Tag: Monitoring

Website Performance & Health Monitoring: Tips & Best Practices

Setting up and running a website or ecommerce project is great – however, your work is far from done once your site is up and running.

Without appropriate health and performance monitoring, your website will suffer the consequences – which can be far greater than simply slow load speed.

Let’s turn our attention to a hypothetical, ideal scenario where all the websites in the world are functioning as they should. Did you know that, aside from skyrocketing user satisfaction, we would also contribute to a better environment?

Poorly performing websites not only impact anyone who creates or uses them, but they also leave a larger carbon footprint.

According to the Website Carbon Calculator, websites have a carbon footprint, and the average website page emits 0.5 grams of carbon dioxide per view. That’s just the median.

When looking at the mean, which also considers high-polluting websites, that number goes up to 0.9 grams.

Aside from issues on a global scale, an unhealthy, inadequately-performing website will cost you time, money, and revenue. Website health is similar to our own: it’s easy to neglect and difficult to improve.

You need to be aware of the main components that make up website health to conduct appropriate monitoring practices to help save processing time.

With the emergence of quick and easy website builders, crafting websites has become accessible to everyone. All you need to do is sign up, choose a domain, pick your template, and voila! You have a website in seconds.

However, many website owners dismiss the fact that website creation is only the first step. Appropriate performance maintenance and health monitoring are also crucial.

And on that note, let’s look at some essential website health and performance indicators: what they are, how to monitor them, and how to make improvements.

Aspects To Monitor For A High Website Health Score

Core Web Vitals

High Website Health Score via Core Web VitalsImage from author, October 2022

Google PageSpeed Insights

The first metrics you should consider when conducting performance testing are your Core Web Vitals. These performance indicators show speed, stability, and responsiveness, helping you understand the quality of your website user experience.

Several tools track your Core Web Vitals, but many website owners gravitate towards a simple tool: Google PageSpeed Insights.

After entering your URL into the tool, you will be presented with a report showing whether you passed your Core Web Vitals test and any other aspects you need to keep an eye on. Here are the three key metrics you will see:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Aim for a score of 2.5 seconds or less.

If your score is over 2.5 seconds, this could indicate the following: your server is lagging, resource load times are not up to par, you have high numbers of render-blocking JavaScript and CSS, or there is slow rendering on the client side.

First Input Delay (FID)

Aim for a score of 100 milliseconds or less.

If your score exceeds that time, you may need to reduce third-party code impact, reduce JavaScript execution time, minimize the main thread work, keep transfer sizes small, and request counts low.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Aim for a score of 0.1 or less.

If your score exceeds this, you can avoid random layout shifts by including size attributes on your visual and video content (or reserve the space with CSS aspect ratio boxes). Avoid overlapping your content, and be mindful when animating your transitions.

Page Speed Blockers

Several factors can affect your website load speed. However, if you’re on a time budget and would like to focus on the main culprits first, pay close attention to the following factors:

  • Unused JavaScript and CSS Code.
  • Render blocking JavaScript and CSS Code.
  • Unminified JavaScript and CSS Code.
  • Large image file sizes (more on that below).
  • Too many redirect chains.

In order to improve the load of JavaScript and CSS files, consider preloading them.

Another option would be enablingearly hints, which tells the browser in the HTTP server response which resources it should start downloading by taking advantage of “server think-time,” thus speeding up the page load.

To test your website:

  1. Navigate to https://pagespeed.web.dev/
  2. Enter the URL of the page you want to scan.

I would recommend choosing your homepage first.

Another handy tool is WebPageTest.org, which also shows your Core Web Vitals and other metrics that can help you drastically improve your website performance and health. Also, it’s free!

Simply paste a page URL into the search box shown on the site, and it will conduct a full test from a default location.

You can also register as a user and choose from a list of locations to test your website from different countries, devices and browsers.

WebPageTest will show you exactly where your website is in terms of performance, and what could be slowing it down through a Performance Summary composed of four key sections: Opportunities and Experiments, Observed Metrics, Real User Measurements, and Individual Runs.

observed metricsImage from author, October 2022

At UCRAFT, we use a combination of tools such as PageSpeed Insights, Chrome Dev Tools, WebPageTest, and several others, to gain a clear understanding of what we need to work on when it comes to our website performance – especially since the SaaS industry is highly competitive already.

Design Elements

design elementsScreenshot from author, October 2022

When we think about website performance and health monitoring, we usually leave these to the tech team to deal with.

But what if I told you how you design your website, and the elements you choose can make or break your performance?

That’s right – it’s time to get the design team involved.

Image Optimization

Images are great, but they can slow down your website if they are not sized appropriately. Make sure to resize your images, and avoid uploading giant files when they will not be shown in their entirety.

Likewise, compress your images and try out different file types like WebP, JPEG 2000, and JPEG XR instead of opting for heavier JPEG or PNG files.

Consider implementing native lazy loading to ensure that images are loaded when the user views them, instead of loading them all at once.

Almost all browsers, including Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, support loading=”lazy”  attribute on <img> or <iframe>, which tells the browser to load them when the user scrolls closer to them.

Make sure not to lazy load above-the-fold images, as it will degrade the LCP score of your page, and Google recommends using fetchpriority=”high” attribute on images above the fold to improve LCP.

If you use that attribute, no need to preload the images. You should either preload or set “fetchpriority” attribute on images above the fold.

Also, take advantage responsiveness of the “srcset” attribute to load properly sized images based on the screen size, and avoid loading redundantly large images on small screens. This will greatly help to improve LCP score.

Fonts

Extravagant custom fonts are often challenging to read for users without 20/20 vision, but they can also considerably slow down your website.

Switch externally-hosted fonts for more web-safe fonts, and give Google fonts a try – as long as they are hosted through Google’s CDN.

Moreover, consider incorporating variable fonts into the general aesthetic of your website, since this font specification can significantly reduce font file sizes.

Make sure to preload your fonts.

Animations/Additional Features

This goes without saying: Don’t go overboard with animations, videos, special effects, sliders, or other fancy elements.

It’s nice to include some interactive elements here and there, but saturating your website with too many moving “things” can be frustrating for users and your servers alike.

Don’t use non-composited animations, as they cause re-painting of the page, which increases main-thread work – and the webpage may appear visually unstable when it loads.

PWA Solution For Mobile Optimization

Why not go the entire mobile-friendly route and turn your mobile site into a Progressive Web App (PWA)?

Since PWAs are built with service workers, they load cached content at a quicker rate. Not only that, but PWAs resemble native mobile apps, which is great for performance and UX.

Additional Technical Performance Metrics

Uptime

Uptime shows how well your website is functioning.

If your website crashes or is down frequently, it will harm your user experience, Google rankings, and, therefore, your revenue.

If possible, aim to have a 99.999{4224f0a76978c4d6828175c7edfc499fc862aa95a2f708cd5006c57745b2aaca} uptime and test your website from different locations.

Tools for uptime monitoring:

Database Performance

If you’ve checked the basics and your website is still slow to respond, it might be due to poor database performance.

You can check this by monitoring the response time for your queries and pinpointing the database queries that are taking up the most time.

Once you’ve done that, get optimizing! You can use tools such as Blackfire.io to help you easily identify bottlenecks and find solutions based on accurate data.

Web Server’s Hardware

Your website may lag if your disk space is packed with log files, images, videos, and database entries. Make sure to monitor your central processing unit (CPU) load regularly, especially after you’ve implemented updates or design changes.

Tools such as New Relic can help you improve your entire stack through efficient monitoring and debugging.

Search Visibility

A lot of the metrics discussed above already have a significant impact on search visibility.

So when you run your website pages through Google PageSpeed Insights and optimize them, you are also doing important things for your SEO.

You can also opt for website crawling tools such as Semrush or Sitechecker.pro, Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, or any other tool that best suits your needs.

Website crawlers help find all types of issues, such as:

  • Broken links.
  • Broken images.
  • Monitor core web vital metrics.
  • Redirect chains.
  • Structured data errors.
  • Noindexed pages.
  • Missing headings and meta descriptions.
  • Mixed content.

Make sure you’re all set when it comes to the following points:

  • XML sitemap – Ensure your sitemap is formatted correctly and check whether it’s necessary to make any updates and re-submit your sitemap via Google Search Console.
  • Robots.txt – Ensure you utilize a robots.txt file for your web pages (HTML, PDF, or any other non-media formats that search engines can read) to manage crawl traffic better, especially if you suspect your server may be overwhelmed by requests from Google’s crawler.

Website Security And Caching

Get Your SSL Certificate!

A healthy website is a secure website.

Even if your website loads in perfect time and gets a 100/100 score, there is no way users (or search engines) are going to trust your site if it doesn’t start with https://.

An SSL certificate is essentially a code on your server that builds an encrypted connection, guaranteeing that user data remains secure.

Obtaining an SSL certificate is not a particularly difficult process, but it can be lengthy when done manually.

However, if you are using a well-established hosting provider such as BlueHost, more often than not, your provider will be able to issue a free SSL for your domain.

Consider Using A CDN

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are distributed servers working in unison to deliver fast internet content.

In other words, a CDN is a tool that speeds up the performance of your website by keeping its content on servers close to users, regardless of geographic location. This is also known as caching.

If you have a global presence, a CDN is a must! It will increase your page load speed, decrease your bandwidth costs, spread out your traffic (reducing the chances of your site going down), and increase security via features like DDoS mitigation.

Top players in the industry include Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront, and Google Cloud CDN. However, there are many other options, so do your research and pick the best CDN for your website and business requirements.

Setup Web Application Firewall

A Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects web applications by filtering out suspicious HTTP traffic. It is aimed at preventing applications from attacks such as:

  • Cross-site forgery.
  • Cross-site-scripting (XSS).
  • File inclusion.
  • SQL injection.

Below is a list of the most popular and trusted web application firewalls:

Or if you use WordPress, you can consider installing plugins such as:

Verdict

That’s a wrap! As you can tell, website performance and health depend on various aspects.

If your website is lagging, the first logical step is to check your Core Web Vitals and see what you can improve. You can also take a look at other technical metrics and improve on them.

SEO is also vital to your website’s health, so check your search visibility, links, and potential load blockers to see what you can improve on.

And don’t forget about your SSL certificate and caching, either.

Your website design can also impact your load speed and performance, especially if you or your designers are fond of using weighty design elements.

Remember to optimize your images, avoid heavy fonts, and use animations in moderation.

More resources:

Featured Image: JulsIst/Shutterstock

New research points way to monitoring metabolic diseases — ScienceDaily

Scientists have taken the to start with step to making the following technology of wearable overall health screens.

Most investigate on measuring human biomarkers, which are steps of a body’s overall health, depend on electrical alerts to sense the chemical compounds excreted in sweat. But sensors that count on perspiration normally demand substantial quantities of it just to get a studying.

A new review indicates that a wearable sensor may possibly be equipped to observe the body’s health by detecting the gases released from a person’s skin.

“It is completely non-invasive, and absolutely passive on the behalf of the user,” claimed Anthony Annerino, guide writer of the review and a graduate university student in components science and engineering at The Ohio Condition University.

Some wearable products, like smartwatches or exercise trackers, are now capable of measuring pulse costs or temperatures, but this team’s strategy would allow the technologies to sense biomarkers linked to metabolic ailments, like heart sickness or diabetic issues.

Their investigate is printed in the journal PLOS One.

“Discerning health challenges by the pores and skin is seriously the top frontier,” stated review co-author Pelagia-Iren Gouma, professor of products science and engineering. Gouma also leads the Smart Connected Wellness undertaking, which aims to support exploration in overall health and medicine.

“The challenge nevertheless has a few of a long time to go,” stated Gouma. “But in six months, we should really have evidence of idea and in a yr, we might like to have it examined in folks.”

The ultimate merchandise of the team’s research would be a little system a individual could wear on reduced-sweat human body spots, like driving the ear or on the nails, she said. And as far more persons become acquainted with utilizing wearable equipment in their every day life, Gouma expects technological innovation and medicine to turn out to be even far more intertwined.

“We are developing a new technology of pores and skin sensors, and it will truly be the new norm,” Gouma reported.

Researchers, together with Gouma, have a extensive background of measuring the concentration of organic and natural compounds in our breath — a style of gasoline — as indicators of health and fitness. A person case in point would be blowing into a breathalyzer, a machine which can measure the amount of money of alcohol in a person’s blood or be made use of to detect viruses.

But such a gadget needs “active intent” and only delivers a “momentary snapshot” of the overall body, Annerino mentioned. In comparison to the sum of chemicals we launch when we breathe, he stated, this team’s sensors can operate on a great deal smaller sized quantities of gaseous acetone released from the skin.

Acetone is a single of the substances secreted from the pores and skin that can notify scientists a great deal about the interior workings of the human human body. Concentrations of acetone in the breath have also been demonstrated to be associated to blood sugar amounts and unwanted fat-burning rates.

“This is an space of study that hasn’t been approximately as well made nevertheless, for the reason that we are just now generating the engineering to measure decrease concentrations of these gases with superior selectivity,” Annerino claimed.

To examination no matter whether their sensors could detect various amounts of these enlightening chemical substances (which would signal the existence of the gaseous molecules), the scientists produced a movie materials manufactured out of derivatives of plant cellulose and electroactive polymers. This film can bend significantly in response to how a lot of the acetone is detected in its setting.

Annerino’s group then put the movie in excess of remedies that contains ethanol (alcohol), acetone and drinking water to gauge its sensitivity, selectivity and repeatability.

“We discovered important bias towards bending extra on exposure to sure chemicals more than other individuals,” mentioned Annerino. This bending takes place in milliseconds, and the researchers made use of device learning and intricate computational algorithms to precisely record and monitor the film’s bending response to the unique chemical answers.

Their conclusions confirmed that the movies are sensitive sufficient to keep track of lengthy-expression changes in the physique. Whilst concentrating on a metabolic rate sensor, yet another achievable use would be to observe ethanol which, in the human body, can spell indicators of liver ailment. A lot more work demands to be done on how the films utilized in this analyze would get the job done as real sensors worn on the physique, the scientists reported.

The opportunity to make someone’s lifestyle much easier was a person of the motives Annerino claimed he was so eager to get concerned with the examine. “Not every investigation examine has an noticeable effect on modern society and people’s lives, but that’s a little something that this project in unique definitely has,” he stated.

Other co-authors were being Manoj Srinivasan, an associate professor of resources science and engineering, and Michael Faltas, a latest graduate of the components and aerospace engineering plan. This perform was funded by the National Science Foundation.

28 of the Best SEO Tools for Monitoring Your Law Firm Website | Good2bSocial

[author: Noreen Fishman]

Search engine optimization is incredibly complex and always changing. Just when you think you’ve got ranking figured out, a new algorithm changes things. It doesn’t help that so much of the ranking information is secret, which can make it difficult to direct your efforts. Fortunately, there is no shortage of SEO tools for law firms, designed to make things simpler. Here are some free and paid tools that can help your law firm to expand your keyword research and relevance and improve your search engine rankings. 

Free SEO Analysis and Monitoring Tools for Your Law Firm

Here are 10 free SEO tools for law firms:

1. HubSpot Website Grader – You can simply enter the URL of your website to receive a report card that shares insights and tipsseo tools for law firms for improving SEO efforts. This grader focuses on gauging website performance, improving the user experience, finding and improving specific issues, and optimizing for mobile. This is a great platform for general website improvements that firms of any size can take advantage of. 

2. Google Search Console – The Search Console has multiple features that can help firms improve their SEO efforts. You can either conduct an initial analysis or refresh your existing strategy with updated keywords. You can learn to do more with keywords, crawl for errors, see how mobile-friendly your website is, and see how many of your pages are indexing with Google. 

3. Internet Marketing Ninjas – This is an SEO-focused company that offers a variety of free tools. Hop on their site and you can take advantage of things like a broken link tool, image metadata information, on-page optimization tips, and page load times. One of their unique offerings is a side-by-side comparison tool where you can measure your website against competitors. 

4. Google Analytics – GA does have a paid version, but the free one is pretty robust. Using Google Analytics alongside the Search Console will yield the best results. That way, all of your SEO data will be consolidated and centrally located, providing insights on things like comparing website traffic sources, filtering referral traffic, and using site content reports to understand engagement metrics. 

5. Google Trends – Many of the SEO tools for law firms offer similar functionality, but Trends is most helpful for starting new ventures or developing a new content strategy. It’s designed to show marketers what popular industries, topics, and ideas people are exploring. While not a place to get granular data, it’s great for pulling information on current conversations and ideas and tracking them over time. 

6. Seolyzer – This free tool helps with site crawling, log analysis, and specific SEO tactics. It’s designed to show marketers how people and search engine crawlers view their websites. It provides information that crawling bots leave in your server’s log files while browsing your site to identify and create your SEO KPIs

7. Bing Webmaster – The tools offered by Webmaster can provide key information on your SEO tactics. Users can see backlink profiles, perform keyword research, and use the site scanning feature to crawl for technical errors. You can also pull an SEO report to review any errors on individual pages in order to correct them. 

8. Check My Links – This is a Chrome extension that is used to make sure your links on both internal or external web pages work. With this information, you can make immediate changes to improve linking strategies. One extremely helpful feature is the ability to copy all of your bad links to your clipboard in one click for simple review or exporting. 

9. Seobility – SEO algorithms are always changing, so it can be difficult to know how your site is currently stacking up. With Seobility’s free checker tool, marketers can test their website’s level of compliance with today’s SEO guidelines. Just enter your url to get accurate SEO scoring, meta information analysis, link structure suggestions, and more. 

10. BROWSEO – When you input your url into this tool, you’ll be able to review your webpage in order to analyze its UX and content as well as gain insight into SEO. The output from the tool focuses on HTML to highlight the page’s structure, optimized search terms, and other SEO-related factors. It’s particularly helpful for reviewing all of the metadata for a page in one place. 

Paid SEO Platforms for Your Law Firm

Here are 18 paid SEO tools for law firms:

11. Ahrefs – A more advanced tool, Ahrefs examines your website in order to produce keyword, link, and ranking profiles. Their main featuresseo tools for law firms are a site and content explorer that can show you the performance of each, and a keywords explorer. You can take advantage of a $7 free trial and their tiered plans run from $99 to $999 per month. 

12. HubSpot SEO Marketing –  The Marketing Hub on HubSpot includes an SEO tool that can support multiple areas of your website efforts. This tool is integrated with HubSpot landing pages, webpages, and blog posts so that you can align opportunities for more traffic and leads. It’s also great for understanding SEO impacts across email, marketing automation, lead management, and analytics. The plans begin at $45 per month and go up to $3,200 for the enterprise level. 

13. SEMrush – A well-known tool out of all the SEO tools for law firms, SEMrush offers a robust dashboard that reveals the performance of entire domains or specific pages. They offer a lot of useful resources including an SEO Toolkit. This toolkit allows marketers to track their website’s visibility improvement over time as well as identify which keywords it’s ranking for and more. Plans range from $119.95 to $449.95. 

14. KW Finder – For performing simple keyword research, you probably don’t need a comprehensive platform. This software is great for finding keywords that aren’t too challenging to rank for but still have the potential to bring in traffic. It’s popular because it seamlessly shifts between languages and regions so it can be used by almost anyone, anywhere. Take advantage of a free trial or pay $29 per month for ongoing use. 

15. SE Ranking – If you’re interested in the overall performance of your website, you can use this platform. It analyzes website health and performance, keyword rankings, and traffic. Like some other tools, it also provides competitive insights. The plans begin at $39 per month and go up to $189 per month. 

16. ContentKing – Content certainly is king when it comes to SEO, and this powerful tool works with real-time information to provide key insights. It tracks your website 24/7 to quickly point out any issues, and you’ll get alerts if anything on-page goes wrong with your content. You can also follow the history of your content and perform searches within the history. Prices range from $139 to $1,279 per month. 

To learn more about how to create content that will be successful with search engines, check out this complimentary eBook: SEO for Law Firm Websites.

17. Seomater – This SEO auditing and website crawling tool offers a unique pay-as-you-go option along with more structured plans. It focuses on technical SEO analysis and on-page optimization testing. After the tool crawls your site, you’ll get a report that highlights various SEO-related elements including page quality and speed, internal and external link information, overall organic presence, and more. As mentioned, you can pay as you use the tool, or sign up for a plan ranging from $19 – $179.  

18. SpyFu – A competitive research tool for Google Ads, SpyFu helps with keyword research as well as competitive research and the creation of custom lists and domains. It’s most useful for marketers who want to drive more traffic to their Google Ads campaigns along with their website. You can even download a competitor’s PPC or SEO keywords. The Basic plan is $39 per month and prices go up to $129 per month for Unlimited. 

19. Keyword Hero – Keywords are one of the pillars of effective SEO, so they’re crucial to get right. This tool matches your visitor’s sessions with the keywords they used to land on your page, all while using your Google Analytics account. Leverage it to identify and separate traffic sources and then optimize your position in the SERPs. Try a 14 day trail for any plan, choose the free edition, or invest in a plan for $9 – $149 per month. 

20. AnswerThePublic – Search listening is an often-overlooked area of SEO. This tool collects autocomplete data from Google and other search engines to give you access to lists of phrases and questions that people are searching for around your keywords. Marketers can monitor keyword trends, see real-time search information, and get new ideas for their content. Plans are available in monthly or annual versions between $70 and $199. 

21. Remove’em – If you’re using a website domain or SEO strategy that isn’t recently built from scratch, you might be dealing with some problematic backlinks. It’s important to address these links as soon as possible, and this tool helps. Scan your backlink profile and export a list of bad backlinks. You can get a lifetime plan for a one-time fee of $249 or get an Agency plan (10+ websites) for $899 a month. 

22. Linkody – This is another tool that’s great for learning about off-page SEO through backlink tactics. Linkody allows marketers to discover, track, analyze, and disavow backlinks all from one simple interface. Users also love that they can “spy” on competitor backlinks to point them toward niche-relevant, high-quality backlink opportunities. 

23. Moz Pro –  The subscription provides an all-in-one tool for improving your firm’s search ranking. There are multiple research options to help users find SEO opportunities, track growth, build reports, and otherwise optimize. Moz Pro offers email reports that provide insight into pages your site links to as well. Use a free 30-day trial or sign up for a plan between $99 and $599 per month. 

24. Woorank – This tool is known for in-depth site analyses that can reveal opportunities for digital marketers. Users can take advantage of features like a marketing checklist with tasks to complete as part of SEO execution, and social insights to see the part that those channels play in your SEO goals. It’s also helpful for understanding which optimization tactics to use based on mobile data. Take advantage of a free two-week trial or plans that are $79.99 or $199.99 each month. 

25. GrowthBar – This Chrome extension helps with keyword research, competitive analysis, and tracking SEO rankings over time. It’s unique because it allows users to access data points about any website directly from the search engine results pages, which is key for competitive insights. Use this information to understand the growth channels, keywords, backlinks, and advertising that are working for firms like yours. They offer a free trial and their fees range from $29.90 to $79.90. 

26. Majestic – Majestic is mainly used for link analysis. It focuses on backlinks and is able to give metrics on quality of links and quantity of links. They offer a number of tools to analyze links, such as a site explorer analysis that gives a high-level overview of a website’s link profile and a unique topics report that determine’s a site’s topic based on backlinks. There are a range of plans and a free trial.

27. Brightedge – Brightedge offers SEO solutions that include a customizable dashboard, forecasting, SEO recommendations, backlink management, and competitive analysis. Brightedge’s products focus on discovering how to best optimize through competitor analysis, targeting high-value topics through built-in recommendations, and reporting on key metrics. 

28. Siteimprove – Siteimprove has a range of SEO checks that help ensure your site is at its best. These 70+ unique checks look at items like meta descriptions, spelling mistakes, broken links, outdated files, poor readability, and more. They have 3 different solutions: Inclusivity, which works to protect your brand against compliance lawsuits and fines; Content Experience, which looks for ways to improve content and user experience; and Marketing Performance, which gives insights into how visitors interact with your content. 

Takeaway: 

These are some of the best SEO tools for law firms, but of course, you won’t need all of them. Review your most important SEO goals and then determine which options can help you to achieve them. You may also want to take advantage of our free SEO Audit. This process will evaluate your law firm’s website and help you identify areas of improvement.

HubSpot : 28 of the Best SEO Tools for Auditing & Monitoring Your Website in 2022

There’s nothing quite like a sudden Google algorithm update to leave you feeling equal parts confused and concerned. It seems as though search engines like Google wait for you to get all of your ducks in a row and then unleash an update that makes your efforts instantly obsolete.

Plus, there’s still some secrecy behind how Google evaluates websites and determines which sites appear – and how they appear – on the search engine results page (SERPs) for different queries.

The good news is that there are several search engine optimization (SEO) tools out there – some free, some paid – that can help you view

your website the way search engines like Google see it – this way, you can improve your ranking and relevance for your target keywords.

Note: Some of the free tools below also offer paid plans while some of the paid tools also offer free plans – so, we recommend you check out the pricing pages for the tools you’re most interested in to determine which plan is ideal for your needs and goals.

For universal SEO tips, you can use today to grow your business, check out our video guide below.


Best SEO Tools

  1. HubSpot Website Grader
  2. Google Search Console
  3. Google Analytics
  4. UpCity Free SEO Report Card
  5. Internet Marketing Ninjas
  6. Bing Webmaster
  7. Google Trends
  8. Seolyzer
  9. SEOquake
  10. Seobility
  11. Check My Links
  12. BROWSEO
  13. HubSpot SEO Marketing Software
  14. Ahrefs
  15. SEMrush
  16. KWFinder
  17. GrowthBar
  18. Woorank
  19. BuzzStream
  20. Moz Pro
  21. Linkody
  22. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
  23. Remove’em
  24. AnswerThePublic
  25. Keyword Hero
  26. SpyFu
  27. Seomater
  28. ContentKing


Free SEO Tools

These tools are free to use, but you might find a paid option that has more features. We’ve shared some of the best features in each tool as well as how you can get the most out of them for your SEO strategy.


1. HubSpot Website Grader

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The goal of marketing is to generate traffic and qualified leads via the company’s website. That’s why, as marketers, we need to understand exactly what we can do to improve the SEO of that website.

With HubSpot’s Website Grader, simply enter the URL of your website to automatically receive a report card with actionable insights about your SEO efforts. From there, you can sign up for the HubSpot Academy SEO course that teaches you how to improve your website’s SEO, user experience (UX), and more.

With the HubSpot Website Grader, you can:

  • Website performance: Learn about your website’s performance in seconds, and identify specific performance issues and receive clear, actionable feedback on how you can fix them.
  • On-demand support: Receive how-to education on how you can improve your website.
  • Improve specific website issues: Gain access to a five-lesson HubSpot Academy course on Website Optimization so you can understand how to improve upon your website’s specific problem areas.
  • Optimize for mobile: Discover how to optimize your website for mobile.
  • Boost web security: Learn how you can implement website security best practices.
  • Enhance the user experience: Personalize your website’s UX to create a delightful experience for users.


2. Google Search Console

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Google Search Console has a number of tools available to help you appear in the SERPs for the search terms and phrases your target audience is looking for.

If you’re the owner of a business or an SEO on your marketing team, Search Console can help you conduct an initial SEO analysis from scratch or update your existing SEO strategy with fresh keywords. Google Search Console monitors, debugs, and optimizes your website – and you don’t need to know how to code to benefit from this tool.

Here are some examples of website elements Google Search Console will teach you about and help you optimize:

  • Keywords: Learn about the keywords your webpages are currently ranking for.
  • Crawl Errors: Identify any crawl errors that exist on your website.
  • Mobile Responsiveness: Understand how mobile-friendly your website is and discover opportunities to improve the mobile experience for your users.
  • Google Index: See how many of your web pages are in Google’s Index (if they aren’t in Google’s index, you can use the tool’s URL Inspection Tool to submit a page for indexing).
  • Analytics and Metrics: The website-related metrics that matter most to you, like clicks, impressions, average click-through rate (CTR), and average position.


3. Google Analytics

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Although Google Analytics has a paid version, the free version of the product can help you manage your website’s SEO – this is especially true if you pair Google Analytics with Google Search Console. In doing so, all of your website’s SEO data will be centrally located and compiled, and you can use queries to identify areas for improvement with the keywords and phrases that you want your website and web pages to rank for.

Other ways that you can use the free version of Google Analytics to understand and improve your SEO are:


4. UpCity Free SEO Report Card

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The Free SEO Report Card by UpCity lets you analyze your website to determine how it stacks up against the competition.

In exchange for your email address and a few data points, SEO Report Card will serve up a report that covers the following:

  • Rank Analysis: A snapshot of where your website ranks on the most popular search engines.
  • Link Building: A detailed account of the number of websites that link back to your site.
  • On-Site Analysis: A look at how successful you were in incorporating your main keyword throughout your site.
  • Website Accessibility: Information about your site’s load time and accessibility.
  • Trust Metrics: An overview of your site’s level of trust or authority.
  • Current Indexing: An indication of how many of your site pages have been indexed.


5. Internet Marketing Ninjas

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Internet Marketing Ninjas is an SEO-focused company with a variety of free tools you can use to compare your website against the competition, optimize web pages for certain keywords, generate meta tags, and increase organic traffic to your website.

Here are some examples of the free Internet Marketing Ninja SEO tools you can take advantage of:

  • Broken link tool: Identify broken links and redirects and use the site crawl feature to generate an XML sitemap of your website.
  • Image metadata: See all of your page links (external, internal, etc.) on your web pages to review what’s working well and what’s broken or needs an update.
  • On-page optimization tool: Use this to evaluate your web page content, meta information, and internal links.
  • Side-by-side comparison: Compare the SEO of your web pages versus a competitor’s web pages.
  • Page load time: Analyze page-load time and how long each component of a web page takes to fully display.


6. Bing Webmaster

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Microsoft Bing Webmaster gives you access to many tools that offer insight into your website such as reporting, diagnostic, and SEO tools. The SEO tools that you can use for free have the power to help you analyze your website, manage backlinks, and review keywords to ensure your site is well-optimized for organic search.

Here are some of the other things you can do with Bing Webmaster’s SEO tools:

  • See backlink profiles: Learn about your backlink profile to understand referring pages, domains, and anchor links.
  • Perform keyword research: Determine which keywords and phrases your audience is searching for as well as the search volumes of those keywords and phrases.
  • Use the site scanning feature: Crawl your website and identify technical SEO errors.
  • Get SEO reports: Review any errors that are on your website and individual site pages.


7. Google Trends

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Traditional SEO tools like the ones we’ve already discussed are great for conducting research and audits when your business is already established. But what if you’re starting a new business venture and want to know what popular industries, topics, and ideas people are exploring? Google Trends is a great place to explore untapped potential that can yield a large keyword landscape for your website.

You’ll want to note that Google Trends isn’t where you’ll get granular data. This tool performs best when you use it as a compass to set a direction for your SEO strategy, and then pair those insights with a more robust software like HubSpot’s SEO Marketing Tool.

Here’s what you should look for in Google Trends:

  • Trends: Look for trends in specific countries or regions of the world.
  • Popular topics: Find popular people and long tail keywords related to them.
  • Comparisons: Compare and contrast trends over time.


8. Seolyzer

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Seolyzer is a free site crawling, log analysis, and SEO tool that helps you determine how search engines like Google view your website. Seolyzer pulls information that crawling bots leave in your server’s log files while browsing your site to identify and create your SEO KPIs. The tool also identifies error codes, redirects, and page speed performance.

Additionally, Seolyzer can help you:

  • Monitor SEO issues: Identify poor response time, error messages, and crawl volume so you can resolve them before serious damage is done.
  • Manage your unique KPIs: Analyze page performance, crawl volume, HTTP status codes, active and new pages, and desktop versus mobile responsiveness.
  • Segment web pages: Determine what your most crawled pages are.
  • Compare web pages: See what Google deems as the most important to the pages that are crucial to your business’s bottom line.
  • Measure SEO impact: Understand the impact of your SEO efforts on a page-by-page basis or by the category of the page.


9. SEOquake

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SEOquake is a Google Chrome extension that automatically checks a web page’s SEO parameters quickly for free. This includes on-page SEO audits, internal and external link reviews, real-time URL and domain comparison, and data file export.

Other things you can use SEOquake for are:

  • Link Analysis: Get a detailed description of how all of your links are doing – including URLs, anchor text, and other link types – with the tools Link Examiner feature.
  • Focus on metrics that matter: Adjust the SEOquake reports you receive to display only the parameters and metrics that you care about.
  • Audit your website’s SEO: Identify any SEO-related issues that would be findable by search engines.
  • Share your findings with stakeholders: Export the results of your SEO analysis into an adjustable and shareable report.


10. Seobility

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Seobility is a free SEO-checker tool. With it, you can test your website’s level of compliance with today’s SEO guidelines. By simply entering your URL, your site will be analyzed and you’ll receive tips on how you can better optimize your website.

In addition to a detailed SEO audit of your website, you’ll gain access to 1,000 subpage audits, email reporting and alerts, and keyword monitoring.

Here are some more advantages of using Seobility:

  • Find technical errors: Resolve on-page SEO issues quickly to recover lost traffic and prevent future traffic dips.
  • Accurate SEO scoring: Receive an SEO score that accounts for various website factors including meta-information, page quality, link structure, and more.
  • Meta information analysis: Understand the specific SEO issues with your meta information such as meta titles/ descriptions, meta tags, and invalid or incorrect domain names or page URLs.
  • Optimization opportunities: Identify areas for improvement regarding your page speed and quality (related to text, duplicate content, responsive design, and alt attributes for content).
  • Link structure suggestions: Understand how your page and link structure can be improved by getting data about your headers, internal links, and incorrect anchor text.
  • Server error fixes: Identify specific server errors related to any redirects, HTTP headers, or CSS and Javascript files.


11. Check My Links

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Check My Links is a Google Chrome extension that you can use to ensure your links on both internal or external web pages work. For instance, if you were to search a term on Wikipedia, Check My Links would be able to tell you how many links that Wikipedia page has in total and how many of those links are broken.

This is helpful because you can make corrections to broken links immediately (or hopefully, before a page goes live). Check My Links is ideal for developers, content editors, and web designers according to its creators.

Here are some more examples of what Check My Links can do:

  • Identify broken links: Check each link on your webpages and identify all invalid links.
  • Auto-highlight issues: Quickly see the good links in green and the broken links in red.
  • Export broken links for further analysis: Copy all of your bad links to your clipboard in one click.


12. BROWSEO

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BROWSEO is an SEO browser that allows you to review your webpage in a limited format so you can analyze its UX and content as well as gain insight into its SEO. Once you input the URL, the output will hone in on your HTML so you’re able to understand the page’s structure, optimized search terms, and other SEO-related factors.

Examples of what you can do with BROWSEO include:

  • See the number of words on the page: Find the sweet spot for copy length on your webpages.
  • Determine the number of internal and external links on your page: This allows you to see how your linking strategy is working on each page.
  • See all of your meta information: Review title tags, alt text, and meta descriptions.


Paid SEO Tools

Next, let’s look at some paid SEO tools. (Note that some of these tools have free trial periods. Some also offer entirely free plans but with restrictions in terms of flexibility and customization.)


1. HubSpot SEO Marketing Software

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Price: $45/ mo for the Starter plan, $800 for professional, and $3,200 for enterprise.

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub includes an SEO marketing software tool that’s perfect for helping you build authority across your website. Since this software is integrated with HubSpot landing pages, webpages, and blog posts, you’ll never miss an opportunity to optimize your content for traffic and conversions.

No matter if you’re creating your first content strategy or you’re an expert in all things SEO, HubSpot’s SEO Marketing Software gives you the tools and the confidence to rank in the SERP and report on your performance.

HubSpot’s marketing software doesn’t keep SEO in a silo. This tool works in conjunction with:

  • Email: Send professional emails using your own branded designs.
  • Marketing Automation: Create dynamic campaigns for segmented audiences.
  • Lead Management: Track leads through each stage in your sales process.
  • Analytics: Review your campaign to identify success and opportunities for improvement.


2. Ahrefs

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Price: Seven-day trial for $7, $99/ mo for Lite, $179/ mo for Standard, $399/ mo for Advanced, $999/ mo for Agency

Ahrefs is an advanced SEO resource that examines your website property and produces keyword, link, and ranking profiles to help you make better decisions on your content.

Some of Ahrefs’ main features are:

  • Site Explorer: Shows you the performance of specific webpages on your website.
  • Content Explorer: This allows you to search high-performing webpages under specific keywords and topics.
  • Keywords Explorer: Generates the monthly search volume and click-through rates of specific keywords.
  • Site Audit: Crawls specified verticals within your domain and reveals a number of technical issues at the page level.


3. SEMrush

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Price: $119.95/ mo for Pro, $229.95/ mo for Guru, or $449.95/ mo for Business

SEMrush is an elaborate dashboard that reports on the performance of domains as a whole and their specific pages. SEMrush offers numerous resources, one of which is the SEO Toolkit.

Toolkit allows you to track a website’s visibility improvement over time as well as identify which keywords it’s ranking for, what the page’s rank is for a keyword, the keyword’s monthly search volume, and more.

SEMrush also allows you to:

  • Build links: Analyze backlinks from other websites to your site.
  • Use the Keyword Magic tool: Identify all keywords you need to successfully build an SEO strategy.
  • See your competitors’ strategies: Identify the paid keywords or ad copy used in the PPC ads of your competition.
  • Receive recommendations: See how you can increase your organic traffic by optimizing your content.


4. KWFinder

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Price: 10-day free trial; $29/mo

Sometimes you don’t need an SEO tool with all the bells and whistles if you only need to do keyword research. KWFinder is a great software that fills the gap between nuts-and-bolts SEO work and copywriting. You’ll find keywords that aren’t too difficult to rank for but still carry the potential to bring in traffic.

What makes KWFinder unique is how seamlessly it shifts between languages and regions so that you can serve your audience no matter where in the world they are.

Some of the top features KWFinder offers include:

  • Hidden long tail keyword insights: Find long tail keywords that give you more opportunities to acquire traffic.
  • Competitor keyword insights: See how your competitor’s keyword strategy compares to your own, plus find more keyword opportunities.
  • SERP analysis tool: Analyze competition in the SERP to understand what elements readers are looking for on your pages.
  • Local keyword research tool: See what searchers are looking for locally and appeal to local markets for more niche traffic.


5. GrowthBar

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Price: Free five-day trial, $29.90/ mo for Basic, $39.90 for Premium, and $79.90 for Agency.

GrowthBar is a Chrome extension that can help you perform keyword research, competitive analysis, and track SEO rankings. With the GrowthBar, access data points about any website directly from the search engine results pages. This allows you to assess your competitors’ performance and view the growth channels, keywords, backlinks, and ads that are working for them.

Here are some more key features of GrowthBar:

  • Use the Top Keywords and Backlinks feature: See which paid and organic keywords are driving the most traffic for your website and get a list of the most authoritative backlinks pointing to your site.
  • Get your Keyword Difficulty Score: Quickly assess how hard it would be to rank for a particular keyword based on the strength of the domain authorities of the URLs ranking on page one.
  • Use the Word Count tool: View the word count of any page directly from the SERP.
  • Run Facebook Ads: Get a visual of what they look like from a search engine’s perspective.
  • Use the Keyword Suggestions tool: Get a list of related keywords you might want to rank for along with their Search volume & CPCs.


6. Woorank

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Price: Free 14-day trial, $79.99/ mo for Pro, $199.99/ mo for Premium, or contact for Enterprise quote

Woorank’s in-depth site analysis helps marketers reveal opportunities for optimization and improvement. This analysis takes into account the performance of existing SEO initiatives, social media, usability, and more.

Each report is divided into sections to help you easily analyze your site and identify targets for optimization. Here are a few features of the report:

  • Marketing Checklist: Review common marketing tasks that you can complete as part of your SEO strategy execution.
  • SEO: Analyze your SEO metrics against your goals.
  • Mobile: Decide which mobile optimization tactics to employ based on the mobile data.
  • Social: Get insight into how social media is playing a part in your traffic and SEO goals.


7. BuzzStream

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Price: Free 30-day trial, $24/ mo for Starter, $124/ mo for Group, $299/ mo for Professional, $999+ for Custom

Although backlinks to your website are critical to ranking well on Google, the outreach you do while link building can feel a lot like cold calling. BuzzStream makes it easy to research the appropriate people, come up with effective email messages, and track who’s accepted each link request.

BuzzStream also helps you:

  • Identify candidates for outreach: Find them based on their industry and how engaged they are across various social networks.
  • Identify candidates for backlinks: These are individuals who will likely be receptive to your backlink request for other reasons that are unique to your business’s niche.


8. Moz Pro

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Price: Free 30-day trial, $99/ mo for Standard, $149/ mo for Medium, $249/ mo for Large, $599/ mo for Premium

The Moz Pro subscription serves as an all-in-one tool for increasing your business’ search ranking. Moz’s collection of research tools provides subscribers with the resources they need to identify SEO opportunities, track growth, build reports, and optimize their efforts.

Moz Pro also includes:

  • Website crawler: Analyzes up to 3,000 links on a given URL.
  • Email report: Details that crawl data for the pages your site links to.
  • Insight into various “crawlability” factors: These include duplicate content and redirects that could be influencing your SEO performance.


9. Linkody

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Price: 30-day free trial; $14.90/ mo for Webmaster, $24.90/ mo for Advanced, $49.90/ mo for Pro, 99.90/ mo for Agency, and $153.90 /mo for Agency XL

The best way to understand the performance of your off-page SEO is by having a good overview of your backlinks. Linkody allows you to discover, track, analyze, and disavow backlinks all from an easy-to-use interface.

Aside from that, the tool checks your links 24/7 and informs you of any changes so you can take immediate action in case a link is lost or broken.

Other Linkody features include:

  • “Spy” on your competitors’ backlinks: Simply enter the URL of your competitor and let the tool pull all the links and metrics. The information returned will help you discover niche-relevant, high-quality backlink opportunities for your brand.
  • Gain useful insights: See your most important metrics when it comes to backlink tracking, such as the ‘rel’ attribute, Google indexation status, the website’s Domain Authority, Spam Score, Alexa rank, and more.
  • Create white-label reports: Download reports that can be shared with your team and/or clients to get a better idea of your backlink distribution and link-building progress.


10. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

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Price: Free or €149/ year

Designed specifically for the SEO-minded, this program crawls the websites you specify, examining the URLs for common SEO issues. This program simplifies and expedites an otherwise time-consuming process – especially for larger websites. (It could take hours or days to manually evaluate the same URLs.)

Other notable features of Screaming Frog SEO Spider are:

  • Java Program: Screaming Frog includes an intuitive Java program with easy-to-navigate tabs.
  • Easy export to Excel: Further analyze your SEO data.


11. Remove’em

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Price: $249 one-time payment for Life-Time plan, $99/ mo for Subscription (one website), or $899/ mo for Agency (10+ websites)

If you’re buying a website domain that has been used in the past, or you’re rebuilding a poor SEO strategy, you may discover some problematic backlinks while conducting your audit. Artificial or unnatural links have the potential to seriously hurt your search ranking. Remove’em helps get rid of those links.

This tool has the ability to:

  • Scan your backlink profile: Discover a list of contact information for the links and domains you’ll need to reach out to for removal.
  • Export a list of backlinks: If you wish, you can disavow backlinks by telling Google not to take these “bad” links into account when crawling your site.


12. AnswerThePublic

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Price: $99/ mo for Monthly plan, $79/ mo for Annual plan, $199/ mo for the Expert plan

AnswerThePublic is a search listening and keyword tool that listens to autocomplete data from Google and other search engines, and then provides you with a list of phrases and questions that people are searching for around your keyword. This allows you to craft your website and content to your audience to increase traffic and conversions.

With AnswerThePublic, you can also:

  • Receive updates: See when people are talking about your most relevant keywords.
  • Monitor keyword trends: Understand keyword research behavior among your target audience and customers.
  • See real-time searches: View the keywords and phrases that your audience is researching in real-time.
  • Get ideas for your website and blog: Discover new content ideas based on relevant keyword research.


13. Keyword Hero

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Price: 14-day trial for any plan, Free for Little Hero, $9/ mo for Big Hero, $49/ mo for Giant Hero, and $149/ mo for Ultimate Hero

Keyword Hero pairs your visitor’s sessions with the keywords they used to land on your page, all within your Google Analytics account. In other words, this tool gives you an understanding of the search intent of your organic traffic.

Here are some more actions you can take with Keyword Hero:

  • Identify the organic traffic and conversions: Uncover the success you receive from your intended keywords.
  • Separate traffic: Identify brand versus non-brand search traffic.
  • Optimize your position in the SERPs: Optimize your website for specific target keywords.
  • See query details: Understand whether your visitors used informational versus transactional queries to find on your website.


14. SpyFu

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Price: $39/ mo for Basic, $69/ mo for Professional, $129/ mo for Unlimited.

SpyFu is a competitor keyword research tool for Google Ads. In addition to keyword research, it helps with PPC competitive research, SEO competitive research, and the creation of custom lists and domains.

The tool helps you drive traffic to your Google Ads campaigns and website, monitor both paid and organic rankings on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and obtain reliable and accurate contact information for leads.

With SpyFu, you can also:

  • Download a competitor’s PPC keywords: Use this insight to develop more competitive PPC strategies that can compete in the ad space.
  • Download a competitor’s SEO keywords: Use this insight to develop more competitive organic keyword strategies that can compete in the SERP.
  • Review ranking trends: the ranking of a page or website for a keyword over time.
  • Discover keyword ideas: Keyword advice for your Google Ads to increase chances of conversion.


15. Seomater

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Price: Pay as You Go (starting at $5), $19/ mo for Small Business, $49/ mo for Professional, $179/ mo for Unlimited.

Seomater is an SEO auditing and website crawling tool. It assists with technical SEO analysis and SEO on-page optimization testing. Once the tool crawls your site, you’ll receive an SEO report that explains your website’s various SEO-related elements including internal and external links, backlinks, page quality and speed, social media, organic presence, and more.

Your analysis will also come with tips on how you can improve each of these SEO elements. In addition, you can:

  • Use the SEO Monitoring Alerts feature: Your website will be automatically crawled and you’ll get an immediate notification if something is problematic in terms of SEO.
  • Get detailed reports: Find insights about your on-page and off-page SEO elements.
  • Use the Domain Comparison tool: Compare two competitors’ websites to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their SEO (such as broken links, content quality, HTML tags, and more).


16. ContentKing

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Price: $139/ mo for Basic, $319/ mo for Standard, $449/ mo for Pro, or $1,279 for Enterprise.

ContentKing is a real-time SEO auditing and content tracking tool – it tracks your website 24/7 so any issues related to SEO don’t go unnoticed for too long. The tool is cloud-based, meaning there’s no installation required and your data and reports are available whenever you need them.

With ContentKing, you can also:

  • Improve your SEO: Use ContentKing’s 24/7 website audits (and algorithms) to gain insight into your SEO and receive tasks that will help you optimize your webpages.
  • Get alerts: Get notified whenever something on your website is broken or is no longer well-optimized so you can efficiently fix the issue.
  • Track Changes: Follow the history of all your content changes on your site (such as changes on individual web pages and changes in robots.txt) and search the history of your changes.
  • Visualize data: See real-time dashboards and reports.

Now that you’ve learned about some of the best free and paid SEO tools on the market, determine which option will help you achieve your SEO goals and get started auditing, optimizing, and monitoring your website, individual web pages, and content.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in December 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Originally published Dec 6, 2021 7:00:00 AM, updated December 06 2021


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