5 Free SEO Reporting Tools Reviewed

Five free tools that make my SEO life easier and campaign reporting a breeze.

I’ve been working on several Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns lately and started to wonder how I ever did anything without the great reporting tools that are out there today. Keeping regular reports of your SEO efforts is not only great for sending to clients, but is also essential for tracking your progress on do-it-yourself campaigns.

Here are my top 5 SEO reporting tools and a brief review of each to help you get your feet wet:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

As the first step in your SEO campaign, you’ll need to compile a list of targeted keyword phrases to optimize your site for. Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, you can input a general keyword phrase and it will very quickly return a list of related keyword phrases along with their estimated monthly search volumes.

This tool is intended for Adwords campaigns, but the data it delivers is very relevant to your SEO efforts. In just a few minutes, you can export (txt, excel, csv) a list of keyword phrases for your niche and then sort by search volume to decide which keyword phrases you want to try and tackle.

Link Diagnosis Backlink Reporter

I’ve used Link Diagnosis since it was first announced 2 years ago, and I must say that I have never been disappointed. Enter your website’s domain name and click start. You are returned a breakdown of all links pointing back to your site from other websites. Check the PageRank, anchor text and no-follow status of your backlinks on one screen.

This tool has evolved very much since its first release, and you can now create an account to save your reports and even group and track progress on individual projects. Export your reports to CSV to further analyze or format your data. You can also try their Site Diagnosis tool, where you enter your XML Sitemap address and discover what pages on your site are actually indexed.

Rank Checker Firefox Extension

Another lifesaver from Aaron Wall, author of SEO Book. This tool installs directly into Firefox as an extension so that you can run ranking reports while you’re browsing. Enter your website’s domain name, then paste in your list of keywords to add them to the queue. Click start and Rank Checker will begin fetching your rankings for Google, Yahoo! and Live.

Export your findings to a CSV file for further analysis, and save your queue for 1 click reporting next time. You can save multiple jobs, complete with historical data reporting, and even schedule regular scans for no hassle reporting. Also be sure to check out Aaron’s other SEO tools.

Website Grader

Hubspot’s Website Grader was referred to me by Suzanne Willis a few years ago, and I have been using it regularly ever since. Just enter your website’s domain name and click generate. It is great for evaluating a website’s SEO status at the start of a project, as well as at regularly scheduled increments during project execution.

You can get a quick glance at SEO vitals like: metadata and alt description usage, domain age & expiration, number of indexed pages, last crawl date and more. I include these stats with my monthly SEO reports to make sure everything is in order and to keep an eye on progress.

Google Analytics

We can’t forget about the bottom line: traffic. Google Analytics allows you to analyze your website’s traffic to see where visitors are coming from. Traffic sources are clearly broken into search engines, referring sites (links) and direct traffic. You can quickly see how you are doing at any point in your campaign, and this data is vital for your SEO efforts.

Simply add the Google Analytics tracking code to your site and it will start tracking your traffic sources, average time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, most popular pages, referring keyword phrases and more. Then, add your goal conversion pages and track your conversion rate.

Conclusion

I hope you find these free SEO reporting tools to be as useful as I have. If you need further help, each tool provides ample documentation to help you get started. Best of luck with your SEO endeavors!

What SEO reporting tools do you use? Comment below.