- When I got started in SEO,
there were dozen of tools out there.
They were all expensive,
and, hey, unless you wanted rankings,
you would have to pay for one of these tools.
But times have changed.
There's not just dozens of tools now,
there's hundreds of tools.
And because of that,
there's a lot of free ones as well.
Hey, everyone, I'm Neil Patel.
And today, I'm going to breakdown
why you should stop paying for SEO tools,
and only use these four free tools
if you want to rank number one on Google.
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So, tool number one.
You ready for this?
Google Search Console.
Here's what I love Google Search Console for.
I do a comparison of my traffic right now,
for the last 30 days,
to my traffic six months ago.
And I look for the pages that have the biggest drop off
in impressions and clicks.
I now know that these are the pages
that I need to go back on my site,
go and adjust and update.
Think of it this way.
There's over a billion blogs on the Internet.
That's roughly one blog per every seven people.
Do you think we need that many blogs out there?
No, that's too many!
Just imagine how much content is being created
with over a billion blogs.
Now check this out.
The pages that have the biggest drop in traffic
are the pages that, hey,
search engines are no longer ranking as well.
So, if you back into those pages, those posts,
you update them with the latest and greatest information.
You may add some videos
if you think that helps improve the experience.
You delete the stuff that doesn't make sense.
You shorn out the fluff, because sometimes,
you may have just long articles
because you were tryina keyword stuff.
Whatever it may be, if you just go in, update it,
and provide the best experience,
you'll notice that usually within 30 days,
your traffic on those pages will go up.
And if you're not sure
on how to provide the best experience,
I got two recommendations for you.
One is do a search for that keyword in Google
and look at all the pages that rank for that keyword.
Look at those pages.
What do they have that you don't have?
Adjust your article to include all that stuff.
Two, I would go to YouTube,
look for all the videos in your space
that can add value to your topic,
and embed them in.
Because a lot of people don't do that.
That'll help your time on site and engagement on your site,
which will also help improve your rankings.
The second tool I have for you is
Structured Data Markup Helper.
Look, if you want those star ratings on your site,
you want to be included in the rich snippets,
you want your listing to stand out,
you got to use structured data.
But how do you use structured data?
Well, it's complicated
because depending on the type of website you have,
the structured data is going to look different.
Whether it's a local website, national website,
a e-commerce website, or it's a website
that is focusing on lead generation or consulting,
it's going to be different.
So use a Structured Data Markup Helper,
and it'll help you do all the little things,
from even doing things like including breadcrumbs.
So that way, when someone's doing a search on Google,
they can see all those little breadcrumbs,
and that helps increase your click through rate.
The third tool I have for you, Google Trends.
This is super important.
The reason being is
if your brand continually gets searched more and more,
you'll notice that your rankings increase.
So, it's all about brand building.
And you'll find, "Hey, Neil,
"why do I need to increase my brand?"
Well, Google, Facebook, and all the social sites out there
have issues of fake news.
So, the way they're combating this is ranking brands better,
because they believe that brands, like a Nike, a CNN,
whoever it may that's a big brand,
is less likely to put out fake information.
And that's true.
So what you want to do is continually look at your brand name,
compared to your competitors,
and see how you're growing.
And Google Trends shows you that.
And if you don't know how
to make your brand continually increase,
use tools like Hello Bar to collect emails,
because every time you collect emails,
then you can email them out using tools like Mailchimp,
which are also for free,
that way you can get people back to your site,
which helps your brand.
The other thing you can do is use tools like Subscribers,
which also has a free plan,
so people can subscribe to your site
through push notifications.
And then every time you have more new content,
new feature releases, more products for sale,
you can send out a push, get people back to your site,
which then also grows your brand as well.
Now, last but not least, another free tool, Ubersuggest.
If you want to do SEO, Ubersuggest has the features
of Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs,
pretty much the majority 80 plus percent
of their features for free.
So, if you want to site audit,
well there's a SEO audit report in Ubersuggest
that breaks down your load time, your title tags,
your meta description, your code errors,
your URL issues, your redirect issues.
And it tells you how to fix each of them.
And it breaks down in priority
on which ones you should change first
to get the maximum amount of traffic.
You're looking for more keywords to go after?
Ubersuggest also has a keyword ideas report.
And the keyword ideas report shows you
all the keywords that you can go after.
According to Jumpshot, roughly 49% of the searches
that happen on Google get no clicks.
Well, with Ubersuggest, they'll show you keywords
that are based on questions, comparisons, prepositions.
These are all high intent keywords.
So if you after them in your copy,
you'll find that you'll get more clicks, more traffic,
and those visitors that are aligning on your site
will convert because you're not just going after
generic keywords now.
There's also backlinks report.
You can put in any URL of your competitor or your site.
Shows you who links to them.
And then you can hit up all those people,
assume you put in a competitor URL,
and ask them to link back to your site
if your content's better.
It also has the Top Pages report.
You put in a competitor URL, click on Top Pages.
It'll show you the most popular pages
on your competitor site
based on search traffic, backlinks, and social shares.
This will give you idea of the type of content
you should produce versus the type of content
you shouldn't produce.
And, of course, last but not least,
there's a traffic analyzer report that shows you
how much traffic your competitors are getting versus you.
So you have a rough comparison
on what you need to do to improve your traffic.
So, if you need help growing your traffic,
check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital.
If you have any questions on any of these tools,
leave a comment below and I'll answer you.
If you enjoyed the video,
like it, share it, comment, subscribe.
Thank you for watching.