1. Google Search Console.
Google search console is the free google ranking tool provided by google to help you manage your website on google. The tool is absolutely free and anyone can have it. All you need is your gmail account and you can access the tool. But first you need to add your website to this tool. You add your website by verifying ownership.
Add your website to google search console
As you can see in the image above, you click on the add property option, add the link, then get the text that google provides and add it to your website. When you add the text to your website, return to google search console and click confirm ownership. When successful you will now start seeing the data about your website on google.
Such information involves all your ranking pages, all your indexed pages, all your crawled and non-crawled pages, your ranking keywords and so much more. Such information is very critical in determining the ranking of your website on google. For example by making sure that all your webpages are indexed, you can make sure that you are not missing out. In addition to that, you can also make sure that you capitalize on the keywords that you are ranking for. For example you can write more articles for such keywords.
Google Analytics.
2. Google Analytics.
Analytics is a key factor of ranking on google. Knowing what people are clicking on, what people are visiting and where these people are coming from can be critical. You need to know how many people are on your website and where they come from. You need to know which pages they visit and what actions they perform on your website. All this kind of information can help you know how to optimize your website. It can also help you know how to make more content that people like. If you are having a high bounce rate it can help you deal with that. All this information can be obtained from google analytics. The process of adding your website to google analytics is almost similar to google search console explained above. You will need to verify your ownership of the website using the script they provide you with. Once verified you can start observing your statistics and using it to make it better and improve. All this for free.
PageSpeed Insights.
3. PageSpeed Insights.
Ranking on google is not just about onpage seo. It is also about matters like the speed of your webpages. The pages of your website have to load fast. In the world of today, no user will wait for 15 minutes for your website to load. The moment the browser starts to load and 5 seconds pass most people leave that page and click on another. If they searched on google, they will just return back and click on another result. Google also knows this and that's why if your website is slow google will not rank it high. Which means that just speed will hurt your rankings. Thus you must improve the speeds of your webpages. Tools like pagespeed insights help you know the speed of your webpages. It will help you know which pages are fast enough and which are slow. Pagespeed insights will also suggest for you on how to improve it. It will suggest for you all the things about your webpage that you need to change so that it can speed up. The best part? It is free.
Lighthouse.
4. Lighthouse.
Lighthouse is a free tool provided by google developers. It is a tool used to diagnose your webpages. The tool will show you a lot of information about your webpages. Such information include performance of your webpage, accessibility, best practices and seo. Such information is very critical in improving your website. It will help you speed up your website and webpages. Lighthouse will also help you improve the SEO of your website by even suggesting to you what to improve. It will inform you which scripts are slowing down your pages. It will inform you which resources are loading slow. Some of those resources will need to be loaded asynchronously. Some will need to be minimized. In addition to that, it can even suggest you which files to preload and which to load from CDNs. It shows you so much information that i cannot go through all of it in this article. Just visit the tool and see.
GTmetrix.
5. GTmetrix.
GTmetrix is another major seo tool that you cannot afford to ignore. Also free like all the other tools that we have discussed above. GTmetrix will provide you with similar information as lighthouse tool above. The tool will help you improve the speed and performance of your website. It will help you know the latency of your website and the speed of your server. Such information can help you even know the best hosting companies to use. It can tell you all the things on your page that are not displaying well such as the largest contentful paint LCP.
Yoast SEO.
6. Yoast SEO.
This is a WordPress plugin. This is unlike most of the other tools we have discussed above. Yes the tool is free but it has a paid version tool. What they do is some of the important features like seo analysis and sitemap generation are free. If you want more advanced features, you will need to pay for them. However, the reason why this app has made it here is because, the free features are very powerful. Remember that this is a tool that comes as a WordPress plugin. Of-course you cannot be able to use the tool without WordPress . If your website does not use WordPress you will not be able to use it. This tool will enable you to generate sitemap for your WordPress website. It will analyze your articles and tell you the readability. It will also tell you which article is optimized for seo and which is not. There is so much more that it offers. Hence i ask you to visit the tool and try it for yourself.
Seo Review Tools.
7. Seo Review Tools.
This is a website that provides a collection of seo tools that you can use to improve your google rankings. Such tools include keyword tool, rank checker, backlink checker, domain authority checker, seo writing assistant, duplicate content checker and content idea generator. Imagine all those tools just at one platform. The best part, they are all free. So this is a great tool that you can use to improve your seo and rank higher.
Google Keyword Planner.