9 Effective SEO Tools to Use on a Budget

High search engine rankings add immense value to a business as they can generate increased traffic, visibility, and revenue. Appearing on top of organic search results also boosts your brand awareness. However, it requires consistent efforts and continued investment of time and money.

Most digital marketing agencies pay hundreds of dollars every month as subscription fees for expensive SEO tools. But many startups and small businesses can't afford that. To boost your sales and outsmart your competition, you need an SEO tool that is affordable yet robust and effective.

Here are nine affordable and result-driven SEO tools that you can use to achieve higher search rankings.Ā

1. Ubersuggest

Popular serial entrepreneur Neil Patel's Ubersuggest has almost similar features as BuzzSumo, but since the outbreak of COVID-19, Ubersuggest has been made available for agencies and marketers free of cost.

Just enter the keyword or phrase you are targeting, and it will return the most popular articles and blog posts containing those words. It uses various metrics to curate a list of blog posts with the highest number of backlinks, social shares, and traffic. It will tell you what's trending and give you an idea about the content that resonates with users. You can use this tool to generate topics for your content marketing campaigns.

Ubersuggest also allows you to reverse-engineer your competitors' SEO and digital marketing strategies. It provides you research-backed insights into the SEO strategies that other companies have successfully implemented and how you can also adapt them for better results.

It is also a great tool to get keyword ideas. It provides hundreds of suggestions, including short-tail and long-tail keywords and other useful metrics like competition data, volume, and even seasonal trends.

Ubersuggest can also generate a list of keywords that your competitors use based on Google's user queries. It provides you comprehensive backlink data and niche-based content that people are linking to. You can contact these sites and ask for the relevant backlinks to save your time. The tool also offers an action plan to improve your link profile and a list of the best backlinks that will have the maximum positive impact on your rankings.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics utilizes comprehensive website data to help you make smart decisions. It tracks your every action and measures its impact on traffic and conversion. It also gathers user data about email sign-ups, downloads, clicks, conversions, and keywords. If you want your pages to rank for specific keywords, no other tool can provide better insights than Google Analytics.

It also helps you understand user behavior on your website so you can tweak your marketing strategy, content, and products accordingly. Furthermore, it utilizes Google's machine learning capabilities, which generates reliable data that you can use to convert insights to tangible results.Ā

3. Google Page Speed

Webpage speed is a crucial and direct ranking factor. It applies to both mobile and desktop sites. Google Page Speed calculates your website's loading speed and provides suggestions to improve it based on Google's guidelines.Ā

4. Google Keyword Planner

The best things in life are for free, and the same is true for Google Keyword Planner. Google offers this tool free of cost when you sign up for a Google Ads account. It helps you explore popular search terms and also the ones that are easy to rank. It can be a handy resource for marketers and businesses, especially if they are relatively inexperienced. The tool uses Google's artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to offer suggestions based on the keywords you enter. The suggested keywords include the necessary metrics and data.

5. Google Search Console

A few years ago, website owners used Google Webmaster Tools to gain crucial performance-related insights and fix SERP issues. But on 28 May 2015, it was rebranded as Google Search Analytics, and in 2018, it was rechristened Google Search Console when Google made significant changes to the platform.

Google Search Console can quickly identify undesirable crawl errors and broken URLs. The platform also gives your backlink profile's complete picture. It helps you gain deep insights into the website's performance on search engines using vital metrics like a number of unique impressions, click-through rate, and average ranking position. Since it is Google's proprietary tool, it uses the data stored on the Google servers to reveal information about your webpage's average ranking in any country.

The tool also allows you to track how your rankings have changed over time. Google Search Console may not strictly be an SEO tool, but the data it provides can help you rank high on SERPs.Ā

6. SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is a multi-purpose SEO tool that can help you with all the aspects of yourĀ  SEO campaign. Although it is a paid software, the free version is as good as some other best SEO tools.

SEO Powersuite's free version helps you do the following:

• Find ways to divert traffic from competitor websites.
• Improve your search engine rankings.
• Identify the right keywords based on online searches.
• Perform a detailed SEO audit on your site.
• Optimize your site with the most popular and low competition keywords.
• Gain insights into your competitors’ backlinks and formulate a link-building strategy.
• Build new partnerships and discover guest posting opportunities.

7. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a comprehensive SEO analytics tool that also acts as a website crawler. It analyzes the site-wide SEO for your and your competitors' websites. It will also provide you vital information about the various errors on your webpages, such as broken links, faulty redirects, and duplicate pages.

The tool helps generate an XML sitemap, review meta robots and directives, and analyze page titles and metadata. Screaming Frog has both paid and free versions; the free version analyses up to 500 URLs. It extracts crucial data about your competition and fixes common SEO issues to improve your website.

8. Check My Links

Google does not like broken links as they hinder user experience on your website. Since manually checking broken links is time-consuming, Check My Links allows you to perform an audit on your site to locate broken links within minutes. It will help you to quickly repair broken links and improve your SEO across the website. Check My Links highlights the valid links in green and broken links in red. It also highlights links in yellow to indicate potentially problematic links.

9. Open Link Profiler

Link building is a tedious task, but Open Link Profiler simplifies it by providing comprehensive data about your backlink profile. Engineering high-quality links can significantly boost your website's SEO. Visit their website, enter your URL, and it will give you access to a list of all the links that point to your site.

Open Link Profiler also gives you information about the quality and origin of backlinks. It helps you get rid of toxic links and adds higher-quality links. The free version allows you to export up to 1000 links.

Conclusion

You don't always need expensive tools to get high search engine rankings. Many SEO tools offer incredible value at a relatively low cost. The user-friendly tools discussed above will help you enhance your website's SEO profile, increase loading speed, fix broken links, perform website audits, and efficiently handle other digital marketing tasks.