Did you know there are over six million searches on Google every minute? People are looking, and your SEO efforts can help them find you. With an average cost per click of $6.56 for Google Ads, generating traffic organically instead is well worth the investment.
“We found love in a hopeless place 🎶 ”
You know that famous Rihanna song? If you’re new to search engine optimization, or if you don’t have the budget to allocate to premium tools or professional help, generating organic traffic can seem like a hopeless endeavor.
We’re here to help you find the love (traffic… following along?) you’ve been looking for.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is the process of improving a website to boost its visibility and rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). You’ll start by identifying what potential customers are actually typing into search engines when they’re looking for something you offer.
But, if you don’t have a budget to allocate to search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll need to find and use all of the best free SEO tools possible to start generating more WooCommerce traffic.
Then, it’s all about serving visitors through a quality, safe user experience and great content related to the terms your potential customers are searching.
How to optimize your WooCommerce store for SEO
Search engines use a complex algorithm to rank websites in their search results. These algorithms take into account a range of factors, including:
- The user experience. Does your site load quickly and look good on all devices? Is it easy for browsers to locate what they’re looking for?
- The keywords you include. Does your site’s content talk about the topics users are searching for?
- Your content quality. Are you sharing unique, accurate, and comprehensive information that visitors will find helpful and enjoyable?
- Links to and from your site. Do others in your industry link to your content because it’s so valuable? Google tracks this as an indication you’re doing great work. Linking to other, related sites can also show that you’re committed to providing visitors with what they need — even if it’s on a different website.
- Technical performance and safety. Is your site easy for search engines to crawl? Do you have an SSL certificate?
By optimizing your website for key factors, you can improve your chances of ranking higher in SERPs and increasing your organic search traffic.
And while it can get quite complicated, getting the basics right will often be enough for you to see an impact on your traffic. As you aim for more competitive keywords, you’ll need to take things a step further, but by then you’ll have the budget to dedicate to premium tools and professional help.
So today’s post is all about doing the best you can with what you have. Remember that SEO is an ongoing process. Dedicate time each week to make improvements in one area or another. Eventually, you will see results.
To help you pick the best free SEO tools for your online store, we’ve reviewed dozens of tools and sorted them based on the key purposes they serve.
Free tools to help identify keywords
To be successful with SEO, you’ll first need to know your target. What, specifically, are your potential customers looking for? What terms are they searching? It might not be for a product, but rather subjects around your niche.
For example, they could be searching specifically for “small squeaky dog toy”. Or they might be looking for a related term like “how to engage my older dog.”
The exact terms they use are called “keywords”.
There are a number of great tools to help you research and identify relevant keywords to target, including:
1. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a tool that was primarily designed to identify keywords for pay-per-click advertising campaigns. It also doubles as a valuable option for keyword research.
Using the keyword discovery feature, you can find new, related keyword ideas based on a starting word, phrase, or even just your store’s URL. This helps expand your keyword list and identify relevant terms to target through on-page SEO and your content strategy. You can also see the average monthly search volume for keywords the tool suggests, which helps you understand their popularity.
Google’s Keyword Planner will also highlight historical trends, allowing you to identify variations in each behavior throughout the year, which can be really useful for planning seasonal promotions or campaigns.
Google Keyword Planner requires a Google AdSense account, but it is free to use.
Key benefits of Google Keyword Planner:
- Helps you discover new keywords based on a word or phrase
- Shows average monthly search volumes for keywords
- Allows you to research keywords for different countries and regions
- Helps you identify seasonal variations
2. Google Trends
Google Trends is a free tool that visually represents the search popularity of a given keyword, topic, or phrase over time. This data can be invaluable for SEO purposes, as it gives you insights into shifts in interest for specific terms, niches, or products. This understanding can help you tailor your content strategy, products, and SEO efforts more effectively.
This tool will also suggest keywords relating to trending topics. It offers a comparison feature that helps you measure the popularity of keywords or topics to make informed decisions about which to prioritize for higher SEO impact. You can analyze trends on a country, regional, or sub-regional level — allowing you to compare the search behavior of customers most relevant to your business geographically.
Google Trends can be particularly useful for seasonal ecommerce businesses or those who have the ability to respond to current events as it allows you to see seasonal and trending search terms. For example, a T-shirt store could print topical designs based on the data provided. It also enables you to identify spikes in search interest for specific keywords, allowing you to capitalize on the rising demand by creating timely content or adjusting your targeting.
Google Trends is a free tool with no premium version.
Key benefits of Google Trends:
- Shows the search demand over time for keywords, phrases, or topics
- Analyzes trends for different countries and regions
- Allows you to compare trends for different keywords
3. Moz Keyword Explorer
Moz Keyword Explorer is an SEO tool that helps you find keyword opportunities and understand how different keywords perform. Once you enter a seed keyword, the tool suggests other related keywords alongside their search volume and projected organic click-through rate. You can also see Moz’s proprietary ‘Keyword Difficulty Score’ for each particular keyword suggestion, which shows how easy (or hard) it is to rank for each keyword.
A free account also helps you assess your own business, along with your competitors, by analyzing why pages rank highly for a given keyword or which keywords drive the most organic traffic to your competitors’ stores.
Moz Keyword Explorer offers both free and paid plans. You can make ten queries and receive up to 1,000 keyword suggestions a month for free. Moz Pro provides higher limits and additional features for $79 a month.
Key benefits of Moz Keyword Explorer:
- Gives suggestions from a seed keyword
- Shows estimated search volume, CTR, and proprietary Moz Difficulty Score for each keyword
- Analyzes why pages rank highly for a given keyword
- Allows you to see your competitors’ highest-performing keywords
4. Seed Keywords
Seed Keywords takes a different approach to keyword research by allowing you to crowdsource keyword ideas. Instead of automatically generating relevant keywords with traffic metrics like other keyword research tools, it allows you to create a scenario and ask your contact what they would search for in that situation.
For example, if you run an ecommerce site that sells organic skincare, you could use Seed Keywords to ask your contacts or current customers, “You are looking for a natural moisturizer. What search terms would you use?” By leveraging your contacts, you can gain valuable insights into potential customers’ real search intents, which you can use to help tailor your content and campaigns.
Seed Keywords is a completely free SEO tool with no premium options.
Key benefits of Seed Keywords:
- Allows you to ask your contacts what they would search for in a particular scenario
- Collates results to help you identify potential keywords
5. Soovle
Soovle is a free keyword research tool that has been around since 2008. It aggregates keyword suggestions for any search term or keyword from various search engines and platforms, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and YouTube.
By using Soovle, you can gain a broad perspective on what users are searching for across different channels. This can help you identify long-tail keywords and content ideas based on what people are actually searching for, potentially uncovering less competitive niche terms.
Soovle also allows you to save the suggestions it gives and download them or export them to Google Trends so you can see how the search volumes for keywords change over time.
Soovle is completely free, with no premium version.
Key benefits of Soovle:
- Shows related terms based on a seed keyword or search term
- Aggregates results from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Answers.com
Free tools to analyze your site’s SEO
Understanding how your site currently performs will help you plan the best areas to focus on in the future. Maybe you have great content, but your site loads super slowly. Boosting speed could result in a massive improvement in rankings.
There are a range of tools that provide valuable insights into various aspects of your store’s current SEO efforts. Some of the best are:
6. Google Lighthouse
Google Lighthouse is an open-source tool that’s built into DevTools in Google Chrome, and that can also be accessed through Google PageSpeed insights.
Google Lighthouse analyzes a page and gives you feedback on a wide range of areas that can impact how well the page performs on search engines.
For example, you can see how well search engines crawl your site. Or review the validity of your structured data, which controls how search engines understand and display key information and products from your site.
Google Lighthouse also provides feedback on the content of the page you’ve asked it to analyze. It looks at your page titles, meta descriptions, font sizes, and much more.
You can also see how well your store performs when accessed from a mobile device, as well as how accessible your site is, both of which can significantly impact how well your store ranks on search engines.
All of the reports provided by Google Lighthouse contain tips and suggestions to rectify any issues that have been identified.
Google Lighthouse is a free SEO tool with no premium version.
Key benefits of Google Lighthouse:
- Allows you to analyze your site’s pages against SEO best practices
- Analyzes the performance of your site on both mobile and desktop devices
- Provides suggestions to address any issues identified
- Accessible from within DevTools in Google Chrome
7. Ahrefs Site Audit
The site audit tool by Ahrefs analyzes your website and gives a detailed report outlining the SEO health of your online store.
After you verify ownership of your site, the tool crawls every page and provides an overall SEO score, along with detailed reports on how optimized your site is for search engines. For example, the tool will highlight any technical SEO issues such as broken links, missing meta descriptions, or mobile usability issues, along with content-related issues like thin content or lack of keyword optimization.
Ahrefs Site Audit also analyzes your site’s backlink profile and shows how well your site performs in search results. All of the reports provided also help by suggesting ways to address any issues identified.
The basic version of Site Audit is available for free through Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and provides a useful picture of your site’s SEO and any key issues. You can receive more detailed insights and proactive monitoring with one of Ahrefs paid plans, which starts at $79 a month.
Key benefits of Ahrefs Site Audit:
- Analyzes your entire site’s SEO
- Provides an overall SEO score alongside detailed reports
- Gives suggestions of how to address any SEO issues
8. SEOquake
SEOquake is a free SEO browser extension that allows you to conduct an on-page SEO audit of your site. With it, you’ll be able to see key SEO metrics at a glance for any site you visit, including the number of internal and external links.
You can also access more detailed reports and metrics through the extension, including a page-level SEO audit, which analyzes your page against SEO best practices, and a keyword density report, which shows the most common words on the page. You can also run comparison reports, which is useful for understanding how the SEO of a page on your site compares to a competitor’s.
SEOquake is a completely free SEO tool with no premium versions.
Key benefits of SEOquake:
- Analyzes key page-level SEO data through a free Chrome extension
- Counts the number of internal and external links on a page
- Provides an overview of the keyword density of the page
- Allows you to compare the SEO of a page on your site with a competitor’s page
9. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a comprehensive tool designed to audit the SEO of your online store by crawling your entire website to spot any technical SEO issues.
This free tool offers a snapshot of the SEO of your site. It crawls your site like a search engine spider and thus offers some insight into problems that could impact indexing by Google and others.
Screaming Frog will help you by identifying key issues such as HTTP header errors, broken links, bloated HTML, and pages that search engines are blocked from crawling.
Plus, Screaming Frog will find any duplicate content that can have a significant negative impact on your rankings. Finally, it analyzes your page titles and metadata so that you know if they’re too long, too short, missing, or duplicated across your site.
Screaming Frog has a free version alongside a premium version, which offers scheduled scans and other analysis features for $259 a year.
Key benefits of Screaming Frog:
- Crawls your site to identify technical SEO issues
- Identifies broken links
- Spots duplicate content
- Creates a visual map of how search engines see your site
Free tools to analyze and boost your site speed
The speed of your website, as well as the user experience (especially on mobile devices), are key factors in determining your search engine rankings.
Google knows that slow-loading websites are painful for visitors and doesn’t want to send searchers to sites that will annoy them.
Google also now gives increased weight to the experience of people visiting your site from a mobile device. In fact, it now primarily uses the mobile version for ranking and indexing.
Google’s core web vitals measure other key aspects of the user experience (like page “jumpiness” and delayed ability for users to interact with key elements) and these are factored into ranking decisions.
The great news is that there are a number of free SEO tools that can help you analyze the speed and user-friendliness of your site and implement changes to improve it, including:
10. Jetpack Boost
Jetpack Boost is a free SEO plugin that helps you improve the speed and performance of your WooCommerce site.
Jetpack Boost analyzes the performance of your site on both mobile and desktop, presenting you with an easy-to-understand numeric score and letter grade that indicates how your site may be evaluated by Google. With just a few clicks, you can then use the plugin to implement powerful performance improvements.
For example, you can use Jetpack Boost to defer JavaScript, which can help improve the speed each page takes to load. You can also use the plugin to optimize the CSS on your site to prioritize loading what your visitors first see on a page — known as the content that’s ‘above the fold’’. Loading this CSS first can make your site appear to load quicker and help improve your core web vitals.
Jetpack Boost also includes a cache, which stores a snapshot of your site to give visitors the best browsing and shopping experience and improves your SEO by loading your site more quickly. You can fine tune the cache to exclude dynamic pages, such as your shopping cart, and refresh your cache on‑demand using a simple interface to ensure your content is always up to date.
The plugin also includes a helpful image guide feature so you can spot images with a suboptimal resolution, size, or aspect ratio and address these to improve your visitors’ experience.
Jetpack Boost was made by Automattic, the WordPress experts behind WooCommerce, which means it seamlessly integrates with your online store. It’s specifically designed to help WordPress and WooCommerce site owners make improvements that will have the most significant impact on site speed and core web vitals.
Jetpack Boost is available as a free SEO tool. There is also a paid version available from just $9 a month, which gives you access to advanced tools to improve your store’s performance even further.
Key benefits of Jetpack Boost:
- Analyzes the performance of your WooCommerce store on both desktop and mobile
- Defers JavaScript and optimizes CSS loading
- Caches your site to help it load quickly
- Helps you identify images that are in need of optimization
11. Jetpack CDN
Jetpack CDN is another site performance tool that’s available as part of the free Jetpack plugin. It helps speed up your site by loading key content from a super-fast network of dedicated servers.
When you activate Jetpack CDN, all the images from your site, alongside the static CSS and JavaScript files used by WordPress and WooCommerce, will be sent to your visitors from Automattic’s content delivery network (CDN) instead of your host’s web servers.
Using Jetpack CDN will help your site load more quickly as you’re reducing strain on your traditional web servers and sending content from a location more physically near the visitor.
If that’s not enough, Jetpack CDN also automatically resizes your images for mobile devices.
Key benefits of Jetpack CDN:
- Improves the speed of your site by delivering all your images and the core JavaScript and CSS files used by WordPress, WooCommerce, and Jetpack from Automattic’s servers
- Automatically resizes images for mobile devices
- Made especially for WordPress and WooCommerce
- Includes a range of other valuable security and performance tools with the Jetpack plugin
12. Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free SEO tool developed by Google that allows you to evaluate the performance of your website on both desktop and mobile devices.
PageSpeed Insights analyzes your site and provides a detailed report that includes a performance score out of 100. This tool also offers a range of different reports and charts that help highlight potential problem areas that may be causing performance issues.
PageSpeed Insights also provides suggestions for how to tackle any issues. For instance, you might see recommendations to reduce redirects or leverage browser caching.
PageSpeed Insights is a completely free tool with no premium versions.
Key benefits of Google PageSpeed Insights:
- Evaluates both mobile and desktop performance
- Provides clear optimization recommendations
- Generates a range of reports
- Offers analysis that’s aligned with the page speed factors that could impact the Google search ranking of your store
13. GTmetrix
GTmetrix is a free SEO tool that helps you analyze the speed of your site. A free account allows you to see how your site loads from seven different locations and identifies technical factors that are slowing it down.
It provides detailed reports and charts that are simple to understand, even for those without a technical background. These reports paint a clear picture of where loading delays are occurring, along with recommendations for how to increase the speed of your site.
You can use the reports provided by GTmetrix to focus your optimization efforts on the areas that will have the greatest impact. For example, your report might identify large image files as a culprit for slow loading times, which you could address by using the CDN offered by Jetpack to serve optimized versions of your images from a global CDN.
The free version of GTmetrix includes ample insights for most store owners. If you need more advanced features and in-depth analysis, GTmetrix PRO offers additional functionalities, including access to additional test locations and an increased number of on-demand tests.
Key benefits of GTmetrix:
- Provides in-depth performance reports
- Recommends specific steps for improving load times
- Generates visual representations of page load sequences for easy analysis (Waterfall charts)
- Tests your store’s performance from seven different locations
Free all-around SEO tools
In addition to the SEO tools that help with a specific task, there are also a number of tools that are more broad. Here are some of the best options that just require a free account:
14. SEO Review Tools
SEO Review Tools is a website that offers a suite of 66 free SEO tools designed to help you analyze and optimize how your online store is performing on search engines.
The functions offered by SEO Review Tools are split into categories covering technical SEO, SEO authority, SEO content, and webmaster tools.
SEO Review Tools allows you to analyze your competitors, review your internal links, and see information about your domain authority.
From one of the top free keyword research tools to a content outline generator and SEO Content Editor tool, you can also get help with the entire SEO content creation process from ideation to optimization.
SEO Review Tools is completely free to use, but some individual functions are not as powerful as the dedicated tools we’ve discussed elsewhere in this guide.
Key benefits of SEO Review Tools:
- Offers 66 free SEO tools to cover a range of SEO tasks
- Allows you to analyze the technical SEO of your site, including meta descriptions and broken links
- Provides tools to help you analyze your SEO authority, including a competitor checker, and domain authority tool
- Offers basic tools to help you create SEO-friendly content including keyword research and content outlines
15. Semrush Free
Semrush is a comprehensive SEO and digital marketing platform that offers a wide range of features to help businesses improve their online visibility, including SEO and PPC. While many advanced features require a subscription, the platform also offers a selection of free SEO tools with usage limits that still provide significant value for people looking to improve the SEO of their online store.
Semrush allows you to research up to ten keywords a day using its Keyword Magic tool, which returns a list of the top keywords that are likely to be effective. It also provides the search volume and an estimation of the difficulty of each suggested keyword.
You can then use the Keyword Overview tool to see more detailed metrics for any keyword. For example, you can view the search volume over time, along with the top ten pages that rank for that keyword.
Semrush also provides limited free access to its Domain Overview tool, which allows you to analyze up to ten domains per day. This tool reveals which keywords a domain ranks for, its main competitors, the relevant keywords that drive the most traffic, and an overview of the domain’s backlink profile.
You can monitor your SEO performance for free using the Position Tracking tool. With this feature, you can track the position of your site in search results for ten keywords at either a global, national, regional, or ZIP code level. You can also crawl up to 100 URLs using the Site Audit tool, which provides an overall SEO health score and detailed reports of any issues, along with recommended fixes.
In addition to their free SEO tools, full access to all of the 55 SEO and PPC tools provided by Semrush is available through a paid plan, which starts at $129.95 per month.
Key benefits of Semrush:
- Shows the top ten keywords that are likely to be most effective for a topic or seed keyword
- Provides detailed metrics for keywords, including the top-ranking pages
- Monitors the rank of your site for ten keywords
- Analyzes the SEO of a URL to give a health score and detailed reports of any SEO issues that are identified
- Gives an overview of the SEO for a domain, including the most effective keywords
16. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins. It offers a range of useful features to boost the visibility of your WooCommerce store.
Yoast SEO automatically applies many of the key technical SEO best practices for your site. It adds a section within the WordPress Editor so you can modify things like the meta description and page title. You’ll also get a preview of how the page might display on search engines based on the inputs you’ve used.
Yoast SEO also allows you to set a focus keyword for each page on your site, and then it provides suggestions for optimizing the content accordingly.
Finally, Yoast SEO will automatically create and update the XML sitemap for your site, which makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages, products, and posts.
Yoast SEO is a free SEO plugin, but there’s a premium bundle for $149. This provides additional features specifically aimed at improving ecommerce SEO — like support for generating structured data product snippets and an AI tool for writing product descriptions.
Key benefits of Yoast SEO:
- Allows you to set and preview the title and meta description for your products, pages, and posts
- Provides SEO suggestions within the WordPress Editor
- Generates an advanced XML sitemap for your site
17. SEOPress
SEOPress offers a range of tools to help you improve your site. This SEO plugin allows you to set the titles and meta descriptions of posts, products, and pages and preview how they will appear on search engines. You can also set default meta descriptions using a wide range of parameters and product metadata.
SEOPress integrates with the Google Indexing API, which means that it can ask Google to crawl and re-index your site after you’ve made changes. The plugin will also automatically set the name, alt text, and caption of your product images based on their filename.
The free SEOPress plugin analyzes your content for an unlimited number of keywords and is integrated with Google Analytics so that you can monitor the impact of your efforts from within your WooCommerce dashboard.
This tool also improves your SEO by generating XML sitemaps for your site and automatically redirecting attachment pages to the post or product URL. SEOPress is available for free, with a premium version unlocking additional WooCommerce SEO features, including automatically generating structured data for each of your products.
Key benefits of SEOPress:
- Allows you to set meta descriptions and titles for each post, product, and page
- Generates an XML sitemap for your site
- Helps you analyze the SEO of your posts, pages, and products
- Automatically sets the alt text, name, and caption for images
- Integrates with a range of indexing APIs, including Google, to request search engines re-index your site
Free tools to track how your SEO is performing
You’ve been putting in consistent work to improve your site and climb the rankings. Great! Now, to help make sure your SEO efforts are generating tangible results, it’s important to monitor the performance of your website and track key metrics such as impressions, traffic, user behavior, and keyword rankings.
Fortunately, there are a number of free options available to help you monitor your SEO performance and identify areas for improvement, including:
18. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free SEO tool that allows you to monitor how well your online store is performing in search.
With a free account through Google Search Console, you can see which queries are bringing users to your site and analyze your site’s impressions, clicks, and position for different keywords on Google Search. This tool also helps you analyze and review your store’s structured data, including product snippets, as well as how well your site is performing on the ‘shopping’ tab on Google.
You can use Google Search Console to review any SEO issues, including broken links, mobile usability issues, or indexing errors that Google has identified when crawling your site. This tool also provides a way for Google to communicate with you if it discovers security issues or if Google’s search quality team has imposed a penalty on your website. You can then take action to resolve any issues and let Google know you have fixed them.
Key benefits of Google Search Console:
- Shows how Google “sees” your site
- Analyzes which search terms have brought visitors to your site
- Alerts you to any technical SEO issues, including broken links and indexing errors
- Allows you to review the performance of your structured product snippets on Google
19. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics platform that provides a wealth of data about your website’s traffic and user behavior, which offers crucial insights that can inform and refine your SEO strategy.
For example, a free account with Google Analytics allows you to see your website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates, which can provide insights into what content drives visits and engagement. You can also see the journey your users take on your site, which can be helpful for understanding what pages they visit before making a purchase or how often people bounce from a page without visiting any other page on your site.
Google Analytics allows you to filter the data it presents by a range of criteria, including landing page and visitor demographics, enabling you to see which products and pages resonate best with different customer segments.
You can also use Google Analytics to track conversions and goals, so you can discover which landing pages lead the most visitors to make a purchase. Google Analytics connects to other Google tools, including Google Search Console, allowing you to see user behavior and keyword performance in one place.
Key benefits of Google Analytics:
- Tracks your visitors’ behavior on your site
- Allows you to analyze the traffic on your website by a wide range of criteria, including demographics
- Enables you to track conversions and identify the best-performing pages
- Integrates with other Google tools, including Google Search Console and Google Ads
20. Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools is a suite of tools that helps you monitor and enhance the presence of your store in Bing search. Despite Google’s search dominance, it’s valuable for any website owner to understand how Bing indexes and views their site, and many of the insights gained through this free tool could also help improve the performance of your site on Google searches.
Bing Webmaster Tools provides a range of data to inform your SEO efforts. For example, you can see which keywords bring organic search traffic to your site from Bing, along with your average ranking position for each keyword. You can also use this free SEO tool to analyze your backlinks and their authority.
It also provides access to a Keyword Research tool, which allows you to see the search volumes for any seed keyword or phrase and receive suggestions for additional keywords.
Finally, you can run on-demand site scans to check your site for technical SEO issues, including broken links, page speed, accessibility, and duplicate content that could harm your search rankings.
Key benefits of Bing Webmaster Tools:
- Empowers you to analyze the performance of your site on Bing Search
- Allows you to run on-demand SEO scans to check for technical SEO issues
- Includes a keyword research tool to see search volumes and receive suggestions
21. MozBar
MozBar is a free SEO Chrome extension that adds a bar at the top of every page of your website displaying a range of important metrics related to SEO.
You can customize what metrics are shown on the bar, but by default, you can see the proportion of internal and external links, how likely Moz thinks the page is to be classed as spam, and Moz Domain Authority and Page Authority — metrics developed by Moz to estimate a site’s ability to rank well in search engines.
If you want, the page analysis function will show key SEO elements for a page, including meta tags, headings, links, and keywords present within the content.
You can also use MozBar on Google Search to create different profiles, which enables you to see the search results as if you were in a different city, region, or country. MozBar will also add the key metrics that are visible when you visit a page underneath each search result.
MozBar is available for free. A premium version is available as part of Moz Pro for $79 a month, which allows you to receive content optimization suggestions and see the particular keyword difficulty for search terms.
Key benefits of MozBar:
- Allows you to see key SEO metrics for each page you visit
- Shows SEO metrics within your Google search results
- Enables you to create custom search profiles so you can see the search results from different regions and countries
- Highlights key SEO features on a webpage
22. Similarweb Browser Extension
The Similarweb browser extension offers a quick and convenient way to analyze key SEO metrics for your website and your competitors’ sites. The extension is available for free on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browsers.
When you click on the extension, it instantly reveals the estimated monthly visits, average visit duration, bounce rate, and the number of pages viewed per visit for the website and page you’re on. You can then use the extension to see how this data has changed over time and identify any seasonal changes.
It also gives you a useful breakdown of traffic sources for any page, and if you use the extension on your competitors’ sites, it can help you decipher their strategies and uncover potential new ways to boost your visibility.
The Similarweb browser extension also shows you how the page and site you’re on ranks globally, regionally, and compared to others in the same industry.
While Similarweb offers a range of premium SEO tools, its browser extension is completely free to use.
Key benefits of the Similarweb browser extension:
- Gives a snapshot of key SEO data for any page
- Analyzes traffic, visit duration, and bounce rate over time
- Shows the ranking of your site globally, by country, and by industry
- Reveals the breakdown of traffic sources for the website
The tools you should use for your ecommerce store will depend on the current needs of your store and how much optimization work you’ve already completed.
Here are some questions to think about when choosing the best SEO tools for your store:
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of your SEO efforts? You could begin by using a tool like Google Lighthouse or Ahrefs Site Audit to analyze your website’s performance and SEO. Then review our list of recommended tools to find the ones that specialize in improving your weakest areas.
- What ecommerce platform are you using? The best tool will depend on the platform you’re using to run your store. For example, if you’re using WooCommerce, tools such as Jetpack Boost and Jetpack CDN are great choices to help you optimize the speed of your site.
- What time (and budget) do you have at your disposal? While there are many great free SEO tools available, some require a bit of time and effort to set up and use. If you don’t have a lot of time or money to invest in SEO, look for tools such as Jetpack CDN that are easy to use and don’t require complex setup, and consider if a paid SEO tool may be a good investment for select cases.
- Where is your target audience located? If your target audience is located in a specific country, state, or town, you’ll need a tool that can track your rankings and analyze keywords in that region.
Frequently asked questions about ecommerce SEO
Does SEO matter for my online store?
Yes! SEO is absolutely crucial for the success of any online store. Here’s why:
- SEO helps increase the natural visibility of your store in search engine results pages (SERPs), making it more likely for potential customers to find your products without the need for costly PPC ads.
- A well-optimized online store provides a better user experience, which can encourage customers to stay on your site longer and make a purchase.
The good news is that there are many free options available to help you with different elements of SEO.
For example, Jetpack Boost and Jetpack CDN are a great combination to help you increase the speed of your WooCommerce store, which is a crucial ranking factor for search engines. Other tools can help with keyword research, content optimization, and technical SEO.
By taking the time to optimize your online store for search engines, you can improve your visibility, attract more traffic, and increase your sales.
Does Google have a free SEO tool?
Yes, Google offers a range of tools to help ecommerce store owners improve their search rankings. The free Google tools that can be used for SEO include:
- Google Search Console, which provides insights into your website’s performance in search results, including which keywords are driving organic traffic to your site and which pages are ranking well.
- Google Lighthouse, which audits your website’s performance and SEO and provides suggestions for how to improve it, including optimizing your site for speed, mobile devices, and accessibility.
- Google PageSpeed Insights, which analyzes the speed of your site.
- Google Keyword Planner, which helps you research keywords and get insights into their search volume and competition.
- Google Trends, which shows you how the popularity of search terms has changed over time, which can be helpful for identifying new keyword opportunities.
- Google Analytics, which provides insights into your website’s traffic, including where your visitors are coming from and what they’re doing on your site.
What’s the best SEO tool for my ecommerce site?
There isn’t a definitive answer to the question of which SEO tools are best for an ecommerce site, and many store owners choose to use a combination of tools to help with different aspects of SEO.
For example, Jetpack Boost and Jetpack CDN are great choices to help improve the speed of your WooCommerce store, while tools such as Google Lighthouse are great for analyzing sites for performance and spotting additional SEO issues. Tools like Moz Keyword Explorer can help with keyword research.
The review above outlines some of the best free SEO tools available. You may also want to consider using a combination of free and paid tools to get the best results from your SEO efforts.
Should I pay for SEO tools?
Whether or not you should pay for SEO tools depends on a number of factors, including your budget, the size of your business, and the time you have available.
Most paid tools do one of two things: Cover advanced aspects of SEO or automate or speed up the implementation of the basics.
So if you’re just starting out and have the time to spend on getting SEO basics correct, you may just want to use the free SEO tools we’ve reviewed in this guide. For example, you might choose Jetpack CDN and the free version of Jetpack Boost to improve the speed of your store, the tools from Semrush and Moz to determine the best keyword targets, and Google Search Console to monitor how your site is performing.
As your store grows and you advance through the ranks, you may find that you need to use paid SEO tools to edge out the competition or get that last little bit of help to go from the top 10 to the top five positions. Paid SEO tools can provide you with more features and functionality than free SEO tools, such as detailed keyword research data, comprehensive competitor analysis, and additional speed optimization tools.
If you have a small budget and limited time, SEO tools can maximize your efforts without too much additional spend. However, hiring a professional would be the ideal route if you have limited time and a strong budget.
Ultimately, you need to weigh the cost of the tools against the potential benefits. If you’re not sure whether or not paid SEO tools are right for you, you can always start with free SEO tools and then upgrade later on if you need to.
