48 Best Free Tools for SEO

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If you have just started with search engine optimization (SEO), you might be searching for tools to help you achieve good results. You might want to look into free tools first, especially if you’re tight on budget.

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If you have just started with search engine optimization (SEO), you might be searching for tools to help you achieve good results. You might want to look into free tools first, especially if you’re tight on budget or you’re still exploring what works for you.

We get you. While premium tools are quite valuable, the best free SEO tools are often enough to help you kick off your strategies.

Can we do SEO for free?

Of course! Premium SEO tools allow you to do a lot of things in one place, but you don’t always have to pay to ensure that your efforts will yield results.

There are tons of software and platforms that you can use to do keyword research, create content, build links, and analyze your data. 

Free SEO tools are awesome because you save money while improving your website’s traffic, rank, sales, and brand reputation. 

Are SEO tools worth it?

SEO tools can benefit you in many ways, particularly by streamlining your process and analyzing your results.

Free tools are worth your time, and some paid SEO tools are also worth your money, as long as you find the ones suitable to your needs.

Do you need SEO tools? Definitely! They can do things you can’t simply do manually, and they make your tasks a lot more efficient and effective.

But hold up! You need to do your research first because many of the free tools are junk and won’t give you accurate results.

What are the best free SEO tools to try?

As mentioned, there’s a wide range of SEO tools out there, and it can be overwhelming to choose.

So, we’ve rounded them up here so you don’t have to search them one by one to find the best free SEO tool for you. We’ll give you insights into what they can do for you and how they work. 

Let’s dive in!

Best free tools for SEO

Google Analytics

If you’re serious about SEO, Google Analytics must be in your toolkit. It’s a free tool that gives you valuable data about your website, such as site traffic, traffic sources, time on page, and audience demographics.

Google Analytics data can help you tell whether your SEO strategies are working or not, so you can tweak your strategies.

You can change your content strategy and focus on specific platforms that drive search traffic and particular demographics that use your content.

Ahrefs Keyword Generator

Keyword research is a critical step in creating content for SEO. Ahrefs Keyword Generator is a handy free tool you can use to discover keyword ideas.

We find it particularly useful to find keywords that would be easy to rank based on Ahrefs’ keyword density score and volume. 

Ahrefs Backlink Checker 

Your backlink profile can tell you whether your SEO strategies are working. The more backlinks you get, the higher you can rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Ahrefs Backlink Checker shows you your site’s domain rating, how many backlinks you have, how many linking websites there are, plus what percentage of them are dofollow.

Dofollow links allow a search engine to point back to your website, which helps strengthen your domain authority.

Ahrefs Backlink Checker also gives you the list of referring pages, the anchor text used, and the target URL. 

Google Trends

Google Trends is one of the most underutilized tools, but it’s a great one that you can use to get insight into trends around a certain topic you want to cover. 

You can use it to find keywords in a specific country and see the top queries about them, interest over time, and geographical locations.

In other words, you’ll get an idea about what people are searching for on Google and develop your content strategy around that.

You can leverage the emerging trends before the keywords become too competitive. When they become a hit, you’ve already positioned yourself at the top.

Help A Reporter (HARO)

HARO is a link-building platform, which is important if you want to increase your backlink profile and rank on search engines.

Backlinks are important for SEO because they serve as a vote of confidence. A search engine will view your website favorably because the links vouch for the content that you have.

How does HARO work? HARO connects journalists and expert sources.

Journalists seek insights from experts that they can use in their reports, while expert sources hope to get valuable earned media coverage for their brands. It’s a win-win deal.

Journalists send their queries on HARO, and you, as the expert, can provide your insights based on your professional experience, title, job, and industry.

When journalists use your insights, they will give credit to you and usually add a link to your site. This is a great opportunity for you to build your brand awareness and credibility too. 

Answer the Public

Answer the Public is another great place to get keyword ideas.

While most keyword research tools would get their keyword data from the Google Keyword Planner, Answer the Public finds them on social media, blogs, and forums.

Answer the Public turns people’s questions into keywords that you can use to create content that will be useful to people.

Remember, Google ranks useful content higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a software rich with SEO features. You can use it to track your site’s ranking on SERPs, know which of your pages aren’t getting indexed on Google and why, which keywords your site ranks for, and more.

There’s a technical aspect to SEO, so it’s also important to know the issues that can affect your site’s ranking. 

best free tools for seo

WooRank’s SEO & Website Analysis Tool

WooRank is a known SEO analysis tool that allows you to keep tabs on your marketing data and create reports about them.

You can also monitor a competitor’s SEO performance, such as which keywords they are targeting and which ones are ranking.

Knowing how your competitors are doing can aid you in creating strategies to get ahead of them.

In addition, you can use Woorrank’s SEO and website analysis tool to spot duplicate content, security issues, and downtime. It provides guidance on how to navigate through the issues and solve them.

Keyword Hero

Sometimes, you might find it hard to match keywords with your site’s on-site metrics and conversion.

Keyword Hero can help you identify missing keyword data for better analysis. 

It gathers data from nine different sources and using cloud-based AI and machine learning algorithms, it statistically matches search phrases to your sessions.

It may sound a bit complicated, but Keyword Hero uploads the data back to Google Analytics, so you’ll be working on a familiar platform while analyzing your new data set.

It’s free for up to 2,000 sessions per month.

MozCast

Google updates its search algorithm hundreds of times a year.

While you won’t notice most of them until a big update rolls out, some of the minor updates can change the way we write content or manages our sites.

MozCast tracks these updates to Google’s search algorithm to help you stay updated on the latest developments.

These include SERP features, such as Featured Snippets, Top Stories, Related Questions, Ads, and HTTPS Results.

Animalz Revive

Over time, you might lose traffic due to content decay. By then, you have to update your content, expand them, or optimize them, so it can start getting more traffic again.

Animalz Revive helps you identify the contents that need refreshment. It shows traffic data, including how much traffic you’ve lost since the content’s peak. 

Animalz Revive analyzes data through your Google Analytics account and emails you the results. 

CanIRank

SEO campaigns may take months before you see results. What if you can predict whether an effort will pay off?

You can use CanIRank to know the probability of ranking for a search term. We think that’s cool.

It provides competitive analysis data and, with the help of its AI, gives you better keyword suggestions to target and what you can do to improve your SEO metrics.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

As of writing, mobile internet traffic accounts for 59.72% of global online traffic.

So, your site must be mobile-friendly. It means that any user will find it easy to navigate your page on a mobile device 

You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see whether your site is optimized for mobile devices.

Its “Page loading info” can help you improve the code on your site, so its pages will be indexed, and you can improve your SERP ranking.

Seed Keywords

Are you using the correct keywords that real people type on search engines?

Seed Keywords is a free tool that helps you find valuable keywords by creating a search scenario and then asking your friends to type in the phrases they would use to address it.

When you get the right keywords that people actually use when they search for a topic on Google, you can create more useful content that ranks higher on SERPs.

Exploding Topics

What many people don’t capitalize on in search engine optimization are emerging topics that are about to get popularly searched.

Exploding Topics, which works similarly to Google Trends, helps you find popular keywords that you can take advantage of before they get competitive.

You can create content around these relevant keywords to your niche or industry. Exploding Topics can also be useful when you’re updating old content to refresh them and keep them relevant.

SEObility

 You can do a deep site analysis using a free SEO tool—SEObility. It provides some SEO analysis data that you can usually find in paid SEO tools.

 These include website crawling, a rank tracker tool, and a backlink checker. It can also flag issues like slow-loading pages, sitemap issues, blocked pages, and technical SEO problems.

 One of SEObility’s best features is its content report, which shows you issues you need to address to improve SEO.

 For example, your content might have low value, you’re missing some meta titles, you have duplicate content on your site, or your content has keyword stuffing.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest offers a free version that you can use to analyze your site’s traffic.

It shows how many keywords your site ranks for in organic search, what’s your organic monthly traffic, your domain authority, and how many backlinks your site has.

 Ubersuggest also has a free keyword research tool, which you can use to find all related keywords from the search terms that people actually use on Google.

It allows you to see which keywords would be easy to rank for and whether they’re worth targeting.

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BROWSEO

If your site isn’t ranking on Google, there might be some underlying issues in the structure. BROWSEO can help you identify that.

This tool shows you a preview of your site as it appears on SERP. This way, you’ll see whether your content is displaying correctly.

Is your title not cut awkwardly? Do you have optimized meta descriptions?

Then, you can make the changes as needed to improve their performance.

Detailed.com

Want to know who’s making it big in your industry SEO-wise?

You can use Detailed.com to get a list of your biggest competitors in the industry and who’s talking about them. Detailed.com shows you who recently linked to your competition.

This competitor analysis can help you gauge what’s working for the industry leaders, which you might apply to your own SEO strategy.

Detailed.com also has a backlink analysis that shows you which sites are giving quality links. It also has data about Twitter influencers, which can help you find people to connect with.

SERPerator

If you’re working on your local SEO or you’re targeting a specific location, SERPerator is an amazing tool that you can use to check SERPs based on locations.

The results page on search engines may change depending on the user’s location, as well as the device they use.

So, to gauge whether your SEO strategies are working, you might want to check the SERPs across different locations using SERPerator. You can use it as a guide to tweaking your SEO strategies.

Screaming Frog

When you’re doing SEO, site audits are a normal part of the process. Screaming Frog is a popular tool for that, and people swear by how fast it gives you insights about your site.

Screaming Frog helps you identify duplicate content, bad redirections, and what to improve for link building.

Its SEO Spider Tool crawls websites efficiently, no matter how small or big they are, and gives you real-time results.

With SEO Spider, you can find broken links, analyze page titles and meta details, generate an XML sitemap, and integrate with Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights APIs.

Reddit Keyword Research Tool

Reddit is a popular forum site where discussions on various topics happen.

It’s also a great place to find resources and information, and yes, keyword ideas for your SEO content.

Reddit Keyword Research Tool provides you with keywords that you won’t usually find with other tools.

It scrapes Reddit words and phrases from subreddits and provides information about their monthly search volume.

This keyword tool also has the option to view the context of the keywords, linking you to the actual Reddit thread where the words were found. This way, you’ll understand better how the keyword was used. 

Yoast WordPress Plugin

If your site is WordPress-based, Yoast is a plugin you must have. It’s a 100% free SEO tool with many features designed to help you make the most of your website.

Yoast guides you on writing SEO-friendly content using the focus keyword you’ve identified.

It also gives information about the readability of your content, which is important in ensuring that people and search engines can understand your content.

We also like the Google snippet preview, which allows you to see what it will look like when it appears on Google’s search results.

This way, you can optimize your title and meta description and make sure that you have the keywords there.

Yoast also updates your sitemap automatically, which is amazing, especially if you’re not adept in technical SEO.

Sitemaps are important because they help search engines find, crawl, and index your site and all its pages.

Yoast has a premium plan, which unlocks more features and functionality.

These include internal linking blocks, social previews, and automatic internal linking suggestions, among others.

People Also Ask

People Also Ask is a tool that pulls results from the “People Also Ask” section of Google’s SERP. PAA shows you questions that other users have related to your search query.

This is a nifty tool that you can use for content ideas. You can write articles that answer people’s questions.

Again, when you publish useful content, Google and other search engines are likely to reward you with a higher SERP ranking.

SEOlyzer

SEOlyzer is another log analysis tool for SEO, providing you with real-time reports about the SEO health of your site. 

It monitors SEO KPIs, such as crawl volume, HTTP status codes, active pages, new pages, SEO visits, performance per page, and average performance.

Redirect Path

Redirects, when done incorrectly, can ruin your SEO efforts. Redirect Path is a Google Chrome extension that flags 301, 302, 404, and 500 HTTP status codes, as well as meta and JavaScript redirects.

When you uncover these issues immediately, you can improve your site’s performance. 

Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz’s Keyword Explorer is a keyword research tool that can give you 500 million keyword suggestions.

It provides details such as search volume, keyword difficulty, and expected organic click-through rate scores.

You can also conduct a competitive keyword analysis, which allows you to discover your competitors’ most important keywords.

You just have to enter your site’s URL to know the keywords you best rank for or enter a keyword and discover which keywords are best to target.

You’ll have to create a free account and verify it. Then you can get your comprehensive keyword analysis. 

Moz Competitive Research

Moz’s Competitive Research is a new free SEO tool that you can use to gain intel on the top SERP competition.

You can use the tool to analyze and spot keyword gaps based on your competitors’ top keywords and identify content opportunities based on the pieces they’re ranking for certain keywords.

This SEO competitive analysis tool also gives you site overview SEO metrics, such as your page’s overall health, domain authority, and ranking keywords.

Google’s Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is designed for ads, but it’s also an excellent tool for keyword searches.

By having an idea about how keywords perform in ads, you can choose keywords that you can use for your SEO content.

Keyword Planner’s keyword research tool allows you to know how often specific keywords are searched over time. That will help you narrow down keywords that you can use for your campaigns.

Keyword Surfer

Keyword Surfer is a Chrome extension that helps you find keyword opportunities.

It gives you keyword search volume directly in your Google search results. Surfer provides the data for this extension.

You can gain insights into their search volume, CPC, and visibility metrics, among others. 

You can create and save the keyword collections that you can export as a CSV file to your computer for easy access.

Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a must tool if you’re focusing on local SEO and you have a brick-and-mortar store.

You need to claim your business listing so that you’ll appear on Google Maps, the Knowledge Panel, and the Local Pack when people search for related terms.

Ensure that you provide accurate and updated details in your Google Business Profile, such as your address and contact number, and operating hours.

Adding some photos can also support the legitimacy of your business profile.

Optimize your profile even more by updating Q&As and your offers. You must also respond to reviews. 

Local Search Results Checker

Another handy free tool for local SEO is BrightLocal’s Local Search Results Checker.

It shows you Google SERPs for any keyword, so you can choose the best topics that will help you rank locally.

You can search per country, city or ZIP code, and language on Google and Google Maps.

SEMrush

SEMrush is one of the favorite free SEO tools among marketers. It’s quite easy to use when doing keyword research, giving your data about which keywords your site or competitor’s page is ranking for.

Keyword information includes their position in SERPs, traffic trends over the past year, and URLs that they drive traffic for.

It also has a Domain Vs. Domain analysis that you can use to compare your website to your competitors and craft better content pieces to outrank them.

SEMrush also has a free SEO audit tool that you can use to audit up to 100 pages per month.

Site audits show your Site Health and can help you optimize areas that need improvements.

It provides you with the top issues your site has and even allows you to learn more about specific errors and how to fix them.

Small SEO Tools 

Small SEO Tools is a suite of tools that you can use for various aspects of your SEO strategies.

It has tools for text analysis, image editing, keyword research and analysis, backlink tools, website management, website rank tracking, proxy, domains, meta tags, and development.

If you’re looking for SEO tools for a very specific task, such as paraphrasing or plagiarism check, you’ll find one here. It also has some tools that are quite hard to find, such as the proxy and JSON tools.

Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is one of the SEO tools you can use to manage tags on your website. The good thing is that you don’t have to edit any source code, whether you need to add, edit, or disable tags on your site.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an amazing SEO research tool and one of the favorites among marketers. You can use it to get content ideas based on high-performing content.

Just search for a particular topic, domain, URL, or brand and its Content Analyzer will show the top content pieces and their engagement on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. It also contains the number of links and evergreen score.

Based on such information, you can create content pieces that will help you get links and more shares, which are important if you want to rank high on SERPs.

You can also monitor your performance and connect with influencers who can help you promote your site, brand, or content pieces.

Hunter

Hunter.io is a platform you can use to find professional email addresses of people you want to connect with relevant to your business.

This is particularly helpful when you’re doing journalist outreach for link-building and SEO.

Building links for your website can be time-consuming, so SEO tools like Hunter can save you time and effort. Hunter has indexed over 100 million professional email addresses collected from public sources.

You can do up to 25 searches and 50 verifications a month with Hunter’s free version. You can upgrade to a paid plan if you need more.

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is another tool you can use to conduct competitor analysis. It’s a competitive research platform that allows you to view how a domain is performing.

You can view its traffic, top pages, engagement, and more. You can also gain insights into the marketing channels that they use.

SpeedMonitor.io

Is your website not loading fast? It might be just your internet connection, or there might be some technical issues in the backend.

SpeedMonitor.io can help you track your site’s loading speed and performance data every day. You’ll receive a notification via email or Slack when your page speed score drops.

Page speed can affect how your site will rank on SERPs. Our attention span is quite short these days, so when your site does not load within 8 seconds, your visitors will likely leave. That influences the bounce rate and session time on your site, which impacts your SEO.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is another one you can include in your list of free SEO tools, speaking of site speed.

It’s a global network that you can use to improve your website and app performance, particularly in speeding them up and optimizing your content.

Its features include a content delivery network (CDN), domain naming system (DNS), load balancing, DDoS protection, universal SSL certificate, and website & application acceleration.

Wordable

Wordable is a content marketing tool that can aid your team in working more efficiently. You can use Google Docs to write your content and publish it to WordPress in one click without compromising the formatting and HTML elements.

For SEO, Wordable guides you on optimizing your content for better ranking and conversion.

For instance, you can compress images and set their image attributes or alt text easily. It can also set the featured image automatically and auto-generate a Table of Contents from your headers.

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is an open-source automated tool you can use to improve the quality of your web pages and, ultimately, your SEO performance.

You can use it for auditing your site and assessing its performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO.

You can also analyze the performance of your mobile pages and progressive web apps (PWAs).

It’s a Google-recommended tool, so there are speculations that they have quite similar evaluation systems in their ranking algorithms. 

SpyFu

SpyFu is an amazing tool for keyword research and competitor analysis. It shows you the search volume for a particular keyword per month and the keyword difficulty or how likely you are to rank for it.

You can put in a competitor’s domain and gain insights into its SEO strategy, such as what keywords they’re ranking for organically and which ones they pay for.

Panguin Tool

Panguin Tool is a free SEO tool that you can use to monitor whether your site has been impacted by Google’s algorithm updates. 

Barracuda Digital, the company behind Panguin Tool, created an interactive timeline documenting Google’s algorithm update history.

So, when you see your traffic dipping, you can line it up with Google’s updates and see if it’s a possible culprit.

Then, you can dig deeper into the updates, and why you’ve been hit, so you can take action if necessary.

Check My Links

Check My Links is a Google Chrome extension that lets you know the status code for each link on your page.

It’s particularly helpful when checking for bad links, like broken links, so that you can fix them.

Sites with broken links are normal on websites. However, they can affect user experience, which could impact SEO through higher bounce rates and shorter session times.

MozBar

MozBar is a handy SEO tool that you can use to know how the website you’re visiting is performing.

It immediately pulls a report containing information, such as on-page elements (meta descriptions, metadata, H1s, etc.), page attributes, link data, and HTTP status codes.

You’ll learn about the page’s domain authority, page authority, spam score, and types of links (dofollow, nofollow, internal and external links).

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools is a must-have if you want to rank on Bing. It focuses on organic search and provides you with keyword reports.

You can use Bing Webmaster Tools for researching keywords, analyzing your backlink profile, and auditing your site for common technical SEO issues.

SEOWorkers Analysis Tool

SEOWorkers analysis tool allows you to generate a report about any website and view its SEO data.

You can use it to have an idea of your ranking potential, along with other background information.

The report includes meta tags analysis, HTTP headers check, keywords found in the anchor tags, and keywords relevancy, among others.

How to Choose the Best SEO Tools for Your Business

Admittedly, with lots of SEO tools to choose from, it can be overwhelming to decide which ones are worth your time and effort. You have to make sure that they’ll meet your business needs.

Here are a few things to consider when selecting SEO software: 

The basic functionality

What are the basic features that an SEO tool must have?

A decent software or platform must be able to audit your website, know your domain authority or rating, and track search engine rankings and relevant site data.

You also need a tool that can help you research keywords and analyze traffic behavior. On-page optimization is also important to ensure proper content and structure.

Competition analysis is another key feature to have. You should also be able to do backlink analysis and social media analysis. 

How much it costs

 Many free SEO tools can do the trick and help you boost your ranking. But if you want to unlock more tools and functionalities, going for a paid plan may be a good option.

However, you must consider the price. You can find cheaper options if all you need is basic functionalities. Meanwhile, SEO tools with comprehensive features can cost a lot, so you should be prepared. 

Wrapping Up

SEO may seem a little complicated when you’re just getting started, but with the help of tools, you can navigate your way around it much easier.

There are paid SEO tools that provide comprehensive features, but they cost quite a lot. But if you know where to look, the best free SEO tools can help you kick off your SEO campaigns effectively.

It may take a few trials and errors to see what tools work for you and meet your needs. You may also use a combination of them to cover your SEO requirements, like free keyword research tools and on-page SEO tools.

Ultimately, choosing the right SEO tool boils down to which one offers more features with fewer limitations so that you can do more with it.

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