12 Free SEO Monitoring and Analysis Tools Every Business Needs

There are many SEO monitoring tools in the market today, and the good news is that the best of them are free of charge.

The world of SEO monitoring and analysis is fast and complex and you should monitor your campaign to ensure you always have a high ranking in SERPs. You should also take advantage of free analysis tools to make head or tail of the murky word of SEO.

So, which are the best SEO monitoring and analysis tools?

1. Google Search Console: Google Search Console, previously known as Google Webmaster Tools, helps you determine if your website has a manual Google penalty, and if it can identify broken links and other crawling problems, download links, identify how many of your web pages are indexed, and test your structured data and robots.txt file. The “Fetch as Google” feature allows you to see what Google can see. The Bing equivalent of this tool is Bing Webmaster Tools.

2. Remove’em: In 2014, Google released an update that effectively killed guest posting because most guest bloggers were writing poor-quality guest posts just for link building. Since Google insists that these links should be removed (or at least switched to no-follow), tools like Remove’em come in handy since they help identify where these links are located. Simply enter your site’s URL and use the “Search” feature for a list of anchor texts and advise on whether they are over-optimized. You can then use the Google Disavow tool or contact the webmaster where the link is placed to remove them.

3. Google Analytics: Google Analytics, which has been evolving over time, gives you analytics data by analyzing user experience, content, and the success of your campaign. You will be able to determine where visitors are coming from, what pages they are visiting, and how long they are staying on your website. The ‘Goals’ feature allows you to measure how the website is meeting business goals. Your USA SEO service can export the analysis in PDF, CSV, XML, TSV, and CSV for Excel and share this info with you.

4. Quick Sprout: This is an SEO analysis tool that does in-depth analysis of such SEO factors as backlinks, keywords, and site speed among others. It gives you an SEO score that you can use as a benchmark as you set goals and measure SEO progress. Quick Sprout also does social media analysis as well as competitor analysis.

5. Ubersuggest: Uber suggest gives you thousands of SEO-friendly keywords to choose from. All you need to do is feed it with a single search term and it will find related keyword phrases and keywords. The keyword suggestion tool works by expanding the keyword by adding numbers and letters to mimic real-life search queries. As an example, “Blue Jeans” would yield “Blue Jeans and T-shirt”, “Blue Jeans business”, Blue Jeans company”, “Blue Jeans + a”, and so on.

6. Google Adwords Keyword Planner: This is the de facto source of information on keyword volumes, giving you traffic stats as well as historical search data important for SEO and PPC. Although you will not get the exact numbers (and there are many tools in the market that generate seed lists), Planner has features that will help you get excellent data, examples being multiplying keyword lists (which is very important in local SEO) and searching for keyword and ad group ideas and seeing how the keywords may perform. You can filter the results to only get metrics that are important for your campaign.

7. Google Trends: Google Trends gives you what is trending on Google Search and it helps you explore trend histories. The tool offers geo-targeting, making it ideal if you are interested in local traffic (as you should be!). It also gives you trending news, which allows you to write relevant blogs and to share relevant information on social media for more traffic.

8. Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool: This tool helps you fix what is broken in your current SEO efforts. This website crawler audits all the web pages and determines if they are SEO friendly by identifying such things as server errors, broken links, blocked URLs, and duplicate content. It can also analyze Meta descriptions and page titles. The tool, which you can integrate with Google Analytics if you want additional data, generates sitemaps and error reports for ease of reference.

9. The Alexa Toolbar: This tool, as the term suggests, can be installed onto a browser. It gives up-to-date info about Alexa data such as the loading time, popularity, and how the site competes with others on the Internet. It will not interrupt your browsing while doing this.

10. SERP_OverlayMoz tools: This is a suite of inbound marketing tools that, in combination, cover all SEO aspects from social media marketing to link building and from content marketing to brand awareness. Moz Open Site Explore helps you do backlink analysis. Moz Local, previously known as Get Listed, gives you the current state of your business’s citations, getting data from over 15 sources such as Google, Facebook, and Foursquare. Followerwonk gives you important Twitter data.

11. HubSpot SEO: This tool is an all-in-one SEO framework giving everything from SEO recommendations to SEO analytics. Notable features are advanced keyword targeting, as-you-type SEO, Google+ integration, and mobile optimization.

12. Siteliner: Google considers duplicate content to be Grey HAT SEO. Siteliner helps analyze duplicate content quickly. All you need to do is type in the URL of your site and click away. Other than duplicate content, you will also get such data as common content, unique content, average page size, internal and external links, average page load time, and text-to-HTML ratio.

There are many free tools and all of them could not fit into our list. Other free SEO monitoring and anaylsis tools that deserve an honorable mention include:

• Keyword.io: Helps in keyword research.
• Portent’s Title Generator: Gives you ideas on highly sharable content.
• Facebook Audience Insights: Gives you demographic information on your Facebook audience.
• GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, and WebPagetest: Help examine page speed.
• SEO Quake: Gives you data on links, social shares, traffic, and on-page keywords among others.
• Microsoft Free SEO Toolkit: Performs a full SEO audit.
• XML Sitemap Inspector: Inspects all links in your sitemap to determine are working as they should.
• Site Condor: Extracts on-page structured data and elements, controls how crawl jobs run, and analyzes aggregated results.
• Robots.txt Testing Tool: Lets you know which robots.txt file is blocking Google bot.
• Copyscape: Helps you check for plagiarism.
• BuzzStream Meta Tag Extractor: Gives you keywords, Meta descriptions, and title tags in URLs.
• SimilarWeb: Does competitive analysis.
• Panguin Tool: In combination with Google Analytics, helps you determine if you have been affected by Google Penguin.

SEO monitoring and analysis tools save you time that you would spend doing the work manually. Note that the info and results you get from these tools is not always easy to understand or implement and you should consider hiring a professional for the job.

Selina Jenkins helps small businesses improve their ranking for SEO. She will devise ways for you to compete with larger competitors offering USA SEO service. She also offers PPC, SMM, and other services to complement your SEO efforts.