Website optimization and SEO costs can spiral quickly if you aren’t careful, and it often seems like everyone has a quick-fix snake-oil pitch to “fix” your website. While hiring a reputable SEO agency can absolutely be beneficial, there are free website optimization tools you can use to get started yourself.
PageSpeed Insights
A free tool from Google, PageSpeed Insights only requires entering a URL to get insights into various speed metrics, including largest contentful paint (LCP), time to first byte (TTFB), blocking time and a speed index.
Lighthouse
If you’ve wondered what search engines dislike about your website, Lighthouse is a great place to start. It can be installed or accessed via the inspect option in Chrome. It’s a great tool to quickly identify issues with performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.
ScreamingFrog
ScreamingFrog is one of the most affordable technical SEO tools that’s still powerful enough for enterprise-level companies. It also offers a free version that gets you started with a detailed website audit. A few of the items ScreamingFrog can process in the free version are hreflang attribute audits, broken links and redirect issues, duplicated pages and creating sitemaps.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers several versions for beginners to developers. For small businesses and beginners, there are detailed walkthroughs on how to connect Analytics to your website. Depending on your platform, you may have a shortcut available from your website dashboard to connect Analytics as well. Google Analytics focuses on your traffic and how visitors behave. Tracked metrics include the number of page views, session durations and demographics for visitors. These insights can be helpful in discovering issues, such as which pages lose visitors fastest.
Google Search Console (GSC)
In addition to core web vitals, Google Search Console also helps you track rich results such as snippets, recipes and jobs as they could appear on Google. It also shows you how many pages are currently indexed by Google and why remaining pages aren’t indexed, and allows you to submit a sitemap.
Google Ads Keyword Planner
Even if you aren’t planning on running ads, Google Ads Keyword Planner gives you insight into search volume, related keywords and competition for specific keywords (by comparing cost per click bids).
