Free SEO Tools That’ll Add Instant Value to Your Digital Marketing

Whether you’re just getting started with digital marketing and SEO or are looking for tools to add value to your programs without dipping into your marketing budget, I wanted to share some of our favorite free SEO tools that can come in handy for any digital marketing campaign.

SEOquake

SEOquake is one of my most frequently used SEO tools because it analyzes important areas of your website in a matter of seconds. The browser extension (I use Chrome) makes it even easier by providing detailed analysis of whatever webpage you’re on in only a couple of clicks. The features I use the most are Keywords Density and Diagnosis.

Keywords Density shows you the Title Tag and Meta Description of the webpage you’re currently viewing. This is useful for both competitive analysis as well as keeping track of how you’re describing your web content to search engines.

Keywords Density also gives you a snapshot overview of all the keywords used on a particular webpage. This is especially helpful for competitive analysis as it gives you an idea of which keywords your competitors are targeting. There are many tools (both free and paid) that offer this analysis – this is just one option that I prefer to use.

Diagnosis comes in handy especially when you’re conducting an SEO audit for prospective clients because it allows you to pull specific data and examples from the client’s website without giving away all of your secrets for free.

Diagnosis will perform a quick analysis of the current webpage and show you how the page performs across a number of areas important to search engines. Again, it shows Title Tag and Meta Description (and notes if your tags are too long according to search engine parameters), as well as HTML headings, missing ALT tags on images and text to HTML ratio, among others. It also shows advice for each tactic so you know how to make fixes according to SEO best practices.

You can pull a Diagnosis of your prospective client’s homepage to show the errors on one particular page without giving a full-blown audit before they sign a contract.

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer, a free tool from SEOmoz, is great for comparing your site to up to five competitors for performance in areas such as page authority, domain authority (both SEOmoz metrics), inbound and outbound links and social shares, among others. This is another tool that’s great for prospective SEO client audits and proposals because it shows clients how their websites stack up compared to competitors in areas they may not have considered before.

Google Keyword Tool

Although Google Keyword Tool is meant to be used with a paid AdWords campaign (you need an account to unlock all the functionality), you can still extract valuable data about the demand and competition level of keywords you wish to target organically. For example, the keyword ‘digital marketing software’ receives approximately 1,000 global monthly searches, and the competition level for this word is high – which means a lot of websites are targeting this term (see below screenshot).

The tool will also suggest similar keywords to the one in your query to give you alternative, relevant options for your keyword targeting.

Google Keyword Tool can come in handy whether you’re building your very first keyword list or looking to expand and/or switch directions in your keyword and content strategies.

Do you have other free SEO tools you find useful? Feel free to leave them in the comments!