A marketer is always in search of something that can help them in their job. The variety of information on the internet increases every day, making it harder for an ordinary person to get quality and accurate information about products and services.
Google is one of the most popular search engines used by both individuals and companies all over the world. Moreover, Google's algorithm is in charge of over 90% of the world's traffic, and it makes it easier than ever to get in front of your ideal customers.
Have you been wondering how to rank your website in Google with the changing scenarios and fluctuations in search results? Well, you need some tools to improve visibility and search engine rankings.
In this blog, we have shared the most useful free SEO tools by Google that SEO professionals must use to boost their SEO efforts.
Before we start, let us introduce the basic definition of SEO and why it is so hyped?
What is SEO?
SEO or Search engine optimization is the act of getting traffic from "free" (organic) search results on websites like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
SEO doesn't cost you anything to implement and can be done by anyone with basic internet skills. Often, it takes the form of backlinks, editing page content, and meta tags, to name a few steps.
The only way you can get a high ranking on a Google search result is by getting quality backlinks from other websites. This form of marketing depends not on the amount of money you spend but on the value and relevance that your website brings to your targeted keywords or phrases.
Without spending a single penny, SEO does provide you with the opportunity to reach out to potential customers in your niche.
The reason why SEO is popular is that it can boost your business and increase revenue. In a nutshell, you have to get in front of people looking for what you offer or sell online.
Why do you need Google SEO Tools?
Now that you know what SEO is, why would Google provide us with free tools when it has already made billions of dollars by selling our data to advertisers?
Yes, Google makes money when you use its services (Gmail, YouTube, etc.). However, Google's main source of profit is ad revenue which makes off traffic to your website.
Getting ranked on the first page in Google indeed increases the chances of people finding your site, resulting in increased conversions and sales.
To rank on the first page of search results, you need organic traffic from Google organic.
However, getting your site ranked is a tough nut to crack and needs consistent efforts on your part. Since the latest algorithm update, Google considers various metrics to index the pages on their search engines.
Google considers the following metrics:
- Page Rank: Google looks at the quality of your site and its relevance to search terms. The higher the PageRank, the better is your website's link authority.
- Domain Authority: This metric measures how well a domain's pages rank in relation to other websites on a particular topic.
- Page Speed: Google looks at your site's load time to determine if it's faster than others. The higher the speed, the better is user experience.
- Snippets: Google takes snippets of your content and uses them to determine the overall quality of your site. The more relevant and unique, the better is Google's trust in you.
- Mobile-Friendly: Google uses a variety of metrics to determine the mobile-friendly nature of your site. It takes factors like percentage of traffic from mobile devices, on-page, and technical SEO into consideration.
- Sitemap: Google uses the sitemap to determine how well your site is indexed. It takes a look at the number of pages, links, and crawl rate to assess your site's indexability.
- Social Media: Google uses social media metrics to determine if your website can be trusted or not.
What are the best free Google SEO Tools?
Google Search Console or webmaster tool
Google search console is an official tool provided by Google to monitor the performance of your website in organic search results. Google search console
This free tool allows you to find errors with your site, indexed pages, etc. It also helps you understand how well a user interacts with your website, which search engines use keywords to come up in the search results, etc.
Using Google search console, you can:
- Check how many pages are indexed and what is indexed,
- Check if your site has a manual penalty,
- See any broken links or crawl errors,
- Check robots.txt file to make sure that Google does not index certain files on the website that you do not want them to do so and get information about your structure data such as title and description of each page in HTML format.
It gives a detailed report of several important metrics such as:
- Keyword analysis: It shows the search queries used by users to find your website, pages that are indexed, and how many visitors have come from a particular keyword.
- Page speed analysis: This tool will tell you if your site is fast or not. It also tells you how many seconds it takes for your page to load.
- Crawl rate: This is the number of pages indexed by Google daily. If there are fewer than 100 pages indexed, this metric will be zero.
- Link analysis: Here, you can see the number of links pointing to your website. You can also see the number of external domains linking to your site and the number of unique pages that link to it.
- Sitemap: This tool shows you how many XML sitemaps have been created for your website, their date and whether they are in a standard or extended format.
Google PageSpeed Insights
The Google Page Speed Insight allows you to identify and fix any speed issues on your website. It is a lightweight tool that helps you find the outperformance of your site and the steps you need to take for your site to load quickly and efficiently.
It helps you understand how fast or slow your site loads and gives you suggestions on improving it.
The best part about this tool is that it will not only tell you how fast your site loads but also show you what can be done to improve it.
Google Page Speed Insight gives scores to your page speed and divides it into various metrics.
It consists of four suggestions:
- Improve page load: This is the most important suggestion. It will tell you how to improve your page speed by eliminating unnecessary resources, using compression techniques, and reducing request size.
- Improve caching: This is the second suggestion, and it will tell you how to improve your page load by caching resources used frequently. It will help you reduce image size, which reduces bandwidth consumption.
- Reduce render-blocking JavaScript: This is the third suggestion, and it will tell you how to improve your page load by eliminating unnecessary JavaScript files. It will also tell you how to use external resources instead of using in-page JavaScript.
- Reduce server response time: This is the fourth suggestion, and it will help you identify what you can do to improve your page load by reducing server response time. It will also tell you how to reduce the number of requests and eliminate unnecessary resources from your pages.
Google Analytics
If you are not using a tool like Google Analytics in digital marketing, you are missing something big.
Google Web analytics is a powerful tool that helps you understand the traffic on your website and how it behaves.
It is an essential part of digital marketing because it allows you to determine what keywords bring visitors, which pages they visit, and how long they stay on your site.
You can set up goals, milestones, and reports in Google Analytics. It helps you to measure your performance and allows you to understand the demographics of your visitors.
Google Analytics helps you find out which keywords bring traffic to your site, how much money they spend, and what pages on your website they go to next. It also gives a detailed report of each visitor's behavior.
If you want to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign, you need to have a dashboard that shows the performance. Google Analytics provides this functionality for you by providing you with an easy-to-read and actionable report of all relevant data.
Google Ads Keyword Planner
Google AdWords keyword planner is a free Google SEO keyword tool that allows you to find the best keywords for your website. You can check the keyword popularity and traffic volume, CPC, and competition for each keyword.
It also suggests other keywords that may be of use to optimize your website with the right keywords.
The keyword planner allows you to search for specific keywords or just type in a broad term, and it provides the best related words for you. It also advises on the popularity of each keyword, how many searches are made on Google per month etc.
Use it while coming up with content ideas by researching what people are looking for and what they want to read. You can then target this set of people through ads and articles.
It is a good way of getting more website traffic with a minimal budget because you will pay only when somebody clicks on your ad.
How to use Keyword planner?
Enter a keyword or group of keywords into the tool, and Google Keyword Planner will return statistics about how many people search for those words on Google each month, as well as data on competitors' positions in SERPs (search engine results pages), which can help you choose your keyphrase.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a very powerful tool that most content marketers often ignore. It can show you what people are searching for in the real world, which is a good way of getting your content noticed.
Google trends is a great way to keep track of the latest trending topics in your niche.
It helps you find out what people are looking for right now and which words they frequently use to search online. It helps you understand what the audience wants so that you can tailor your articles to suit their needs.
You can also use Google Trends to find out what people are searching for and what they want. It shows the latest searches by volume in different regions, countries, time zones, and languages. You can get an idea of how your website is doing at any given moment in terms of traffic.
How to use Google Trends?
To use Google Trends, go to the home page and click on "Trends." It will open a pop-up window.
Click on the search box in the middle of the screen and enter your keyword(s). You can also select from topics such as general interest, tech, and news.
Once you have done this, Google Trends will give you a graph that shows the volume of searches for your keyword(s) over time. It will also show how it compares to other keywords with a similar volume on Google.
You can also click on the "Search Traffic" tab to see where people are searching for your keyword(s).
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free service that sends you an email when new articles are published about your keywords.
It is a free service offered by Google that sends emails with links to articles based on keywords of your choice. You can use Google Alerts for any topic of interest you want to keep an eye on.
The SEO benefit is that you gain access to highly targeted, relevant content perfect for building backlinks.
How to set up Google Alerts for SEO?
There are two ways to use Google Alerts for your SEO campaigns. You can either create alerts around specific keywords or around broad topics you are interested. It is easier to start with a broad topic that interests you, but it may take more time to gain relevant backlinks.
Once you have decided about what you want to monitor, it is time to set up your alerts.
To set up Google Alerts for SEO, go to the home page and click on "Alerts."
In the search box, enter your keywords. You can also choose from topics such as general interest, tech, and news. Once you have done this, it will give you a list of search terms.
Click on "Create Alert," and you will be taken to a page where you can set up your alert for Google Alerts. It is recommended that you check the box next to "Broad topic."
Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Here's a big thing: Around 60% of the searches now come from mobile and tablet devices.
The Google Mobile-Friendly Test is a tool that helps you make sure your website will load well on mobile devices. It checks how easy it is for people to navigate your site and check out the content.
The search giant gives the page speed testing tool a score to check page speed. The tools is useful because it can help you determine if your site needs to be optimized for mobile devices or not.
Google Mobile-Friendly Test is useful because it will show you if your site needs to be optimized for mobile devices. If you get a low score, there are steps that can be taken to make sure your site loads faster on mobile devices.
Another similar tool like Google Page Speed insight Lighthouse or Pingdom.
Lighthouse checks for site speed on mobile devices. The tool is more technical than the Google Mobile-Friendly Test, and it gives you a score of 0 to 100.
Pingdom also does similar things like Lighthouse, but they do not give you a score. They show how many resources your site uses when it loads.
Whitespark's Google Review Link Generator
According to a report by BrightLocal, 93% of consumers read online reviews as a part of their purchasing decisions.
Whitespark provides a free tool that allows you to create a handful of different links to share your Google business reviews.
The links created by this generator provide rich anchor text, which will positively impact local ranking signals and help drive more clicks from the search engine results pages to your business's Google My Business page.
If you have a business located in the US, UK, or Australia and want to get more reviews from Google, Whitespark's tool can help.
Google My Business
Google My Business is a free tool that helps you attract potential customers to your business, increase online visibility and enhance customer engagement. You can manage all of the major components of your Google My Business account right from Gmail.
The main purpose of the tool is to help local businesses increase their local visibility on Google search results pages by connecting with customers in the form of reviews, photos, and videos.
The tool allows you to create a Google My Business page, edit business information such as address, hours of operation and phone number. You can also manage social media accounts that are connected with your Google My Business account.
Google My Business is an effective way for small businesses to be found on Google Maps and Search, allowing them to stand out in local search results. As you manage your business's exposure on Google, you can keep track of important information right in Gmail, like daily visitors and customer reviews.
It is important to have a Google location listed in your Google My Business account. You can get a business listed by submitting information about your location and it will then be linked to the main page of your business's website.
Google Chrome browser
We all know that Google Chrome is a web browser, but how does it help with SEO?
The fact that it is the most popular browser on the web, and there are many extensions for it, makes it more useful than other browsers like Firefox or Safari.
Google Chrome gives a major boost to SEO and content marketing as it comes with a number of free extensions for assistance.
You can easily use these SEO extensions by tapping on the extension icon. Some of the most popular Chrome extensions for the SEOs are:
- Ahrefs SEO Toolbar
- Grammarly grammar checker
- SEOQuake research toolbar.
- Moz SEO toolbar.
- Lighthouse browser extension.
- SEMRush for SEO
Once you find the one that suits your needs, it can become a valuable part of using and managing your website as well as an important research tool for content ideas, which helps increase traffic and leads.
Google Voice
Google Voice is a free telecommunications service that offers voice mail, voice call forwarding, voicemail transcription, and low cost international calling. Google Voice also allows the user to have multiple phone numbers assigned to one device.
In 2005 as Gmail was becoming popular as an email service, Google decided to expand into other telecommunications services. With the creation of Google Voice, users were able to connect with others using traditional phone calls or by using text messages.
The user can choose which numbers should be used for voice mail and sending texts; each number belongs to only one account holder.
Google Voice is completely free for both domestic and international calls; additionally, each user is given a free number to use. The call quality can vary depending on the internet connection, and it is less reliable than a traditional phone.
It is a great solution for entrepreneurs with several business lines but lacks the extra funds to pay for each one. Instead of paying one bill every month with fluctuating minutes, each person can have a new phone number that can be used as needed.
The service is easy to use and has a simple interface, making it perfect for those who are not tech-savvy. With the click of a button, users can record voicemail greetings or text messages in almost any language.
They allow you to take advantage of text messages in almost any language. They allow you to take advantage of text-to-speech functions and Google Voice will transcribe the message for you - even if it is misspelled!
Google sheets
Google sheets is a part of Google Drive, is a tool in the form of a cloud-based spreadsheet.
It can be used to track website data and calculations in real-time when multiple people have access to it.
It can be used to record data, organize information and share the same spreadsheet with multiple people.
Google sheets has a variety of features that makes it different from other similar tools.
These features include:
1. Add-ons: You can add different types of functionality to your spreadsheet, such as video uploads and online calculators. The possibilities are endless with Google sheets!
2. Responsive design: The tools in the form of spreadsheets are designed for responsive devices so that you can use them on any device and the same spreadsheet will look the same. This makes it easier to organize your information and collaborate with others.
3. Search: With Google sheets, you can search for specific cells and words in a spreadsheet so that you don't have to manually go through all the cells.
4. Accessibility: Google sheets is accessible to everyone, regardless of their ability to use technology or knowledge about spreadsheets.
Here are some examples when Google Sheets might come in handy:
- Creating new keywords and keeping track of them (when you need to know which keywords are performing well, which ones aren't, etc.)
- Keeping track of PPC campaign data (such as conversions, cost per click, specific keyword CTRs at certain times of day or under different circumstances)
- Compiling notes about competition - share your research with others who are involved in your project to make sure you're all on the same page.
- Tracking an SEO project - note the number of indexed pages by URL, changes in rankings over time, etc.
Conclusion
When it comes to SEO, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. The goal of SEO is to drive traffic and leads to your website or landing page, but that doesn't mean you can't get a lot of value out of the process if you use the right tools.
Google SEO tools can help you manage your SEO strategy and improve your chances of ranking on the first page of Google.
Choose the best suite of Google free SEO tools and put them to work for you.
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