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If you are interested in search engine optimization, don’t waste time and don’t let your competitors leave you behind. Instead, be proactive, choose the best tools, monitor your progress and stay up to date with SEO news. Sometimes some of the best SEO tools are free.
I have already presented you with various tools to use to strengthen your online presence, reach a wider target and increase your income. For example, my publication on how to succeed in SEO in a world dominated by artificial intelligence was a great success.
This time I’m going to review X of the best Google tools for SEO experts. Please note that the most well-known tools will not be mentioned. You will therefore not find the Keyword Planner Tool, Google Analytics or the Google Search Console.
I prefer to share tools that you may not use that could have a huge impact on your SEO.
Let’s go !
1- Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Did you know that around 60% of searches are now done from a mobile device? Ten years ago, this would have been hard to believe. However, it does. And that’s not likely to change.
It is important to understand the impact this may have on search results. Google wants your website to be responsive, so this is not something you should take lightly. Luckily, the search engine giant is doing its part to make your life a little easier. With the Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool, it only takes a few seconds to determine whether your website is mobile-friendly or not.
After entering your URL and clicking “Test URL”, you should get something that looks like this:
As you can see, there are no guesswork with this free tool. Either your website is mobile friendly or it is not and this will impact search results.
If your website fails this test, don’t waste another day before making the necessary changes. Adapting your website to a mobile format could do wonders for your search engine rankings, as well as the amount of organic traffic you generate.
2- Google My Business
Local SEO is important. But regardless of your business and its field, if you want to make yourself known on the web, you will need to have a solid strategy focused on search engine optimization.
Most of the time, this starts with Google My Business and a Google my business listing, which allows you to provide your potential customers with more information about your business, including opening hours, address and contact details. This tool is simple and free.
According to this statistic shared by Social Media Today, 50% of local searches on mobile lead the visitor to the location during the day.
Creating a Google My Business listing does not guarantee an increase in online and offline visitors but definitely moves you in the right direction.
Here is an example of how a listing appears on the web:
Consider adding more photos as time goes by. At the same time, it is important to regularly generate positive reviews on social networks in order to improve your ranking on search engines.
3- Google PageSpeed Insights
Does the speed of a website really matter?
Well, it all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you want to find your site at the top of the search engine rankings, then this is an essential factor. And, if you want your visitors to have a positive user experience, this is also a good idea.
In other words, you will need to make sure that your website is as fast as possible. Speed will impact your SEO and how users interact with your website. This is why you need to ensure that your website loads as quickly as possible, at all times, so that it is well ranked.
With Google PageSpeed Insights, you no longer have to guess whether your website is up to speed. It also helps you make your website fast on all devices.
Running an analysis will provide the following:
Be sure to check the data for mobile and desktop, as it is important to make sure your website is up to date on each type of device.
Google also provides advice on things you should improve. With this information, you may find several ways to quickly and easily increase the speed of your website.
4- Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a service offered free of charge by Google when you have a website. It allows you to check the indexing of their website and therefore helps improve the natural referencing of your website.
Concretely, Search Console allows you to know daily the keywords that led to a visit to your site.
You will find several types of information on the platform allowing you to get a fairly precise idea of the health of your site and how it is perceived by the search engine.
Here is the main information available on your Search Console:
- The number of impressions
- The average position of your page URLs
- The CTR
- The number of clicks from the results pages (views per page, keywords, country, etc.)
- Netlinking and internal networking: external links received by the site and the distribution of internal links
5- Google Trends
A very powerful tool, often underutilized by online marketers, Google Trends can help you address topics that are popular right now.
In addition to exploring “featured” ideas, you can also search for any topic or keyword that comes to mind. It also allows you to track people’s search intent based on time of year. This will give you an indication of the “best” period to highlight topics concerning your business.
In the example below we can observe that searches around bread increased significantly during confinement.
Google Trends doesn’t always provide data that you can use to your advantage. But, from an SEO perspective, it’s worth using regularly. It can help you discover a topic that will drive a lot of traffic to your website.
6- Google Alerts
One of the best things you can do is set up an alert for your top three to five competitors. This way, you will receive a notification each time they are mentioned by online media. This is crucial to your long-term optimization efforts.
Why is this useful?
On the one hand, it allows you to keep tabs on your competitors and what they are doing. This also gives you the opportunity to draw inspiration from your competitors in order to obtain the same type of visibility.
There is nothing wrong with following publications and bloggers who regularly talk about your competitors. Once you have a solid list, reach out to these people and pitch your business.
If you have something interesting to offer or can prove that your business is just as important as competing businesses, don’t be surprised if it leads to positive visibility and possibly a link to your website.
Using these alerts is very simple, just type a topic and view the preview.
If you like what you see in the preview, it’s time to create the alert and wait for the updates to arrive.
7- Google Lighthouse
Google Lighthouse is an open source tool that will allow you to do an SEO audit of your website. The goal is once again to optimize and improve the quality of your different pages on your site.
After analysis, you will obtain a score out of 100, which assesses the progress of your optimization. This analysis is based on four central themes:
performance analysis of a site
analysis of site accessibility
the SEO audit
analysis of good practices
There is a Lighthouse plugin for faster analysis.
8- Keyword Planner, the free Google Adword tool
Your Google Ads ads are unlikely to produce any impact if their distribution is not targeted to your target audience. To optimize the ROI of your Google Ads campaigns, good targeting and a choice of relevant keywords is essential.
Google Keyword Planner will allow you to identify the most relevant keywords for a campaign in order to optimize the performance of your ads.
Please note that you can use this tool even if you do not run AdWord campaigns. It is a very good tool for finding the keywords that will be essential to you.
9- YouTube
Did you know that Google bought YouTube for over a billion dollars?
It’s been over a decade, so I understand if you’ve forgotten that the most used search engine in the world owns the largest video sharing website (and the second most used search engine in the world). world).
If you want to develop an overall online marketing and SEO strategy, it is essential to get involved in creating and sharing videos.
There are many benefits to dedicating most of your video marketing resources to YouTube, including the fact that it has the largest user base of any video sharing service.
Additionally, YouTube videos often rank highly in Google search results. I also wrote an article on SEO on YouTube that many of you read. So even if you can’t appear on the first page of Google, you can have more success with your YouTube videos.
Youtube is also a very good tool for suggesting content on your subject by simply doing a search in its search bar.
Conclusion
It doesn’t matter if you are doing SEO for a local or national business. Using one or more of these tools will certainly improve your overall SEO.
It’s time to review your SEO strategy, to make sure it’s in good working order.
What do you think of this list of free Google tools? Have you used any of them in the past?
