4 Free SEO Checker Tools That Don’t Suck [Video]

[The following is an edited transcript of the above video]

Today, I’m going to show you four free SEO checkers that don’t suck. I’ve tested over 20 of them, so you don’t have to. I’m pretty confident that you probably haven’t heard of some of these tools – let’s dive in and check them out.

We need a website to test these tools on, so I’m at Blues City Deli here in St. Louis – it’s a bit of a sandwich institution locally.

1. Moz Local

This brings us to our first tool – Moz Local. I’ve put ‘Blues City Deli’ into Moz Local. This is a paid tool, but they have this free version that you can use, and it’s pretty comprehensive.

Overall, Blues City Deli is in good shape. You can see they have a 78% score, they’re looking pretty good.

You’ll notice a few of these listings are incomplete – you can click on these and most of them will take you directly to the website to fill out your listings, and what you’re doing is filling out NAP (name, address, phone number). That’s a big thing for local businesses – you want a consistent name, address and phone number in all of the different networks and directories, and you want as many of these citations as you can get.
Moz highlights where you have it right and where you’re missing some of these, and you can click right through. You don’t have to get the paid tool or anything to do that, it’ll send you right to them. Also, it shows you where some of your data is incomplete. 

The key is to make sure that your NAP is correct. If you had an address ‘2438 McNear’, but they forgot ‘Avenue’, you’ll want to clean that up. You can do it all manually, and this tool will help you point out the issues. Alternatively, you can use the paid version and they’ll help you clean that up in a more automated fashion.

2. SEO Toolbox

Tool number two is the SEO toolbox from seositecheckup.com. You get one free test per day, or you can sign up and get fifteen free tests. I already used my free test inadvertently, so I just signed up – the process took around three seconds. 

You’ll notice right away that they’ve highlighted that the meta description is missing – while meta description is not a direct ranking factor, it can be an indirect one. What I mean by that is, Google will typically make up a description if you don’t have one there. You want to control that message because you need to match your description to search intent and make people click through at a higher rate. While it’s not a direct factor, it’s indirectly influencing if someone clicks through to your result on the search. In that sense, it’s highly important.

You’ll notice that a lot of these tools go into keyword usage and things like that. That is a little bit tricky until you set it up perfectly, because it may think that a keyword is important that’s not. You have to take some of these results with a grain of salt.

Let’s look at some of the rest of these – for example, site map. They’re saying, “Okay. You’re lacking a site map.” I like that it’s clickable and tells you what to do, which is very helpful. I also like that it’s testing the amount of objects on a page (how many requests are happening).

You can see here they have tons of scripts. We talked about that on the last video on WordPress optimization, how to get those scripts down and combined CSS to one file instead of 10 or 20. That’s what’s slowing down their server. Also, it looks at the mobile snapshots, very comprehensive.

3. Seoptimer

Seoptimer – and I think that stands for Search Engine ‘Optimer’ (if I’m butchering it, feel free to correct me in the comments). I’ve run the same site, Blues City Deli.

I really like this visual chart, which shows the page speed info, server response, scripts, and total page size. The visualization is nice, showing you the danger zone, a warning, what they consider good and where you land.

I’m seeing a pattern with all of these tools – they’re noticing that while Blues City Deli maybe has some of the optimization on page down, and they have some of the local stuff mostly down, their website is not very speedy, and that’s showing up in all of these.

Using multiple testers like this can be good, because it kind of reinforces the issues. You see they’re saying, “Hey, minify your JavaScript.” and we just saw they had like 25 JavaScript files. They need to minify them and combine them.

4. WooRank

This brings us to the last tool – WooRank. I have WooRank installed as a Chrome plug-in, which is an awesome feature because you can take it around the web with you and click at any time.

As you can see, they’re all picking up very similar things – the meta description is an issue. If we click on the mobile icon, we can see the mobile rendering looks. We can look again – look at where these errors are coming up over, and over, and over. It’s load time, page speed, things like that. These tools are all picking up on that.

Conclusion

These are the four tools that are great for a quick hit – “Hey, what’s going on with these sites?” before I might move on to a paid tool and do a deep site scan and really get into the technicalities. This enables me to do a very fast SEO analysis, and come away with a pretty good idea of the direction we need to go when we’re looking at auditing some of these technical issues.

Let me know down in the comments which of these tools you find the most useful, or connect with me on Twitter.