There’s a reason why I don’t publish much SEO stuff on Profit Copilot.
I think it’s a lousy way to build a business, because you don’t have much control over the outcome. You’re dependant on Google, Yahoo, or Bing to show you some love. I’ll rant more about that another time.
Ok, obviously SEO is important and we can’t ignore it completely (free traffic is great), but we shouldn’t put all our eggs into one basket.
So with that in mind, check out these 3 free SEO tools you can use to improve your rank.
Table of Contents:
SEO Audit Tool
First up is the ‘SEO Audit Tool’ by Found.co.uk. This is gonna flag up any technical problems – like issues with your sitemap or content, – stuff like your keywords and description. And it also runs an external link analysis, so it tells you quality of your links. It’s a pretty good tool.
Obviously putting your keywords in the title and headlines is a smart idea, and making sure your description is on point too.
But listen, I don’t know how important meta keywords are anymore, but it’s probably a good idea to keep them just incase.
Website Grader
Next up is the ‘Website Grader’, which looks at your website’s performance – like page speed, which is vital for good SEO. It also checks your pages title, meta data, page headings and a bunch of other stuff too. And the site copy is pretty cool too.
Page speed is something we all battle with. Sure, we can use a CDN, crunch our images and minify our JS, but in the real world webpages have to appeal to more than just search engines. And if you’re a bit clever about it, you’ll be converting that free traffic into leads, too.
That means displaying opt-in forms and other scripts that slow down pages.
SEO Report Card
And then finally we have the ‘SEO Report Card’ from Upcity. This tool let’s you compare your site to your competitors. So you can check where you rank on Google, Yahoo and Bing. It also gives you a good idea of what your current indexing looks like, so you can quickly get an idea of how many of your pages are in the search engine results pages.
This is great if you’re considering expansion into a particular niche, or if you just want to keep an eye on the competition.
Final Thoughts
In all, Google uses more than 200 signals to determine the position of a website in the SERPs. So these tools are a good starting point because the SEO health of our websites is something we need to consider – even if we shouldn’t depend on it to sustain our businesses.
Instead of chasing backlinks and looking for the next big loophole, my advice is to invest that time into creating outstanding content that your readers will love.
The other day I heard someone say: “Google only loves you when everybody else does”. And I think that’s a great way to sum up an effective SEO strategy.
Another way to look at it might be to write for people first, and search engines second.