Many SEO experts have a pretty good idea how Google ranks a website or webpage, but only the Google people really fully know how the search engine evaluates a site and determines which sites to list for search queries. Notwithstanding that, there are still ways for you to check on the health of your page’s ranking with Google. Fortunately, many of them simply involve the use of the following free tools:
- Google Webmaster Tools – The best way for you to know what Google thinks of your site is to get it straight from the source. These are simple-to-use tools for understanding the basics of Google search. For instance, its “Fetch as Google” tool lets you see a particular page as Google sees it. If that particular page is performing poorly, the information this tool provides can help you address its issues so that you can improve its Google ranking. Another great tool in this arsenal is “PageSpeed Insights”, which measures the speed of your page in both desktop and mobile devices. Through this tool, you can work to increase the responsiveness of your site.
- SEO Report Card – You don’t need to pay money for this tool by UpCity, but it will get a bit of your contact information. That’s a fair exchange for the report it serves up, which includes:
- Rank analysis – It shows your site’s ranking on the three major search engines based on the keyword you indicated.
- Back links – It lists the different websites that link to your site.
- On-site analysis – It shows you how well or poorly you incorporated the keywords throughout your website.
- Website accessibility – This focuses on your site’s speed in terms of load time and accessibility to crawlers.
- Trust metrics – It inspects your site’s overall trust level and authority.
- Current indexing – It tells you the number of your site pages that have been indexed.
- Website Grader – This free tool from HubSpot generates personalised reports. By providing your URL and your email, you’ll immediately get a score (1-100) as well as a detailed report using the following key metrics:
- Performance – It evaluates the size, requests, speed, and more of your site’s pages.
- Responsiveness – It looks into your site’s mobile readiness.
- SEO – It determines the visibility of your site both to humans and bots.
- Security – It looks for details, like an SSL certificate, which serve to clue your visitors in on the authenticity and safety of your site in terms of contact information submission.
There are many other tools, free and otherwise, for checking your site’s Google ranking, but you can have a solid start with these three.
Are there any other platforms or online tools you used, you’d recommend? We’d love to hear from you – either add your comments in Discus below, or Tweet us @DigiEnable
We also offer a useful Website check, where we can give you the important info of where your website is current at, how popular your backlinks are, and tips and tricks on how to improve your SEO on-site. For more info check out our Website Check page.
