Advanced Top Free SEO Tools 2016

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1. Google Analytics

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’ve used Google Analytics. I think we may have written about it once or twice.

The most valuable SEO data is that which helps you understand your visitors  and how they interact with your site.  No tool I’ve used delivers that data like  Google Analytics, and none of the tools I mentioned does a better job providing data that helps you understand the number that matters most – the bottom line.

2. Google Search Console

Analogous to BWT (yet much richer), Google Search Console – formerly “Google Webmaster Tools” – provides data and configuration control for your site in Google.

3. Moz

Moz is a suite of user-friendly inbound marketing tools. Below are my favorite free Moz tools:

• Open Site Explorer is a backlink analysis tool with helpful metrics approximating link equity.
• Followerwonk shows data on Twitter.
• Moz Local (formerly Get Listed) lets you see the state of a company’s local citations and is the first place you should go when you first start local SEO on a site.
• Mozbar is a browser toolbar that lets you quickly get at Moz’s key features for the page you’re on.
• The SERP Overlay (seen on the right) is part of the Mozbar and shows OSE metrics on individual search results.

4. Google Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner, the tool formerly known as Adwords Keyword Tool, lets you pull monthly Google search query volume estimates for dozens of keywords in seconds. I can never understate the importance of knowing what people search for.

5. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a website crawler designed specifically for SEO. Within mere minutes, you’ll get critical data on every URL. Best to just download it and take it for a spin. Once you see all that data, you’ll have questions, but there’s resources to help you:

6. Google (and Bing)

This is one is so obvious that I forgot to include it last year: the Google and Bing search engines themselves are veryuseful SEO tools. Mastery of search engine functionality is part of mastering SEO. With some Google-fu (and Bing-fu), you can examine indexation and duplicate content, find content scrapers, check keyword rankings, analyze SERP listings, and scout for outreach and link prospects.

7. Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools (aka BWT) remains extremely overlooked. It’s great for keeping an eye on how Bing (which powers Yahoo) is treating your site and also enables you to have some control in the matter. It also shows you clicks to your site from Bing by search query, and it has a feature for looking up Bing search query volume. It also offers benefits beyond Bing by providing insights into crawling, indexation, on-page keyword optimization, and other elements that can impact your performance in Google.

8. Keywordtool.io

Enter a query in this freemium tool and it will quickly spit out a ton of great keywords based on the autocomplete feature of Google, Bing, YouTube, or App Store Search.

Keywordtool.io is great for generating a ton of keyword ideas containing your seed term, especially long-tail keywords that won’t show up in the AdWords keyword tool due to having  very low volumes. I usually use Keywordtool.io when I am building a list of potential keywords, especially when I need long-tail keywords.

9. Google Trends

Marketers who know where the puck is heading tend to win more. Google Trends shows changes in search query volume for specific queries (and topics and entities).

For marketers, especially in volatile industries like technology and fashion, it’s critical to at least keep up with the market. And, if you can master online trends analysis and get a step ahead of the competition, the results can be quite profitable indeed. For search marketers, it’s plain good sense to analyze changes in search query behavior. Even everyday writers can improve their results by understanding which topics are trending.

10. Chrome Developer Tools

“F12” is now the SEO button, because it is the shortcut to major awesomeness built right into Chrome. Some SEO tasks you can do with Chrome DevTools include: examining mobile UX and SEO with the amazing mobile emulator, diagnosing page speed, picking apart source code, examining HTTP status codes, and mocking-up live edits to a webpage (including the title tags and Meta descriptions in the SERPs). Resources below.

11. Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is the Internet’s most complete historical archive and lets you see what a website used to look like back in the day. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used this free tool for detective work  to crack client cases of missing traffic. For that reason, the Wayback Machine holds a special place in my heart. If the numbers for a site have changed and something about that site has changed but you don’t have a site back-up available to figure out what – the Wayback Machine has your back.

12.Hootsuite

In 2015, social media is typically vital to SEO success. Hootsuite is one of many platforms for managing social media. I’m not saying Hootsuite is the best social platform, but it is what I’m most familiar with and is plenty helpful for promoting new content and staying on top of opportunities to engage with key influencers.

13. SEO Quake Toolbar

SEO Quake shows data on traffic, links, social shares, on-page keyword optimization and more. The SEO Quake website has lots of helpful tips on what to do with all this data.

14. Web Developer Toolbar

The Web Developer Toolbar has become much relied-upon during the technical phase of our SEO audits.

15. GTmetrix

Having a tool to examine page speed and diagnose opportunities for improvement  is now an essential part of the SEO toolkit. Anything that impacts user-experience impacts SEO, and site speed is a big deal for UX, especially for mobile. Many page-speed tools exist; I’ve found GTmetrix reliable and a good balance between thorough and user-friendly. Other page speed tools that are good include  Pingdom, WebPagetest (great visual waterfall), and Google PageSpeed Insights. That last one is especially good.