If you’re a blogger, keeping your content optimized for search engine crawlers is essential to make sure that your posts are well-received by your readers. Fortunately, Google provides an incredible suite of free tools that are intuitive and easy to use so that you don’t need to invest in expensive SEO services for everything SEO. Here are 11 free SEO tools by Google.
From search console and analytics, trend monitoring with opportunities to jump on potential topics through Google trends, efficient keyword planning using Ads Keyword planner and Sheets, experimenting with various elements through Optimize and Lighthouse testing from Google Webmaster Toolbox—you have full access to many of the resources you need for SEO optimization without breaking the bank!
1. Google Search Console – to check your website’s visibility and indexing status
2. Google Analytics – to measure website performance, user engagement, and track goals
3. Google Tag Manager – for managing tags and tracking codes on the website
4. Google Trends – to analyze search trends related to keywords and topics
5. Ads Keyword Planner – to research keyword popularity, costs, and competition
6. Google Sheets – for easy data analysis and tracking of SEO metrics
7. NLP API – To analyse your content and that of your competitors.
8. Google Optimize – a/b testing for your content.
9. Google Lighthouse – To track user experience on your website.
10. Google Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) – Syncing your data sources into reports and visualisations.
11. Google Alerts – To monitor online mentions of you or your website.
Google Search Console – to check your website’s visibility and indexing status
Google Search Console is a powerful SEO tool for bloggers to measure website visibility. With it, I can check my website’s indexing status and optimize visibility through the many reports available. The specific tools available from Google Search Console include the ability to view rankings of my website in search results, check how my pages are found by their robots, submit URLs for crawling and indexing, fix any broken links or errors that show up on a site and perform various other checks like checking URL parameters so they don’t block content. It even enables me to request a reconsideration if mistakes have been made in the past. All in all, it’s an essential SEO tool to ensure that your website is getting seen.
Google Analytics – to measure website performance, user engagement, and track goals
As a blogger, I’m always looking for ways to improve my website performance, user engagement, and track goals. To help me with this I rely on Google Analytics. It helps provide insight into how well my site is doing and allows me to view data such as page visits, bounce rate, organic search traffic sources and more. Plus with it, I can follow e-commerce insights like product list views, transactions, revenue and so much more that I can use to track how effective my campaigns and goals are performing over time. With the accuracy of Google Analytics, I’m able to make informed decisions about the future of my website.
Google Tag Manager – for managing tags and tracking codes on the website
Taking control of the website tags and tracking codes can be a cumbersome task, but with Google Tag Manager it can be optimized and automated quickly.
Google Tag Manager is a tool that helps you manage the tags, which are small pieces of code that collect data about how people use your website or mobile app. You can use Tag Manager to easily update and deploy tags, without having to manually add code to your project.
Once you add a small piece of Tag Manager code to your project, you can use a web-based interface to set up tags, triggers, and variables. These help you automate your tag configurations and simplify your code.
When you use Tag Manager, all your tags, including those from Google Ads, Google Analytics, and other third-party tags, are stored in a container. This container can replace all other manually-coded tags on your website or mobile app.
If you want to learn how to use Tag Manager, you can take the Google Tag Manager Fundamentals course in Analytics Academy.
If you upgrade your website or mobile app to Tag Manager, it’s best to migrate all your tags at once, but it’s not required. You only need one Tag Manager account per company, but you can set up multiple Tag Manager accounts from a single Google account.
Google Trends – to analyze search trends related to keywords and topics
Google Trends is one of the most powerful SEO tools available to bloggers, giving us the ability to measure popularity and search patterns related to keywords and topics over time. This insight can help us optimize the content on our blog and make sure it answers our readers’ queries, while also enabling us to adjust certain aspects or focus more closely on the topics that are trending among the people looking for information. With Google Trends, we have a greater understanding of what is popular in order to increase engagement and interest from potential readers.
Ads Keyword Planner – to research keyword popularity, costs, and competition
If you’re a blogger, then using Ads Keyword Planner is a key tool to research keyword popularity, costs, and competition. Google’s Ads Keyword Planner has all the tools you need to efficiently run your SEO strategy. Search for keywords quickly and easily by entering your search term into its extensive database; Google Trends gives an ongoing indication of each keyword’s popularity over time; set alerts when additional data becomes available; review the estimated cost and competition associated with each keyword; and use Google Sheets to store data from the planner as well as other SEO analysis. With this powerful tool at my fingertips, I can confidently optimize my website to drive more traffic and reach a higher ranking in search results!
Google Sheets is a computer program that lets you make spreadsheets. You can change the information and share it with others online. It has things like adding, deleting and organizing rows and columns, like other spreadsheet programs. However, unlike others, Google Sheets allows many people to work on the same spreadsheet from different places at the same time. You can also chat with others using the program. You can upload your spreadsheet from your computer or mobile device. The program saves everything you do without you having to click “save” and you can see what other people are changing as they do it. Google Sheets is a great tool for working on projects with others, making it easier to stay organized and get things done quickly.
NLP API – To analyse your content and that of your competitors.
Bloggers can take advantage of Google’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) API to improve the effectiveness of their content. The NLP can be used to identify entities and categories, plus analyze sentiment and syntax in your and your competitors’ articles. Entities, such as people, places, and things, can add richness and context to a blog post. Sentiment analysis allows bloggers to gauge how their audience is interpreting the content. Syntax analysis reveals the underlying structure of the language being used and provides better insight into Blogger’s writing output. Classifying text typically groups together related items for further review. Last but not least, matching keywords with SEO topics helps ensure that blog posts are more widely read by the intended target audiences. You can analyse the highest ranking content for your keyword simply by pasting it into the API demo and clicking ‘analyse’ and then using this to tweak your article.
Google Optimize – a/b testing for your content.
Google Optimize can be an incredibly helpful tool for bloggers looking to further refine their content. Using ab testing, Google Optimize gives you the ability to compare different versions of your blog post with ease. It allows you to look at two texts side by side and compare how readers would interact with one versus the other. This allows you to quickly spot any differences between versions that may lead to different results. With ab testing from Google Optimize, you can make informed decisions about what works best for your blog and reach wider audiences with your content. It will be available until September 2023, after which Google is looking to use integrations by collaborating with a/b testing providers.
Google Lighthouse – to track user experience on your website.
Google Lighthouse is a tool that helps you check if your website is working well for people or businesses like bloggers who use it. Even if you don’t know much about how people use your website, Google Lighthouse can help you figure it out.
Google Lighthouse looks at different things to see if your website is easy to use, fast, and follows good practices. These things include how quickly the website loads, how easy it is to navigate, and how well it works on different devices.
Google Lighthouse also has some specific metrics that it uses to check your website. Some of these metrics are Core Web Vitals, which help you understand how people are experiencing your website.
Core Web Vitals measure things like how long it takes for your website to load, how easy it is to use, and how stable it is while people are using it.
As a blogger, I want to stay ahead of the competition and keep my user experience as smooth as possible. By running regular audits, I know that my website content is up to date and compliant with both user interface and experience best practices. It also helps me optimize my pages for user-friendly web performance, all while providing helpful feedback that can be used to improve both the user’s experience on my pages and also result in better rankings on search engines. By looking at the metrics using Lighthouse, you can see what parts of your website might need improvement.
Overall, Google Lighthouse helps you make sure your website is easy to use and works well, even if you are not a web development expert.
Google Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) – Syncing your data sources into reports and visualisations.
Google Looker Studio is an increasingly popular tool for bloggers to analyse and action website data. It provides actionable reports and useful visualisations, allowing us to gain a better understanding of our website’s performance, which can then be customised and shared. With its pre-built templates for quick setup, easy integration with multiple data sources and customisable dashboards, it has become the perfect tool to enable us to make information accessible in a variety of formats with the ability to customise, share and interpret data synced from numerous sources. This type of modelling platform rarely comes for free so if it would be as useful for your blogging business as it has been for mine, it’s definitely worth trying out.
Features include:
Free version and Pro version (paid).
LookML modelling method.
Integration with Google Sheets.
Highly flexible data modeling features.
Supports 50+ SQLs and databases.
Ability to merge features from numerous data sources.
Google Alerts – To monitor online mentions of you or your website.
Google Alerts is a free tool from Google that tells you when someone mentions you, your website, your article or keywords, or something else you want to know about anywhere on the web. It will send an email with the information. This is helpful for bloggers because it can tell you when you are mentioned. If you search often to monitor your mentions, using Alerts will help increase efficiency.
Staying on top of relevant news is key to ongoing success as a blogger and I rely on Google Alerts. It only takes a few moments to create a Google Alert, yet it saves me countless hours of searching through the web for pertinent updates. With this powerful and simple-to-use tool at my fingertips, I receive updates swiftly so that I can easily access relevant information as soon as it is published. When you are trying to build a reputation or brand, monitoring the sentiment of your mentions is important and the alerts allow you to respond quickly when necessary.