The Best Free SEO Tool

Atiba de Souza: SEO tools can just flat out be expensive. I know, I run an agency and we do content marketing and SEO. And so, yeah, I know. It totally gets super, super expensive and, you know, I get business owners and people that I meet all the time who asked the question, "Is there a way that I don't have to spend so much money on tools? Are there ways I can do things for free?" And the short answer is, yes. And so we're going to look at a couple of them today. I'm going to jump into some things with you and just share some of my experiences with some of the free tools and also some of the limitations that you're going to face with those.

Alright, so let's jump in and do that. Welcome, everybody I am your host of Atiba, and welcome to the Traffic Keys Media podcast where we do what? We teach you how to drive organic traffic to your website. Because more traffic, more quality traffic, equals more leads, more leads, means more revenue, more revenue is better for your bottom line.

So let's dive in to today's topic. And this is a big one. It really, really is. And I'm going to break it down really small and only cover two tools today. Okay. And tell you that it really depends on what it is you want to do. Okay. It depends on what it is you want to do. If your goal is to do research, to figure out what your strategy for SEO should be and learn what's available, in other words, keyword research, competition research, that type of thing. Then that's one way to go. The other way is if you're looking for tools that tell you, okay, what's actually going on on my website? And you want to come up with a strategy based on what's actually going on on your website, then that's a different way. 

So you can be in one of the two camps or maybe you're in, in both, which is perfectly fine too. Okay. And so I'm going to share with you— I'm going to demo one and tell you about another, share with you two tools that you can use. The first one that I'm not going to demo for you today, that I have demo'd before, which happens to be my favorite tool. 

And so therefore I have a paid subscription to it. And so I can't demo their free version is SEMrush and I will drop a link to some rush down below. SEMrush has a free version, which is actually, okay. I'm not going to say it's great. It's okay. The thing that you get with SEMrush's free version is the ability to go in and do keyword research and get real data back on volume and keyword difficulty, and even some competition data as well. 

And they will allow you to use that tool for a period of time for free. So if you were looking to get in, get a bunch of information, get out. That's the place to go, my opinion. Okay. Now, are there other free tools that will give you keyword data in terms of volume? Yes. People will love to talk about Neil Patel's too, but personally, no offense, Neil, but I've looked at the data that it provides and the data often is wrong. 

It's not, it's not accurate. SEMrush has much more accurate data. Now, no one's data is. But I've just found that Neil stayed on a lot of those other tools that provide you volume data for keywords for free. They're usually not very accurate. And therefore, I wouldn't suggest that you use any of them. 

So use SEMrush, use their trial, and get as much information at that time as possible. That's one way to go. If you're looking for keyword research and keyword data. Now, if your goal is to more monitor your website, see what's going on because you're producing content, you have a strategy and you're executing, you want to know if it's working and how it's working. Then Ahrefs has created a subset of their tool that they're offering for free. And there really are no real strings attached. Okay. As long as you own and manage the site, they will give you great snapshot data on what's going on right now on your site. So I'm going to jump in and show you this, and I can show you this because I actually don't use the paid version of Ahrefs. 

I do have the free version for this exact reason so that I can show you guys how this works. Okay. So in Ahrefs here, once you set up the account, which can be a little bit tricky, gotta some tutorials and some videos and stuff, but once you get it all in and get it all set up, you can come in, and this is one of the sites that we manage here. 

And it's going to give you a great snapshot of the site, right? What's the URL rating? The domain ranking? How many backlinks does it have? The referring domains? How much organic keywords and organic traffic, and what the value is. So, it gives a great static, information. Right. Ahrefs has traditionally been the leader in this industry when it comes to backlinks and backlinks research. They are, in my opinion, and an opinion of a lot of other people, the gold standard for monitoring the back links to a website. So you can come here and they do show you your backlink profile and you can see what your different backlinks are as they grow or as you lost on four sites that you own. Now, if you don't own the site, they won't show you this information on the free version. And that's why I say, if you're just looking to manage your site and not know anything else about what's going on in the world, the free version of Ahrefs is a good option. 

So show your backlinks here, then coming down into a little bit further into organic search down here. You've got your organic keywords that you rank for. So it will show you your organic keywords. This year I use it, but it's more antidotal for me because again, I'm a SEMrush guy. I have done— manually, looked at the SERP report from SEMrush and looked at the SERP report here and found that SEMrush is more accurate. 

And so they've got great information here on this side that you can use. And especially from a free version, you can come in and see. You know, hey, this keyword, where is it ranked? How much traffic is it getting so on and so forth? You can see all of this type of data here for free about your own website.

So I love it from that point. If you're the type of person who you want to get in, but you don't want to pay a bunch of money. We use it in the agency just as a barometer. So SEMrush is, and I said, we are on the paid version there, SEMrush is our gold standard and it produces great information for us. 

We use Ahrefs and a bunch of other tools as well to kind of do a check in balance. So if SEMrush says that the volume of this keyword is a thousand, and then Ahrefs says the volume of this keyword is a hundred, then I'm going to wonder why is there such a discrepancy what's going on here? We checked other tools.

And so we use it more of a check in balance, but you can use it to actually manage your entire site and see what is the health of my website right now, this moment, because it does not give you any historical data. Okay. In their free version, you have to do the paid version to get historical data. And you can just get that really great picture of where I am right now. 

So that's between the free version of SEMrush, which will help you figure out strategy. If that's what you're looking for and the free version of Ahrefs. You've got some great options. Okay, that you can use of high powered tools that actually provide great value that you don't have to go out and pay a ton of money for, until you're ready for it. 

There comes a point in time when you're going to need more and that's okay. When it's that time, then pay for it. But right now, if you're looking for free alternatives, these are two that are really, really great. Again, Imma drop links down below for both of these. Check them out, let me know what questions you have. 

Like I said, I use these on a daily basis, so let me know what questions you have. Alright, everybody. Bye-bye.