Working as a full-time Digital Marketing Strategist means you wear many hats to help your organization. One moment you may be tasked with crafting email communications or installing tracking across a website. The next, you could be setting up new digital ads or writing a new blog post for the site. But one of the most challenging and most time-consuming areas is SEO.
Experienced SEOs understand that SEO best practices and benchmarks are ever-changing, even if the end goal is always that #1 organic position in search results. It is important that we stay abreast of these changes and adapt our strategies and recommendations to stay ahead of the competition.
After all, SEO is the marathon of digital marketing, and Google SERPs are the course.
In this blog, you will get an inside look at free helpful tools that can help inform your SEO strategy and improve your marketing outcomes.
5 Free SEO Tools for Enhanced Optimizations
1. SEO Meta (Chrome Extension)
One of the best tools you can use is the SEO Meta Chrome Extension. This tool allows SEOs to quickly identify important page information for optimizations. Instead of manually crawling the page’s html code, SEOs can use this free tool to find page titles, meta descriptions, header hierarchy, image alt tagging and more!
This information can be used for several SEO strategies: SEOs can find missing or broken links on a page without spending time clicking on everything on the page. Or you can identify meta descriptions and page titles that need a keyword focus or do not meet character requirements.
This is important because SEO is about bridging the communication between search engine crawlers and human users. When a user searches for “pepperoni pizza shops,” they are likely not interested in finding a blog on pepperoni pizza recipes. So, if your classic pizza recipes website does not want to sell pizzas and only offers recipes, your page title and meta description should clearly reflect that intent. And this tool can help you identify where you need to do some work.
2. Lighthouse (Browser Tool)
Lighthouse is a powerful tool that comes readily installed on your Google Chrome browser. You can find it in the Developer Tools tab in your browser settings. This amazing SEO tool takes seconds to crawl your website to identify dozens of performance metrics and errors. These reports include a grade (1 -100) and outlines SEO performance, mobile compatibility, content load times, and even JavaScript errors.
SEOs can leverage this more technical SEO data to provide developers with enhanced optimization opportunities. The best example of enhanced optimizations one could offer using this tool is improvements to page load speeds. These are usually a quick win for page performance in SERPs, as Google will reward you for faster loading content. The bottlenecks in speed are often due to outdated image format, or failure to “lazy load” content further down the page which is not visible or necessary at first encounter. The Lighthouse audit is an excellent starting point to guide SEO strategy.
3. Grammarly (Chrome Extension)
If you are an SEO that also writes on-page content or even email correspondences, you probably know about the magic that is Grammarly. This tool is not only a spell checker, but also provides the writer with phrase suggestions, tone, and collegiate grammar correction. Grammarly offers a desktop app and a powerful Chrome extension that works on any website’s text input fields.
SEOs can use Grammarly to craft a variety of content. This tool is perfect for emails, short and long form blogs, and even meta descriptions. The tone indicator is great for those technical writers trying to maintain a professional tone or for creative writers trying to convey friendliness. The versatility of this tool is its best quality, besides being free to use!
4. Climb Marketing: Meta Description Pixel Counter
Every SEO knows the struggle of respecting character and pixel counts in search engine results pages (SERPs) and complying with SEO benchmarks. The Climb Marketing: Meta Description Pixel Counter takes the headache out of compliance! Oftentimes we work from spreadsheets that track and outline our optimizations and recommendations. This tool can take dozens of meta descriptions, page titles and content pieces and returns the character and pixel counts for each blurb. It goes without saying that this is a must-have in your SEO toolbox that allows you to spend that saved time working on other important tasks.
5. People Also Ask
The final free tool worth highlighting is People Also Ask powered by SearchResponse.io. This website conveniently gathers suggested search queries related to your input. These are the terms and phrases typically found in the “people also ask” section of SERPs – hence the name! This information is a great source of long-tailed keywords for blogs and content type ideas for SEOs i.e., whitepapers, infographics, etc. We can also utilize this tool to identify top domains in each space, opening them up to deeper analysis and ultimately deeper insights into ranking.
Crossing the Finish Line
Search engine optimization can be a daunting task for both beginners and professionals. We must address on-page user experience, fix broken links, write content, and much more. These free tools can help ease the lift and give SEOs out-of-the-norm insight into your website.
If you found this list helpful, or use other free programs and tools, let us know on LinkedIn!