When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), there are plenty of tools out there to help crunch numbers, generate content ideas and just make sure a website is running as it should. But where do you start? And do all SEO tools – and there’s a lot of them – warrant your attention?
Put simply, Google is the best place to begin your SEO journey and the answer is no, not every tool is going to be for you and your business. With furniture retailers in mind, we’ve explored 16 tools, well a bit more when incorporating most of Google’s tools – but we’ll get into that shortly, that are either free or have free plans available when practicing good SEO.
Ready to jump in? You may need a coffee, or two, for this as we uncover some useful tips and tools to help your website. If you’re already doing all of these, then hats off you to!
Google Tools
Let’s get straight to the point here. Google offers a vast number of free tools that are vital when implement good SEO into your website. Not only do they cover the key information through Google Analytics, but they also serve up some clever insights that shouldn’t be left untouched. Oh, and by the way, this will be a brief summary as we feel the best way to explore is by you actually exploring, so here we go.
Google Analytics – all the data you could need that comes through your website. Traffic acquisition, popular pages, geographical locations, search terms and everything from top to bottom level stats.
Google Search Console – this highlights the core vitals of your website and flags up any errors to fix. It also shows search term data too, as well as scores to maintain a healthy site.
Google Ads Keyword Planner – enter a keyword or group of keywords into the tool, and it will return all sorts of helpful stats to guide your keyword strategy, including monthly search volume, competition, and even suggested terms.
Google PageSpeed Insights – checks the speed and usability of your site on multiple devices, grading its performance on a score from 0 – 100, while also providing tips on how to make it better.
Google Trends – shows the popular search terms over time, which is useful for uncovering seasonal variations in search popularity, like bedroom furniture for example. The tool will throw up data on search history with a score, the highest being most popular. See and compare what terms your customers are searching for.
Google Mobile-Friendly Test – checks your site’s mobile-friendliness and also tells you what went wrong and what you need to fix (if there’s an issue of course!).
Google My Business – create a free Business Profile on Google to manage your business from Google Search and Maps, which verifies your business and helps to start reaching more customers. This is a must!
There are other Google tools for the more advanced SEO pro, but the seven just mentioned are more than enough to get you going.
Ok, now Google is covered, what other tools are out there? Here’s our thoughts on 15 more. On coffee two yet?
Answer The Public
Answer The Public leverages Google Suggest to find all of the questions people may have related to any industry or keyword that you type in to its search. You can tailor content around these questions to potentially appear in search results.
MozBar
You may’ve heard of SemRush, Ahrefs and Moz, which are all-in-one SEO pro software that come at a cost. However, each provide free elements and one that is worth exploring is the MozBar. It’s a free Chrome Extension that makes it easy to get link metrics for pages and domains as you search, displaying the Domain Authority, Page Authority and number of backlinks for sites. It’s handy if you want to research a particular page quickly or have a snoop on the competition.
Broken Link Checker
This tool is a must to use at least once a month. The Free Broken Link Checker finds dead links on any website in minutes. Just paste the URL and let it do its thing. Remember, broken links impact how Google ranks and crawls your site. No broken links = happy Google bots.
Screaming Frog
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that helps you improve onsite SEO, by extracting data and auditing for common SEO issues. It’s downloadable and crawls 500 URLs for free. It can flag up any missing meta data or low content pages for example, and tons of other stuff too.
Similarweb
This platform provides web analytics services and offers its users information on their clients’ and competitors’ web traffic and performance.
SerpStat
Serpstat is another all-in-one platform for online competitors and backlinks research, keywords analysis and website issues analysis with recommendations on how to fix them.
Siteliner
This is a website analysis tool to find duplicate content, broken links, and much more. It may flag up two pages with the same content or keywords that are competing when trying to rank. Fixing these will tell Google which page it should be ranking and could boost its performance.
Social Blade
Social Blade gives all users access to its public database which is able to provide global analytics for any content creator, live streamer, or brand. So, say you’ve got a fancy new furniture promotion in your store and want to get the word out. Search for social profiles through this tool can find potential influencers or accounts that could be worth a partnership.
Local SERP Checker
This checks Google SERPs for any keyword. View localised search results for any country, city or post code on Google and Google Maps. Not sure who your competition is? This will help show you who is near you under a specific search term. For example, search furniture in your area and you will see related businesses pop up.
Orbit Media Campaign URL builder
There are many free tools out there to build custom tags on URLs when either doing a promo or running ads. This tool easily tags URLs so you can track campaigns in Google Analytics.
Keyword Hero
The first of our keyword tool picks. The Keyword Hero shows you which keywords users used to land on your page in your Google Analytics account. It has a free plan where you can analyse up to 2,000 sessions and provides a bit more detail in search term acquisition than the ‘not provided’ message that sometimes appears in Analytics.
Keyword Surfer
This is a 100% free Chrome extension that allows you to see search volumes directly in Google search results. It’s one of the fastest ways to reveal search data, run keyword research, and get content guidelines directly in Google Search. Surfs up!
The Keywords Everywhere
Another browser add-on that can be easily installed on either Chrome or Firefox, this tool shows you monthly search volume, CPC and competition data of keywords on multiple websites, giving you an idea of trending terms or ones to avoid.
Keyword Tool
The final keyword tool is Keyword Tool. This generates up to 750+ long-tail keyword suggestions for every search term, which can help with content inspiration or building keyword lists to explore further.
Yoast SEO
Finally, you’ve made it to the end of the list with Yoast SEO. This helps optimise blog posts for search engines. Upon entering the main keyword for your blog post, Yoast SEO will suggest how to tweak your content to optimise it for search engines.
There you have it! Remember, most of these tools have paid for upgrades but the free versions do pack a powerful punch when getting to grips with all things SEO. We hope you have found some value and that some of these can help your business.
Don’t neglect SEO as we’re sure your competition isn’t. Time for another coffee!