Guest post by Jeremy Chatelaine

In today’s digital world, every business needs a strong online presence to thrive. This is why it’s important to make sure things such as your website are optimized to capture as many visitors as possible. 

When optimizing your website to rank high within search engine results, SEO is a great place to start.

This is because 69% of online experiences start with a search engine. For companies, having a website that captures visitors, this is a great deal of opportunity.

You may ask, how can I optimize my site for SEO on a budget?

This is where affordable SEO tools come in handy.

SEO tools play a vital role in helping you achieve higher rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs) and increasing organic traffic to your website.

What are SEO Tools?

SEO tools are software applications designed to assist website owners, digital marketers, and SEO professionals in optimizing their websites for search engines. 

These tools provide a wide range of functionalities and data-driven insights to improve a website’s visibility, rankings, and overall performance in search engine results.

SEO tools offer various features and capabilities that can be highly beneficial for optimizing a website. They provide valuable data and analysis on keyword research, on-page optimization, backlink analysis, website audits, rank tracking, competitor analysis, and reporting.

Utilizing these tools, website owners and agencies can gain valuable insights into their website’s SEO health, identify areas for improvement, and implement effective strategies to increase their visibility in search engine results.

Benefits of SEO Tools

Some main benefits SEO tools can bring are: 

• Enhanced visibility: SEO tools provide valuable insights and analysis that help optimize a website for better search engine rankings. Applying these tools to conduct keyword research, on-page optimization, and backlink analysis, website owners can increase their visibility in search engine results, attracting more organic traffic and attracting more potential customers and clients.
• Competitive advantage: SEO tools offer features for competitor analysis, allowing website owners to gain insights into their competitors’ SEO strategies, keywords they rank for, and backlink profiles. This information helps identify opportunities and gaps in the market, enabling website owners to make informed decisions and increase sales effectiveness.
• Data-driven decision-making: SEO tools generate reports and provide analytics on a website’s SEO performance, including metrics such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, and conversions. This data allows website owners to track the effectiveness of their SEO efforts, measure the impact of optimization strategies, and make data-driven decisions for continuous improvement and optimization of their website’s SEO performance.

7 Affordable SEO Tools

Here are 7 affordable SEO tools you can use to optimize your website while not breaking your marketing budget.

1. Search Atlas

Search Atlas is an enterprise SEO platform that harnesses the power of AI to help you optimize your website for SEO.

With Search Atlas, you can perform site audits, do backlink analysis, track keywords, and write content that’s optimized to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs).

In addition, this software can help you with the content marketing side of things, such as planning content with its content planner capabilities. 

With its blog topic generator, it can also help you generate blog ideas. So whether you need help with on-page or off-page SEO, Search Atlas has your back.

Core Features:

• Content strategy: Search Atlas has great features for your content strategy, including an AI content writer that helps you generate content, along with content rewriting capabilities and other tools such as a blog post idea generator and an AI image generator.
• Keyword research: Keyword research is an important part of any SEO strategy; Search Atlas has a great keyword research tool that helps you find the best keywords for your site to rank for and what keywords your site currently ranks for.
• Backlink analysis: Backlinks play a major role in ranking within search engines. Search Atlas has tools for you to check the backlinks of any website and gives you recommendations for what websites you should target for links.
• SEO recommendations: One thing that makes Search Atlas stand out from other tools in its niche is that it provides you with insights into what steps you should take in order to improve the SEO of your site.

Pricing

Search Atlas has 3 different tiers that you can choose from, including its starter tier, which costs $79 monthly. Its growth tier, which costs $148, and its growth tier, which costs $320. All of these tiers are priced when billed monthly, and each of them includes more site projects and a few more features.

2. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an invaluable tool provided by Google that allows website owners and webmasters to monitor and optimize their website’s presence in Google search results. 

As an SEO tool, Google Search Console offers a range of functionalities to improve your website’s performance in search engine rankings. 

One of its key features is the ability to conduct website audits, providing you with a detailed analysis of your site’s health and identifying any potential issues that may impact your visibility in Google’s search results.

In addition, you can also measure your website’s search traffic and performance, allowing you to analyze and make necessary changes to ensure that your site is up to par.

Core Features

• Sitemaps and crawling: Google Search Console enables you to submit a sitemap, which helps search engines understand the structure and organization of your website. You can also view how Google’s bots are crawling and indexing your site, identify crawl errors, and ensure that important pages are being properly crawled and indexed.
• Performance tracking: Google Search Console allows you to monitor your website’s performance in Google search results. You can track key metrics such as clicks, impressions, click-through rates (CTR), and average position. This data helps you assess the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Index coverage: With this feature, you can monitor the indexing status of your website’s pages. It identifies any indexing errors, such as pages blocked by robots.txt or issues with canonicalization. You can also submit new pages for indexing and request Google to re-crawl and re-index specific URLs.

Pricing

Google Search Console is a free service to use and won’t cost you anything.

3. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that offers a range of functionalities to enhance your on-page optimization efforts. Its content analysis feature evaluates the quality of your content, ensuring that it is well-optimized for specific keywords and meets SEO best practices. 

The plugin provides real-time suggestions and recommendations to improve your content’s readability, keyword usage, and meta tags, helping your pages rank better in search engine result pages (SERPs).

In addition to on-page optimization, Yoast SEO assists with technical aspects of SEO. It provides tools for generating XML sitemaps, managing robots.txt files, and handling canonical URLs. These features ensure that search engines can efficiently crawl and index your website, resulting in better visibility and higher rankings.

Yoast SEO also helps with optimizing social media previews, allowing you to control how your content appears when shared on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This feature enables you to craft compelling and click-worthy snippets, maximizing engagement and traffic from social media channels, such as LinkedIn.

Core Features

• On-page optimization: Yoast SEO offers comprehensive on-page optimization tools to improve the SEO-friendliness of your content. It analyzes your content and provides real-time suggestions for optimizing headings, meta tags, keyword usage, and readability, helping you create content that ranks well in search engine results.
• Technical SEO tools: Yoast SEO provides various features to handle technical aspects of SEO. It generates XML sitemaps, manages robots.txt files, and handles canonical URLs, ensuring that search engines can crawl and index your website effectively.
• Social media optimization: With Yoast SEO, you can optimize how your content appears when shared on social media platforms. It allows you to customize social media previews by setting titles, descriptions, and images, making your shared content more appealing and clickable, leading to increased engagement and traffic from social media.

Pricing

Yoast SEO has a free plan and a paid plan. Its paid plan is billed monthly at $99 dollars; with the paid plan, you get access to more features, such as the ability to optimize your site for the right keywords, access to their new tools before anyone else, and access to their learning academy.

4. AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a tool that focuses on your SEO by harnessing the power of search listening. It gives you access to the important questions being asked on Google so you can optimize your content strategy accordingly to attract more organic traffic. 

It allows you to find the gaps in current content so you can optimize it with keywords to match specific questions your audience may have. You can also use search listening to find keywords worth attempting to rank within SERPs for. 

Additionally, AnwserThePublic allows you to discover potential content ideas and stay ahead of the updates to Google by focusing on user intent.

Core Features

• Discover unique keywords: AnswerThePublic helps uncover quirky or surprising questions and niche subjects that might not be immediately obvious through traditional keyword research. This can attract more organic traffic and lead to creative content ideas
• Time-saving keyword research: AnswerThePublic allows users to save significant time by automating the process of finding relevant keywords. Instead of manually searching for keywords, users can quickly identify valuable keywords and queries.
• Content gap analysis: The tool helps SEO teams identify gaps in existing content by highlighting specific questions and topics users are searching for. This information enables content optimization to address users’ needs better.
• User intent focus: The tool emphasizes understanding user intent, helping SEO teams create more relevant and targeted content. This approach aligns with Google’s evolving algorithms, ensuring content remains optimized for user needs.

Pricing

AnswerThePublic offers both free and paid plans to cater to a wide range of user needs. The Individual plan is priced at $9 per month. For those seeking more extensive features and flexibility, the Pro plan is available at $99 per month. Additionally, its top-tier Expert plan is priced at $199 per month.

5. Buzzstream

BuzzStream is a comprehensive outreach platform designed to streamline and enhance digital PR and link-building efforts. Whether you are an individual SEO professional, b2b marketer, or part of a larger team, BuzzStream offers a suite of tools to help you organize and optimize your outreach campaigns effectively.

One of BuzzStream’s key strengths lies in its ability to expedite the process of building qualified prospect lists for link building.

It assists users in discovering valuable metrics and contact information for potential prospects, thus facilitating the creation of a database of past promoters. This feature is instrumental in securing more backlinks and increasing website traffic, as it allows for more targeted and efficient outreach efforts.

BuzzStream also excels in email outreach, enabling users to send high-quality emails at scale. This eliminates the problem of lost emails or inbox overload, ensuring that your outreach efforts remain organized and productive. 

Additionally, the platform leverages data to help users refine their outreach strategies, thereby improving their chances of success in securing placements and links.

Core Features

• Prospect Discovery: The tool helps you identify and gather metrics and contact information for potential prospects, saving you time in the research phase.
• Email Outreach: BuzzStream enables you to send well-crafted emails at scale, ensuring your communications are effective and organized
• Database Management: It allows you to build and maintain a database of past promoters and contacts, enhancing your ability to secure links and traffic
• Data-Driven Insights: BuzzStream utilizes data to help you fine-tune your outreach strategy for better results.

Pricing

BuzzStream offers a range of pricing plans to cater to different needs. They have a Starter plan priced at $24 per month. The Growth plan is priced at $124 per month, and The Professional plan is available at $299 per month, BuzzStream also provides a Custom plan starting at $999 per month. Each plan comes with a free trial option, allowing users to explore the platform’s capabilities before committing to a subscription.

6. PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed is a valuable tool designed to help website owners optimize their sites for speed, an essential factor in enhancing user experience and improving SEO rankings. 

Page speed plays a crucial role in determining how well a website ranks in search engine results, as slower-loading pages can negatively impact user engagement and SEO performance.

One of the standout features of PageSpeed Insights is its ability to provide a comprehensive Core Web Vitals Assessment. This assessment encompasses all the major metrics that impact your website’s performance, including aspects like loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. 

In addition to Core Web Vitals, PageSpeed also offers detailed insights into performance issues on your website. It highlights areas that need improvement, such as large image files, inefficient code, or resource-heavy scripts. Armed with this information, you can take targeted actions to boost your site’s SEO, loading speed, and overall performance.

Core Features

• Core web vitals assessment: Provides a comprehensive evaluation of key metrics affecting website performance, including loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
• Performance insights: Identifies specific performance issues and areas for improvement, such as oversized images or inefficient code.
• Speed optimization recommendations: Offers actionable suggestions for optimizing your site’s speed, which can positively impact both user experience and SEO rankings.
• Monitoring and tracking: Allows you to continuously monitor your website’s performance over time, ensuring that any improvements made are sustained.

Pricing

Regarding the price, it’s important to note that Google provides PageSpeed Insights as a free tool for website owners. You can access it online through the PageSpeed Insights website.

7. GTMetrix

GTMetrix is an all-in-one optimization tool for website speed and optimization, allowing you to know things such as when your website is running slow and how it’s been performing over a period of time. 

You can also see how your website loads on different devices and how it performs around the world not just locally. 

GTMetrix’s reports you can get insights into how fast your page loads, why it is slow, and action steps to take in order to increase website speed and optimization. 

Page speed is a huge factor within SEO, so when you optimize your website for page speed with GTmetrix, you’ll boost your rankings within search engines and boost engagement too.

Core Features

• Website speed and performance analysis: GTMetrix is an all-in-one optimization tool that provides detailed insights into your website’s speed and performance. It allows you to assess how fast your page loads, identify performance issues and take actionable steps to increase website speed and optimization. This helps improve user experience and engagement.
• Device and global performance testing: With GTMetrix, you can see how your website loads on different devices and test its performance in multiple global locations. This feature provides a comprehensive understanding of how your website performs across various platforms and geographical regions, allowing you to optimize accordingly.
• Comprehensive reports with actionable insights: GTMetrix generates reports that offer in-depth information about your page’s loading speed and the reasons behind any slowness. These reports provide valuable recommendations and actionable steps to optimize your website’s performance. By following these insights, you can enhance your page speed and improve its overall SEO and user experience.
• Impact on SEO rankings: Page speed is a crucial factor in search engine optimization (SEO). By optimizing your website’s page speed using GTMetrix, you can boost your rankings within search engines. Improved rankings lead to increased visibility, organic traffic, and better engagement with your website.

Pricing

GTMetrix has 4 different plans to choose from. The first choice is its free plan which is limited but has some great features. The second plan to choose from is its solo plan for $8 a month. The third plan is called the starter plan for $17 a month. And the final plan is called Growth and costs $34 a month.

Conclusion

SEO tools are indispensable resources for website owners, b2b marketers, and SEO professionals seeking to enhance their online presence and achieve better search engine rankings. 

These powerful tools offer a wide range of functionalities and data-driven insights to optimize websites for improved visibility, increased organic traffic, and, ultimately, greater success in the digital landscape. 

Increasing SEO with one of these tools is a great way to attract more customers organically and can be an effective and cost-effective marketing channel as well. 

So if you’re looking for a new marketing channel or just want to get more eyes on your website, SEO tools could be an effective strategy for you to do so.

About the Author

Jeremy is the founder of QuickMail.io, a SaaS company that enables personal one-to-one conversations at scale through automation – for outbound outreach, inbound leads, trial/onboarding, customer communication, and more. Before founding QuickMail, he worked for more than 15 years as a developer in the video game industry and in finance.