5 Free SEO Tools by Google for Site Audit

Did you know that Google offers free SEO tools for site audit which you can use to check your site’s technical SEO and improve site visibility in Google search engine rankings? SEO software are very essential now for site owners to identify site issues and fix them in a timely manner to maintain search engine rankings.

Free SEO Tools by Google

While there are several paid SEO tools like SEMrush available in the market, and many engage in group buy SEO tools, these free Google SEO tools are essential SEO software that should be used by every site owner and webmaster to improve their search engine rankings.

1. Google search console for webmasters

google search console

The Google Search Console is obviously the best tool which was previously known as Google webmaster tools.

This provides in depth analysis of your website as seen by the Google bots. It is the best tool to give insights into your search engine traffic ranking, keywords, top pages as well as provides useful insights into search engine penalties and unnatural links and poor core by vitals which might be slowing your website and affecting your search engine rankings.

2. Google pagespeed test for site speed

Google Pagespeed test is the official Google tool that will give you an idea of how Google assesses your site speed and what the core web vital issues you should fix to increase your site speed and improve search engine rankings as a result.

google pagespeed test

Ever since fast site speed became a Google ranking factor and Google published the core web vitals documents which enabled webmasters to understand how Google analyzes site speed using various factors like CLS, LCP etc, there are now several page speed testing tools out there that can also help you measure site speed with other useful features as well.

Also learn how to load CSS faster, how to load Google fonts faster and how to increase your site speed in general as well

3. Rich results test for superior SERP features

The rich results test will enable site owners to target the SERP rankings and push their site upward in search engine rankings by seeing whether their schema markup is suitable for featuring in the SERPs for specific results like carousels, images, or other non-textual elements.

google rich results test

As you are aware that Google search engine page results are no longer about a bunch of websites links alone, in fact, there are now a lot of SERP features in search results which basically means that you might get results about videos, images, recent Twitter updates, or YouTube videos and all these can push your search result downwards, which will reduce the clickthrough rate though you might be ranking very high in Google search results.

Have you ever checked your website structure using the Schema markup Validator? Ever since schema became an important mechanism to create websites structure such that Google bots and other search engine robots can better understand your website’s structure, it has become important to use WordPress themes or other stand-alone single-page site themes that have proper schema markup.

This is important so that your site structure is properly understood by search engine crawlers and they can rank your site not only for special features like features snippets, but also rich text snippets and many other SERP features.

4. Google robots.txt tester to custom block site indexing

Then Google Robots.txt tester is tightly embedded inside the Google Search Console and will check the robots.txt files of verified sites that you have added there.

Robots.txt is a very powerful file that guides Google bots as well as other search engine robots on which parts of your website you want to block from search crawlers and which parts of your website you want them to index very well.

robots txt tester

Most site owners do not bother to even check their robots.txt file and this is something that every webmaster must care about to guide the flow of search engine robots in the right direction and index content that actually matters while not wasting search engine crawler budget on useless web pages indexing which makes no use to your search engine rankings.

5 Google Disavow Tool

Google disavow tool is a powerful tool that can block backlinks coming to your website.  This is to be sparingly used with a lot of caution as it will guide Google to not consider backlinking domains to your site side, especially in cases where you are affected by negative SEO, or when you purchased backlinks from spammy domain and now have a very poor backlink profile with lots of toxic backlinks which has led to unnatural links Google penalty.

disavow file

It is notable that the Disavow File option is kept separate from the Google search console as it is a very powerful tool and if not used properly can lead to a rapid decrease in search engine rankings which might be difficult to recover. So if your traffic is low, do remember to check the disavow file status of your website, which can only be checked separately and you will never know about it, especially if you bought a new website.

There are a lot of services by freelancers to help you create disavow files by identifying bad backlinks by tools like SEMrush, which are causing high Moz spam scores. But is recommended to always seek the advice of an SEO expert before dumping all backlinks into the disavow file.

So do try out these free Google search SEO tools and see how they can make a difference to your search engine rankings and improve your SEO.

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About the Author: P Chandra is editor of QOT, one of India's earliest tech bloggers since 2004. A tech enthusiast with expertise in coding, WordPress, web tools, SEO and DIY hacks.