Starting on your SEO journey, but can’t commit to paying for expensive SEO tools! You’re in luck. Because in this tutorial I’m going to share with you some of the top SEO tools for WordPress you can use right now to get ranking results and grow your website traffic.
When you’re starting in SEO or trying to execute a successful SEO campaign on a budget you’re going to need software tools to help you at different stages. The problem is there are a lot of tools out there. And trying to find which ones to use, will take a lot of time. So let’s find out the best free tools. I’m going to cover a range of free tools that you can use for SEO research auditing and monitoring. So let’s dive right in.
Contents
Top SEO Tools For WordPress
Keyword Research Tools
We’ll start with tools focused on keyword research. Because it’s the foundation of every SEO campaign. Probably 80% of the keyword research ideas we generate here at ceeveeglobal.com come from free tools.
We only move on to paid tools to,
- Validate ideas,
- Compare competition data points or,
- Research search intent.
The first one is Google. Google offers plenty of insights just within the search results pages. Google has some great user-focused search features which will help you generate tons of keyword ideas.
Google’s Auto-Suggest
Google’s auto-suggest feature shows as you start typing a query into Google.
It predicts various search query outcomes based on previous user search history. To see the most relevant results make sure that you’re signed out of your Google account. And change your regional search settings to match your target location to remove any personalization or history that Google might show.
Using an incognito or private window in your browser can also help remove personalization. Try to be really specific with your searches and play around with search intent and context. This will help you gather the most complete keyword ideas for your campaign.
Related Searches
Also, you can use related searches are shown at the bottom of the search results page. Again this is built on previous user search behavior and also it is another resource for keyword ideas.
People Also Ask Results
If you make an informational search query in Google you’ll also see the people also ask results feature. This gives you an idea of the common questions users are asking surrounding your search phrase. This is particularly useful because it can identify common questions your web page should answer. And give you an indication of the keywords that you should use within them.
Google Free Keyword Planner
Now you have a bunch of keyword ideas by browsing Google search results. You can now plug them into Google’s free keyword planner. Google’s keyword planner tool is designed for that adwords pay-per-click platform.
However, the information it provides will give you a lot of useful insights such as the average monthly search volume for each keyword the competition level and the price advertisers are paying per click. Which again gives you an indication of how competitive a keyword.
Answer The Public
Answer the public works from Google’s auto-suggested questions. But it’s a much more comprehensive tool. When you enter a keyword it’ll give you groups of different questions neatly organized into numerous graphics. There are plenty of ideas related to your keyword and most of them are up to date. Thankfully the data can be exported into a CSV file for you. Then sort keyword data however you wish. Not only is answer the public great for keyword research but you can also use it to generate blog topic ideas too.
Ahrefs
Next up is ahrefs. Ahrefs is a full SEO tool suite with premium plans. But they do have a free keyword generator which is really useful. Enter a target keyword or phrase and it will pull the top 100 keyword ideas from its database of over 8 billion keywords.
For each phrase, the keyword generator displays search volume, keyword difficulty from 1 to 100, how recently this result was updated, and a list of common questions related to your search term.
You can use this free tool to
- identify long-tail keywords
- target less competitive phrases and
- isolate your search using geographic location.
The downside is that you can’t download the data creating an inconvenient workflow a common downside with free SEO tools.
Grammarly
Google favours quality polished well-written content. And there are various tools to help you measure against these factors. Grammarly is a great tool to help you write content that has no spelling mistakes and perfect grammar. Most content writers use Grammarly to ensure that all of the content they write for their clients is absolutely perfect. And it’s super simple to use. Once signed up all you have to do is either write from within the editor or paste your content from another document. It will then scan the content and highlight issues that might need your attention.
on-page SEO
On-page SEO is super important to get right. And we have a great free tool just for the job.
SEO Site Checkup Tool
Seo site checkup is a great tool to highlight specific on-site SEO issues. Here you just need to enter a website url and the tool will quickly scan the site and categorize potential issues into six categories. Overview, general SEO speed, server and security, mobile usability, and advanced SEO. The security information is a great feature. It will tell you if all versions of your URL redirect to the secure version. If your mail server SSL is properly configured and ensure email addresses are not written on the pages in plain text. This is to prevent spammers from finding them.
It even lets you email this report or download it as a pdf for free. The report contains great information that documents why the changes should be made. It’s very developer-friendly as well.
Technical SEO Tools
Now we’re on to technical SEO which could be quite daunting to tackle. But critical to understand and fix issues.
Technical SEO covers things like,
- Site maps
- Page speed
- URL structure
- Schema and
- Site navigation
Google Search Console
Google search console gives you an inside look at how they see your site. You can easily monitor and in some cases resolve server errors, site load issues, and security issues like
hacking and malware from within the console. You can monitor search performance and ensure any site maintenance or adjustments you make happen smoothly. You can also receive
notifications whenever there are platforms affecting your website’s visibility in search such as,
- Server errors
- Blocking of critical pages
- Link penalties and more.
Screaming Frog
Screaming frog is another great technical SEO tool. And has been a highly recommended crawling tool within the SEO space for many years. The free version allows you to crawl up to 500 pages of a website. Which is an ideal amount for many small sites. With the free features, you can detect broken links, redirect chains, take a look at titles and meta descriptions, find duplicate pages and more. You can also visualize the entire site in a tree visualization which is super handy for getting a bird’s eye view of a URL structure.
Now here are a couple of great multi-channel tools that cover more than one area of SEO. These tools cover a variety of tasks. So are great to avoid having a load of tools pinned to your browser.
CeeVee-seotools
If you need to know about one free SEO tool site it has to ceevee-seotools.com. In ceevee-seotools there are more than 50 free SEO tools to use for your SEO project.
As an example, domain authority checker and page authority checker of a site.
These are unique metrics created by ceevee-seotools. The estimator website or web pages authority is based on backlinks and ranking power. Ceevee’s domain authority is arguably the most commonly used well-known metric within the SEO community. The higher the authority the more likely you are to rank. You can also use these metrics to compare your website’s authority with the competitors already ranking for your target keywords.
SEO Quake
An alternative to ceevee-seotools is SEO quake. This extension is made by semrush. And includes more semrush related data points. You’ll be able to compare metrics such as the links to the domain and the number of links to that particular page.
Conclusion
If you’re just starting out on your SEO journey or trying to rank a website on a budget then I’m sure that you’ll find a ton of value in these free tools. If you come across other free SEO tools that you find really useful we’d love to hear about them in the comments below.
