There are now some truly amazing free SEO tools that can get you very close to all the way toward ranking higher for targeted online searches.

Wait.

Is it really possible to fully optimize for Google’s algorithm without paying for expensive SEO tools?

I would say yes. Now it is. And that’s awesome.

How to Optimize Your Existing Website for Search Engines

Once you’ve done your initial pass at optimizing your website for your target keyword phrases, you should monitor and work to improve your rankings over time.

As I often tell our team and our clients, the work of SEO never really ends.

We all need to remain vigilant to continue to reap the rewards of targeted search traffic from customers and clients who are looking online for exactly what we offer.

Here’s the process I follow when I’m optimizing my own pet portrait company’s website for Google search. While I love using fancy paid SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush and Moz Pro, I can get pretty dang far using just the following free SEO tools:

• Ubersuggest
• The Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension
• Google Sheets
• Yoast SEO Plug-in
• The new Google Search Console Performance Report
• SimilarWeb
• ScreamingFrogSEOSpider
• GTMetrix
• hunter.io
• Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

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Most business owners would avoid setting up shop to sell things people don’t want, yet they regularly plop content and pages on their website with hardly a thought for what their customers want. Keyword research should be your roadmap; let the search data guide how you create your website, from your regular pages to your blog posts. It’s now possible to know the demand for what you offer before you even create it!
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Business owners often ask us what SEO entails. Despite the still-common belief, good SEO doesn’t consist of “manipulating” Google’s algorithm. To the contrary, ranking on the first page for your services is more a matter of following online marketing best practices and adhering to search engine guidelines and capitalizing on what we actually know about how Google works.

To rank well, you need:

1. Keyword Research to anticipate how people search for your services
2. Onsite Optimization built onto your website so Google and Bing start to associate those keywords with you
3. Speed and Mobility so your website loads fast and works well on mobile devices
4. Accurate business listing citations on the web’s top directories and data aggregators
5. Lots of great reviews on your Google My Business listing
6. Great, keyword-rich content posted regularly on your site
7. Links from other sites showing you are trusted, authoritative, and valuable

Easy, right? Well, not exactly, but it at least helps to know what we’re up against when we want to be in the “modern phonebook” on page 1 of Google and Bing. The following describes how we break this all down in our recommended 6-month SEO projects.

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