Ranking highly on the search engine results pages (SERPs) takes a lot of time, effort, and research.
That’s why you need reliable SEO tools.
Without the right software, obtaining the data and insights, you need to develop a successful SEO campaign is going to be a nightmare.
Fortunately, there are affordable SEO tools you can use to come up with a winning campaign. We’ll cover several of them in this guide.
1. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is an all-in-one SEO freemium platform offering rich SEO data and insights that’s easy to use for both seasoned and rookie marketers.
For one, it has a robust keyword research tool. To show you how it works, I entered “surfboards” for US English, and Ubersuggest presented this report:
Ubersuggest shows the keyword’s monthly search volume, CPC, and difficulty score for organic and paid search rankings.
The platform shows keyword suggestions, related keywords, questions, prepositional phrases, and comparison formats, with their performance data.
To guide you on your blog posts, Ubersuggest gives content ideas based on top-performing pieces on Facebook and Pinterest:
With Ubersuggest’s Traffic Analyzer, spy on your competitor’s top pages and keywords.
Enter its URL, your target language and location, say, “alibaba.com,” in US English, and Ubersuggest showed these results:
Ubersuggest lists your competitor’s top pages for each country or city, with their number of monthly visits, backlinks, and Facebook and Pinterest shares.
The same goes for the keywords your rival ranks for (100 of them for free), so you’ll know what new keywords to pursue:
Uncover who links to your competitors to hit those sites up and build backlinks. Ubersuggest shows your rival’s domain score, its number of backlinks and referring domains, etc.
Additionally, perform an in-depth site audit, with Ubersuggest crawling 150 pages, to discover your SEO health, errors, and ways to fix them:
Ubersuggest also presents your desktop and mobile page speed:
Finally, Ubersuggest has a free Google Chrome browser extension to unpack more keywords from Amazon, YouTube, and Google. You can also export the reports in CSV format.
Access most of Ubersuggest’s features and data for free even without signing up for an account (this has a daily limit). If you want to remove the daily limit and get more features, sign up for a free account.
If you need even more data for massive SEO campaigns, subscribe to Ubersuggest’s affordable plans:
- 12 USD/month for solopreneurs and small business with 1 to 3 websites;
- 20 USD/month for small companies handling 4 to 7 sites; and
- 40 USD/month for large enterprises managing over eight websites.
2. Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free SEO tool that measures your site’s loading speed on mobile and desktop. It reveals substantial amounts of technical data, including other insights.
I typed in “patpat.com” (on mobile) as a sample. Pagespeed Insights shared its numerical score, plus a red color signifying a slow speed, yellow for average, and green for fast.
Below it, you’ll find “Opportunities” or suggestions to improve your loading time. On the right, you’ll see the estimated speed increase you can get for every recommended action.
From its Diagnostics section, get more information on your site performance and adherence to best web development practices, with dropdowns revealing the specifics:
Pagespeed Insights also displays the performance checks your site meets, requiring no further intervention:
With these data and insights, you can determine and optimize your site’s loading time, improving your user experience, conversions, and other performance aspects.
3. AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic helps you uncover the questions your audience is searching for in the search engines.
The software pulls data from Google’s autocomplete results, so you know the questions are something that your audience is interested in.
The game plan is simple.
Enter the keyword you’re looking to optimize your content for in AnswerThePublic’s search box. That way, you can incorporate the questions and keywords that the software comes up with.Here’s an example.
Let’s say you’re in the keto diet niche. If you type in the phrase “Keto diet” in the search box, this will come up.
As you can see, the platform was able to come up with several interesting questions.
It has questions about how safe the keto diet is, if it has negative effects on the kidney, and several more questions that make absolute sense.
You can either use these questions as the main topic of your articles, or you can insert 5 – 10 questions in a single article, so you know your article is optimized strategically for several keywords.
You can also use the tool to look for comparisons.
It also has other tabs for prepositions, alphabeticals, and related, allowing you to find more keywords for your campaign.
AnswerThePublic is one of the best tools you can use when using the skyscraper method — a strategy where you checkout relevant content that’s ranking on Google’s SERPs so you can create content that’s better than all the pages that’s already ranking for the keyword.
With the help of AnswerThePublic, you can come up with a web page or a blog post that covers questions that your audience is taking the time to search for in Google.
4. Grammarly
If you want your pages to rank high in the SERPs, it needs to be optimized for the search engines AND your readers.
Grammarly helps you with the latter.
Its features help improve the readability and quality of your written texts, making it more appealing to your readers, share-worthy, and definitely link-worthy.
With Grammarly, you can:
Set writing goals
Adjust your content based on audience type, domain, tone, and formality to get custom writing suggestions. It helps keep your content in line with your brand.
Get detailed suggestions
Grammarly scans and suggests edits based on the correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery of your content. It also shows you an overall score for your content.
All of these categories make your content grammatically correct, easy to read, and interesting for your readers.
It’s worth mentioning that you have access to a lot of Grammarly’s features even without signing up for a paid account. It’s paid packages are also affordable. Their Premium plan starts at $11.66 per month, while their Business plan starts at $12.50.
The quality of your content plays a crucial role in SEO. With poorly-written content, you can’t convince website owners to link to your pages. Considering how important backlinks are to SEO, you’ll be severely handicapped if people are hesitant to link to your site just because your content is poorly-written.
5. Website Penalty Indicator
Google rolls out algorithm updates a few times in a year to keep up with the changing behaviors of internet users — and to catch spammers and unethical marketers.
That’s why site owners need to check their sites regularly to ensure they haven’t been penalized.
The Website Penalty Indicator is the perfect tool for the job.
You don’t need to sign up for an account to use the tool. Just enter your domain in the empty field, choose your database, enter the captcha numbers, then click the “Check Domain” button.
The results give visual data of your previous organic traffic plus a history of major Google updates represented by the colored bars.
If you noticed a drop in your traffic, that means your site took a hit from the update. You can also zoom into the graph to see more information during a certain period.
Additionally, when you scroll down the page, all the previous updates are listed down so you can check the possible update that impacted your ranking.
6. Yoast or other WordPress SEO plugin
Yoast as an example is an SEO WordPress plugin for optimizing web pages for the search engines.
You only need to install the plugin and follow the tool wizard to fix your website’s SEO.
The tool doesn’t require you to do coding as well, making it perfect for newbie marketers or those who can’t allot too much time on their site’s SEO.
Additionally, Yoast’s SEO content analysis gives a score based on different ranking factors and provides recommendations to improve your content’s SEO.
Yoast also scans your content for readability. It offers suggestions on your use of transition words, sentence and paragraph length, and etc.
Overall, the plugin ensures your site uses standard SEO best practices, such as:
- Keyword-optimized content
- OpenGraph tags for each page
- Canonical URLs for avoiding duplicate content
- Implementing a valid schema.org data
Please note: There are other alternatives to WordPress SEO plugins, we mention Yoast as its the most popular and typically friendly enough for all users to understand, but as more advanced user it’s rare we’d use Yoast. We typically recommend a particular SEO plugin based on the site in question and the needs of that site, those include but are not limited to :
- All in One SEO
- SEO Framework
- Rank Math
- SEO Press.
What’s next?
There may be hundreds of SEO tools online. But with these tools alone, you can create an SEO campaign that’s so “deadly,” you’d be able to rank your pages and generate loads of relevant traffic to your website.
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