Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for making your website stand out in this day and age. If you don’t know, SEO is the process of making your website more appealing to search engines so that they’re likelier to rank your pages higher on search results. You can do this by editing the content on your pages as well as their backend settings It seems like everyone has a website in 2024, so nailing your SEO is critical for ranking above the competition.

Optimizing your website isn’t something you can do without the right tools for the job. But luckily, a lot of those tools are easily accessible online - and a lot of them are free!

Let’s take a look at a few of our favorite free and at-cost SEO tools available online that will help put you ahead of your competition.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolkit with resources that can help you build a solid SEO foundation and audit your website after to improve upon it. Ahrefs’ best features are locked behind a subscription paywall, but they also have a few free tools. Let’s look at a couple:

Keyword Explorer 

Keywords are the backbone of SEO, and Ahrefs’ keyword explorer makes finding effective keywords easy. The generator lets you enter a topic or phrase and shows you keywords related to that prompt people have been searching for. This will give you a whole collection of relevant keywords to work into your website and SEO descriptions, along with the following information:

• How difficult it is to rank for those specific keywords. This is based on how much competition there is with other websites using those same keywords.

• How many people are looking for that keyword per month on average.

You can use Ahrefs’ keyword explorer for free, but it will hide some lower-volume results from you unless you subscribe to their SEO toolset. But even in its free version, Ahrefs’ keyword generator is a valuable resource.

Image Alt Texts

Image alt texts are descriptive captions added to the backend of your website’s image files. They’re designed to provide a written description of the contents of your photos that screen readers can read aloud. That way, users with visual impairments who might not be able to see the images clearly can fully understand their contents.

Image alt texts are primarily to make your website more accessible, but accessibility can also impact your SEO. If your users can’t reliably navigate your website, they’ll click away from it immediately, signaling to search engines that the people who found your site didn’t find it helpful. This will harm your search engine rankings, so filling out all your image alt text fields with worthwhile captions is crucial.

Ahrefs Image Alt Text Generator does the hard work of writing those descriptions for you. Just upload your photo, and the AI tool will analyze its contents and generate a short blurb based on what’s in the photo. You can also write your own description of the photo to help the AI generate a more accurate image alt text.

Two cool features of Ahrefs’ image alt text generator are its writing tone and variant options. You can ask the AI to write your image alt texts in one of 16 tones of voice and generate either one, three, or five captions, giving you several options to experiment with and choose from.

Like other AI tools, Ahrefs’ alt text generator is still in its early stages and far from perfect. You might need to generate your alt texts a few times to find one that works or edit the captions they create. But if you’re new to SEO and have never written image alt texts previously, Ahrefs’ AI tool can be a great way to get familiar with the process.

Full Site Audits

Finally, Ahrefs will audit your site for SEO errors and recommendations. While this isn’t a free tool like the keyword finder or image alt text generator, it is a valuable resource if you manage your website. It will spot critical and non-critical issues that even SEO experts might miss and help elevate your website’s ranking.

AI 

A free AI resource like ChatGPT can write pretty good SEO descriptions for you in just a few seconds, you just have to know how to prompt it to give you what you want. To get a basic description, you can either write a description of the website page you need an SEO description for or copy a passage of text from that page and paste that into your prompt. Examples of both would look like:

• Write an optimized SEO description under 160 characters for a website page with this content: [paste a passage from the page here]

• Write an SEO description under 150 characters for my business website. Here are the details:

• Business Name

• Location

• Services

You will also need to specify how long you want your SEO descriptions to be in your prompts. SEO page descriptions should typically fall between 110 and 160 characters, but ChatGPT will go far over this limit if you don’t tell it how long you want your descriptions to be. It will still go over your specified character limit in some cases too, so it's always good to check the character count before plugging the description into your page.

If you’d prefer to write your SEO descriptions yourself, you can ask ChatGPT to generate a list of keywords based on your content and the phrases you want to rank for and use those keywords in your writing. You can then use those keywords to guide your writing.

Google Tools

Google has a handful of helpful SEO resources available for free to make sure your presence on the search engine is as strong as it can be. Of all the tools on Google you can use to improve your SEO, Google Trends and Google Search Console are our favorites. 

Google Trends

Google Trends is a simple, accessible SEO tool that can show you what Google users are searching for in real-time. When you enter a topic into the ‘Explore’ tab, you can see how much traffic it's generating and compare it to similar topics. You can use this data in your SEO efforts, finding the topics relevant to your industry that are generating the most buzz and basing blog posts around them or utilizing them in your SEO descriptions.

The explore feature also lets you check where the search traffic is coming from. It can show you the states, regions, and even cities generating the most traffic for your chosen search topic.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console has features that will show you how many people are seeing your website on search engines, how many of those people are actually visiting your website once they find it, which pages they’re landing on, and so much more. You can use this information to identify your website’s performance 

But maybe the most helpful feature on Google Search Console is how it lets you see which pages on your website are indexing and which aren’t. If a page is indexed on Google, it means that it’s stored in Google’s database and is eligible to show up in search results. But if Google determines that your page cannot be indexed, that means Google won’t use it as a result in search inquiries.

Search Console will also tell you why your pages aren’t indexing so you can determine the issues and fix them in the backend of your website. In some instances, all it takes to fix an indexing issue is to manually request Google add the problem page to its index, but some issues will require deeper fixes.

Semrush

Semrush is an all-in-one SEO suite with over 55 SEO and marketing tools available to subscribers. Semrush is similar to Ahrefs in that they have tools to help with keyword research and on-page SEO. Though you have to sign up to access most of Semrush’s SEO tools, they have some helpful free resources like their blog and insights pages designed to help educate users on the world of SEO.

Need help with your website’s SEO settings? Book a consultation with NAV Creative to learn how we can help!