The world of digital marketing and SEO in particular can be extremely confusing for many people. After all, digital marketing is a completely data-driven and analytical process and many people are just not good at analyzing numbers. This can make sifting through and molding this incoming data into a comprehensible SEO Strategy a fair challenge, even for those in the industry sometimes the volume of data can become too much for any one person to handle and make sense of themselves. Luckily these days there are plenty of free and incredibly useful SEO tools designed to make your life easier.

In a word, yes, there are plenty of free SEO tools available that can help add value to any SEO campaign, some are even used by industry professionals in order to provide this service to their clients! Many programs are made by up-and-coming programmers looking to make a name for themselves and expand their portfolios; just as well-established tech firms with solid experience and development power make many.

As SEO changes and different aspects of a site become more or less important to a search engine, so do the tools change and programs are constantly being refined and developed to give their users the best chance in this hyper-competitive digital environment.
However, in a bizarre twist of events, this in itself has become quite a thriving industry for budding program developers and the market has become somewhat saturated with free tools claiming to right all of the wrongs in your SEO strategy. Some programs essentially just try to mimic already popular programs, meaning that these tools are only comparable too, and often a lot worse than the tools they try to emulate. It is often better to use the original tool being emulated, as they will most likely be the most well-funded and well experienced in providing these programs to their customers.

Now Ahrefs is not a singular tool, it is actually a whole suite of tools designed to make auditing your site, link building, and tracking your rankings a breeze. Ahrefs has become something of a ubiquitous tool for many marketers as you can essentially run an entire campaign off the back of their intuitive and clever tools.

With this not only can every aspect of your campaign be quantified and evaluated, but your strategy can also be compared with those of your most direct competitors. Through this, you can actually build up a picture of exactly where your competitors have the edge and emulate that strategy

One of the best-known and most well-established SEO tool suites has to be Moz. Moz provides a host of different analytical tools and software that is purpose-built to increase your search engine visibility; the most highly praised of which being its Link Explorer. This can give you in-depth information on the quality and authority (as well as a whole host of other information) of both follow and no-follow links.

In addition, Moz has one of the widest ranges of individual tools, all performing highly specific analytical functions, which when used right, can give levels of accuracy in their reporting and a variety of information practically unseen by most of their competitors. However, Moz is not the most user-friendly of suites and is primarily designed with qualified digital marketing professionals in mind.

These tools are all designed with the sole purpose of providing those performing SEO with a higher level of accuracy in their reporting and ultimately, more control over the successes of their campaigns. However, even with this data many have absolutely no idea how they should implement it, for this reason, many make the decision to find a professional SEO agency to help them make heads or tails of their campaigns.