SEO
110 Top SEO Tools That Are 100% Free
SEO (short for search engine optimization) is the practice of tweaking your website so that it ranks higher on search engines like Google.
If your site isn’t ranking as high as you’d like it to, it’s time to take a good look at your SEO strategy.
Tried and true, as well as new, SEO tools make it easier for site owners to find what they need to do in order to stay on top.
What Are SEO Tools?
SEO tools provide data and alerts about the overall health and success of your website.
They help uncover areas of opportunity and identify weaknesses or issues that may prevent you from ranking and earning visibility in the SERPs.
Just as actual tools each have a specific role, the same is true in SEO.
There are SEO tools that can help you with:
- Analytics.
- Keyword Research.
- Links.
- Local SEO.
- Mobile SEO.
- On-page SEO.
- Research.
- Rank Checking.
- Site Speed.
- WordPress SEO.
SEO tools are incredibly useful – but you need to understand how to use them to get the most out of them.
There are even a few toolsets that can help you in more than the areas we just mentioned, giving you more of an all-at-once glance at your SEO performance.
Do You Need SEO Tools?
The short answer: Yes.
Imagine trying to build a table using only your hands.
You wouldn’t get very far, would you?
No.
You will need tools – saws, a measuring tape, a drill, and screwdrivers, to name a few.
Well, if you want to build a website, you’ll only get so far with your hands.
You can build a website, but without tools, you wouldn’t know:
- How many visits your webpages are getting.
- Whether traffic has dropped significantly.
- If you have any HTML errors.
- The number of links you have.
- What keywords you could be using to attract more visits.
And so much more.
What Are The Best Free SEO Tools?
If you’re looking to get started with SEO or want to achieve better results for the low, low cost of $0, here are 110 of the best free SEO tools you should be using.
Free SEO Analytics Tools
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an invaluable resource that is virtually indispensable to any digital marketer serious about SEO.
It provides a lot of handy data about websites such as the number of site visits, traffic sources, and location demographics.
With the detailed information from Google Analytics, digital marketers can tweak their content strategy and figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Google Analytics is one of the best free SEO tools that every digital marketer should be using.
2. Data Studio
Google Data Studio lets you merge data from varying sources, such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and create sharable visualizations.
If you’re just getting started with it, this beginner’s guide to Data Studio will be helpful.
More advanced users can learn how to use CASE statements for better Data Studio segments here.
3. Keyword Hero
Missing keyword data?
Leave it to Keyword Hero, which uses advanced math and machine learning to fill in the blanks.
This service is free for upwards of 2,000 sessions per month. Keyword Hero is also currently providing a 90-day free trial.
4. Mozcast
Mozcast tracks changes big and small to Google’s search algorithm.
With Google making hundreds of changes on a yearly basis, keeping abreast of the latest developments helps you make sure you’re doing everything to have the best SERPs.
5. Panguin Tool
The Panguin Tool, provided by Barracuda Digital, lines up your search traffic with known changes to the Google search algorithm.
If you see a drop that lines up with an update, then you’ve likely found the culprit and can get to work on fixing it!
Free Crawling & Indexing Tools
6. Redirect Path
Screenshot by author, May 2022The Redirect Path Chrome extension will flag 301, 302, 404, and 500 HTTP Status Codes.
Additionally, client-side redirects like meta and JavaScript redirects will also be flagged, ensuring any redirect issue can be uncovered immediately.
HTTP Headers such as server types and caching headers, as well as the server IP address, can also be displayed with the click of a button.
Furthermore, all of these details can be copied to your clipboard for easy sharing or addition to a technical audit document.
7. Link Redirect Trace
Use this Chrome plugin to make sure all your link redirects are directing people and crawlers to where you want them to go.
8. Quick Click Website Audit
The Quick Click Website Audit is a bookmarklet-style extension that links to many of today’s most used online SEO tools.
When a link is clicked, it extracts the current page’s URL and feeds it into the selected tool, so you don’t need to copy and paste the links into all the tools. It saves a few seconds, dozens of times a day.
9. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Crawl your website for SEO errors.
Discover HTTP header errors, JavaScript rendering hiccups, excess HTML, crawl mistakes, duplicate content, and more with Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
10. Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer
Upload your log files to Screaming Frog’s Log File Analyzer to confirm search engine bots, check which URLs have been crawled, and study search bot data.
11. SEOlyzer
Another SEO log analysis tool that provides data in real-time and page categorization.
12. Xenu
One of the original free SEO tools, Xenu is a crawler that provides basic site audits, looks for broken links, and the other usual suspects.
13. Where Goes?
Track where redirection URLs and shortened links go with Where Goes?
14. Check My Links
Screenshot by author, May 2022Check My Links is a nifty Chrome Extension that will crawl through your webpage and identify the status code for each link on the page – including broken links.
Each status code is color-coded with 200 status codes returning dark green, 300 status codes returning light green, and 400 status codes returning red.
Once identified, you can then copy all bad links to your clipboard with one click.
15. Robots.txt Generator
Create a correct robots.txt file in an instant so search engines know how to crawl your website.
Advanced users can customize their files with Robots.txt Generator as well.
16. HEADMaster SEO
Checks URLs in bulk for status code, redirect status, response time, response headers, and HTTP header fields with HEADMaster SEO.
Get results in real-time, sort and study your findings, and export your work to CSV.
17. Keep-Alive Validation SEO Tool
Check URLs in bulk – or one by one – to see if their servers support persistent connection, which makes your website load faster.
Check what version of HTTP your server is on and whether there are any external connections on your URL with this tool.
18. Hreflang Tag Generator
Generate hreflang tags so that Google knows which language particular pages on your website are in. This will allow Google to search those pages in that language.
19. XML Sitemaps
Create a site map of up to 500 pages for free without registration.
Download your sitemap as an XML file or get it via email.
20. BROWSEO
Screenshot by author, May 2022BROWSEO lets you see how your website looks to a search engine.
It basically strips your webpage of any styling and shows you the underlying structure. This helps you figure out if Google’s bot has any difficulty accessing important content on your site.
A neat feature of this free SEO tool is the SERP preview. This shows a preview of how your site appears in search results.
You can see if your titles and meta descriptions are adequately optimized and make changes as needed.
21. SFAIK Screaming Frog Analyzer
A robust visualization of Screaming Frog crawl data using Google Data Studio.
22. SEOWL Google Title Rewrite Checker
This Google Title Rewrite Checker will allow you to check if Google is rewriting the title of a list of pages allowing for deeper Title Tag structure analysis.
Free Keyword Research Tools
23. AnswerThePublic
Screenshot by author, May 2022AnswerThePublic is a nifty tool that provides content marketers with valuable data about the questions people ask online.
Once you input a keyword, it fetches popular queries based on that keyword and generates a cool graphic with the questions and phrases people use when they search for that keyword.
This data gives content creators insight into the concerns and desires of potential customers and enables them to craft highly targeted content that addresses those needs.
Answer the Public also provides keyword suggestions using prepositions such as “versus,” “like,” and “with.”
It is an excellent research tool that can help you create better content that people will enjoy and be more likely to share.
24. Keyword Explorer
This keyword research tool will give you up to 1,000 keyword suggestions, a keyword difficulty score, click-through-rate date, and SERP analysis. You get to do 10 free searches per month.
25. Keyword Planner
Google’s Keyword Planner is designed for ad campaigns, but you can use it for keyword research by seeing how keywords perform in ads.
26. Keyword Sheeter
Get keyword volume, cost per click, and competition data with this free keyword tool.
27. Keywords Everywhere
Screenshot by author, May 2022Keywords Everywhere is a must-use keyword research tool due to the massive list of sites that it provides free search volume, CPC, and competition data for:
- Google Search
- Google Trends
- eBay
- Answer The Public
- Google Keyword Planner
- Bing
- Etsy
- Soovle
- Google Search Console
- YouTube
- Ubersuggest
- Majestic
- Google Analytics
- Amazon
- Keyword Sheter
- Moz Open Site Explorer
It’s available for Chrome and Firefox.
28. wordable.io
This tool lets you put your Google Docs into WordPress, while retaining your formatting without excess code. Start out with five free exports – no credit card required.
29. Also Asked
Find out what questions people are asking about particular keywords so that you can write content that answers those questions with Also Asked.
Conduct searches by country and in different languages. You can claim three free searches to start.
30. Google Trends
See the interest in a particular term from as recently as an hour to as far back as 2004 with Google Trends.
Sort by categories, country, and type of search. See related topics, popularity by region, newest most frequently searched for terms, and compare to other terms.
31. Keyword Surfer
This Chrome extension shows you the search volume right in your Google search results. You can also see the word count and the number of keywords for top-ranking pages.
32. CanIRank
Screenshot by author, May 2022As the name implies, CanIRank helps you find out if you can rank on the first page of search engines for a particular keyword.
Unlike other tools that merely provide data about how competitive keywords are, CanIRank lets you know the probability that you’ll rank for a search term and uses AI to give you suggestions on how to better target keywords.
CanIRank provides great competitive analysis data and actionable steps to get your site ranking higher with better SEO.
33. Seed Keywords
Come up with a question or topic you want to research, send it to your contacts, and have them select the keywords they would search for to get the information you want with Seed Keywords.
34. Exploding Topics
Similar to Google Trends, Exploding Topics will help uncover topics that are about to become popularly searched before they become popularly searched!
35. Ubersuggest
Screenshot by author, May 2022Ubersuggest is a simple keyword research tool that scrapes data from Google’s Keyword Planner for keyword ideas based on a keyword you provide.
The tool also returns handy data for each keyword including the search volume, CPC, and level of competition.
An excellent feature of Ubersuggest is its ability to filter out keywords that you’re not interested in from search results.
The tool has recently added a feature where you can type in a competitor’s domain to get better keyword ideas.
36. Keys4Up
Get the related keywords, also known as semantically linked keywords, for any search with Keys4Up.
37. Wordtracker Scout
Wordtracker Scout will help discover what keywords people search for when they’re ready to make a purchase.
38. KWFinder
With KWFinder, you can discover long-tail keywords – those more specific, less frequently used keywords that yield higher results because of how specific they are.
Free Link Tools
39. Disavow Tool
Use Google’s Disavow Tool to free yourself from toxic backlinks.
40. Moz Link Explorer
See the backlink profile and domain authority of any URL with Link Explorer.
41. Link Miner
Discover if a given URL has any broken links and discover the metrics of those links, including both search and social data with the Link Miner extension.
42. Backlink Checker
Use this Backlink Checker to discover all the backlinks data about a particular URL.
See the number of referring domains, the number of backlinks, the domain and URL rating, and its Ahrefs Rank, a domain’s position in Ahrefs’s list of most powerful sites.
43. The Anchor Text Suggestion Tool By Linkio
Discover the best anchor text to use for any URL with this Anchor Text Suggestion Tool.
44. SendPulse
SendPulse allows for the configuration of chains of emails, notifications, and SMS messages based on user actions, variables, or events.
45. Magic PR
Get a press release informed by SEO best practices with Magic PR.
46. Scraper
This Chrome extension lets you scrape data from any URL and export the info into a spreadsheet.
47. Help A Reporter (HARO)
Help a Reporter is a resource that connects journalists and experts who act as sources for stories.
48. Streak
Convert your Gmail inbox into customer relationship management (CRM) software with this free extension.
Local SEO
49. Google Business Profile
Connect with customers across Google Search and Google Maps using a free Google Business Profile.
50. Whitespark Google Review Link Generator
Use this tool to find your Google Review listing and generate a shortened link to your page.
51. Local Search Results Checker
Conduct local searches using Google Search or Google Maps with Local Search Results Checker.
52. Moz Local Check Business Listing
Confirm that your company’s details appear correctly on various directories with Moz’s Local Business Checker.
53. Whitespark Local Citation Finder
Track your citations, discover new opportunities, and get the citations your competitors have with this Local Citation Finder.
54. Review Handout Generator
Print instructions on how to leave a Google review via desktop or mobile device for your business with Whitespark’s Review Handout Generator.
55. Fakespot Review Checker
This Chrome extension lets you know if the product you’re about to buy comes from a reputable seller and, if not, provides an alternative.
56. Mobile SERP Test
See your local SERPS on various mobile devices with Mobile SERP Test from Mobile Moxie.
Mobile SEO
57. Merkle Mobile-First Index Checker
See how your website stacks up relative to SEO best practices depending, on whether it’s your desktop or mobile version, with Mobile-First Index Checker.
58. Mobile-Friendly Test
Test your website’s mobile-friendliness with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing tool.
59. GTMetrix
See how quickly your website loads with GTMetrix. Discover what’s keeping it from loading as fast as possible, and see what steps to take to optimize load speed.
60. Cloudflare
A free content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers that gets your content to load faster by using a server closest to the person doing the loading.
Free Multi-Tools
61. Semrush
Screenshot by author, May 2022Semrush is an excellent keyword research SEO tool that, among other things, makes it easy to find out what keywords any page on the web is ranking for.
It provides detailed information about those keywords including their position in SERPs, the URLs to which they drive traffic, and the traffic trends over the past 12 months.
With this feature-packed tool, you can easily find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for and craft great content around those terms and phrases.
Semrush also offers more features and unlimited access with various paid plans.
While they’re not cheap, you can get started with a 14-day free trial, if you want to test out the premium features. Or follow their guide on how to use features with a free account.
62. Chrome DevTools
Edit pages in real-time using tools that are built right into Google Chrome DevTools. Diagnose problems as you encounter them.
63. Marketing Miner
Get SERP data, ranking, tool reports, and competitive analysis all in the form of convenient reports with Marketing Miner.
64. MozBar
Screenshot by author, May 2022MozBar is a free SEO toolbar that works with the Chrome browser. It provides easy access to advanced metrics on webpages and SERPs.
With MozBar and a free Moz account, you can easily access the Page and Domain Authority scores of any page or site.
The Page Analysis feature lets you explore elements on any page (e.g., markup, page title, general attributes, link metrics).
You can find keywords on the page you’re viewing, highlight and differentiate links, and compare the link metrics of different sites in SERPs.
If you need to do detailed SEO research on the go, MozBar is one of the best options to consider.
You can unlock even more advanced features such as Page Optimization and Keyword Difficulty with a MozPro subscription.
65. SEO Minion
Conduct on-page SEO analysis, check for broken links, get a SERP preview, and more with this Chrome extension.
66. SEOquake
See SEO metrics and conduct an SEO audit with this Chrome extension.
67. Sheets For Marketers
Learn how to automate tasks in Google Sheets and discover the best automation templates and tools via this curated list.
68. Sheet Consolidator
Create workbooks using CSV exports with a table of contents and enabled hyperlinks using this simple Excel Sheet Consolidator tool.
69. Google Search Console
Screenshot by author, May 2022This list wouldn’t be complete without a mention of Google Search Console.
Aside from the fact, that the data comes from Google, Google Search Console is rich with insights related to:
- Keyword and URL performance.
- Indexation issues.
- Mobile usability.
- Sitemap status.
- And much more!
70. Small SEO Tools
A suite of tools to make it easier to create content including a plagiarism checker, article rewriter, grammar check, word counter, spell checker, paraphrasing tool, and more.
71. Internet Marketing Ninjas
From social tools and schema generator tools to webmaster tools and web design tools, check out the free suite of tools from Internet Marketing Ninjas.
72. Ahref’s SEO Toolbar
Get SEO metrics and SERP details from Ahrefs free Chrome or Firefox extension.
73. Bing Webmaster Tools
Featuring keyword reports, keyword research, crawling dates, and more.
Unlike Google Analytics, Bing Webmaster Tools only focuses on organic search. A must-have for anyone who wants to be ranked on Bing.
74. Woorank
Screenshot by author, May 2022Woorank is a handy website analyzer that provides useful insights that can help you improve your site’s SEO.
It generates an SEO score for your site and an actionable “Marketing Checklist,” which outlines steps you can take to fix any problems with your site’s SEO.
Another cool feature of this free tool is the social shareability pane. This section provides social network data such as the number of likes, shares, comments, backlinks, and bookmarks across popular social networks.
Woorank also has a great mobile section where you can find information on how your pages render on mobile devices and how quickly they load.
75. SEObility
Find a suite of SEO tools that includes a site auditor, a SERP tracker, a backlink tracker, and more with SEObility.
76. Lipperhey
Lipperhey will provide free analyses of your website, keyword tips, SEO analytics, and a backlink checker.
77. Dareboost
This tool will provide you with an audit of your technical SEO, content, and website’s popularity.
You can also find out which keywords you should add to your pages.
78. Siteliner
Discover duplicate content, broken links, and page authority, and get both an XML sitemap and a detailed report of key site information with Siteliner.
On-Page SEO
79. Counting Characters Google SERP Tool
Screenshot by author, May 2022While counting characters has been a long-standing approach to evaluating meta description and title tag length, the reality is Google doesn’t count the meta title and description in the number of characters. It uses pixels instead.
The Counting Characters tool will provide both the character count and the pixel count to ensure you are creating meta tags that are not cut off by an ellipsis – represented by (…).
80. Natural Language API Demo
Use machine learning to determine the sentiment of text with the Natural Language API Demo.
Use this data to improve your product or site design.
81. Rich Results Test
The Rich Results Test will discover if your website can support rich results, which is when your Google result includes non-textual elements like images.
82. Structured Markup Validator
Google’s structured data tool no longer exists. The Schema Markup Validator is the recommended alternative.
83. Ryte Structured Data Helper
The Ryte Structured Data Helper will provide you with a handy overview, showing you how to quickly and clearly validate your page’s Schema markup.
84. Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager allows you to manage your website tags without editing any code!
85. View Rendered Source
See how your browser renders a page with this Chrome extension, including modifications made by JavaScript.
Differences between raw and rendered versions are shown line-by-line.
86. Higher Visibility Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool
Find out what your SERP snippet will look like with Higher Visibility’s Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool.
87. Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator
Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator tool will help create JSON-LD markups for articles, breadcrumbs, events, FAQ pages, and how-to guides.
88. Animalz Revive
Find out which of your pages needs an update or an upgrade with Animalz Revive.
You can see the traffic for your pages, including the percentage of traffic your page lost since its peak.
89. Copyscape Free Comparison Tool
Copyscape’s Comparison Tool will help check to see the percentage of shared text between two different pages to weed out plagiarism.
Research
90. BuzzSumo
Find out which content does best for a particular keyword and who the influencers are for a given topic with the free features of BuzzSumo.
91. Hunter
Hunter will help find all the important email addresses associated with a given domain.
92. SimilarWeb
Conduct competitor analysis with SimilarWeb that shows you a given domain’s traffic, top pages, engagement, marketing channels, and more.
93. Wappalyzer
Wappalyzer will help you find out if a given website is using a CMS, CRM, ecommerce platform, advertising networks, marketing tools, or analytics.
94. Wayback Machine
See a website throughout time, including pages that are no longer on the web with the Wayback Machine.
95. SEO Explorer
SEO Explorer is a free tool for keyword and link research.
Free Rank Checking Tools
96. Ahref’s SERP Checker
See the domains that place in the top 10 for any given keyword in 171 countries, and get robust analytics from Ahref’s SERP Checker.
97. SERPROBOT
Find a dedicated SERP tracking tool with the appropriately named SERPROBOT.
Set up automatic alerts, choose the frequency with which your SERP is checked, and get visual representations of changes.
98. Taptimize
Track SERPs for up to 10 keywords for free with Taptimize and get actionable SEO tips.
99. Bulk Google Rank Checker
See your website’s SERPs for various keywords en mass with the Bulk Google Rank Checker.
100. LSI Graph
Discover related keywords with LSI Graph. See their trends, traffic volume, CPC, and competition, and remove low search volume results.
Free Site Speed Tools
101. Mobile-Friendly Test
Screenshot by author, May 2022Google’s search algorithm places a lot of emphasis on how mobile-friendly a site is.
To that end, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool is designed to help you determine if your site is correctly optimized for smartphones and tablets.
You just type in your site’s URL, and it will plainly inform you whether your website is mobile-friendly.
The tool also offers suggestions on how you can improve the mobile-friendliness of your site.
The Page Loading Info feature lets you know if Google can properly access all the resources on a particular page and what to do if it can’t.
102. Lighthouse
This is Google’s open-source site speed utility. Lighthouse provides audits of performance, accessibility, web apps, SEO, and more.
103. Page Speed Insights
Find out your website’s page loading speed and how to improve it with Google’s Page Speed Insights.
104. SpeedMonitor.io
Track your site’s loading speed daily with SpeedMonitor.io.
You can also track a competitor’s site speed and conduct on-demand audits.
105. WebpageTest
WebpageTest conducts site speed tests from different locations using different browsers.
106. Web.dev
This useful tool measures page quality, including page loading speed. It will also provide tips and insights to help you improve.
107. Web Vitals
This GitHub extension measures Core Web Vitals, providing you with instant feedback on loading, interactivity, and layout shift metrics.
WordPress SEO Tools
WordPress is a robust SEO-friendly CMS platform with numerous plugin options available to improve SEO.
While this post isn’t a WordPress-specific list of plugins, it is worth mentioning a handful of key plugins worth considering.
108. RankMath
A newer SEO suite for WordPress, RankMath has 15 modules and provides SEO guidance using 30 different types of improvements.
109. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most installed SEO suite for WordPress, with regular updates and new tools.
110. Ahrefs WordPress SEO Plugin
The Ahrefs WordPress SEO plugin will provide you with content audits, backlink checking, and tools to monitor and grow your organic traffic.
Here are additional lists of Google Analytics plugins, Twitter plugins, and plugins to improve site speed.
Hitting The SEO Highway Today & Beyond
There’s no question SEO is a strategic process, but it takes very little money to get started with implementation.
These free SEO tools will help you improve your website’s ranking, traffic, and conversion rates.
Tools such as Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs offer a lot of great features and, when used properly, can produce remarkable results.
When you combine the efforts of all SEO tools at your disposal, you’ll be that much closer to a successful SEO campaign.
More Resources:
Featured Image: EtiAmmos/Shutterstock
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SEO
How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO
Quick question: What do you typically do with your old blog posts? Most likely, the answer is: Not much.
If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Many of us in SEO and content marketing tend to focus on continuously creating new content, rather than leveraging our existing blog posts.
However, here’s the reality—Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated in evaluating content quality, and we need to adapt accordingly. Just as it’s easier to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases, updating old content on your website is a more efficient and sustainable strategy in the long run.
Ways to Optimize Older Content
Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort.
Refresh Content
If your blog post contains a specific year or mentions current events, it may become outdated over time. If the rest of the content is still relevant (like if it’s targeting an evergreen topic), simply updating the date might be all you need to do.
Rewrite Old Blog Posts
When the content quality is low (you might have greatly improved your writing skills since you’ve written the post) but the potential is still there, there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely.
This is not a waste—you’re saving time on brainstorming since the basic structure is already in place. Now, focus on improving the quality.
Delete Old Blog Posts
You might find a blog post that just seems unusable. Should you delete your old content? It depends. If it’s completely outdated, of low quality, and irrelevant to any valuable keywords for your website, it’s better to remove it.
Once you decide to delete the post, don’t forget to set up a 301 redirect to a related post or page, or to your homepage.
Promote Old Blog Posts
Sometimes all your content needs is a bit of promotion to start ranking and getting traffic again. Share it on your social media, link to it from a new post – do something to get it discoverable again to your audience. This can give it the boost it needs to attract organic links too.
Which Blog Posts Should You Update?
Deciding when to update or rewrite blog posts is a decision that relies on one important thing: a content audit.
Use your Google Analytics to find out which blog posts used to drive tons of traffic, but no longer have the same reach. You can also use Google Search Console to find out which of your blog posts have lost visibility in comparison to previous months. I have a guide on website analysis using Google Analytics and Google Search Console you can follow.
If you use keyword tracking tools like SE Ranking, you can also use the data it provides to come up with a list of blog posts that have dropped in the rankings.
Make data-driven decisions to identify which blog posts would benefit from these updates – i.e., which ones still have the chance to recover their keyword rankings and organic traffic.
With Google’s helpful content update, which emphasizes better user experiences, it’s crucial to ensure your content remains relevant, valuable, and up-to-date.
How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO
Updating articles can be an involved process. Here are some tips and tactics to help you get it right.
Author’s Note: I have a Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist you might also be interested in following while you’re doing your content audit.
Conduct New Keyword Research
Updating your post without any guide won’t get you far. Always do your keyword research to understand how users are searching for your given topic.
Proper research can also show you relevant questions and sections that can be added to the blog post you’re updating or rewriting. Make sure to take a look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section that shows up when you search for your target keyword. Check out other websites like Answer The Public, Reddit, and Quora to see what users are looking for too.
Look for New Ranking Opportunities
When trying to revive an old blog post for SEO, keep an eye out for new SEO opportunities (e.g., AI Overview, featured snippets, and related search terms) that didn’t exist when you first wrote your blog post. Some of these features can be targeted by the new content you will add to your post, if you write with the aim to be eligible for it.
Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags
If you want to attract new readers, consider updating your headlines and meta tags.
Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:
- Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
- Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
- Appeal to your target audience – who may have changed tastes from when the blog post was originally made.
Remember that your meta tags in particular act like a brief advertisement for your blog post, since this is what the user first sees when your blog post is shown in the search results page.
Take a look at your blog post’s click-through rate on Google Search Console – if it falls below 2%, it’s definitely time for new meta tags.
Replace Outdated Information and Statistics
Updating blog content with current studies and statistics enhances the relevance and credibility of your post. By providing up-to-date information, you help your audience make better, well-informed decisions, while also showing that your content is trustworthy.
Tighten or Expand Ideas
Your old content might be too short to provide real value to users – or you might have rambled on and on in your post. It’s important to evaluate whether you need to make your content more concise, or if you need to elaborate more.
Keep the following tips in mind as you refine your blog post’s ideas:
- Evaluate Helpfulness: Measure how well your content addresses your readers’ pain points. Aim to follow the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
- Identify Missing Context: Consider whether your content needs more detail or clarification. View it from your audience’s perspective and ask if the information is complete, or if more information is needed.
- Interview Experts: Speak with industry experts or thought leaders to get fresh insights. This will help support your writing, and provide unique points that enhance the value of your content.
- Use Better Examples: Examples help simplify complex concepts. Add new examples or improve existing ones to strengthen your points.
- Add New Sections if Needed: If your content lacks depth or misses a key point, add new sections to cover these areas more thoroughly.
- Remove Fluff: Every sentence should contribute to the overall narrative. Eliminate unnecessary content to make your post more concise.
- Revise Listicles: Update listicle items based on SEO recommendations and content quality. Add or remove headings to stay competitive with higher-ranking posts.
Improve Visuals and Other Media
No doubt that there are tons of old graphics and photos in your blog posts that can be improved with the tools we have today. Make sure all of the visuals used in your content are appealing and high quality.
Update Internal and External Links
Are your internal and external links up to date? They need to be for your SEO and user experience. Outdated links can lead to broken pages or irrelevant content, frustrating readers and hurting your site’s performance.
You need to check for any broken links on your old blog posts, and update them ASAP. Updating your old blog posts can also lead to new opportunities to link internally to other blog posts and pages, which may not have been available when the post was originally published.
Optimize for Conversions
When updating content, the ultimate goal is often to increase conversions. However, your conversion goals may have changed over the years.
So here’s what you need to check in your updated blog post. First, does the call-to-action (CTA) still link to the products or services you want to promote? If not, update it to direct readers to the current solution or offer.
Second, consider where you can use different conversion strategies. Don’t just add a CTA at the end of the post.
Last, make sure that the blog post leverages product-led content. It’s going to help you mention your products and services in a way that feels natural, without being too pushy. Being subtle can be a high ROI tactic for updated posts.
Key Takeaway
Reviving old blog articles for SEO is a powerful strategy that can breathe new life into your content and boost your website’s visibility. Instead of solely focusing on creating new posts, taking the time to refresh existing content can yield impressive results, both in terms of traffic and conversions.
By implementing these strategies, you can transform old blog posts into valuable resources that attract new readers and retain existing ones. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into your archives, and start updating your content today—your audience and search rankings will thank you!
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.
The new guide has six sections:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment
The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.
Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.
To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.
The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.
Google explains:
“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”
Read the new Google Trends documentation:
Get started with Google Trends
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero
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