My 9 Favorite Free SEO Tools

Key Takeaways

in this video i'm going to show you my favorite seo tools the best part every single tool on this list is 100 free i'm brian dean the founder of backlinko the place where marketers turn for higher rankings and more traffic and if you're looking for tools that will help you get higher google rankings you'll love this video keep watching the first tool on this list is called seedkeywords.com most keyword research tools work the exact same way enter a seed keyword into a tool and get a list of suggestions the problem with this approach is this everyone types the same exact seed keywords into these tools no wonder most keywords are super competitive that's where seed keywords comes in it helps you sidestep this problem instead of pulling seed keywords out of thin air you actually ask customers how they'd find you online then you use those seed keywords in a traditional keyword research tool for example let's say that you run an online flower delivery ecommerce site well you do see keywords to create what's called a scenario basically you ask people how they would search for what you sell then send that scenario to people and if you're like me you'll be surprised at the responses that you get finally put the terms that you find into your favorite keyword tool and you'll find some untapped keywords that your competitors don't know about yet which leads us to our second free seo tool serperator now it didn't include serperator on this list just because it has a name that kind of sounds like terminator although that didn't hurt with that here's how this tool works as you probably know the search results change dramatically depending on where you are and the device that you're using and this awesome tool helps you check out the search results across different locations and devices all you need to do is specify your device and location and you'll see exactly how the results will look for someone searching from that location using that device pretty cool and now it's time for our third seo tool exploding topics you probably already know that finding new trending keywords is an seo goldmine and it's simple math if you target an old keyword they're gonna be more blog posts articles youtube videos and content in general that you have to compete with but when you target new keywords that are trending up you get in early before the search results get super competitive for example a while back i wrote a post optimized around the keyword mobile seo back when that keyword was relatively new even though that keyword didn't have a ton of searches yet i knew that google had been rolling out updates that penalized sites that weren't mobile optimized which meant that searches for that keyword were primed to explode and because i got in super early i was able to carve out a top three ranking for this growing term a ranking that i still hold to this day the question is how do you find these new trending terms well you could use google trends but the issue with google trends is that you already need to know what you're looking for in other words google trends is great for confirming a trend on a keyword that you already know about but it's not really helpful for coming up with new trends and topics enter exploding topics with exploding topics you get a list of new trending keywords presented to you on a silver platter and the tool has a database of training topics across several different industries including health fitness marketing fashion consumer products and more moving right along our next free seo tool is called lsi graph you've probably heard of lsi keywords before they're basically words and phrases that are closely related to your main keyword and when you include these terms in your content google sees your content as comprehensive which can give you a nice little rankings boost for example let's say your target keyword is star wars lsi keywords for star wars would be things like luke skywalker jedi princess leia and the millennium falcon so how do you find lsi keywords a very cool free tool called lsi graph just enter your target keyword into the tool and you'll get a list of lsi keywords that you can sprinkle into your content pretty cool with that it's time for tool number five tubebuddy tubebuddy is a free chrome extension that helps you optimize your youtube videos for seo for example let's say that you want to use some of the same tags that another video is using well you can use tubebuddy to easily see those tags and use them in your video or let's say you're looking for a keyword to optimize your video around you can use tubebuddy to see the competition level on youtube's first page for that keyword which leads us to tool number six word tracker scout word tracker scout takes kind of a unique approach to keyword research instead of entering a keyword into a tool word tracker scans a page and finds keywords that show up over and over again that way you can go over to one of your competitors pages and grab the keywords that they're already using in their content you can even sort the list of keywords by opportunity which are terms that have the best ratio of search volume and competition and now it's time for seo tool number seven the google search console no list of seo tools would be complete without talking about search console why well if you take a step back search console is actually a pretty feature-rich piece of seo software and unlike almost every other tool in the market the data that you get comes straight from google so you know it's legit for example you can use the search console as a rank tracker to check your site's ranking in the serps you can also use it to get a feel for your site's backlink profile now this isn't nearly as good as a paid tool like ahrefs but it's not terrible last but not least you can see all the pages that your site has indexed in google and if you have any technical seo problems that's holding your site back which leads us to tool number eight answer the public most keyword research tools get their data from the same exact place the google keyword planner answer the public is a little bit different this tool focuses on questions that people ask on forums quora reddit blogs and on social media and it turns those questions into awesome keywords my favorite feature inside of answer the public is that they have a section dedicated to versus keywords so why is this helpful in my experience versus keywords are great for seo that's because versus keywords usually aren't super competitive and the people that search for versus keywords tend to be pretty advanced which means they're usually close to buying something for example i recently published this post that compared ahrefs to sem rush even though this keyword doesn't get a ton of searches the people that do search for this keyword are pretty advanced remember these aren't newbies that are looking up what seo is or how it works they're comparing two different paid tools and these are the exact type of people that i want to get in front of which is why i published that versus post and like i said versus keywords aren't usually really competitive which is why i was able to rank in the top three within a few weeks and now it's time for our last tool seo tool number nine animals revive animals revive helps you find older content on your site that needs an update and upgrade or both before this tool came along you had to manually find these pages in google analytics and it was a huge pain but with this tool you get a list of pages that need some tlc it even shows you how many visitors you're losing by not updating your old content so before we end this video i've got a quick bonus tool for you sightliner siteliner is a free technical seo tool that scans your site for seo problems like blocked pages messed up redirects duplicate content and broken links you can even drill down into each page on your site to see if the tool found any issues you can also compare your site's loading speed and page size to other sites in siteliner's database which is helpful for benchmarking so that's my list of my nine favorite free seo tools if you like this video make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel right now just click on the subscribe button below this video also if you want exclusive seo traffic techniques that i only share with subscribers head over to backlinko.com and hop on the newsletter it's free now i want to turn it over to you which tool from today's video are you going gonna try first are you gonna find trending keywords using exploding topics or optimize your videos with tubebuddy let me know by leaving a comment below right now [Music] [Music] you