Article Note: This article “16 Best Free Website Analysis / Analytics Tools to Supercharge your SEO” was first published on 28th June 2012. We have last updated this article on 29th March 2021 with fresh information.
Criticism or feedback is important in every field, in relationships, in jobs, or in website performance, a response or feedback helps us to understand how can we improve and become better than before. This is what web analysis tools provide us with, an evaluation or assessment of how a website works and how it can be improved to give a seamless experience to its users.
In simple words, we can say that web analysis is the data behind a website, and web analytics tools are the tools that are designed to measure, track, analyze, collect, report, and review data. These tools also track user behavior, website traffic, and website conversation. The website analysis tools have the full report of data, and will help you understand who all are visiting your website, how long do they stay there, how many people buy products from your website, etc. these data matrices allow you to make some data-driven decisions, for the betterment of the customers and growth of the business.
The Importance of Website Analysis / Analytics Tools in SEO
Analyzing a website is handled by one sometimes to recognize areas of strong points and drawbacks of a website for development purposes. A website analysis is also the determination of magnitude and finding of data pertinent to a specific site for the purpose of evaluating its current status on the web.
Website analysis is additionally a comprehensive audit of a website – its layout, prominence, and utility. The purpose of the analysis is to identify areas of development for a website and provide precise directions on a way to perform the suggestions.
“It’s perfect for a company that hasn’t modified their website in an exceedingly long period of time but has some considerable traffic attending to it, or for a company that is within the marketplace for a restructure.” – as nicely elaborated by Navneet Kaushal, the CEO & Founder PageTraffic, in one of his recent interviews.
It’s invariably better to urge the analysis done before you go into a redesign of a website – in this manner the company that finally builds your new website can have a good plan from where to begin their work.
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Best Free Website Analysis / Analytics Tools for Great SEO Success
There is a variety of tools out there for website analysis and lots of them are free. Out of them, 16 best web analytics tools are embodied here. Some can analyze one specific feature of a page and others can provide a complete grade to the page as an entirety. The majority of them will help out with your SEO activities. These free website analytics tools will help you understand, what’s happening on your website and will also give you an insight, and will allow you to boost the experience and drive more engagement on your website. Experiment with a few of them that looks interesting and useful.
1. Google Analytics
The best free web analysis tool is Google Analytics. This giant search engine offers such features, for which competitors may charge. Its layout is quite straightforward and helps to give an insight into the audience and their integration with other products. This tool allows you to social networking sites, blogs, websites, etc. It can also provide you with a customizable report. It not only helps you to organize your data in a better way but also helps you to easily integrate with various other Google products.
Its standard version is best for the new users to web analysis tools, while its premium and upgraded versions have very advanced options like reporting of unsampled raw data, integration of salesforce, advanced funnel reporting, and many more.
Google Analytics is also one of the most effective free web log analysis tools available on the market. There are some reports that don’t seem to be available; however, the graphs and precise reports make it quite interesting. Some companies have the reservation in allowing a giant company like Google direct access to their website metrics, while other companies dislike requiring a bug placed on their web pages so as to track them.
Know more about Google Analytics
2. Hotjar
Hotjar is a web analysis tool that is easy to operate due to its spontaneous heat maps which provide you with a practical insight into all your data. This tool is free to use at a basic level providing features like replay sessions of the website visitors, device-based heat maps, the tool will help you understand the conversation funnel of the consumers and form an analysis of the parts that don’t perform well. The best thing about this tool is that it gets updated regularly with new features, providing the users a seamless experience in using this web analytics tool.
3. Open Web Analytics (OWA)
Another free tool for web analytics is open web analytics (OWA). This is open-source software where you can store a large amount of data without any limit. This has the same features as any other web analytics tool but has some other supplementary options. Open web analytics will provide you with information like traffics, referrals, visitor locations, some data, and matrices, etc. Other than that, OWA also provides you three distinct features, such as heat maps; it’s like a tracker that shows where the visitor has clicked on your site, second is it allows you to record the mouse movements of the visitors, and see how they navigate your page, lastly it provides you with DOM, Document Object Model, which allows you to have code snippets of the links, images, and buttons where the visitor has clicked.
4. Bitly
Bitly is best known as a free link shortener, as it shortens the links and saves space. It gives you the efficiency to share those shortened links and analyze the performance. Bitly also offers the option to brand your URL as it gives better recognition, and branded URLs also increase readers’ engagement on the website. It has many other features too apart from shortening the links; you can measure your content through the analytics platform of Bitly and its optimized links make it easy to consume content regardless of which device you are using. This tool comes in both free and paid options depending on the type of experience you want to have with your web analysis tool.
5. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another free tool for web analysis, which reports to you about the traffic and performance of your website suggests ways to fix issues, and also helps you in making your website shine. This tool optimizes the content by analyzing the clicks and impressions on the website. It also notifies you about issues on the website and helps you in fixing them. This tool will enhance your site through monitor tests and will tell you its position on Google search.
Know more about Google Search Console
6. Matomo Analytics
This is an open-source web analytics tool, which provides you with an understandable report of how the visitors are accessing your website. This tool provides you 100% ownership of your data so that no external source can look into the working of your website. This tool provides you raw access to the data and also allows you to migrate the data between other hosting options. They have a built-in GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and PII (Personally Identifiable Information) so that you can learn how to respect user privacy in a better way.
Know more about Matomo Analytics
7. GTmetrix
GTmetrix powered by Lighthouse is a web analytics tool that has a suite of different options and features that optimizes your website making it easy and clear to use. This tool gives you a detailed assessment of your website with lighthouse metrics, web vitals, and various other analysis options. It analyzes your webpage for performance optimization and actionable insight. Its main job is to focus on the performance matrix of the visitor and measure their experience on your website. It tracks the performance of the website through monitoring, visually attractive graphs, setting alerts about various conditions, etc. This tool can also analyze your web page on mobile devices.
8. Bing Webmaster Tools
This free web analytics tool will give you an insight view of your website, and will help you in making necessary changes, and will also raise the stakes of your site. Bing Webmaster Tools will send you reports about the increasing traffic on your website, will update you about what people are searching for, and will also send you personalized messages and alerts for your website. This tool has various sub-tools like SEO tools, diagnostic tools, and reporting tools. The SEO feature will allow you to have the backlinks and report on keyword research. This tool will help you uncover various SEO issues, and will guide you on how to perform in a better way. This tool also provides tight security and privacy to your website.
Know more about Bing Webmaster Tools
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9. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a free all-in-one SEO tool formed by Neil Patel, co-founder of NP Digital. This tool offers you full access to historical data in form of visually attractive graphs. It will help you drive through the massive amount of website traffic, and will have access to more keywords. This tool will have a traffic analyzer that will overview the pages and keywords on your website. There is also an SEO analyzer that will provide you with a domain overview. This tool will also provide you with keyword suggestions, content ideas, and a backlink of data.
10. BuiltWith
BuiltWith is a free web analytics tool that leads to market analysis, sales intelligence, and generation. This tool helps in lead generation by accessing data on the website, determining the technology used in the website, predicting the future trends of the website, and through advanced filtering of lead lists.BuiltWith helps you in analyzing the market through its analysis and research tools, API access, data coverage, and CRM integrations. Another feature offered by this tool is sales intelligence, i.e., helps you in making compelling offers to the customers and having informed conversations with them.
11. Website Grader
It is one of the favorite tools on the list due to its various functionality and usability. You’ll have an extensive report split into varied sections with an analysis of the page and suggested changes. Whereas the grader is useful to make you understand where you stand, the suggestions are equally important because they help you pinpoint the areas for improvement, and lots of them are often pretty easy.
Know more about Website Grader
12. Domain SEO Analysis
Domain SEO Analysis is a unique tool from Moz and is one of the most popular tools liked by the SEO companies and is thus considered in this list as one of the best. This tool does perform many actions like analyzing a page, a blog, or a whole domain based on different norms. Domain SEO Analysis can turn out numbers primarily based on a range of elements and provide you with an overall grade. With these tools, you will be able to handle everyday SEO tasks more efficiently. You can evaluate keywords, analyze backlinks, do on-page scrutinization, monitor user-friendliness issues, and pursue rankings bundled with an easy-to-use management platform. While not being a member you are restricted to at least one report per day.
Know more about Domain SEO Analysis
13. AWStats
AWStats is also good free web analysis software. This log analyzer works as a CGI script on your server or from the command line. You run it and it assesses your web logs with different reports. You will be able to use it to evaluate FTP and mail logs also as weblog files. Some helpful options include the flexibility to transform reports to text, XML, and PDF, a report on 404 pages also the referrers for them, plus all the page view stats and typical visitors.
14. Full Page Test
Full Page Test from Pingdom can analyze a variety of aspects of the page, as well as load time, CSS, RSS, objects, redirects, and more. The salient features of this tool are many like examining all components of a web, performance overview, performance grade, and tips, trace performance history, checking from multiple locations, and much more.
Know more about Full Page Test
15. Visitors
It is a command-line free log analysis tool. Visitors can create both HTML and text reports by simply seriatim the tool over your log file. One fascinating feature is that the real-time transferring data you will be able to set up. It is a very fast web log analyzer for Windows, Linux, and different Unix-like operating systems. It takes as response a web server log file and outputs statistics in kind of diverse reports. The design standards are totally different compared to other tools of the same kind. When supported, Visitor tools add options to portal desktops that permit website visitors to switch the content and look of their pages, books, and desktops.
When a change is made through Visitor tools by a user, it’s being saved in the database and preserved each time the user logs in to the portal. This tool offers a small subset of options that are accessible within the Portal Administration Console, like changing, adding, and removing port-lets, the portal look & feel, pages and books, and other options. This Tools also offer a customize menu that portal visitors may use to gain access to their portal desktop accordingly.
16. Similar Page Checker
Similar Page Checker is an extremely great tool to search out similar pages out there over the web. Duplicate content in your website may damage your site so far as search engine optimization is concerned. Similar Page Checker helps you to make confirm you are not being penalized by search engines for identical content. This tool offers you to ascertain the proportion of resemblance between 2 pages. The right percentage of resemblance once with a search engine could penalize you is not yet established, it differs from one search engine to another. To search engine, Your objective should be to stay your page resemblance as minimum as possible, preferably unique.
Know more about Similar Page Checker
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Final Words
In any business, having an insight into the data and tracking the statistics to make some decisions, is one of the pivotal reasons for the growth or downfall of the business. Any business, no matter big or small should track its sales, stocks, orders, expenses spreadsheets, etc. If you are running an online business then you should use any of the above-suggested web analytics tools to track your data. This will help you make wise decisions about the business and your business will reach new heights.
If you want web analytics tools to function properly then do set some goals according to your business type. Then it will be easy for you to understand all the data and properly utilize the analysis tools. If you didn’t use any of these above-listed website analysis tools then your online business will be like an aimlessly flying bird. These tools help you achieve pre-determined business goals, monitor key performance indicators, and optimize business strategies.
Web Developer & SEO Specialist with 15+ years of experience in Open Source Web Development specialized in Joomla & WordPress development. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions".