Trying to wrap your head around search engine optimization (SEO) can be challenging at the best of times. Your main keyword might seem obvious enough — if you’re in the business of selling home insurance, you’d probably love nothing more than to rank first for “home insurance” on Google — but where do you go from there? What can you do better? What is your competition doing?

Before you spend hundreds of dollars on something that you barely understand how to use, you’ll want to know about a much more affordable option that’s perfect for keyword research, site audits and more. In fact, you can actually use it for free! In this Ubersuggest review, we’ll provide an overview of what you can do, how you can do it, and how this all comes together to improve your rankings in Google. 

Ubersuggest Review: First Impressions

The first thing that may surprise you about Ubersuggest is that you really can use it for free. While some other SEO tools may offer a very limited free trial (or even charge you to use the tool for a trial period!), Ubersuggest really does offer a completely free option. You can tinker around right away and, after a few searches, you’ll be prompted to sign in with your Google account.

You are under no obligation to spend any money. You can literally use the free account for as long as you wish, and you get way more for free with Ubersuggest than you would with any other tool. Indeed, you really have access to practically all of the functions. Unless you plan on running hundreds of reports a day, the free account will suit you just fine.

The other really big thing here is that Ubersuggest has been designed so that it is more readily accessible and understandable even by people who aren’t as experienced in search engine optimization. Rather than bombard you with overwhelming charts and data everywhere, the dashboard is focused, clear and uncluttered. You still get all the data you need, but it’s presented in a much more manageable manner. This is far more approachable.

Looking for Keywords

Naturally, one of the first features you’ll likely gravitate toward in an SEO tool is keyword research. In the case of Ubersuggest, you really should create a project so you can track and improve your rankings over time. This is also how you’ll be able to monitor your SEO health and get daily status updates. Putting that all aside for now, though, let’s look at the core keyword research tool.

When you plug an initial keyword search into the search bar (you can also define the language and country), you’ll get an initial keyword overview report like the one shown here. This gives you a bird’s eye view of the monthly search volume, estimated SEO difficulty (the higher the number, the more competitive it is in organic search), the paid difficulty, and the average cost per click (CPC) if you were to pay Google to be seen as an ad. You’re also shown a breakdown of mobile vs. desktop volume, as well as a breakdown by the searcher’s age and how many people click on the SEO results.

In an ideal world, you can unearth a keyword that has high volume and low competition, but of course everyone is looking for that too. With the keyword tool here, you can dive deeper to uncover potential opportunities.

You can easily see more keyword ideas based on your initial search, sorting by Google suggestions, related keywords, questions, prepositions and comparisons. For each of these, you can see the search volume trend over the past 12 months, plus volume and difficulty. If you create that project, as mentioned above, you can then track up to 20 keywords for free from any country or city.

The user-friendly interface makes it easy to sift through these keyword ideas at your own pace. What’s more, you’re also presented with a number of content ideas based on content that has already been published online. Get ideas for new blog posts that have done well for other publications, particularly in terms of social shares, but also with visits and backlinks. 

Conducting a Site Audit

Searching for possible keywords to pursue is, of course, only one part of any successful SEO campaign. You also need to make sure that your website as a whole is up to snuff. That’s where the Site Audit function of Ubersuggest comes into play.

This SEO analysis lets you conduct an in-depth site audit, crawling up to 150 pages across your site for free. You get a broad overview of your site, like your on-page SEO score, the number of organic keywords you rank for, and your estimated total number of backlinks from other websites. This gives you a general sense of your site’s SEO health. 

More important, though, are the specifics that you get with this health check. Of the up to 150 pages that the tool crawls, it’ll tell you how many pages have issues, what those errors and warnings are, and how you can suitably address them. These are specific action items you can take to improve the SEO health of your website. 

Researching the Competition

You’ve looked for keywords to go after and you’ve started tracking them. You’ve conducted a site audit to reveal specific actions you can take to improve the SEO health of your website. What’s next? Use Ubersuggest to review the competition and look for even more opportunities!

Simply enter the domain of any competitor. You can see useful, relevant information like the number of organic keywords they’re ranking for and the number of backlinks (including what proportion are nofollow) they have. There’s also a handy graph that shows the organic monthly traffic for the past year.

Scroll a little further down the page, though, and that’s where you’ll find the real meat of the report. It’s here that you’ll see the top pages on your competitor’s website, including information on estimated visits, backlinks and social shares. These are the pages that drive organic traffic to that domain, so you’ll want to inspect them to see what they’re doing right.

Also in this competition report, you’ll see a list of the SEO keywords they’re ranking for, plus who is linking to your competition. With the keywords, you can see how you might try to beat them and, with the backlinks, you can see what sites you might want to contact to get a backlink of your own. Put all of this together and you can put together a comprehensive SEO plan to boost your rankings and beat the competition. 

Use Ubersuggest for Free

Everything, literally everything mentioned in this Ubersuggest review, you can do for free. From the keyword research to the competitor analysis, you’re getting some really powerful data that can lead to very specific action items. What’s more, Ubersuggest also offers a free Chrome extension, making it even easier for you to find more keywords on Google, Amazon and YouTube. Each search in Google reveals key SEO metrics, like search volume and CPC. And you get keyword suggestions too.

Really, the best way to appreciate what Ubersuggest can do for your SEO efforts is to use it yourself. For free. There are paid plans, but these are geared more toward larger companies who want to run SEO campaigns at scale. Unless you plan on generating hundreds of reports a day, the free account will do just fine.