Choosing a translation solution; How to scale internationally while protecting your brand, sales and rankings

Scaling your business internationally is hard at the best of times. Translation, and more importantly localisation, is at the core of this complexity, and yet making the right choices cannot only ensure everything goes smoothly but provide enormous additional opportunities for brands. A recent exchange with an entrepreneur really brought to light a lack of […]

The post Choosing a translation solution; How to scale internationally while protecting your brand, sales and rankings appeared first on Builtvisible.

Can "Big Content" Link Building Campaigns Really Work?

Posted by willcritchlow

There’s a lot of material out there, on this site and others, about the importance of link-building. Normally, its effectiveness is either taken for granted or viewed as implied by ranking factor studies — the latter of which doesn’t necessarily show that correlated factors actually drive performance. The real picture is one in which links clearly remain important, but where their role is nuanced.

For a while now, I’ve wanted to dig a little deeper into an individual link-building campaign that takes place over a relatively short period of time. I wanted to see what results (besides just link-based metrics) could be attributed to it.

In this post, I will try to pin down the effects that came from the campaign and show that yes, getting a bunch of links from the success of some highly visible “big content’ can drive improved rankings

The reason you don’t see more posts like this one is noisy data — so much goes on with a website’s performance that it can be difficult to draw a hard and fast connection between a campaign and its results for a business’s bottom line. This is especially true for link-building, for three reasons:

  • Websites are naturally accruing links anyway — both the target of the campaign and their competitors
  • To some extent, we anticipate a domain-wide effect, which will as such be proportionately small and hard to pin down vs. noise from the algorithm and competitor activity
  • Links do not have such a step-change impact as technical fixes or creation of new landing pages

However, at Distilled we recently had an opportunity with a particularly strong piece on a niche site to analyze a situation where the impact of our work ought to be more clearly visible among the broader noise. Take a look at these graphs, which show the linking-root domain acquisition of a client of ours over the last two years, as measured by Majestic and Ahrefs respectively:

See what I mean about noise? And I’m saying this is an unusually clear cut case. We actually built nine creative pieces, with link acquisition as one of the goals, for this client, over a two-year period. We’ve talked before about the campaign as a whole, here. There’s one that stands out in both graphs, though which is the one that launched in March 2018.

This gives us a rare, valuable opportunity to see which other metrics, which might have more direct business value, had noticeable changes around that time.

What might we expect to happen?

The theory is simple: Links remain part of Google’s algorithm, and so more links to a site mean better rankings. However, the reality is more complex — in our experience, creative pieces as link-building assets tend to result in two types of links:

  • Links to the creative piece, which in turn links, typically, to the site’s homepage
  • Links directly to the homepage of the client site — e.g. “Research by client (client.com) indicates that…”

The interesting thing here is that for many sites, the homepage is not a core landing page. I’ve written before about how it’s almost impossible to have a good mental model for internal link equity flow, which makes the actual impact of the piece on core pages almost certainly not zero, but otherwise hard to predict. On the same subject, I’d also recommend this video by Dixon Jones at Majestic.

In a similar vein, we also know that the complexities of PageRank are themselves only a part of the unknowable complexities of Google’s ranking algorithm, meaning we can’t guarantee that adding links always moves the needle. I recently recorded this Whiteboard Friday where I mention some recent research by my colleague Tom Capper, which shows how unpredictable these effects can be.

The particular client example I’ve been referring to in this post had two things going for it which, again, brought unusual clarity to these effects:

  1. The homepage was, in fact, a core ranking URL
  2. It was struggling to make its way onto page 1 for many reasonable target terms

Both of these ought to make it an ideal candidate for clearcut benefits from high-quality link building. (This isn’t to say link-building cannot work if these criteria are not met — just that the results will be harder to analyze!)

1st order results

Precisely because of the difficulty in analysis mentioned above, we find clients normally prefer to assess the performance of link-building campaigns in terms of 1st order benefits — by which I mean the performance of the actual creative piece, rather than their commercial landing pages.

The particular piece that stands out in those link acquisition graphs above earned the following 1st order benefits (and I’ve included graphs from our internal tracking platform so you can get a feel for the pace of acquisition):

228 LRDs peak (204 “fresh” index shown below), of which ~145 within a month of launch:

2,140 Facebook shares at the peak, of which ~1,750 within a month of launch:

82,584 landings in Google Analytics, of which ~67,000 within a month of launch:

I mentioned above that not all links tend to be directed at the piece itself, with journalists instead often referencing the homepage. 145 (domain-unique) links were directed at this piece by mid-April, but you’ll notice that March beat an average month by ~200 LRDs, and April also outperformed by ~100. By my back-of-the-envelope maths, you might want to claim as many as 300 LRDs driven to the whole domain by this piece, but your opinion may differ!

Showing the ways it worked

Right, I did say I’d link this at least to rankings, didn’t I?

Remember: This was part of a campaign of 9 pieces, and it launched mid-March, with most 1st order metrics, or leading indicators, coming through within a month (and no major technical changes around this time). There is some signal in among the noise here. Check out this graph, showing the number of keywords ranked for, according to Ahrefs:

Notice that change in gradient after the launch? (And, for the cynics among you, the piece itself only ranks for 20 keywords itself according to this same data source — that wasn’t a primary goal with this content).

Here are the rankings for the client’s (fairly ambitious!) target keywords:

I’d particularly draw your attention to the movement from the “11–20” to “4–10” group, which is consistent with the research by my colleague Tom Capper that I mentioned above. (Sidenote: it was nice to see the client’s Domain Authority increase relative to their competitive set in the recent update. The improvements to DA, aimed at making it better at predicting ranking ability, appear to have worked in this sample-size-one case!).

You can see this pattern more clearly in this graph, which we presented to the client when the campaign concluded late last year:

This effect is surprisingly clear-cut, but it might well be that to continue moving up the SERP, from positions 4–10 to positions 1–3, a very different type of work is needed — perhaps one emphasizing brand, or intent matching.

How can I do this for my site/client?

Here are some useful resources to help when starting on your creative campaigns:

Mark – How to make sticky content

Hannah – What is content strategy

Leonie – How to make award winning creative content – Part 1

Leonie – How to make award winning creative content – Part 2

Conclusion: Big content for links can work

As I mentioned above, it’s surprisingly unusual to see such a clear and obvious case of link-building work moving rankings in a lasting way. This has certain similarities with other such cases we’ve seen in recent years, though:

  • The site started fairly small (if nothing else, this makes the signal bigger relative to the noise)
  • It had target terms that were on the cusp of first-page rankings
  • Some search competitors had far stronger domains

The reports that “links are dead” have, apparently, been greatly exaggerated — instead, it’s just that the picture has gotten more complex.

Obviously Distilled clients are only a finite sample, however, so I’d love to hear your experiences of successful link-building, and, crucially, the kind of situations in which they moved rankings, in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

How Google May Rank Some Results based on Categorical Quality

A New Patent on Categorical Quality Some of the people who write patents for Google tend to stand out to me. One of those is Trystan Upstill. I noticed that he has published another one that looks really interesting, and worth reading. When I started following his patents, I read his doctoral thesis, Document ranking … Continue reading “How Google May Rank Some Results based on Categorical Quality”

The post How Google May Rank Some Results based on Categorical Quality appeared first on SEO by the Sea ⚓.

How to make online reviews one of your most powerful SEO weapons

The importance of online reviews is undeniable. Let’s talk about a few big ones in making online reviews one of the strongest weapons in your SEO arsenal.

The post How to make online reviews one of your most powerful SEO weapons appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

The 55 Best Free SEO Tools For Every Task

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

At Moz, we know the value of premium SEO tools — we’ve built new tools for 10+ years. Paid tools are hugely valuable in SEO when you need advanced features, increased limits, stored data, or online support.

But for 70 percent of other tasks, a free tool often does the trick.

There are literally hundreds of free SEO tools out there, so we want to focus on only the best and most useful to add to your toolbox. Tons of people in the SEO community helped vet the SEO software in this post (see the note at the end). To be included, a tool had to meet three requirements. It must be:

  1. Widely used by the SEO community
  2. Offers above-board value + actionable data
  3. Actually, truly free

The tools are categorized by SEO function. Click on a button below to jump to that specific section.

Categories:

Analytics   Crawling/Indexing   Keyword Research   Link Tools   Local SEO   Mobile SEO   Multi-tool   On-page SEO   Research   Site Speed   Wordpress


Analytics

The best tools to analyze search performance, monitor SERPs, keywords, and competitor analysis:

1. Bing Webmaster Tools

While Google Webmaster Tools gets all the glory, folks forget that Bing Webmaster offers a full suite of website and search analytics. Especially useful are keyword reports, keyword research, and crawling data.

Get it: Bing Webmaster
Also useful: Yandex.Webmaster

2. Data Studio

If you need to merge data from different sources (say Search Console and Google Analytics), visualize, and share it – this is Google Data Studio’s comfort zone. For an idea of all the SEO tasks and dashboards that you can build for free, check out these Google Data Studio Resources from Lee Hurst.

Get it: Data Studio

3. Enhanced Google Analytics Annotations

How do you know if your dip in traffic (or rise) is associated with a Google Algorithm update, or perhaps a major holiday? This is a highly-recommended Google Chrome plugin that overlays additional data on top of your analytics, so you can easily send screenshots to clients showing exactly how outside forces impacted traffic.

Get it: Enhanced Google Analytics Annotations
Alternatives: Panguin Tool, Zeo Tools

4. Google Analytics

The big kahuna, and the most widely-used web analytics package on earth. For being free, Google Analytics is surprisingly robust and plays well with other Google products, including Optimize, Search Console, and Data Studio. Some folks have privacy concerns with GA — though Google swears they don’t use this data for search rankings.

Get it: Google Analytics
Alternatives: Clicky, Open Web Analytics

5. Search Console

Probably the most useful free SEO tool on this entire list, it’s hard to imagine doing modern SEO without access to the data inside Google’s Search Console. This is the most reliable location for information on how Google crawls and ranks your site, and is one of the only places where you can get reliable keyword data.

Get it: Search Console

6. Keyword Hero

Did somebody say (not provided)? Keyword Hero works to solve the problem of missing keyword data with lots of advanced math and machine learning. It’s not a perfect system, but for those struggling to match keywords with conversion and other on-site metrics, the data can be a valuable step in the right direction. Pricing is free up to 2000 sessions/month.

Get it: Keyword Hero

7. MozCast

The brainchild of Dr. Pete and the original Google SERP tracker, MozCast is the go-to algorithm tracker whenever there’s a big update, or not. Also useful are the SERP tracking features showing the prominence of such features as ads and knowledge panels.

Get it: MozCast
Also useful: Algoroo, Rank Risk Index, Ayima Pulse


Crawling/Indexing

Specific tools to make sure your site is crawlable and optimized.

8. Beam Us Up

If you need a free, desktop crawler, you can’t do better than Beam Us Up. While it doesn’t have as many features as Screaming Frog, it does offer 100 percent free crawling with no limits. Windows only.

Get it: Beam Us Up

9. Link Redirect Trace

A free Chrome extension, lots of SEOs recommend Link Redirect Trace as the “all-in-one redirect path analyzer.” The extension reveals information about HTTP headers, rel-canonicals, robots.txt, and basic link metrics from LinkResearchTools. The “Save Screenshot” feature is super useful too.

Get it: Link Redirect Trace

10. Redirect Path

Similar to Link Redirect Trace, Redirect Path is a nifty tool from the good folks at Ayima that shows redirect paths and header information for every URL you visit. Gotta admit, I’ve used this extension for years and it’s almost “always on” in my browser.

Get it: Redirect Path

11. Screaming Frog

Aside from having one of the best Twitter accounts of any SEO tool maker, Screaming Frog is the most popular desktop-based crawler available today. Many people don’t realize that there’s a free version that allows for up to 500 URLs per crawl. While not as fully functional as the paid version, it’s great for small projects and smaller site audits.

Get it: Screaming Frog

12. Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer

Most folks in the SEO space are familiar with Screaming Frog, but many don’t realize that the Frog also offers a standalone free/paid Log File Analyzer tool. The free version is very robust, though limited to 1000 lines.

Get it: Screaming Frog Log File Analyser

13. SEOlyzer

SEOlyzer is a log analysis tool recommended by Aleyda Solis in her very excellent SEO podcast Crawling Mondays. SEOlyzer is a terrific log analysis tool with some cool features like real-time analysis and page categorization.

Get it: SEOlyzer

14. Xenu

Gotta be honest, although Xenu has been on every “free SEO tool” list since the dawn of, no way did I think it would make this one. This Windows-based desktop crawler has been virtually unchanged over the past 10 years. That said, a lot of folks still love and use it for basic site auditing, looking for broken links, etc. Heck, I’m leaving here for sentimental reasons. Check it out.

Get it: Xenu


Keyword Research

15. Answer The Public

It’s hard not to love Answer The Public. The interface has an almost “Cards Against Humanity” rebel vibe to it. Regardless, if you want to generate a massive list of questions from any keyword set, this is your go-to tool.

Get it: Answer The Public

16. Keyword Explorer

OMG. 500 million keyword suggestions, all the most accurate volume ranges in the industry. You also get Moz’s famous Keyword Difficulty Score along with CTR data. Moz’s free community account gives you access to 10 queries a month, with each query literally giving you up to 1000 keyword suggestions along with SERP analysis.

Get it: Keyword Explorer

17. Keyword Planner

Google’s own Keyword Planner was built for folks who buy Google ads, but it still delivers a ton of information useful for SEO keyword planning. It uses Google’s own data and has useful functions like country filtering. Be careful with metrics like competition (this is meant for paid placements) and volume — which is known to be confusing.

Get it: Keyword Planner

18. Keyword Shitter

Yes, it’s called Keyword Shitter. It pains me to write this. That said, it says what it does and does what it says. Type in a keyword and it, um, poops out a poop-ton of keywords.

Get it: Keyword Shitter

19. Keywords Everywhere

An SEO favorite! Install this browser extension for Firefox or Chrome, and see keyword suggestions with volume as you cruise the internet. Works in Google Search Console as well. This one is a must-have for keyword inspiration.

Get it: Keywords Everywhere

20. Ubersuggest

Sometimes I make fun of Neil Patel because he does SEO in his pajamas. I’m probably jealous because I don’t even own pajamas. Regardless, Neil took over Ubersuggest not long ago and gave it a major overall. If you haven’t tried it in a while, it now goes way beyond keyword suggestions and offers a lot of extended SEO capabilities such as basic link metrics and top competitor pages.

Get it: Ubersuggest


Link Tools

Tools to find, evaluate, and process backlink opportunities.

21. Disavow Tool

Google makes the Disavow Tool hard to find because most site owners usually don’t need to use it. But when you do, it can be useful for getting penalties removed and some SEOs swear by it for fighting off negative SEO. If you choose to use this tool, be careful and check with this guide on disavowing the right links.

Get it: Disavow Tool

22. Link Explorer

Link Explorer is arguably the biggest, most accurate link index in the SEO world today, boasting 35 trillion links. The free account access gives you 10 queries and 50 rows of data per query every month, plus adds basic link metrics to the MozBar as you browse the web.

Get it: Link Explorer

23. Link Miner

Link Miner is a free Chrome extension developed by Jon Cooper, one of the masters of link building. Use it to quickly find broken links on each page, as well as see basic link metrics as you search Google. Simple, easy, and useful.

Get it: Link Miner


Local SEO

Free tools to optimize your on Google Maps and beyond.

24. Google My Business

Basically, this is the #1, must-have tool for Local SEO — especially if you live in a market served by Google. It allows you to claim your business, manage listing information, and respond to reviews — among other things. Claiming your business profile forms the foundation of most other local SEO activities, so it’s an essential step.

Get it: Google My Business

25. Google Review Link Generator

The Google Review Link Generator by Whitespark solves a simple problem – how do you give your customers a URL to leave a Google review for your business? Reviews drive rankings, but Google doesn’t easily provide this. This generator makes it easy.

Get it: Google Review Link Generator

26. Local Search Results Checker

One of the hardest parts of Local SEO is figuring out rankings from any location — especially when Google stubbornly wants to serve results from the location you’re in. BrightLocal solves this with a quick local ranking tool that can virtually drop you into any location on earth to check actual local rankings.

Get it: Local Search Results Checker

27. Moz Local Check Business Listing

How consistent is your business information across the local search ecosystem? Moz Local lets you quickly check how your business shows up across the web in the major data aggregators that Google and others use to rank local search results. Very handy to understand your strengths and weaknesses. 

Get it: Moz Local Check Business Listing


Mobile SEO

Tools to optimize your website in Google’s mobile-first world.

28. Mobile First Index Checker

Mobile versions of websites often differ significantly from their desktop versions. Because Google has switched to mobile-first indexing, it’s important that major elements (links, structured data, etc.) match on both versions. A number of tools will check this for you, but Zeo’s is probably the most complete.

Get it: Mobile First Index Checker

29. Mobile SERP Test

It’s amazing how mobile search results can vary by both location AND device. MobileMoxie’s mobile SERP test lets you compare devices side-by-side for any location, down to specific addresses.

Get it: Mobile SERP Test

30. Mobile-Friendly Test

The gold standard for determining if your page meets Google’s mobile-friendly requirements. If your page passes the test, then Google counts it as mobile friendly, which is a bonafide (albeit small) ranking factor. If your page isn’t mobile-friendly, it will give you specific areas to address.

Get it: Mobile-Friendly Test


Multi-tool

Free SEO tools that have so many functions, they have their own special category.

31. Chrome DevTools

The sheer number of SEO tasks you can perform—for free—with Chrome DevTools is simply staggering. From JavaScript auditing to speed to On-Page SEO, some of the best features are hidden away but totally awesome. Need some specific ways to use it for SEO? Check out these resources here, here, and here.

Get it: Chrome DevTools

32. Marketing Miner

Marketing Miner has a low profile in the United States, but it’s one of the best-kept secrets of Eastern Europe. If you need to pull a lot of SERP data, rankings, tool reports, or competitive analysis, Marketing Miner does the heavy lifting for you and loads it all into convenient reports. Check out this list of miners for possible ideas. It’s a paid tool, but the free version allows to perform a number of tasks.

Get it: Marketing Miner

33. MozBar

One of the original SEO toolbars, the MozBar has seen significant upgrades over the years. Log in with a free Moz account and get link metrics as you browse the web, perform on-page analysis, and SERP analysis. The free version is super-useful by itself, while Pro users get additional functionality like advanced keyword suggestions.

Get it: MozBar

34. SEMrush

Like Moz, SEMrush offers a full suite of all-in-one SEO tools, and they have a free account option that works well if you only work with a single website, or only need a quick peek at top level data. The free account level gives you access to one “project” which includes basic site auditing, as well as limited keyword and domain reporting.

Get it: SEMrush

35. SEO Minion

SEO Minion is a very popular Chrome extension that goes beyond most SEO toolbars. Some of the quick functions it performs include analyzing on-page SEO, check broken links, Hreflang checks, a SERP preview tool, and a nifty Google search location simulator. Definitely worth trying out.

Get it: SEO Minion

36. SEOquake

Out of all the SEO toolbars available on the market, SEOquake is probably the most powerful, and comes with a plethora of configuration options — so you can configure it to adjust to your SEO needs. Aside from offering a boatload of data for every URL you visit, you can also perform basic on-page audits, compare domains, and export your data.

Get it: SEOquake

37. Sheets for Marketers

Sheets for Marketers isn’t a tool per se, but a website that contains over 100+ free templates to perform a huge number of tasks using Google Sheets. Find powerful free sheets for everything including competitive analysis, site audits, scraping, keyword research, and more. This is a website for your bookmarks. 

Get it: Sheets for Marketers


On-page SEO

Tools to help you maximize your content potential at the page level.

38. Natural Language API Demo

While there is some debate over how actionable Google’s Natural Language API is for SEO, there is no denying it’s a cool tool with lots of advanced analysis. The free demo allows you to analyze the text of a single page at a time and lets you see how a search engine would view entities, sentiment analysis, syntax, and categorization.

Get it: Natural Language API
See also: Advanced SEO Strategies using Natural Language Processing

39. Rich Results Test

Did you implement review rating stars in your JSON-LD, and want to see if your markup is valid for Google’s Rich Results? Getting a passing grade doesn’t mean your page will automatically display rich results in the SERPs, but think of it as the cost of admission (the cost being free, of course.)

Get it: Rich Results Test

40. Structured Data Testing Tool

Bookmark, bookmark, bookmark this page. Google’s Structured Data Testing tool is essential for not only troubleshooting your own structured data but performing competitive analysis on your competitor’s structured data as well. Pro Tip: You can edit the code within the tool to troubleshoot and arrive at valid code.

Get it: Structured Data Testing Tool

41. Tag Manager

On the surface, Google Tag Manager serves a simple purpose of allowing you to inject “tags” (such as Google Analytics) into your HTML. Beyond that, advanced users can leverage Tag Manager for a host of SEO functions. While Google recommends against using Tag Manager to insert important elements like structured data, it remains useful for a ton of SEO-related activities.

Get it: Tag Manager

42. View Rendered Source

This simple JavaScript auditing tool does one thing, and it does it very well. View Rendered Source is a free Chrome plugin that allows you to easily see the fully rendered DOM of any URL, and compare it to the original HTML. Great for JavaScript auditing and troubleshooting.

Get it: View Rendered Source


Research

Cools free tools for competitive, historical, and technological analysis.

43. BuzzSumo

As an SEO research tool, BuzzSumo is awesome. Its Chrome extension is one of the few tools available that deliver reliable social share count estimates for any piece of content. You don’t get as much data with a free account, but you still get access to top content and trending data. One of our favorite tools.

Get it: BuzzSumo

44. Hunter

Hunter is a popular email search tool, and definitely the most popular free email finder. Use it to find the email address associated with any company or individual, and verify any email address you already have. 50 free queries/month before paid plans kick in. 

Get it: Hunter
Also popular: Viola Nobert

45. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is like competitor analysis on steroids. You can research your competitor’s traffic, top pages, engagement, marketing channels, and more. The free offering is limited to five results per metric, but it’s often enough to grab a quick data point.

Get it: SimilarWeb

46. Wappalyzer

There are lots of tools that help you analyze what technology stacks a website runs on, but Wappalyzer is an SEO favorite. It’s 100 percent free (unless you want advanced reporting) and will instantly tell you what technology a site is using. For example, are they using Yoast or All In One SEO Pack?

Get it: Wappalyzer

47. Wayback Machine

Gotta be honest, I personally use the Wayback Machine 2–3 times a week. It’s perfect for uncovering historical data. You can even find a trove of historical robots.txt files archived. There are a ton of other SEO uses for Wayback Machine you may find useful. 100 percent free.

Get it: Wayback Machine


Site Speed

Tools to speed up your site in order to improve engagement, increase conversions, and rank higher.

48. Cloudflare

There are so many good things to say about Cloudflare, it’s difficult to know what to include here. Aside from a free CDN to speed up your site, it also allows for easy DNS management, and 100 percent free DDoS protection. You can run on a paid plan forever, but if you’re ready to upgrade, the pro features are super cool and amazingly affordable.

Get it: Cloudflare

49. GTmetrix

GTmetrix is one of many webpage speed performance tests that SEOs love to use. It provides familiar reports such as PageSpeed, YSlow, and Waterfalls, as well as automatically visualizing historic data for each page it analyses.

Get it: GTmetrix

50. Lighthouse

Lighthouse is Google’s open-source speed performance tool. It’s also the most up-to-date, especially in terms of analyzing the performance of mobile pages and PWAs. Google not only recommends using Lighthouse to evaluate your page performance, but there is also speculation they use very similar evaluations in their ranking algorithms. 

Get it: Lighthouse

51. Page Speed Insights

Page Speed Insights is another Google tool built on top of Lighthouse, with one key added metric: Field Data. Field Data uses metrics collected by the Chrome User Experience Report so you can see how your page performs with real users across the globe. Not every page has data, but it’s super useful when it does.

Get it: Page Speed Insights

52. SpeedMonitor.io

If manually logging into a speed tool to check your performance each day isn’t your thing, consider SpeedMonitor.io. It uses Lighthouse data to gauge performance, then tracks it over time and stores the results — all for free. You can even add competitor tracking and on-demand audits. 

Get it: SpeedMonitor.io

53. WebpageTest

Webpage test is another performance tool similar to GTMetrix. It breaks down performance into easy-to-understand grades, along with some of the most detailed performance reports found anywhere. 

Get it: WebpageTest


Wordpress

To be honest, there are literally hundreds of Wordpress plugins that can be helpful for SEO. You almost always want a “general” SEO plugin, and we’ve listed two below. For others, you have a lot of options, but this list from Kinsta is a good place to start.

54. Rank Math

The “new” kid on the Wordpress SEO plugin block, RankMath is quickly earning a cult following among certain SEO pros. It’s fully functional and comes with some cool features like built-in redirection, which means needing to install fewer plugins or pay for upgrades. Worth checking out.

Get it: Rank Math

55. Yoast SEO

Yoast is the “name” in Wordpress SEO. The most trusted name, the most installed (30 million sites) and often, the most innovative. With the help of our friend Jono Alderson, they’ve created some amazing advances in the delivery of structured data. I personally use Yoast on most of my Wordpress sites, and they are obviously highly recommended.

Get it: Yoast SEO


Bonus: Free Google Sheet of All 55 Tools

We’ve included a Google Sheet containing all 55 tools listed above. You can make a copy of the sheet and file away for your personal use, or share with your team.

Get the Free SEO Tool Sheet

Special Thanks

A lot of smart SEOs deserve credit for helping out with the recommendations in this post. A number of folks contributed suggestions from Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit.

A comprehensive list of SEO tools and resources is maintained by Saijo George. It’s continually updated and well maintained. You can find it here.

p.s. While these are 55 of the best free SEO tools, it’s by no means a complete list! What are some of your favorite free SEO tools? Let us know in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!