Top 5 Free SEO Tracking Tools
SEO can be hard to understand and hard to see results without tracking. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Better yet, if you don’t measure, you don’t know where you might be failing and wasting money! Top SEO firms use a wide variety of tracking tools and metrics, but we have listed the Top 5 Free SEO Tracking Tools for your small business. These tools will give you a good insight into what is going on with your SEO!
1) Rank Checker
– This rank tracker is from SEOBook.com and has been around for a long time. It is a simple tool, but it works. It will monitor your rankings and keep track of them over time. Use this tool to measure where you rank for specific keywords in the search engines.
2) Google Page Insights
– Google is notorious for free tools that are great. And face it, we all want to rank better in Google! This tool is used to measure page loading and optimization scores. Once you enter your domain, you will get back a Mobile and a Desktop score with suggested fixes. Another free tool, which gives greater detail for free, is GTMetrix.
3) Google Trends
– Another free Google tool. This tool may not seem like a big deal for SEO, because it just shows trends for terms. However, using Google data is always a good idea. This website will show you how a key term is trending. For example, web design has trended downward considerably since 2005, so a web design company would want to see what keywords are replacing it on an upward trend. This gives you insight into what keywords you should focus on for optimization.
4) Open Site Explorer
– This is a freemium tool from Moz.com, which means there are free aspects to the tool, but some require payment. The free portion can give you a lot of insight into links and other opportunities for in-bound links. This one may start to get complicated, but with a little digging and experience, this will be a great SEO tool in your bag!
5) Google Analytics
– I would be failing you, if I didn’t mention Google Analytics. If you are digging into your own SEO, you have probably heard of Google Analytics, and you probably have it installed. The problem is, you may not be using it properly or at all. You should dig into your own site analytics and see what keywords are driving traffic to your website. Look for the actual search terms and how visitors are using your site. Without going in too much detail about goals and funnels, you should use Google Analytics to track conversions on your website. This then should give you insight into which keywords you are working are actually driving business. It should also help you uncover other keyword opportunities, even if that is just with a few blogs!
There are 100’s, probably 1000’s, of quality tools out there, but I feel these five SEO tools will point you in the right direction without spending all day every day working on SEO. You can dig very deep and keep entrenched in SEO and tweaking this and that, but for those people who want to watch what is happening, make a few adjustments, and see some increases, these tools will get you started.
