Boost Your SEO for Google with These 8 Awesome Tools

SEO for Google is the foundation of content marketing. It’s what drives rankings, web traffic, and ultimately converted customers. But it can also feel complicated! There are lots of moving parts to manage in an SEO strategy. Plus, Google updates its algorithm yearly, meaning your SEO strategy needs to continually evolve along with it.

Fortunately, there are some really valuable (and affordable, or even free!) tools you can use to get the insights you need. We’ve put together a list of 8 of the best ones for you to check out. On our list you’ll find tools to help with just about every aspect of SEO for Google — keywords, backlinks, site speed, targeting, competitor analysis and more.

Quick Takeaways

• Tools like SEMRush, Ahreds, and Moz are known as industry leaders and offer comprehensive SEO management features.
• Google offers two free tools every business should be using for SEO: Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
• Screaming Frog Spider is a popular tool that can crawl your website for technical SEO issues (and help you fix them).
• Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest is a beginner-friendly (and very affordable) tool for doing keyword research and finding competitive opportunities.
• PageSpeed Insights analyzes page speed and other core web vitals to help you manage site performance issues.

8 Tools to Boost Your SEO for Google

SEMRush

Image Source: SEMRush

SEMRush is pretty ubiquitous in the content marketing world — and for good reason. It offers 50+ tools that cover a range of areas, including SEO, content marketing, market research, social media, and advertising.

As it relates directly to SEO, you definitely want to check out these tools:

• Keyword Magic Tool – gives you thousands of keyword ideas based on a seed keyword
• Organic Research – helps you find ways to rank for competitor keywords
• Keyword Manager – allows you to list and track performance of up to 1000 keywords
• Organic Traffic Insights – integrates with Google Analytics to give you insights on organic search performance
• On-page SEO checker – gives you ideas to improve the rankings of a specific page on your website
• Site audit – crawls your page to help you identify and fix issues that could be hurting your SEO

SEMRush offers free trials, plus several pricing plans to choose from.

Ahrefs

Image Source: Ahrefs

Like SEMRush, Ahrefs offers a number of tools that encompass several areas. One of the most popular is their Keyword Research Tool, which accesses a database of 7 billion keywords across 10 search engines to generate ideas for your SEO strategy.

Other tools include:

• Projects Dashboard – provides a single-pane view of your SEO performance and initiatives
• Site Explorer – allows you to look at the organic traffic performance and backlink profile of any website
• Site Audit – scans your website for SEO issues
• Content Explorer – helps you research and analyze top-performing content in your niche
• Rank Tracker – track your rankings by page and/or compared to competitors

If you’re a website owner, you can get free limited access to Ahrefs Site Explorer and Site Audit. Otherwise, you’ll have to choose from their pricing plans, which begin at $99/month.

Moz

Image Source: Moz

Moz is known as a pioneer in the SEO and content marketing industries. Their tools are also some of the most popular on the market. Moz offers a wider range of tools and pricing options than most others on our list — Moz Local starts at $14, Moz Pro at $99, and their most comprehensive product, STAT Search Analytics, at a pricier $720 per month.

Even better, however, Moz offers a number of free tools you can use to improve your SEO for Google without needing a paid plan. They are:

• Link Explorer – finds backlink data using a massive index of 40 trillion links
• Keyword Explorer – generates keyword ideas based on a seed keyword
• Competitive Research – helps you find keyword gaps, opportunities, and top SERP competitors
• Domain Analysis – analyzes your domain for important SEO metrics like authority
• MozBar – Chrome extension that shows you SEO metrics for a website as you browse

Google Search Console

Image Source: Google

When you’re trying to boost your SEO for Google, what smarter tools to use than the ones Google created itself? Google Search Console is the first of two on our list. It’s a free tool that gives users insight into their site’s traffic and performance, helps fix issues, and is a good overall tool to use for aligning your strategy with Google’s expectations.

Some of the things Google Search Console will tell you include:

• Search traffic data – how often you appear on Google SERPs, top queries for your site, click through rates and more
• Links – which sites link to your website
• Alerts – let you know when Google encounters spam, indexing, or other issues with your site
• Core Web Vitals – site performance metrics like page speed and mobile-friendliness

To use Google Search Console, you’ll need to verify ownership of your site after signing up. Once you do, you’ll have access to all of their tools and insights.

Google Analytics

Image Source: Google

Google Analytics is another free tool provided by Google, but this one has a different focus than Search Console. Rather than focus on how your site performs in search, it analyzes how users interact with your site when they visit it. On the Google Analytics platform, you’ll find insights like:

• Audience Overview – the sources of your web traffic, who is visiting your site, which pages they’re visiting, how long they’re staying on your site, and what kind of devices they use
• Demographics and Interests – learn about user demographic information (age, gender, etc.) and interests based on online activity
• Site Content – performance metrics for each page on your site and even specific content on your page

The tool even allows you to create custom reports so you can drill down to the specific information you need to improve your SEO for Google.

Ubersuggest

Image Source: Niel Patel

Neil Patel is one of the most well-known personalities in the industry thanks to his massive library of content that helps marketers learn about and execute SEO. The tool he developed, Ubersuggest, is great for beginners and provides a number of user-friendly features to find insights and opportunities.

Its keyword features include the ability to find new keyword ideas, analyze your keyword rankings by traffic, find competitor content by keyword, follow search volume trends and more.

Other features to check out in Ubersuggest: backlink tools to find backlink opportunities, the site audit feature for fixing SEO issues, and the Chrome extension that shows you website insights as you browse.

Ubersuggest offers a 7-day free trial and three affordable pricing plans starting at $29/month.

Screaming Frog

Image Source: Screaming Frog

As far as technical SEO goes, Screaming Frog is one of the top choices on the market. Their most popular tool is the SEO Spider, which does a deep crawl of your website to extract performance data and find ways you can improve your SEO for Google. When it crawls your site, the tool will:

• Find broken links and export the errors and source URLs
• Identify exact and partially duplicate content to streamline site
• Analyze meta data like page titles and meta descriptions for optimization
• Generate XML sitemaps for a birds’ eye view of your site
• Integrate with Google Analytics and Search Console for deepest possible insights

Best of all? Screaming Frog Spider is free (but there is a paid version available if you need to use it for a higher volume of URLs and/or use more advanced features).

PageSpeed Insights

Image Source: PageSpeed Insights

While we tend to spend a lot of time focused on content, page speed and other core web vitals also play an important role in SEO for Google. It also impacts the UX of your site — most users won’t wait more than a second or two for a page to load before they get impatient and try a different site.

PageSpeed Insights is a totally free website tool to help you monitor your site performance and address issues. All you have to do is enter your URL and PageSpeed will give you an overview of your current performance. Then it will give you specific suggestions to help you improve.

Boost Your SEO for Google with Great Content

The team of writers and SEO experts at Marketing Insider Group use a number of the tools on this list to deliver you optimized content and strategies centered around your target customers.Check out our SEO Blog Writing Service to learn more or schedule a quick consultation today!