Social media platforms can restrict organic growth to favour paid ads or even disappear altogether, but search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy you can always rely on! The free SEO tools listed in this guide will help you optimise your WordPress site in several ways.
The good news is, there’s no need to heed the call of snake-oil SEO marketers, especially when there are so many great free SEO tools that can positively impact your rankings, as long as you’re willing to take a look—little time to learn its ins and outs.
In this post, we’ve put together a collection of five free SEO tools for WordPress (and others) to help you improve your Google rankings, including our advice on how they can help you climb the ladder to the top of search queries. Let us begin!
The best free SEO tools for WordPress
Pingdom Speed Test is an easy tool to measure how long your site is loaded to the millisecond precisely. Enter the website URL you want to test, select one of the server locations available and then sit back and write a detailed report for a few seconds.
In addition to loading speeds, Pingdom will also compare how your site compares to its database and archived tests and provide you with a list of performance information that you can put into action to improve your metrics:
A list of performance statistics to improve your ranking on Google.
Now, perhaps you’re not too worried about how fast your site loads, but search engines do. So if you want to improve your ranking on Google, even slowing down your page speed by a couple of milliseconds could be the ticket to getting there.
There are many ways to help improve your page speed times when it comes to WordPress, and we recently covered ten of them in a two-part series.KWFinder lets you look for specific keywords for detailed information. You have to type the first keyword, click on “Search Keywords”, and wait a few seconds for the results to be computed by KWFinder.
The report by KWFinder shows how popular your keyword is, how the popularity and associated keywords you might want to consider changing over time: KWFinder reports
Each listed keyword also receives a “Keyword Difficulty” or “KD” rating. This is calculated from the strength of the link profile using a system created by Mangools, the creator of KWFinder.
Keywords are scale 0 to 100, with the less complicated 0 and the most complex 100. The KD is emphasised in red, yellow, or green, so you can see for one look which keywords can be easily ranked.
KWFinder offers premium plans, but visitors to the KWFinder website can look for two keywords a day without registration. You can also register for a free program with up to five searches per day of keywords. This is sufficient to fulfil most small-scale websites’ needs.[/vc_column_text]
3. Chrome DevTools
Chrome DevTools is a set of web development and debugging tools built into the Chrome browser. They include an elements panel (which allows you to manipulate your site’s CSS and see what changes look like in real-time), a console that provides you with real-time diagnostics, and a networking section with information about your site’s performance, among many others.
However, our main interest lies in the Chrome DevTools dedicated to providing information on page performance and loading speed. To access these free SEO tools, you must first install Google Chrome and then head to the site you will be testing. Next, click the Inspect option, right-clicking everywhere on the page and click on the Network tab once you are there. To start your first test, press the F5 key:
The Chrome Developer Tools Network tab displays a screenshot.
Once the test is complete, a list of all requests made and the time required for the site and an overall load time are submitted. This list shows which elements need optimisation, although images, CSS and JavaScript are the usual suspects. In the previous article, we covered image optimization, and it can be easily managed using the appropriate plugin, both CSS and JavaScript.
4. Alexa
Free SEO tools – Alexa home page
When we refer to Alexa, we must distinguish between their free site overview service and their premium marketing package, which only offers a short free trial period. Since we are talking about free SEO tools, we will focus on the first one and how it can help you improve your ranking on Google.
Alexa tracks your site’s global and national rankings using its algorithms along with historical data, allowing you to see how your performance is progressing over time. The overview also divides the countries from which your visitors come, which from a geo-targeting perspective is useful:
Most importantly, it will show you a general outline of the best performing search engine keywords. With this data, you can decipher the content performing well and then use the information to schedule more related posts for your WordPress blog, reinforce the underperforming ones with better content, or remove the poor quality keywords.
5. Google keyword planner
The Google Keyword Planner allows you to get historical trend and search volume data for the keywords you choose, analyze how much competition there is for them, and analyze information on related keywords organized by relevance:
An example of the Google Keyword Planner in action.
This data allows you to select and build your WordPress posts from high-performance keywords quickly. These keywords can also be used with the Yoast SEO plugin to improve Google’s ranking.
If you want to save time and get the best results, our professional search engine optimization services are here to help you with the tedious task of marketing.
