12 Best Free SEO Tools for WordPress to Increase Traffic

Creating a WordPress website is easy nowadays, which is not easy to understand especially for newbies is how to generate traffic and target the best keywords for maximum profit.

In this tutorial you will learn the best free SEO tools I use every day to get an idea about what works and what doesn’t.

I talked earlier about how to speed up your WordPress website and minimize the load time, speed is essential for SEO, but speed alone won’t cut it.

You need to provide original content that people are looking for.

You must focus on serving your visitors more than your competitors, this way, without competing, you will ensure success.

SEO for WordPress is not only about plugins and the size of articles…

Forget what you learned 10 years ago, such as backlinks building and posting comments everywhere to get traction and traffic.

SEO has changed and many techniques are obsolete in this decade!

Google is changing its algorithms constantly and is using text mining and artificial intelligence to find what websites are providing solutions and the best value to its clients (googlers).

In this tutorial you will discover the best SEO tools without spending a penny!

Let’s go!

1. Google Search Console: Know Your Visitors (Free!)

The first thing every webmaster must do is to link their website with Google Search Console (previously named Google Webmaster Tools) to get insights about how your visitors behave on search.

In Google Search Console you can find the keywords that your website ranks for and your position in search of those keywords.

You can also find the websites that link to your website (backlinks) and the anchors used in those backlinks.

This way, you will find ways to improve your site’s appearance to get more search clicks and position at a better position in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

If you want to check if a specific URL is indexed or ask Google to re-index it, just put the URL in the form on top and hit Enter.

You will find these:

• Coverage: this tells you if the URL is submitted and indexed
• Mobile Usability: checks if the webpage is usable in Mobile phones and tablets
• Breadcrumbs
• Sitelinks search box
• Review snippets

Also as a tip to rank higher, make sure your visitors stay on your website for a certain time (we call it Session Duration) which leads us to the next best free tool to analyze your traffic.

2. Google Analytics: Track Your Traffic (Free!)

To get a better understanding and know the source of traffic, you should install Google Analytics to get an advantage over the competition.

Google Analytics will allow you to know how much time your visitors spend, how many sessions per visit and how many

3. Google PageSpeed Insights: Web Should Be Fast (Free!)

If you want to see how Google measures the speed of your website then PageSpeed Insights is your go-to option!

The global score is between 0 and 100, and is described as follows:

• 0-49: Your site’s speed is slow, follow the suggestions provided to improve your score.
• 50-89: Your site’s speed is average.
• 90-100: Your site is very fast and you should maintain that speed consistently.

4. GTmetrix (Test Your Site’s Speed and Get Advice)

In an earlier tutorial I showed you how to speed up your WordPress website and I used GTmetrix to track the results.

GTmetrix is my favorite speed test tool, I use it more than PageSpeed Insights because it provides practical and more thorough tips & tricks to get a better score.

5. Google Trends (Free!)

Content is king and the worst thing that can happen is to write about something that is losing interest and search traffic over time.

Find what is trending in every country or worldwide to get an idea about what people are looking for.

6. Google Keyword Planner (Free!)

Get creative with the best tool there is for advertisers, Google Keyword Planner doesn’t provide exact numbers of traffic but give an idea about the competition over certain keywords and helps you find better keywords for your content to target.

7. Free Ahrefs Backlink Checker (Free!)

Ahref is a premium service that crawls the entire internet (just like google does) to give you insights about how websites rank and how much your competition is getting from search.

Thankfully they provide this free tool allowing you to get backlinks of your competitors.

This will help you to understand your competitor’s strategy and get an advantage over them.

8. Moz Link Explorer: Understand Backlinks (Free!)

If you want to know your Domain Authority, Linking Domains, Inbound Links and Ranking Keywords. This tool is for you!

9. AnswerThePublic: Get All Search Suggestions (Free!)

AnswerThePublic uses Google suggestions to give you ideas about what people are actually searching on the internet.

Use it to your advantage, the site gives you a free trial for 2 searches per IP address, you can then use a VPN to change the IP.

Here is an example of search ideas.

10. UberSuggest: Neil Patel’s Best SEO Tool (Free!)

This is the best free tool to get site audit for free, use it to get ideas about how much backlinks your competitors have and how they rank on on-page SEO.

11. Soovle: Search Suggestions Across the Web (Free!)

This website gives you one interface to get search suggestions on multiple websites: Wikipedia, Answers, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo!, Amazon & Google

12. Rank Math: Best WordPress Plugin for SEO

This is the best SEO plugin for WordPress users, just install it, it comes with a sitemap.xml generator too!

Bonus Tips for Better SEO Practices

Here are some bonus tips & tricks to boost your SEO game and crush the competition:

1. Content is always king.
2. Use “YOU” more than “I”.
3. Build your website for users, not for spiders!
4. Focus on serving your readers and visitors, not on money.
5. Leverage Word Of Mouth instead of Link Building by yourself.
6. Slow and steady wins the SEO game.
7. Get more traffic, everything else will sort itself.
8. Google is using real humans to check your website, have a good design.
9. Don’t try to sell to people, funnel them!
10. Provide. Provide. Provide. Then earn.

There you have it dear friend, if you have any questions or suggestions about SEO and WordPress please feel free to leave a comment below.

Thank you for your time and have a nice day!