My Must-Have (and Free!) SEO Tools

Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and measuring your performance can feel really overwhelming. Sometimes, it can feel cost-prohibitive as well.

However, there are several free online tools you can use to improve your SEO, measure your performance, and identify things to fix!

Leveraging Free Google Tools

Google is the most often used search engine, and thankfully they also offer free tools to help you show up better in search results. I highly recommend every business utilize these three Google tools:

​Google Search Console – Search Console can tell you what pages on your site are being indexed by Google. More importantly, which ones are not being indexed and why?

In addition to identifying and addressing indexing issues, you can also request that Google index new pages of your site, which is a great step to include in your workflow every time you add content.

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​Google Analytics – GA4 shows important information about your website traffic, your customer journey, and user engagement.

You can start by connecting GA4 to your site and looking at traffic volume, what pages are visited, and where users are coming from (how did they find you?) These insights can help you make decisions about your marketing plan, such as:

• Are your marketing dollars spent on tactics visibly driving traffic to your site? If not, it might be time to make some adjustments.
• Are the important pages of your site getting traffic and engagement? If not, adjusting your customer journey or your messaging could help.
• Are you getting enough organic traffic, and is that growing over time? If not, it's probably time for an SEO audit.

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​Google Business Profile – Google Business Profiles are essential for local businesses and are often shown above website results in a Google search with local or transactional search intent.

Be sure to fill out every single section with keyword-rich information, and check back often to update and refresh the listing content.

Pro Tip: Repurpose social media content to your Google Business Profile as an “update” once a week for a Local SEO boost to your business profile.

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My Go-To Free SEO Tools

Google isn’t the only one offering free tools to help you elevate your SEO. Here are a few additional tools you must add to your toolbox!

​Broken Link Checker – Type your website URL into the search box to check for broken links. Broken links happen for a variety of reasons, but they create a poor user experience and are low hanging fruit to identify and update. Run this search monthly and pop in to fix any broken links identified.

​Tinify – I absolutely love this free tool to compress your website images before uploading them to your site. Large images are absolute killers for website performance. I wrote a whole blog post just about website images using Tinify (it also includes my image workflow!)

​FREE SEO Tool – I created this free SEO tool to address a few of the most common SEO issues I see during SEO audits. These are all things that are easy to fix if you have even basic access to your website backend, so you can DIY these yourself!

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SEO can feel overwhelming, but I hope these free tools can help you get started. Of course, please reach out if you have any questions or want to dive into a more robust SEO strategy! There is still time to make a measurable difference in 2024!

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Winter is Coming

This time of year can make me feel a little stressed about things I intended to get done by year-end, but perhaps didn't get as far along as I would've liked.

If you're feeling like me right now, it's not too late! There are many things we can still accomplish before we slide into holiday mode.

If you're on the fence about starting a new marketing focus this late in the year, let me buy you a coffee! Virtual or in-person, I'd love to connect!