Google holds an astounding 67.6% of the U.S. search engine market according to Search Engine Watch, which is why we are focusing on them. Google’s rollout of Panda, Mobilegeddon, Penguin updates have really shaken up the SEO landscape. Most web designers and developers know that today’s Google cares a lot more about website speed, mobile-friendliness, unique content and user experience. If you want to rank organically, pre-made themes, duplicate or stale content, keyword stuffing or mobile-unfriendly websites will no longer cut the mustard. In order to reach the top SERP (search engine results page) and stay there nowadays, you must deserve to be there. You must provide a unique user experience with a beautiful, engaging and functional website highly catered to your target market. Fortunately, we have some free website tools to help get you there.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights fetches your website for mobile and laptop to generate recommendations for improving website loading times and ranks your website out of 100. The higher the score the better but anything higher than 70 generally means that your website is performing well. Suggestions usually include reducing server response time, optimizing images, leveraging browser caching, minifying JavaScript and increasing sizes of tap targets on mobile devices.
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. It checks your website’s performance and helps you fix issues with support documentation and testing tools so your website can get on top and remain on top of search engine results.
WooRank
Aside from the Google PageSpeed Insights, WooRank is our favorite website tool. It shows you how to improve SEO by analyzing your meta data, title tags, Google preview, keyword consistency, indexed pages and numerous other things that can impact your website rankings. It counts your backlinks, activity on social media and postings in local directories. It checks for mobile compatibility, touch screen readiness, legibility, mobile speed and other things that impact mobile friendliness. There is even an affordable paid version that offers Facebook Insights Sync, custom keywords tracking, uptime monitoring, competitor evaluations and backlinks analysis.
Copyscape
Copyscape is a free plagiarism checker and is very useful when you are hiring a website writer. The software checks if your content has been stolen or if you are purchasing copied content.
SEO Report Card
SEO Report Card shows you how you rank in Google, Bing and Yahoo for your specific keywords compared to one of your competitors. It shows you important metrics like the number of backlinks, times your keyword is incorporated, loading time, accessibility to search engines, your domain authority, and indexed pages. Your domain authority is a score out of 100 which considers linking root domains, number of links, MozRank and MozTrust.
Found SEO Audit Tool
Found SEO Audit Tool shows you errors, warnings, and successes for canonicalization, robots, sitemap, loading time, links, headings, alt tags, keyword analysis and metadata.
Responsinator
With mobile searches having surpassed laptop and desktop searches, how your website looks and functions on mobile devices is now more important than ever. If you have not adjusted your website to be responsive then very likely Google has already buried you in the mobile search results because of their mobile requirements last year. Responsinator is a great way to check how your website resizes in the popular iPhone, iPad and Android devices vertically and horizontally.
In Conclusion
There are tons of free tools out there and these tools are just what we use. These web development tools are great are very helpful if you want to take a more hands-on approach to your website or if you want to check that your web developer or SEO strategist’s work is up to snuff.