If you haven’t heard the term SEO before, it stands for Search Engine Optimisation. In its essence, it is the process of optimising a website to make sure it ranks better on Google. This makes it easier for your audience to find you! It’s quite an intensive process to get your website optimised, and can also be quite an expensive one, but you might not even need it!

Here are a few of our favourite SEO tools that can help to improve your marketing (did we mention they’re all FREE?!):

1. Google Pagespeed Insights

   (this tells you how fast and usable your website is on multiple devices, for the people using it. These things are important to know because user experience is the backbone of a great website!)

2. Google Analytics

   (this gives you all the stats and analytics, and search insights for your website. You’ll have to create an account using your Google account, but it is so worth it to know who your website users are and how they’re using your website.)

3. Google Search Console

   (this one’s a little bit harder to work with than the others and you also need to sign up separately with your Google account, but it has a lot of valuable information that you can use to measure your website’s analytics. It also links up with Google Analytics which is cool.)

4. SERPSIM

   (You can use this to see how your website will look in Google’s search results, this way if something looks off, you can fix it before it becomes a little embarrassing.)

5. AHREFS SEO Toolbar

   (This site helps you check for broken links, redirect chains, nofollow links and on-page elements for any website)

6. Yoast SEO

   (If you’re a WordPress user, this plugin will be your best friend when it comes to SEO. It helps you optimise all your web pages and blog content for search engines by helping you write proper headings, keywords, and meta descriptions. Google loves those!)

7. XML Sitemaps

   (Create a sitemap for your website that you can upload to your Google Search Console. Some web hosts like Squarespace automatically create these for you, but for a lot of WordPress sites you might need to submit this yourself)

8. Google Alerts

   (Set up alerts for your business and get alerted for any online mentions of your brand or business.)

9. Google Mobile-Friendly Test

   (Use this site to see if your website is mobile-friendly. Google prioritises mobile-friendly sites so it is crucial that your site is perfectly responsive to keep Google happy and rank well.

Paid SEO Tools that we also love:

1. Ubersuggest

   (This web app completely audits your website and gives you a breakdown of your traffic, analyses your competitors, gives you tons of keyword research options etc. It costs around R200 per month, but I’d recommend using it for a month and doing all the research you can fit into that month.)

2. Hotjar

   (They have a free option available but the paid options are where you really get into the thick of things. This site generates heat maps and recordings of how people are using your website. A little creepy but it gives you valuable insight into what your most looked at pieces of content are, where things are lacking or how you can improve the overall user journey.