In 2019, US consumers are expected to spend $586.92 billion on e-commerce alone based on a study conducted by emarketer.com. With the availability of online shopping, it’s no wonder that the growth of SEO is fast becoming a necessity and not only for large corporations but for SMB’s as well.
Consumer behavior has taken a huge leap over the years. People no longer just step inside a store and listen to a salesperson sell an item.
Now it all starts with Google.
People are all about online reviews because they’re more accessible thanks to smartphones. If you think about it, smartphones act like that friend who’s always with you 24/7. Naturally, if it has the capability to provide you with information you need, that’s where you’ll turn to find it.
This is the reason SEO continues to grow as a business. Forbes even reported that businesses will spend a staggering $20 billion on SEO services.
This brings us to why you’re here.
You’re probably planning to set up your own SEO business—which isn’t an easy feat by the way! Like anyone who’s new to SEO, you may be inclined to use any available SEO reseller programs and white label SEO tools out there. Well then, you’re on the right page.
Here are 10 of the most useful SEO tools that can help you and your SEO business start on the right foot.
1. Ahrefs
Your go-to tool for site auditing and backlink analysis. Ahrefs can do more than just diagnose and examine whether a website is SEO ready to meet your traffic goals. They offer tools for competitive analysis, keyword research, backlink research, content research, rank tracking, and web monitoring. Their website crawling ability comes in second to Google. This allows for thorough and precise results, which makes this a favorite SEO tool of many.
2. Keywords everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is an add-on for Chrome and Firefox that automatically lets you know the volume, cost-per-click & competition for that keyword. We all know that SEO is highly reliant on keywords. Targeting the right keyword lets you capture the right audience and increase your chances of ranking high on Search Engine Results (SERPs).
Whether you’re doing on-page or off-page content, Keywords Everywhere will target the essential keywords to deliver the right topic or the right headline to attract the right audience.
It crawls data from Google, Youtube, Etsy, eBay, Amazon and many more to provide you with only the most relevant results.
3. Ubersuggest
While Keywords Everywhere helps you with getting targeted keywords, Ubersuggest specializes in keyword variations and long-tail keyword optimization. It’s a free tool that helps you produce rich content by generating keyword ideas that will engage more audiences.
This tool also allows you to discover which pages from your competitor’s sites are ranking and which keywords put them there—all thanks to their SEO pages report.
4. KWFinder
KWFinder is a useful keyword research tool that can also generate long-tail keywords. It ranks keyword difficulty and has metrics for trends, monthly search volumes, CPC, PPC and Google SERP results.
5. Google Search Console
Made by Google. This is an easy-to-use and free all-around web service for web marketers, SEO professionals, webmasters, and web owners to monitor site performance. This tool is useful when you’re diving into data about search traffic, technical status updates and the overall health of a website.
6. Google Analytics
A must-have tool for any SEO. Google Analytics is your gateway to measuring your advertising ROI, analysing channels and sources of traffic. It also provides user tracking ability to deliver information on bounce rate, session duration and pages per session.
You can review online campaigns like tracking landing page quality and conversion by integrating Google Ads into the mix.
Simply put, this is a must-have tool for web stats and insights.
7. Screaming Frog
A feature-rich SEO application that lets you crawl websites’ URLs and audit offline and online SEO. It also analyzes Meta descriptions and page titles to let you know if there are any discrepancies or duplicates on your website.
It also features Google Analytics integration, which allows you to access user data such as bounce rate, conversions, and revenue for landing pages.
8. Yoast
One of the best – if not the best – WordPress plugin made for SEO. Yoast lets you automatically format Meta tags, as well optimize sitemaps and content. It has everything a proper SEO tool should do.
9. Sumo
A must-have plug-in that offers a suite of different opt-in forms. They have advanced features that integrate with a lot of automation software and services. You can use this for A/B testing, and conversion analytics. This also has exit-intent technology, which detects visitor behavior and prompts them with a targeted campaign at the precise moment they’re about to exit your website.
10. SEO Minion
An extension that helps save you hours on SEO work. Analyze on-page SEO, check for redirects, broken links and see how your blog post can rank by checking tags.
Do this if you find broken links:
If you want to learn which broken links have the most referring domains pointing to them. You just have to export all the broken links found by SEO Minion into a CSV file.
Runner-ups (If you’re willing to dole out a bit of cash, these tools are definitely must-haves and you’ll get a lot of bang for your buck.)
1. Semrush
If Ahrefs isn’t your cup of tea, then Semrush might be able to hit your sweet spot. The software offers services from SEO dashboard, keyword analytics to marketing insights and social media tools, track your projects’ progress through their elegant and practical interface.
A tool that helps you measure the accuracy of your store’s overall online visibility. It aims to help you increase visibility on search engines by publishing and updating location data in a simpler and smoother way.
There you have it! Your top 10 free SEO tools to jumpstart your SEO business. There are hundreds of useful SEO tools emerging daily, just make sure that you choose and master the ones that are already proven to work.