When I started doing SEO on NeilPatel.com I used this advanced formula
to rank for 477,000 keywords.
Over time, my traffic started to flatline and I wasn’t ranking for many more keywords, even though I was continually creating more content.
But then I figured out a simple hack that took me from
477,000 keywords to 636,363 keywords as you can see in the image above.
So, what was this hack?
Well, it’s so effective that I just updated Ubersuggest so that includes the
hack.
So how did I do it?
When someone does a Google search, what are they typically
doing? They are trying to find a solution to their problem, right?
So how can you easily identify these problems people are
searching for?
Typically, you want to look for 3 types of keyword phrases:
Questions – people type in questions because they are looking for answers. And if your product or service helps answer those questions, you’ll see a boost in conversions.
Comparisons – when someone is searching for comparison keywords such as “MailChimp VS Converkit” there is high buyer intent, even if your company isn’t mentioned in the search phase. (I’ll go into how to leverage this in a bit.)
Prepositions – when keywords contain a preposition, they tend to be more descriptive. If you aren’t sure what a preposition is, simple prepositions are words like at, for, in, off, on, over, and under. These common prepositions can be used to describe a location, time, or place.
But how do you find these keywords?
Well, I just updated Ubersuggest to now show you questions, comparisons, and prepositions.
Just head over to Ubersuggest and type in a keyword that you want to go after. For this example, I typed in the word “marketing”.
Then as you scroll down, in the keywords ideas table you’ll see tabs for questions, prepositions, and comparisons.
I want you to click on the “view all keyword ideas”.
You’ll now be taken to the keyword ideas report that looks
like this:
Now, click on the tab labeled “questions”. It will adjust the keyword recommendations to show you all of the popular questions related to the main keyword you just researched.
You’ll then see some suggestions that you could consider
going after. Such as:
Why is marketing important?
What marketing does?
How marketing works?
But as you scroll down, you’ll find more specific questions such
as:
Why a marketing plan is important?
How marketing and sales work together?
How many marketing emails should you send?
Now that you are able to see these questions people are typing, in theory, you can easily rank for them as most of them have an SEO difficulty score of 20 or so out of a 100 (the higher the number the more competitive it is).
More importantly, though, you can create content around all of those phrases and sell people to your product or service.
For example, if you created an article on “why a marketing plan is important,” you can go into how you also can create a marketing plan. From there you can transition into describing your services on creating a marketing plan and how people can contact you if they want your help or expertise in creating one.
You can do something similar with the “how marketing and sales work together” article in which you can break down how to make each department work together. From there, you can either be an affiliate for software solutions that help merge the two departments like HubSpot or sell your own software if you offer one. You can even pitch your consulting services that help tie sales and marketing together.
And as for the “how many marketing emails should you send,” you can create content around that and have an affiliate link to popular email tools that have high deliverability and offer automation. Or you can promote your own email product.
Now imagine all of the extra keywords you can rank for by going after question-related keywords. What’s amazing about this is most of these keywords are competitive and they have extremely high search intent.
Can it get any better?
Speaking of search intent, I want you to click on the comparisons
tab.
You’ll see a list of ideas just like you did with the questions tab. But what I love doing here is typing in a competitor’s brand name here.
Let’s say I am offering an email marketing tool. I could type in “Mailchimp” and see what comparison ideas Ubersuggest comes up with.
Now for this example, I want you to imagine that you have an email company called Drip and Drip isn’t really mentioned in any of these keyword comparison ideas.
What’ll you want to do is create articles on all of the popular comparison terms like “Mailchimp vs Constant Contact” or “Mailchimp vs Convertkit” and within those articles break down the differences and also compare them with your own tool Drip.
Be honest when writing the comparisons. Show off which is the best solution using facts and data and break down how you are different and in what ways your own solution is better than the two solutions the reader is comparing.
This will bring awareness to your solution and you’ll find
that people will start purchasing it even though they were comparing two of
your competitors.
If you want a good example of how to create a neutral
comparison type of blog post, check out this article
comparing web hosts.
And if you want to take it one step further, you can click on the “prepositions” tab to find even more ideas.
Sticking with the Mailchimp example, you can see that people are curious about Shopify and WordPress integrations.
You can write articles related to integrations and also push your own product and break down how it differs from the others.
If you want to take it one level deeper, it will give you ideas on how to modify your business. For example, if I created an email marketing tool, I would create a Shopify, WordPress, Woocomerce, and Squarespace integration based on the ideas I got from the prepositions tab.
So how did I rank for 636,363 keywords?
I didn’t use all of the examples above on NeilPatel.com because I am not really trying to sell a product and I don’t have the time to write thousands of new blog posts.
But I did type in my domain name into Ubersuggest and then headed over to the top pages report.
From there I looked at the pages that are already ranking well on Google and clicked on the “view all” button to see the exact keywords each page ranks for.
As you can see from that page I rank for questions like “what
is affiliate marketing” as well as popular prepositions and comparisons.
How did I do this?
Well, that top pages report shows you keywords each of your pages already ranks for. So all you have to do is research each of those terms through Ubersuggest and find popular questions, prepositions, and comparisons.
Conclusion
The natural instinct for any SEO or marketer is to rank for
popular terms that have a lot of search traffic.
But there is an issue with that strategy. It takes a lot of time, it’s extremely competitive, and many of those search phrases don’t cause a ton of conversions as they are super generic.
So, what should you do instead?
Focus on solving people’s problems. The way you do this is by creating content around the questions, prepositions, and comparisons people are searching for in Google.
What do you think about the new Ubersuggest feature?
The post How I Ranked For 636,363 Keywords Using This Simple Hack appeared first on Neil Patel.
Google released a major update. They typically don’t announce their updates, but you know when they do, it is going to be big.
And that’s what happened with the most recent update that they announced.
A lot of people saw their traffic drop. And of course, at the same time, people saw their traffic increase because when one site goes down in rankings another site moves up to take its spot.
Can you guess what happened to my traffic?
Well, based on the title of the post you are probably going
to guess that it went up.
Now, let’s see what happened to my search traffic.
My overall traffic has already dipped by roughly 6%. When you look at my organic traffic, you can see that it has dropped by 13.39%.
I know what you are thinking… how did you beat Google’s core update when your traffic went down?
What if I told you that I saw this coming and I came up with a solution and contingency strategy in case my organic search traffic would ever drop?
But before I go into that, let me first break down how it all started and then I will get into how I beat Google’s core update.
A new trend
I’ve been doing SEO for a long time… roughly 18 years now.
When I first started, Google algorithm updates still sucked but they were much more simple. For example, you could get hit hard if you built spammy links or if your content was super thin and provided no value.
Over the years, their algorithm has gotten much more complex. Nowadays, it isn’t about if you are breaking the rules or not. Today, it is about optimizing for user experience and doing what’s best for your visitors.
But that in and of itself is never very clear. How do you know that what you are doing is better for a visitor than your competition?
Honestly, you can never be 100% sure. The only one who actually knows is Google. And it is based on whoever it is they decide to work on coding or adjusting their algorithm.
Years ago, I started to notice a new trend with my search
traffic.
Look at the graph above, do you see the trend?
And no, my traffic doesn’t just climb up and to the right. There are a lot of dips in there. But, of course, my rankings eventually started to continually climb because I figured out how to adapt to algorithm updates.
On a side note, if you aren’t sure how to adapt to the latest algorithm update, read this. It will teach you how to recover your traffic… assuming you saw a dip. Or if you need extra help, check out my ad agency.
In many cases after an algorithm update, Google continues to fine-tune and tweak the algorithm. And if you saw a dip when you shouldn’t have, you’ll eventually start recovering.
But even then, there was one big issue. Compared to all of the previous years, I started to feel like I didn’t have control as an SEO anymore back in 2017. I could no longer guarantee my success, even if I did everything correctly.
Now, I am not trying to blame Google… they didn’t do anything wrong. Overall, their algorithm is great and relevant. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be using them.
And just like you and me, Google isn’t perfect. They continually adjust and aim to improve. That’s why they do over 3,200 algorithm updates in a year.
But still, even though I love Google, I didn’t like the
feeling of being helpless. Because I knew if my traffic took a drastic dip, I
would lose a ton of money.
I need that traffic, not only to drive new revenue but, more importantly, to pay my team members. The concept of not being able to pay my team on any given month is scary, especially when your business is bootstrapped.
So what did I do?
I took matters into my own hands
Although I love SEO, and I think I’m pretty decent at it
based on my traffic and my track record, I knew I had to come up with another
solution that could provide me with sustainable traffic that could still
generate leads for my business.
In addition to that, I wanted to find something that wasn’t “paid,” as I was bootstrapping. Just like how SEO was starting to have more ups and downs compared to what I’ve seen in my 18-year career, I knew the cost at paid ads would continually rise.
Just look at Google’s ad revenue. They have some ups and downs every quarter but the overall trend is up and to the right.
In other words, advertising will continually get more expensive over time.
And it’s not just Google either. Facebook Ads keep getting more expensive as well.
I didn’t want to rely on a channel that would cost me more next year and the year after because it could get so expensive that I may not be able to profitably leverage it in the future.
So, what did I do?
I went on a hunt to figure out a way to get direct, referral, and organic traffic that didn’t rely on any algorithm updates. (I will explain what I mean by organic traffic in a bit.)
I went on my mission
With the help of my buddy, Andrew Dumont, I went searching for websites that continually received good traffic even after algorithm updates.
Here were the criteria that we were looking for:
Sites that weren’t reliant on Google traffic
Sites that didn’t need to continually produce
more content to get more traffic
Sites that weren’t popular due to social media traffic
(we both saw social traffic dying)
Sites that didn’t leverage paid ads in the past
or present
Sites that didn’t leverage marketing
In essence, we were looking for sites that were popular because people naturally liked them. Our intentions at first weren’t to necessarily buy any of these sites. Instead, we were trying to figure out how to naturally become popular so we could replicate it.
Do you know what we figured out?
I’ll give you a hint.
Think of it this way: Google doesn’t get the majority of their traffic from SEO. And Facebook doesn’t get their traffic because they rank everywhere on Google or that people share Facebook.com on the social web.
Do you know how they are naturally popular?
It comes down to building a good product.
That was my aha! moment. Why continually crank out thousands of pieces of content, which isn’t scalable and is a pain as you eventually have to update your old content, when I could just build a product?
That’s when Andrew and I stumbled
upon Ubersuggest.
Now the Ubersuggest you see today
isn’t what it looked like in February 2017 when I bought
it.
It used to be a simple tool that
just showed you Google Suggest results based on any query.
Before I took it over, it was generating 117,425 unique
visitors per month and had 38,700 backlinks from 8,490 referring domains.
All of this was natural. The original founder didn’t do any
marketing. He just built a product and it naturally spread.
The tool did, however, have roughly 43% of its traffic coming from organic search. Now, can you guess what keyword it was?
The term was “Ubersuggest”.
In other words, its organic traffic mainly came from its own brand, which isn’t really reliant on SEO or affected by Google algorithm updates. That’s also what I meant when I talked about organic traffic that wasn’t reliant on Google.
Now since then I’ve gone a bit crazy with Ubersuggest and released loads of new features… from daily rank tracking to a domain analysis and site audit report to a content ideas report and backlinks report.
In other words, I’ve been making it a robust SEO tool that has everything you need and is easy to use.
It’s been so effective that the traffic on Ubersuggest went from 117,425 unique visitors to a whopping 651,436 unique visitors that generates 2,357,927 visits and 13,582,999 pageviews per month.
Best of all, the users are sticky, meaning the average Ubersuggest user spends over 26 minutes on the application each month. This means that they are engaged and will likely to convert into customers.
As I get more aggressive with my Ubersuggest funnel and start collecting leads from it, I expect to receive many more emails like that.
And over the years, I expect the traffic to continually grow.
Best of all, do you know what happens to the traffic on Ubersuggest when my site gets hit by a Google algorithm update or when my content stops going viral on Facebook?
It continually goes up and to the right.
Now, unless you dump a ton of money and time into replicating
what I am doing with Ubersuggest, but for your industry, you won’t generate the
results I am generating.
As my mom says, I’m kind of crazy…
But that doesn’t mean you can’t do well on a budget.
Back in 2013, I did a test where I released a tool on my old blog Quick Sprout. It was an SEO tool that wasn’t too great and honestly, I probably spent too much money on it.
Here were the stats for the first 4 days of releasing the
tool:
Day #1: 8,462 people ran 10,766 URLs
Day #2: 5,685 people ran 7,241 URLs
Day #3: 1,758 people ran 2,264 URLs
Day #4: 1,842 people ran 2,291 URLs
Even after the launch traffic died down, still 1,000+ people per day used the tool. And, over time, it actually went up to over 2,000.
It was at that point in my career, I realized that people
love tools.
I know what you are thinking though… how do you do this on a budget, right?
How to build tools without hiring developers or spending
lots of money
What’s silly is, and I wish I knew this before I built my first tool on Quick Sprout back in the day, there are tools that already exist for every industry.
You don’t have to create something new or hire some expensive developers. You can just use an existing tool on the market.
And if you want to go crazy like me, you can start adding multiple tools to your site… just like how I have an A/B testing calculator.
So how do you add tools without breaking the bank?
You buy them from sites like Code Canyon. From $2 to $50, you can find tools on just about anything. For example, if I wanted an SEO tool, Code Canyon has a ton to choose from. Just look at this one.
Not a bad looking tool that you can have on your website for just $40. You don’t have to pay monthly fees and you don’t need a developer… it’s easy to install and it doesn’t cost much in the grand scheme of things.
And here is the crazy thing: The $40 SEO tool has more features than the Quick Sprout one I built, has a better overall design, and it is .1% the cost.
Only if I knew that before I built it years ago. :/
Look, there are tools out there for every industry. From mortgage calculators to calorie counters to a parking spot finder and even video games that you can add to your site and make your own.
In other words, you don’t have to build something from scratch. There are tools for every industry that already exists and you can buy them for pennies on the dollar.
Conclusion
I love SEO and always will. Heck, even though many SEOs hate
how Google does algorithm updates, that doesn’t bother me either… I love Google
and they have built a great product.
But if you want to continually do well, you can’t rely on one marketing channel. You need to take an omnichannel approach and leverage as many as possible.
That way, when one goes down, you are still generating traffic.
Now if you want to do really well, think about most of the
large companies out there. You don’t build a billion-dollar business from SEO,
paid ads, or any other form of marketing. You first need to build an amazing
product or service.
So, consider adding tools to your site, the data shows it is more effective than content marketing and it is more scalable.
Sure you probably won’t achieve the results I achieved with Ubersuggest, but you can achieve the results I had with Quick Sprout. And you can achieve better results than what you are currently getting from content marketing.
What do you think? Are you going to add tools to your site?
PS:If you aren’t sure what type of tool you should add to your site, leave a comment and I will see if I can give you any ideas.
The post How I Beat Google’s Core Update by Changing the Game appeared first on Neil Patel.
Who says you have to spend money to get more traffic?
For today’s blog post, I thought it would be fun to break down all of the free SEO tools. Sure you may know of some, like Ubersuggest, but there are many more options than just my own tool.
Now before I dive into the tools, I’ve broken them down into
the following categories:
Keyword Research
Content Marketing
Rank Tracking
Link Building
Technical SEO
So, are you ready to dive in? Let’s get started!
Keyword Research
All of the tools in this category will help you find more
keywords. Many of them have different ways of coming up with keyword
suggestions, so you may want to check them all out.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest
has many different keyword research options. First of all, it shows you how
many searches a keyword has had over the last 12 months so you can see if there
is any seasonality.
In addition to that, it pulls keywords from a few different sources such as Google Suggest and its own database, it shows you all of the keywords your competition ranks for, and it provides keyword suggestions based on questions, comparisons, and prepositions.
My favorite feature of Ubersuggest’s keyword research capabilities is that it not only can you see how competitive a term is, but it also tells you how many links the average ranking website contains.
That way you know how many links you need to build to rank
well.
What’s also unique about Ubersuggest is that it provides
local keyword suggestions. This is great if you are trying to do local SEO.
Answer The Public
Answer The Public
leverages Google Suggest to find all of the questions people may have related
to any industry or keyword.
Just type in a keyword and it will give you a laundry list
of questions people are searching for related to that keyword.
Similar to Ubersuggest it also shows you comparison and
preposition related keywords.
What I like about the tool is compared to any competing tool, it represents the data in nice visuals.
KeywordTool.io
SEO doesn’t just exist on Google. You can also rank higher on Amazon, YouTube, Bing, and tons of other sites.
KeywordTool.io uses
the same concept of Google Suggest, but for a handful of sites like Amazon,
Play Store, and YouTube.
If you are performing SEO on sites other than Google, you
should check out KeywordTool.io.
FAQfox
FAQfox is a neat little tool that finds you questions people want to be answered based on any specific site you want information from.
For example, you can type in the word “cat” and quora.com as the URL and it will show you category based questions people are asking on Quora.
You can do this for Reddit or any other site you want
keyword ideas from.
Google Keyword Planner
Of course, the search giant, Google, has its own keyword
research tool.
Google
Keyword Planner gives you suggestions as well as CPC data and click
estimates.
You’ll also notice that a lot of other keyword tools have CPC data, but chances are they are pulling it from Google Keyword Planner.
When you are using Keyword Planner, look for terms with a high CPC as they tend to convert well when you rank for them organically.
Google Trends
Out of all the tools on the list, I probably use Google Trends 3 to 4 times a week. That’s
how much I love it.
What I love about Trends is that it shows you what is hot right now. In addition to that, it tells you if an industry is getting less search volume or more over time.
You can also filter your data based on a specific country or
you can look at the data from a global perspective.
Soovle
Soovle takes the concept of Google Suggest (autocomplete) but for a lot of the popular sites around the web.
Soovle pulls all of the popular keywords on Google, YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia, Bing, Yahoo, and Answers.com.
AdWords and SEO Permutation Generator
The AdWords and SEO
Permutation Generator is a super simple tool that helps you get creative
with your keyword research.
You enter in a handful of terms you want to target and it will combine them to make different variations for you.
Not all of the keywords will be popular when it comes to search volume, but it will give you a sense of how you can go after long-tail variations within your site.
Keyworddit
Reddit has a ton of categories (subreddits) and Keyworddit helps you find all of the keywords within that subreddit.
What’s neat is it even breaks down the volume for each of
those keywords. That way you can quickly see if any are worth going after.
Generally speaking, you’ll want to use tools like this as it
will give you a new perspective on keyword research.
Pulling results from Google is something that all SEOs already do. Because of that, you need to use other sources if you want to get a leg up on your competition.
Bulk Keyword Generator
The Bulk
Keyword Generator by Higher Visibility does keyword research a bit
differently than most of the keyword tools out there.
First, you pick a business category. Then you select the type of business you have and enter in any locations you are targeting.
You’ll then be given a list of keywords that you can
potentially target.
What I like about this tool is that it makes things super
simple, especially if you are new to SEO.
WordTracker Scout
WordTracker
Scout is a browser extension that gives you a list of keyword ideas from
any web page.
Just browse any site or check out your competition, click a button and boom, you are given ideas on keywords that other people are using.
It breaks the keywords down by relevance and volume.
SearchVolume.io
When you are doing keyword research, how do you know a keyword is getting enough searches?
SearchVolume.io lets you bulk upload up to 800 keywords and it tells you how popular each keyword is.
The tool also works for a handful of other regions, such as Brazil, France, and Italy.
Google Location Changer
Serps has a neat tool that works well if you are doing
international SEO.
Their Google Location Changer
allows you to search Google in any country or city. Just type in a keyword and
you’ll see who ranks.
Using this tool in combination with WordTracker Scout can
give you unique keyword suggestions.
Content Marketing
Content is the one thing we all have to create if we want more search traffic.
Here are free content marketing tools that can help you get
the most out of your search traffic.
Animalz Revive
Have you noticed that your rankings decrease over time?
It’s not just because of Google algorithm updates. In most
cases, your old content won’t perform as well because it’s old.
Animalz Revive shows you which content pieces are dying over time.
That way you know what to focus on. Just look at the ones that have declined the most and then spruce them up so you can get more rankings.
What’s cool about this tool is it will save you a lot of
time. For example, my team updates 90 pieces of content a month. The last thing
you want to do is waste a ton of time on content that never had much traffic.
Google Search Console
Most people use Google Search Console to see which keywords are driving them traffic.
My favorite way of using Search Console is to see which one of my blog posts are getting a lot of search impressions but have less than a 4% click-through rate.
I then go in and modify each of those pages to include the right keywords in my meta tags. Then I look to see which keywords I am ranking for but not really targeting yet, and then either create new content around those terms or modify existing content to also target them.
Content Ideas
Ubersuggest
has a feature similar to Buzzsumo but it is 100% free. It’s called Content
Ideas.
All you have to do is enter in a keyword or phrase and it
will show you all of the popular blog posts that contain that term.
The blog posts are then sorted by social shares, backlinks,
and search traffic.
This helps you create content around topics people want to
read, which means more traffic.
Hreflang Tag Generator
One of my biggest traffic gains has come from translating my
content.
A lot of people ask me if they would be penalized from duplicating
and translation their content.
The answer is no.
All you need to do is use the Hreflang
Tag Generator.
This tool creates tags for you to place in your HTML code so
Google knows you are targeting specific languages and countries with certain content
pages.
Portent Title Generator
For every 10 people that see your headline, only 2 on average will continue to read your content.
In other words, content marketing is all about the headline.
If you are struggling to create headlines, check out the Portent Title Generator.
Just insert a keyword or phrase and it will generate dozens
of suggestions for you.
Title Capitalization Tool
Not sure which words in your title should be capitalized?
This Title
Capitalization tool will take care of that for you.
It may not sound important to you, but if your titles look off, people may not click through from SERP results to read your content, which can decrease your rankings over time.
Grammarly
Every SEO should be using Grammarly.
Which do you think Google prefers? Ranking a blog post that reads well or one that contains a lot of spelling and grammar errors?
Grammarly helps you avoid spelling mistakes. This is really important if you want to rank on Google.
Google SERP Tool
Have you noticed that some listings on Google get cut off because the title is too long?
A big misconception is Google uses character counts for meta tags. In reality, they count pixels.
Google
SERP Tool will tell you how many pixels your meta tags contain and if they
will get cut off by Google.
It also shows you a preview of what your web pages will look
like on Google.
Rank Tracking
Google Analytics is a great tool to show you your overall
traffic, but it doesn’t tell you where you rank.
If you want to track your rankings, you’ll need to use some
tools.
Google Search Console
I know I mentioned this tool above, but Google Search Console is the most unique rank tracking tool out there.
Because this tool is from Google, they can tell you your
average ranking for any one of your pages per country.
And because the data comes from them, they average it out to give you accurate information.
You can also go back 16 months and see how your rankings
have changed over time.
Ubersuggest
Again, I know I also mentioned Ubersuggest above, but it now has a free rank tracking feature.
It provides the same features as those paid rank trackers. You can track your rankings daily for any keyword or groups of keywords for any country, city, or county.
It also saves your data for you so you can go back as far as
you want to see if your rankings have been increasing or decreasing.
Search Latte
If you want to track your rankings manually, you can do so with
Search Latte.
Just put in a keyword and select the language and country so you can see all of the sites that rank in the top 100.
You can then manually find your site and keep track to see
if you are improving or declining.
You may want to use Search Latte in combination with Excel as you can create a daily log of your rankings.
Link Building
You used to have to pay for tools if you wanted link data,
but that’s not the case anymore. Here are the free link tools you can use.
MozBar
This is probably my favorite link tool that I use.
Even though Google doesn’t use domain authority, in general, the higher the authority of a site that is linking to you, the better off you are.
MozBar
shows you the domain authority and page authority of every page on the web.
If you are going to build links, focus on the sites with the highest authority.
SEOgadget for Excel
If you are like me, you probably love using Excel when you
are building links.
SEOgadget
for Excel makes it really easy to pull in data from Majestic and Moz.
If you haven’t tried this yet, you should consider it. It
will make it easier for you to find new insights and run your own calculations.
Backlinks
Backlinks is
a free tool that shows you all of your backlinks. There are no limits in row
count or anything like that… you can just see everyone who links to you.
You can see if any of your links are dofollow or nofollow as
well as the anchor text.
You can filter the results to find backlink opportunities when researching competitors and you have the option to look up link data on a domain, subdomain, or a specific URL.
It will also show when a link was first found and last
crawled and the authority of each link.
Bulk Metrics Checker
Tired of looking up the domain and page authority manually
on each of your pages or sites?
Bulk
Metrics Checker solves that for you.
Just upload a list of URLs and within seconds you’ll have a
list of your page authority per URL. You can also do the same for domains and
upload dozens of domains at once.
Technical SEO
SEO has changed. You no longer can do just a few things and expect your site to rank well. You have to do everything if you expect to beat your competition.
And when I mean everything, that includes technical SEO.
SEO Analyzer
If you haven’t already, try running your URL through my SEO Analyzer.
It will tell you what’s wrong with each of your web pages.
From duplicate meta tags and redirect errors to sitemaps and much more… it pretty much looks at every major factor when it comes to SEO.
It will even tell you your overall site speed and what you need to fix in which order to get the maximum results.
And if you register for a free account, it automatically checks for errors each week on your behalf.
Google Analytics Referrer Spam Killer
When you are doing SEO, there is a good chance that your Google Analytics gets messed up by referral spam.
Google
Analytics Referrer Spam Killer solves that problem by connecting with your
Google Analytics account and blocking off the most common referral spam.
Once you connect it, you’ll find that your data is much more
accurate so you can make better SEO decisions.
Pagespeed Insights
Speed is everything. The faster your site loads the better
you will rank, especially when it comes to Google’s mobile index.
Pagespeed Insights
tells you what you need to fix for your site to load fast on any device.
It doesn’t matter if you are optimizing for tablet devices, desktop, or mobile… it will tell you what to fix.
Pingdom
Fixing your code is one thing, but you’ll also want to make
sure your site loads fast overall.
Your overall load time is affected by things like your
server and CDN.
Pingdom tells you
your actual load time.
With Pingdom, you can pick which location to test your load speed from and it tells you what code on your site is causing the biggest slowdown.
Website Penalty Checker
With over 3,200 algorithm updates each year to Google, how do you know if you have been affected by an update?
Is it related to a core update, your content, or link
building?
Website Penalty
Checker tells you that.
In a nice graph, it shows your traffic over time and tells you if a Google update has caused your traffic to go up or down.
Structured Data Markup Helper
A simple way to increase your search traffic is to use
schema markup.
But there is one big issue, schema markup is a bit complicated to implement. Because of that, Google created a Structured Data Markup Helper to guide you.
All you have to do is select what kind of markup you want to use, type in your URL, and go through the walkthrough wizard.
And at the end, you’ll be given code that you just paste within HTML.
Woorank
Looking for a simple SEO analysis? Woorank shows you a simple report of what’s
wrong with your web page.
All you have to do is type in your domain and within a minute you’ll see a thorough report of what you need to fix.
What I love about Woorank is that it is a great tool for beginners because of their easy-to-use interface.
SEOptimer
Just like Woorank, SEOptimer is a simple tool that gives you a technical overview of your on-page SEO as well as your content.
It breaks down things like page speed as well in addition to showing you how your website loads for both desktop and mobile devices.
You can even see social sharing data.
Varvy
Varvy provides a detailed
technical checklist of all things related to your SEO.
From your Robots.txt file and your sitemap to security settings and even your links, it covers all the bases.
If you don’t have a technical background, Varvy might be a bit complex unless you take the time to read each of their articles that outline what each tip/recommendation means.
301 Redirect Code Generator
When you are doing SEO long enough, eventually you find
yourself changing your older URLs.
But if you don’t add a 301 redirect, you’ll lose your rankings.
301
Redirect Code Generator creates the code you’ll need to tell search engines
your URLs have changed.
Panguin Tool
This tool is similar to the Website Penalty Checker but it is more accurate because it connects directly with your Analytics account.
If you think you have been hit with a Google penalty, use
the Panguin Tool.
Now if you want to see if your competition has also been
hit, this tool won’t work, but the Website Penalty Checker will.
None-the-less, they are both great tools.
Google Search Console
I have to include this tool again. Why? Because if there is something wrong with your site, such as it getting hacked, it will notify you.
It even tells you the pages that were indexed and which ones aren’t.
One thing that you have to do within your Search Console is to submit an XML sitemap.
XML Sitemaps
XML Sitemaps generates a sitemap for you that you can submit to Google Search Console.
You’ll need to do this so you can get more of your content indexed.
Submitting a sitemap doesn’t guarantee that Google will index your content, but it does help… mainly for sites with low domain authority.
Conclusion
Tools don’t have to cost money. I got into SEO because it
was the free traffic source I could leverage to compete with the big companies.
If you want to grow your search rankings, you can leverage
one of the free SEO tools above.
Sure, there are amazing paid tools as well, but why not start with the free stuff?
What other free SEO tools do you use?
The post The Ultimate List of Free SEO Tools appeared first on Neil Patel.
