With every passing year, SEO is becoming more and more important, but with increasing competition, ranking among the top results on the search engine’s results page is becoming harder and more time consuming. This has never been truer than it is in 2021 with the increase in a surge of new websites and online content being uploaded every day. Thankfully, there are tools you can use to automate and streamline the process of optimising your content for search engines.
Whether it’s for SEO audit or website analysis, developers have built online tools to make your life easier. Here are the best free SEO tools to use in 2021:
1. Ahrefs
What is it? Ahrefs is a tool that gives you an overview of the SERP page for any keyword. Through Ahrefs, you can find out how many backlinks and domains the results on a certain SERP page have. Besides that, Ahrefs assesses how well these pages rank through its own internal ranking system.
Why you should use it: For you to optimise your page, what the top competition is doing is one of the most valuable insights you can get. For example, you can use Ahrefs to look into how many backlinks or domains the top results have, and aim for a similar or higher number in order to rank among the top results.
2. Portent
What is it? Portent is a tool that lets you preview how your snippet would look like when it comes up in the SERP.
If your title or meta description is too long, search engines will replace the surplus of characters with ellipses, which can seriously harm your click-through rate. Through portent, you can make sure your meta description and title fit nicely in the search results page.
Why you should use it: Search engine results pages don’t have character or word limits before your title is cut. Instead, it’s measured by pixels, which is much harder to anticipate without using a tool like Portent.
Bonus point: Portent lets you previous your snippet on different devices and screen sizes, including mobile devices where about half of all online traffic comes from!
3. Google Search Console
What is it? Google Search Console gives much-needed insight into your own website’s SEO performance. It shows you the number of organic clicks, identifies issues with web crawlers or indexing, notifying you of security issues and gives you insights into the backlinks and internal links that you use.
Why you should use it: If your page isn’t ranking the way you expect it to, Google Search Console is what lets you know what went wrong, how it went wrong, and why it went wrong for you to go back and fix it. It lets you test your URLs and assess your SEO performance in order to optimise it
4. Google PageSpeed Insights
What is it? Like the name suggests Google PageSpeed Insights lets you know how fast your page loads by perfuming a speed test and giving you a PageSpeed score. What’s more, Google PageSpeed Insights also lets you know what exactly makes your page load slower than it should.
Why you should use it: if your page loads slowly, it won’t rank well. Page speed is an important ranking factor and Google PageSpeed Insights is the best tool to use to find out if you need to work on its speed. What’s more, the tool also highlights the issues preventing your page from loading at the speed it should be, pointing you in the right direction to fix it.
5. Moz Domain Analysis
What is it? Moz is a toolset that encompasses multiple solutions into its kit with a paid subscription, it’s not without its free uses. Moz’s free domain SEO analysis gives you a breakdown of any domain, with insights that include what keywords the domain uses, what it’s spam score is, its top competitors and what featured snippets the domain can rank on.
Why should you use it? While other free SEO tools allow you to assess your page, few of them give the same insight as Moz’s Domain Analysis tool. Ranking on snippets is one of the best things you can do for your website’s ranking as snippets get the highest CTR, and using this tool you can find out what snippets you can work towards ranking on by optimising your keywords further.
The variety of free SEO tools available in 2021 makes it as convenient as possible to audit and optimise your site’s SEO. There’s no excuse not to take advantage of these free tools and get the best ranking anymore!