4 Free (And Simple!) Tools to Improve Your Website’s SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the best digital marketing strategies to help grow your traffic and your sales. Luckily if you are trying to gain a better understanding of SEO, there are tons of free programs that can help improve your website. Here are 4 tools of our favourite free, and simple-to-use tools to help grow your website into an SEO-powerhouse.
#1 – Chrome Lighthouse
As Google’s official SEO tool, Chrome Lighthouse is one of the best free tools to help evaluate your website’s overall SEO health.
Currently, you can use Lighthouse by installing it through the Chrome Web Store. The program is very simple and easy to use. After installation, just log on to your website and click “Generate report”, and after a few moments, the program will give you a bespoke report of your website’s overall SEO status.
These sorts of insights are crucial to help you improve your website’s SEO.
#2 – Page Speed Insights
Page speed is becoming increasingly important not just for the overall user experience, but also for your SEO rankings (especially on mobile). The longer the page loads, the higher the bounce rate is. And the higher the bounce rate, the worse it is for your SEO.
Bounce rate is so important that even Google’s website experience core indicator data shows that if the page load time even increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, the bounce rate will increase by an enormous 32%.
In other words, if you want to improve your SEO, your website needs to be FAST.
So how do you check the website loading speed? The process is very simple. You can use Page Speed Insights to test the loading speed of your website. Page Speed Insights is a website SEO detection gadget developed by Google. Just enter the URL on Page Speed Insights and your score will be displayed within a few minutes.
At the same time, Page Speed Insights will list the shortcomings of your website as well as give recommendations for where it can be improved, so that you can optimize and adjust as needed.
#3 – Check My Links
Internal linking is one of the most underrated (but important) aspects of SEO. Internal links help Google understand the relationship between your pages and also makes it easier for users to find content they are interested in.
However, when your website has been established for a long time, there will inevitably be invalid links, and these invalid links (also referred to as broken links) are bad user experience and SEO as a whole.
Thankfully Check My Links is a free extension for Google Chrome that will help you quickly identify your site’s broken links. Once the extension is added, click ‘detect’, and the program will help you mark valid links in green and invalid links in red.
The extension also helps you check links in bulk, which can help save a lot of time.
#4 – SEO Peek
Another simple, but effective, way to improve your site’s SEO is to focus on your Page Titles and Meta Descriptions – both of which determine the first impression of web users. Simplified and straightforward page titles and description tags can help increase page traffic by increasing your click-through rate (CTR). On the contrary, page titles and description tags that are too long and lack relevance do not attract as many clicks.
And to take it even a step further, the more clicks that your website gets on Google’s rankings – the better Google will rank you.
SEO Peek helps you quickly browse the various SEO elements of the page, including the page title and description tags, without viewing the HTML code, which is quite convenient.
Final Thoughts
SEO is time-consuming, but the 4 recommended tools can help you save time and start turning your website into an SEO-powerhouse.
If you are looking to outsource your Digital Marketing and SEO to an agency that has a proven track record of growing traffic and sales, reach out to us today to speak with a Digital Strategist.
