doing analysis so like quickly i could run a search result and pull some data from the search results just using google sheets pretty cool so i could type in url here and then let's you know look up here just google google sheets um this is a little browser extension you know instead of copying and pasting all the urls this is something uh i got from the guys over at detailed um they're really really smart go ahead and click this you know we've got these two wikipedia links this isn't a very good serve so let's try something else right um let's do seo tools and let's extract the url so now i've got just a list of urls and let's say you know i was trying to do a piece of content on this and i wanted to see what would be the a common title tag right so i could go over here and type title and then i could just use a sheets function and in this case i would use one that we talked about in that other video called import xml where i can actually say look at this url and then give me back the title of that your url and so moz here is actually pulling some other things here like their logo and all that so it's going to break some things underneath this when i pull this down um yeah because because of that one up here but as you can see the miles one's broken and these value ones actually don't work because there's nothing in those um i can easily clean that up by using a filter that's another thing that's really awesome about sheets i can filter this stuff and get to the information i need very quickly um so i can go ahead mods are the ones that are kind of breaking stuff so i'm just going to ignore those ones delete these selected rows and now i've pulled all those title tags from the search results and i can look at what are some of these uh titles that maybe i need to look at you know looks like when it comes to seo tools like this video listicles are really popular so i would probably need to write something within a listicle format or at least something that goes alongside that because that's what google is expecting because they've found that's probably what the user is intending now this is just a quick way to use google sheets you can use it to build programs even there's a lot of tools out there that use sheets or excel based tools spreadsheet-based tools to actually develop seo tools and i've done that before like content generators where you know you build a bunch of different options and you create variables so this is a really way to like start building and creating some of your own tools and you don't have to be a programmer or wizard to use it just just find other things that people are doing online and and take it and make it your own but cheats is a really awesome tool and allows you to do a lot of cool things and there's also a lot of cool add-ons that you can get for sheets as an seo you can get the google sheets analytics add-on where you can actually pull your google analytics in here you can get search analytics pulled right into here you could use the mods api and you can actually connect to moz sign up for your mods account if you've got any api access and i know mos has different levels too you can do some free so if you want access to all the metrics you gotta upgrade here but let's say i wanted to you know you know look at domain authority or something i could easily do that by taking um one of these urls all right let's do brian dean's site over here backlinko and pull it in here and say get the data and they let me do 10 urls every 10 seconds so i could put this in here and miles would tell me you know some some information right into google sheets so last time it was crawled down date you know they're really just going to give me access to like page authority and domain authority so let's say you want to know the domain authority and the page authority of a bunch of pages you could use moz to do that for you and it's absolutely free and it's going to import it right into google sheets and it's going to allow you to work from inside here very cool tool something that i highly recommend if you're not using spreadsheets and check out those videos that i did i think they'll help you quite a bit the next tool is a browser extension and it's the detailed browser extension and allows you to get really good seo insights with a click um it's built by seos for seos so that's a really cool thing as well um a lot of really good information over at detail and if you haven't read any of that stuff or you don't know much about him them if you don't know much about them or or glenn and what they're doing there i highly recommend you check out their website but this extension is pretty stinking cool too i use it to check titles and metas i use it to look at headers and structures of pages uh use it just to get really quick insights you know if a client's asking me something or if i'm on a prospecting call and i want to be able to have a little bit of something to give the person that i'm talking to this extension helps me quite a bit so since we already pulled up this uh this this site from from the seo tools example we can actually run the detailed browser extension here and it works in chrome um and you go ahead and use click it and here you go here's the analysis it's going to give me the title uh it's within the right character limit the description the url it's got canonical links they're using robot index and follow tags i've got word count if they've got images i'd be able to see that i can use uh see what kind of header structure they're using and images and links but i can go up here and i can actually see the headings and i can see the breakdown of this piece of content what are the different things that um that they're talking about and how is it broken down i can look at the the total links to this page both internal links as well as external links from this page i can take a look at the images how many images are here how many have alt tags how many have titles or not i can look at the structured data so see what kind of structured data they're using here and it looks mostly like just website organizational structured data and some list structured data i can look at the social graph so things like open graph or twitter cards and then quick links to some other tools out here this is a really cool tool as you can see we can do a lot of a lot of pretty awesome things i can even highlight nofollow links if they've got any of those going on and i can also do some cool search operators here like let's say i want to do a site domain search on backlinko i could do it right here and i can look at just google search from the visibility of backlinko or let's say i wanted to perform um any page just check to see if any pages isn't secure i can do a search like this and there's really just one page here and it's like really old page and you know obviously not important but this is where you can find pages maybe that are that are lacking https so it really helps you optimize really quickly or just get some insights quickly you can go to somebody say hey did you know you had like 20 pages that are not secure so you can see all this comes from just one plugin that you can just click around very cool tool i highly recommend it also works on firefox so they spend a lot of time looking at serps themselves having some extra data can be really helpful and that's where seo quake comes in it's a free browser extension but it helps you in a number of different ways and i like to use it for quick on page audits you can do that with it you can examine internal and external links you can compare domains and urls in real time and mostly what i use it for is extracting more data from the serps so let's take a look at how you guys could possibly leverage seoquake let's say you were going to you know trying to rank a page for this term best time for a webinar once i turn on seo quake it starts to pull in some pretty cool data here now if you've got a subscription to sem rush you can get a lot more information but you don't have to have one so let's zoom in to see the type of information that ceo quake will give us so if you have a free sem rush account that's all you need is a free account and you will actually get some some more information so i highly recommend if you're not using semrush we actually use it as a paid level i think it's a really really good tool but even if you want to get more out of this tool seoquake having a free sem rush account is really really worth it so you would just click connect here and i would connect my account so now that i've actually connected it i'm going to get a lot more data what it's going to tell me is the the domain score the trust score how many visits approximately this this site is getting what's their average page per visit the average time and bounce rate it can give me the amount of pages indexed in google the the links the linking domains um bing data alexa data how old the page is any facebook information i can look up the who is i can look up the display ads i can look at the sem rank i mean there's a ton of information i can pull straight from here it does it all the way down the search results because i i can start to see okay what might be some of the factors that are influencing this this page is it is it the amount of links they have is it the amount of you know the visibility they're getting in other areas you know this is actually one thing that really helped me this tool was really helpful early on to really debunk a lot of the noise i was hearing in in seo um you know like you know you should try this and you should try that or links only matter or this only matters when you start to look at these pages page by page like you you take this data and actually scrape it right like i can go here and export this to a csv and put in sheets you can start to see that you know some of the things that people say this is what makes everybody rank isn't always true you'll notice here uh in some cases you know you'll have a page right here it's got 61 links to this page goto.com right now is two to this page because go to meetings change their their url um but this one's ranking higher so obviously there's a lot of other factors considering the fact that this link to go to meeting and all that um but links themselves aren't the only things that ranking here and you know looking at a tool like this and be able to look at the serp reports and understand that can really make sure that you're focusing your strategy in the right areas another thing what seo quick does you can set your own parameters here so you can look at google cache like you can set all of these what you want to look at what's important what's not important there's even more settings that you can get into you can look at this serp report in a total sheet like this which again is is really helpful we can look is there any facebook data it doesn't look like it is um we're not seeing much of this google index data and that could just be their tool i can look at the bing index the alexa rank the web archive if that's working i can look at the sem rush rank which is you know how much traffic these pages are getting in their cmrs tool i can also look at backlinks so the subdomain black links versus the root domain backlinks so what's uh what's some of the parameters here what's working so that's pretty awesome and this is all straight from the search results i can export it i can set a location so let's say you're doing seo in a different country i can actually set a country or a language i can sort this page by a certain parameter so i can organize it in a different way really helps me take more control and here's another thing that's really cool so let's say you're doing keyword research seo quake is going to give me difficulties from the google database for this keyword right here at the top as well and i can actually get a full keyword report so this goes right to sem rush you're going to get more information if you have the full tool and not just the free version but it actually will help you do some keyword research as well and right from the serps that's what i really like about it is as i'm looking through the search results i can get real-time data about the links that i'm looking for now all seo tools you know not everybody is perfect not all data points are 100 accurate but at least it's a baseline it's something that you can get started in saying okay here are some of the things that i'm seeing based on the search engines results and the data around the sites that are ranking so it's a pretty cool little little plugin as well and it's a great tool that we use pretty much every single day so i saved the best tool for last and this is screaming frog screaming frog seo spider is a web crawler and it helps you do a lot of things mainly focusing on on-site factors and extracting data and doing audits for seo issues you get 500 urls uh for free so that's that's pretty awesome so you can do smaller sites but you can also do some pretty massive sites with this we've crawled some pretty large websites and did did some pretty uh very very specific deep dives with it we use it for our site audits we use it for data pools we use it again for internal linking seo visualization and a whole lot more there's so much this tool can do and we've barely even scratched the surface and i literally use this tool every single day so i'm going to walk you through this tool why it's so awesome and how you can you know get started to leverage it to really help improve your seo visibility as well so you can use screen frog in a number of ways probably the most common way to use it is to run a site audit where you put your site domain up here you would be in what's called the spider mode and you would run your run your url in here hit start and it would crawl all the pages on your site and all different types of pages so you can see here we've got everything from text to css to images over here there's always a summary of what's going on so all the urls you can counter anything that was possibly blocked and then you can look at your data so right here it'll visualize it underneath so let's say you want to look at security it'll tell you here's the http urls versus the https if there's anything that you need to take a look at you can look at you know the urls themselves are they structured correctly are using the right format um we can look at page titles see if anything's over over the character limit or below and as you notice over here on the big screen you know everything's changing as well each of these we can go into meta descriptions we can look at keywords we can look at header tags we can look at um the content of the page you can actually look and find word count if you set up spelling and grammar which is actually under here in the configuration you actually can set up spelling and grammar and it'll check your spelling and your grammar error so you can see that as well it'll tell you whether one page is is indexable or not it'll look at your structured data if you set it up to do that you can take a look at your site maps and page speed there's so many cool things that you can do with this tool that barely scratches the surface i probably should do a whole video just on screaming frog um what's also pretty cool is you can set up apis here so you can hook up google analytics and search console and page speed insights it's also got some third-party tools like majestic seo hrefs or moss we use this quite a bit when we're doing a big crawl and we're trying to understand like which pages are popular we can pull the data right from google analytics and attach it to those pages and start to do some of that analysis um you can do some cool things with internal linking as well i mean you can pull the google page speed insights as well there's so many awesome things you can do you can look at response times of your website you can look at the overall structure of your website and how it's built out there's this this tool is so packed full of awesome things like i said it's just you're barely scratching the surface and as you begin to click on certain urls you get more data and information about those specific ones right here so i can narrow the home page out and i can look at the status code and all the things that are specific to this url i can look at the internal links i can look at the out links i can look at the images on this and the details with those images i can actually pull them in here and see what they look like i can look at all the resources that are associated with it i can look at how it would look within the search results so here's the snippet and i can start to play around with rewriting those and what they would look like like like i said there's just so much that you can do with this tool it's pretty awesome what's also cool are the visualizations let's say you want to see how your site looks from a crawl tree graph and you can really begin to understand you know your website and how it's made up uh how it's built out and so we've got you know the simplified search page and then we've got you know the different ways that these pages are being crawled and moved through here um if it's green it means it's indexable if it's red it means it's not and there's certain pages that we don't have indexable for certain reasons on this site but at least we can see and we know you might be able to pull this and go wow we're not even letting ourselves index this like what's going on we probably should fix that right um and so that that's one cool graph and then you've also got a directory tree graph which kind of looks at all your different directories and how it's built out so we've got the entire website here you know whether it's our our course site or whether it's going to be the site with our our content and everything that we've got around there so those are the things that we want to look at and actually right here i'm seeing like actually want to index my author page i think that's something very important because i want google to know that i'm the author of this site so they can pass some of that authority to this site as well so that's something i need to fix and again without some of these these tools i wouldn't actually be able to see that as quickly as i would like to so there's definitely some things that i could clean up on this site it's also got some really cool like force directed graphs you can also look at your in-link anchor cloud so you can see what are the internal links on your site and how they're coming across these make for pretty good visualizations to share with clients you can even run what's called the crawl analysis afterwards which adds more information and this actually gives me one of my favorite things in this tool where it will actually calculate an in-link score so it'll calculate how strong my pages are internally and what is the score that those pagers getting it's kind of like an internal page rank it's a very very very useful piece of information to know because this will help me pass that authority to other pages if i need to improve that or maybe i want to make sure that things are easier to get to from one page or another this tool has got so many features it would take me you know hours and hours and hours to go through it all if you're not using screaming frog i highly recommend that you you check this tool out because it will give you awesome insights and it's a free tool which is cooler than anything else but if you like it you're getting a lot of use out of it i highly recommend that you pay for it too because uh it's one of the most amazing tools that we use all the time [Music] you

Channel: SMA Marketing

Views: 2,116

Keywords: free seo tools, seo tools, search engine optimization, best seo tools, seo free tools, top free seo tools, seo tools free, best free seo tools

Id: a-HXw26nTig

Length: 26min 26sec (1586 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021