Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most valuable utilities for online marketing. In short, SEO captures a range of techniques designed to improve search engine rankings. So, your site will be one of the first results on Google. By being one of the first results, customers are more likely to visit your site. A vast majority of visitors go to one of the first results, rather than scrolling through them. Going all-in on SEO is a great way to attract potential customers, but you have to be smart about it. Use these SEO tools for beginners to get the best results.
Google Tools
Google provides a number of SEO tools for beginners that are easy and free to take advantage of. Google Search Console is a great way to test how your site performs on phones and Core Web Vital benchmarks. It also lets you update sitemaps and check your search results performance.
Google Analytics lets you track improvements to your site optimization. You can see how many people are visiting your site, how long they stay, if they’re interacting, and more. It’s a great utility to see what results you’re getting from your work. It can also pinpoint why your efforts may not be achieving what you had hoped.
On-page Tools
On-page SEO tools are a collection of tools that can help you fix elements that appear to the user, mainly content, keywords, title tags, and URLs. Further, 36% of experts view headlines and title tags as the most important SEO item. There’s a wide variety of them, so we’ll walk through a few.
Google Trends
Google Trends is Google’s handy tool for tracking what topics are trending over time. Once you know what people are searching for, you can fine-tune your site content to match what’s trending. Remember to check back with trends periodically, as they’re always changing.
Other On-page Tools
There are plenty of other tools that can help your on-page functions. FAQFox is an SEO tool for beginners that inventories multiple websites for discussion topics. Basically, this lets you know what people are talking about. This lets you get up close with your desired audience and their potential questions or concerns. Address these and market accordingly to bring in large amounts of new customers.
KeywordsFX breaks down SEO to its most essential parts: keywords. Once you’ve identified an appropriate keyword for your marketing, enter it into KeywordsFX and it will suggest many more complimentary ones. The more keywords you have, the better coverage you’ll accomplish. You don’t want to miss out on this SEO tool for beginners.
Tools such as LSI Graph, Moz’s Keyword Explorer, and Keywordtool.io can give you detailed keyword metrics such as trends and search volume. However, they aren’t free to get their full value. Ultimately it’s up to you to decide whether to use these tools.
Off-page Tools
Off-page tools are meant to connect you with other websites to enhance your own optimization. 75% of digital marketers generate backlinks through content marketing. Here are some tools to consider:
Backlink Checker
Backlink Checker is an SEO tool for beginners from Ahrefs that specializes in seeing how many other sites link to your page. It will show you the top 100 backlinks and plenty of other valuable SEO info to take advantage of. And, it’s completely free. It’s a simple way of getting all your links set up properly.
Outreach
Outreach is not as much a tool as it is a practice. Essentially, it’s the practice of reaching out to other sites to have them link to yours. You can’t build a network of great links on your own. There are specified tools that can help this process, though. Hunter.io is an SEO tool for beginners that can get you people’s emails with a minimal amount of information. That saves you a lot of time digging through directories to find who to contact.
BuzzSumo is another great tool that lets you figure out which sites to connect to. You can research influencers, their subscribers, and contact info. There are still people skills to put to work here, but these tools take care of the research aspects of Outreach.
Technical Tools
Technical aspects of SEO are some of the more difficult SEO practices, but there is a good selection of SEO tools for beginners that help in this area. Technical SEO focuses on your site’s performance and index capability from search engines. Google indexes sites to get their info and display them. Screaming Frog is the best tool in this area. It will scan your whole website and let you know about any broken links, errors, duplicate content, and more. It will also generate you an XML sitemap to better help search engines index the site.
Websites with 100-millisecond delays lose potential revenue as conversion rates decrease 7%. You can measure how fast your pages are on devices with PageSpeed Insights and run a Mobile-Friendly Test through Google to see how user-friendly your pages are on mobile devices.
Good SEO processes start with checking what you already have. You accomplish this through an SEO audit, which tells you how efficient your current SEO is and what areas of the site need more work. There’s no better place to start with SEO tools for beginners than assessing your current efforts.
And Many More
This list is far from complete on all the SEO tools for beginners out there. There are plenty of great alternatives that you can find by doing some research and watching some videos. So, if you don’t like any of the tools we’ve mentioned, don’t worry. There are still options. If you want to minimize your research, though, you can’t go wrong with any of the tools here. Mix and match however you see fit, and your site’s SEO will improve with a little effort.