Most SEO tools that are needed to do this job effectively cost money…sometimes A LOT of money on a monthly basis. There’s really no way around it and it’s just the cost of doing business. BUT, there are a number of free tools that, while they can’t fully replace the high-ticket ones, can get you going down the road to good SEO. Here are a sampling of the tools we use at Tactical Ranking (both free and paid).
Ahrefs
Ahrefs has a number of useful tools which allow you to research competitor’ backlinks, keyword, content ideas, as well as track ranking and run full site audits. Monthy subscriptions start at $99, so it isn’t what I’d call super cheap.
But Ahrefs does have a number of useful free tools here. We use the backlink checker and domain authority checker regularly to get a quick idea of what we’re facing both with competitors and client websites.
Majestic
Majestic has a ton of features; too many to go into here, so I’ll just mention the main ones. We use the Trust Factor (the “quality” of backlinks pointing to a site) and the Citation Flow (“quantity” of backlinks) to get an idea of how our backlink campaign is doing as well as gauging competitor’s backlinks.
There are also a number of keyword tools and dashboards and the monthly rate starts at $49.
Pingdom Website Speed Test
There has been some debate in SEO circles with respect to how much ranking weight Google puts into how fast a site loads. But it’s good practice to optimize the load speed of your site to give your visitors a better experience as well as contributing to your overall ranking factors.
Pingdom is free tool to check loading speed. A good rule of thumb is to shoot for load times under 2 seconds.
SEO Scan
This is just a simple, and free, scanner that will check on-page SEO elements of a webpage, including title, description, H1 and H2 tags. It’s just an easy way to see how optimized the basic on-page elements are.
Wordstream Keyword Tool
Another free tool, this site is useful for researching keywords. It returns monthly search volumes as well as high and low bids for ads and relative competition level for the keywords.