Search engine optimization (SEO) is more important today than ever before.
New trends (e.g., the rise of voice search, the machine learning revolution) mean that if you want to stay afloat today, you need to up your SEO game.
One way to do that is by using SEO tools.
What Are SEO Tools?
SEO tools provide data and alerts about the overall health and success of your website.
They help uncover areas of opportunity and identify weaknesses or issues that may prevent you from ranking and earning visibility in the SERPs.
Just as actual tools each have a specific role, the same is true in SEO.
There are SEO tools that can help you with:
- Analytics.
- Keyword Research.
- Links.
- Local SEO.
- Mobile SEO.
- On-page SEO.
- Research.
- Rank Checking.
- Site speed.
- WordPress SEO.
SEO tools are incredibly useful – but you need to understand how to use them to get the most out of them.
There are even a few toolsets that can help you in more than areas we just mentioned, giving you more of an all-at-once glance of your SEO performance.
Do You Need SEO Tools?
The short answer: yes.
Imagine trying to build a table using only your hands.
You wouldn’t get very far, would you?
No.
You will need tools – saws, a measuring tape, a drill, and screwdrivers, to name a few.
Well, if you want to build a website, you’ll only get so far with your hands.
You can build a website, but without tools, you wouldn’t know:
- How many visits your webpages are getting.
- Whether traffic has dropped significantly.
- If you have any HTML errors
- How many links you have.
- What keywords you could be using to attract more visits.
And so much more.
What Are the Best Free SEO Tools?
If you’re looking to get started with SEO or want to achieve better results for the low, low cost of $0, here are 109 of the best free SEO tools you should be using.
Free SEO Analytics Tools
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an invaluable resource that is virtually indispensable to any digital marketer serious about SEO.
It provides a lot of handy data about websites such as the number of site visits, traffic sources, and location demographics.
With the detailed information from Google Analytics, digital marketers can tweak their content strategy and figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Google Analytics is one of the best free SEO tools that every digital marketer should be using.
2. Data Studio
Google Data Studio lets you merge data from varying sources, such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and create sharable visualizations.
3. Keyword Hero
Missing keyword data?
Leave it to Keyword Hero, which uses advanced math and machine learning to fill in the blanks.
This service is free for upwards of 2,000 sessions per month.
4. Mozcast
Mozcast tracks changes big and small to Google’s search algorithm.
With Google making hundreds of changes on a yearly basis, keeping abreast of the latest developments helps you make sure you’re doing everything to have the best SERPs.
5. Panguin Tool
The Panguin Tool lines up your search traffic with known changes to the Google search algorithm.
If you see a drop that lines up with an update, then you’ve likely found the culprit and can get to work on fixing it!
Free Crawling & Indexing Tools
6. Redirect Path
The Redirect Path Chrome extension will flag 301, 302, 404, and 500 HTTP Status Codes.
Additionally, client-side redirects like meta and JavaScript redirects will also be flagged ensuring any redirect issue can be uncovered immediately.
HTTP Headers such as server types and caching headers as well as the server IP address can also be displayed with the click of a button.
Furthermore, all of these details can be copied to your clipboard for easy sharing or addition to a technical audit document.
7. Beam Us Up
This tool lets you know ways in which your website has fallen short of SEO best practices so that you can take corrective measures.
You can filter data by error type, and export you results to Excel, CSV, and Google Drive.
8. Link Redirect Trace
Use this Chrome plugin to make sure all your link redirects are directing people and crawlers where you when them to go.
9. Quick Click Website Audit
The Quick Click Website Audit is a bookmarklet style extension that links to many of today’s most used online SEO tools.
When a link is clicked, it extracts the current pages URL and feeds it into the selected tool so you don’t need to copy and paste the links into all the tools. It saves a few seconds, dozens of times a day.
10. Screaming Frog
Crawl your website for SEO errors.
Discover HTTP header errors, JavaScript rendering hiccups, excess HTML, crawl mistakes, duplicate content, and more with Screaming Frog.
11. Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer
Upload your log files to Screaming Frog’s Log File Analyzer confirm search engine bots, check which URLs have been crawled, and study search bot data.
12. SEOlyzer
Another SEO log analysis tool that provides data in real-time and page categorization.
13. Xenu
One of the original free SEO tools, Xenu is a crawler that provides basic site audits, looks for broken links, and the other usual suspects.
14. Where Goes?
Track where redirection URLs and shortened links with Where Goes?.
15. Check My Links
Check My Links is a nifty Chrome Extension that will crawl through your webpage and identify the status code for each link on the page – including broken links.
Each status code is color-coded with 200 status codes returning dark green, 300 status codes light green, and 400 status codes returning red.
Once identified, you can then copy all bad links to your clipboard with one click.
16. Robots.txt Generator
Create a correct robots.txt file in an instant so search engines know how to crawl your website. Advanced users can customize their files with Robots.txt Generator as well.
17. HEADMaster SEO
Checks URLs in bulk for status code, redirect status, response time, response headers, and HTTP header fields with HEADMaster SEO.
Get results in real-time, sort and study your findings, and export your work to CSV.
18. Keep-alive Validation SEO Tool
Check URLs in bulk or one by one to see if their servers support persistent connection, which makes your website load faster, what version of HTTP your server is on, and whether there are any external connections on your URL with this tool.
19. Hreflang Tag Generator
Generate hreflang tags so that Google knows which language particular pages on your website are in so that Google can search those pages in that language.
20. XML Sitemaps
Create a site map of up to 500 pages for free without registration.
Download your sitemap as an XML file or get it via email.
21. BROWSEO
BROWSEO lets you see how your website looks to a search engine.
It basically strips your webpage of any styling and shows you the underlying structure. This helps you figure out if Google’s bot has any difficulty accessing important content on your site.
A neat feature of this free SEO tool is the SERP preview. This shows a preview of how your site appears in search results.
You can see if your titles and meta descriptions are adequately optimized and make changes as needed.
22. SFAIK Screaming Frog Analyzer
A robust visualization of Screaming Frog crawl data using Google Data Studio.
Free Keyword Research Tools
23. Answer the Public
Answer the Public is a nifty tool that provides content marketers with valuable data about the questions people ask online.
Once you input a keyword, it fetches popular queries based on that keyword and generates a cool graphic with the questions and phrases people use when they search for that keyword.
This data gives content creators insight into the concerns and desires of potential customers and enables them to craft highly targeted content that addresses those needs.
Answer the Public also provides keyword suggestions using prepositions such as “versus,” “like,” and “with.”
It is an excellent research tool that can help you create better content that people will enjoy and be more likely to share.
24. Keyword Explorer
This keyword research tool will give you up to 1,000 keyword suggestions, a keyword difficulty score, click-through-rate date, and SERP analysis. You get to do 10 free searches per month.
25. Keyword Planner
Google’s Keyword Planner is designed for ad campaigns, but you can use it for keyword research by seeing how keywords perform in ads.
26. Keyword Shitter
Yup. You read that correctly.
Get keyword volume, cost per click, and competition data with this aptly named keyword tool.
27. Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere is a must-use keyword research tool due to the massive list of sites that it provides free search volume, CPC, and competition data for:
- Google Search
- Google Trends
- eBay
- Answer The Public
- Google Keyword Planner
- Bing
- Etsy
- Soovle
- Google Search Console
- YouTube
- Ubersuggest
- Majestic
- Google Analytics
- Amazon
- Keyword Shitter
- Moz Open Site Explorer
It’s available for Chrome and Firefox.
28. wordable.io
This tool lets you put your Google Docs into WordPress while retaining your formatting without excess code.
29. Also Asked
Find out what questions people are asking about particular keywords so that you can write content that answers those questions with Also Asked.
Conduct searches by country and in different languages.
30. Google Trends
See the interest in a particular term from as recently as an hour to as far back as 2004 with Google Trends.
Sort by categories, country, and type of search. See related topics, popularity by region, newest most frequently searched for terms, and compare to other terms.
31. Keyworddit
Another fantastic tool for finding keyword ideas is Keyworddit, a free tool that sources keywords from subreddits on Reddit and provides context – a list of threads where a particular keyword was used.
You type in a specific subreddit (e.g., /r/askreddit), and it’ll extract a handful of keywords, as well as the monthly search volume for those terms in the U.S.
Keyworddit is very easy to use and provides valuable insight into the interests of specific audiences.
32. Keyword Surfer
This Chrome extension shows you the search volume right in your Google search results. You can also see the word count and the number of keywords for top-ranking pages.
33. CanIRank
As the name implies, CanIRank helps you find out if you can rank on the first page of search engines for a particular keyword.
Unlike other tools that merely provide data about how competitive keywords are, CanIRank lets you know the probability that you’ll rank for a search term and uses AI to give you suggestions on how to better target keywords.
CanIRank provides great competitive analysis data and actionable steps to get your site ranking higher with better SEO.
34. Seed Keywords
Come up with a question or topic you want to research, send it to your contacts, and have them select the keywords they would search for to get the information you want with Seed Keywords.
35. Exploding Topics
Similar to Google Trends, Exploding Topics will help uncover topics that are about to become popularly searched before they become popularly searched!
36. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a simple keyword research tool that scrapes data from Google’s Keyword Planner for keyword ideas based on a keyword you provide.
The tool also returns handy data for each keyword including the search volume, CPC, and level of competition.
An excellent feature of Ubersuggest is its ability to filter out keywords that you’re not interested in from search results.
With the recently updated version – Ubersuggest 3.0, you can now input URLs and get domain metrics.
37. Keys4Up
Get the related keywords, also known as semantically linked keywords, for any search with Keys4Up.
38. Wordtracker Scout
Wordtracker Scout will help discover what keywords people search for when they’re ready to make a purchase.
39. KWFinder
With KWFinder, you can discover long-tail keywords –
those more specific less frequently used keywords that yield higher results because of how specific they are.
Free Link Tools
40. Disavow Tool
Use Google’s Disavow Tool to free yourself from toxic backlinks.
41. Link Explorer
See the backlink profile and domain authority of any URL with Link Explorer.
42. Link Miner
Discover if a given URL has any broken links and discover the metrics of those links, including both search and social data with the Link Miner extension.
43. Detailed
Find out which links, based on category, drive the most traffic and rankings with Detailed.
44. Backlink Checker
Use this Backlink Checker to discover all the backlinks data about a particular URL.
See the number of referring domains, the number of backlinks, the domain and URL rating, and its Ahrefs Rank, a domain’s position in Ahrefs’s list of most powerful sites.
45. The Anchor Text Suggestion Tool by Linkio
Discover the best anchor text to use for any URL with this Anchor Text Suggestion Tool.
46. SendPulse
SendPulse allows for the configuration of chains of emails, notifications, and SMS messages based on user action, variables, or events.
47. Magic PR
Get a press release informed by SEO best practices with Magic PR.
48. Scraper
This Chrome extension lets you scrape data from any URL and export the info into a spreadsheet.
49. Help a Reporter (HARO)
Help a Reporter is a resource that connects journalists and experts who act as sources for stories.
50. Streak
Convert your Gmail inbox into customer relationship management (CRM) software with this free extension.
Local SEO
51. Google My Business
Connect with customers across Google Search and Google Maps using a free Google My Business profile.
52. Whitespark Google Review Link Generator
Use this tool to find your Google Review listing and generate a shortened link to your page.
53. Local Search Results Checker
Conduct local searches using Google Search or Google Maps with Local Search Results Checker.
54. Moz Local Local Check Business Listing
Confirm that your company’s details appear correctly on various directories with Moz’s Local Business Checker.
55. Whitespark Local Citation Finder
Track your citations, discover new opportunities, and get the citations your competitors have with this Local Citation Finder.
56. Review Handout Generator
Print instructions on how to leave a Google review via desktop or mobile device for your business with Whitespark’s Review Handout Generator.
57. Review Checker
This Chrome extension lets you know if the product you’re about to buy comes from a reputable seller and, if not, provides an alternative.
58. Mobile SERP Test
See your local SERPS on various mobile devices with Mobile SERP Test from Mobile Moxie.
Mobile SEO
59. Mobile-First Index Checker
See how your website stacks up relative to SEO best practices depending on whether it’s your desktop or mobile version with Mobile-First Index Checker.
60. Mobile-Friendly Test
Test your website’s mobile-friendliness with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing tool.
61. GTMetrix
See how quickly your website loads with GTMetrix, discover what’s keeping it from loading as fast as possible, and see what steps to take to optimize load speed.
62. Cloudflare
A free content delivery network (CDN), which is a network of servers that gets your content to load faster by using a server closest to the person doing the loading.
Free Multi-Tools
63. Semrush
Semrush is an excellent keyword research SEO tool that, among other things, makes it easy to find out what keywords any page on the web is ranking for.
It provides detailed information about those keywords including their position in SERPs, the URLs to which they drive traffic, and the traffic trends over the past 12 months.
With this feature-packed tool, you can easily find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for and craft great content around those terms and phrases.
Semrush also offers more features and unlimited access with various paid plans.
While they’re not cheap, you can get started with a 14-day free trial, if you want to test out the premium features.
64. Chrome DevTools
Edit pages in real-time using tools that are built right into Google Chrome DevTools. Diagnosis problems as you encounter them.
65. Marketing Miner
Get a SERP data, ranking, tool reports, and competitive analysis all in the form of convenient reports with Marketing Miner.
66. MozBar
MozBar is a free SEO toolbar that works with the Chrome browser. It provides easy access to advanced metrics on webpages and SERPs.
With MozBar, you can easily access the Page and Domain Authority scores of any page or site.
The Page Analysis feature lets you explore elements on any page (e.g., markup, page title, general attributes, link metrics).
You can find keywords on the page you’re viewing, highlight and differentiate links, and compare the link metrics of different sites in SERPs.
If you need to do detailed SEO research on the go, MozBar is one of the best options to consider.
You can unlock even more advanced features such as Page Optimization and Keyword Difficulty with a MozPro subscription.
67. SEO Minion
Conduct on-page SEO analysis, check for broken links, get a SERP preview, and more with this Chrome extension.
68. SEOquake
See SEO metrics and conduct an SEO audit with this Chrome extension.
69. Sheets for Marketers
Learn how to automate tasks in Google Sheets and discover the best automation templates and tools via this curated list.
70. Sheet Consolidator
Create workbooks using CSV exports with a table of contents and enabled hyperlinks using this simple Excel Sheet Consolidator tool.
71. Google Search Console
Last but certainly not least, this list wouldn’t be complete without a mention of Google Search Console.
Aside from the fact, the data comes from Google, Google Search Console is rich with insights related to:
- Keyword and URL performance.
- Indexation issues.
- Mobile usability.
- Sitemap status.
- And much more!
72. Small SEO Tools
A suite of tools to make it easier to create content including a plagiarism checker, article rewriter, grammar check, word counter, spell checker, paraphrasing tool, and more.
73. Varvy
Check how closely a given URL is sticking to Google guidelines with Varvy.
74. Ahref’s SEO Toolbar
SEO metrics and SERP details from Ahrefs free Chrome or Firefox extension.
75. Bing Webmaster Tools
Featuring keyword reports, keyword research, crawling dates, and more.
Unlike Google Analytics, Bing Webmaster Tools only focuses on organic search. A must-have for anyone who wants to be ranked on Bing.
76. Woorank
Woorank is a handy website analyzer that provides useful insights that can help you improve your site’s SEO.
It generates an SEO score for your site and an actionable “Marketing Checklist,” which outlines steps you can take to fix any problems with your site’s SEO.
Another cool feature of this free tool is the social shareability pane. This section provides social network data such as the number of likes, shares, comments, backlinks, and bookmarks across popular social networks.
Woorank also has a great mobile section where you can find information on how your pages render on mobile devices and how quickly they load.
77. SEObility
A suite of SEO tools that includes a site auditor, a SERP tracker, a backlink tracker, and more with SEObility.
78. Lipperhey
Lipperhey will provide free analyses of your website, keyword tips, SEO analytics, and backlink checker.
79. Dareboost
This tool will provide you with an audit of your technical SEO, content, and website’s popularity.
You can also find out which keywords you should add to your pages.
80. Siteliner
Discover duplicate content, broken links, page authority, and get both an XML sitemap and a detailed report of key site information with Siteliner.
On-Page SEO
81. Counting Characters Google SERP Tool
While counting characters has been a long-standing approach to evaluating meta description and title tag length, the reality is Google doesn’t count the meta title and description in number of characters. It uses pixels instead.
The Counting Characters tool will provide both the character count and the pixel count to ensure you are creating meta tags that are not cut off by an ellipsis – represented by (…).
82. Natural Language API Demo
Use machine learning to determine the sentiment of text with the Natural Language API Demo.
Use this data to improve your product or site design.
83. Rich Results Test
The Rich Results Test will discover if your website can support rich results, which is when your Google result includes non-textual elements like images.
84. Structured Data Testing Tool
The Structured Data Testing Tool will help validate the structured data of any webpage using live data or by copying and pasting code.
85. Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager allows you to manage your website tags without editing any code!
86. View Rendered Source
See how your browser renders a page with this Chrome extension, including modifications made by JavaScript.
Differences between raw and rendered versions are shown line-by-line.
87. SERPSim
Find out what your SERP snippet will look like with SERPSim.
88. Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator
Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator tool will help create JSON-LD markups for articles, breadcrumbs, events, FAQ pages, and how-tos.
89. Animalz Revive
Find out which of your pages needs an update or an upgrade with Animalz Revive.
You can see the traffic for your pages, including the percentage of traffic your page lost since its peak.
90. Copyscape Free Comparison Tool
Copyscape’s Comparison Tool will help check to see the percentage of shared text between two different pages to weed out plagiarism.
Research
91. BuzzSumo
Find out which content does best for a particular keyword and who the influencers are for a given topic with the free features of BuzzSumo.
92. Hunter
Hunter will help find all the important email addresses associated with a given domain.
93. SimilarWeb
Conduct competitor analysis with SimilarWeb that shows you a given domain’s traffic, top pages, engagement, marketing channels, and more.
94. Wappalyzer
Wappalyzer will help you find out if a given website is using a CMS, CRM, ecommerce platform, advertising networks, marketing tools, or analytics.
95. Wayback Machine
See a website throughout time, including pages that are no longer on the web with the Wayback Machine.
96. Bulk Domain Availability Checker
The Bulk Domain Availability Checker will review domain registration en masse and register domains if need be.
97. SEO Explorer
SEO Explorer is a free tool for keyword and link research.
Free Rank Checking Tools
98. Ahref’s SERP Checker
See the domains that place in the top 10 for any given keyword in 171 countries, and get robust analytics from Ahref’s SERP Checker.
99. SERPROBOT
A dedicated SERP tracking tool with. the appropriately named SERPROBOT.
Set up automatic alerts, choose the frequency with which your SERP is checked, and get visual representations of changes.
100. Taptimize
Track SERPs for up to 10 keywords for free with Taptimize and get actionable SEO tips.
101. Bulk Google Rank Checker
See your website’s SERPs for various keywords en mass with the Bulk Google Rank Checker.
102. LSI Graph
Discover related keywords with LSI Graph. See their trends, traffic volume, CPC, competition, and remove low search volume results.
Free Site Speed Tools
103. Mobile-Friendly Test
Google’s search algorithm places a lot of emphasis on how mobile-friendly a site is.
To that end, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool is designed to help you determine if your site is correctly optimized for smartphones and tablets.
You just type in your site’s URL, and it will plainly inform you whether your website is mobile-friendly.
The tool also offers suggestions on how you can improve the mobile-friendliness of your site.
The Page Loading Info feature lets you know if Google can properly access all the resources on a particular page and what to do if it can’t.
104. Lighthouse
This is Google’s open-source site speed utility. Lighthouse provides audits of performance, accessibility, web apps, SEO, and more.
105. Page Speed Insights
Find out your website’s page loading speed and how to improve it with Google’s Page Speed Insights.
106. SpeedMonitor.io
Track your site’s loading speed daily with SpeedMonitor.io.
You can also track a competitor’s site speed and conduct on-demand audits.
107. WebpageTest
WebpageTest conducts site speed tests from different locations using different browsers.
WordPress SEO Tools
WordPress is a robust SEO-friendly CMS platform with numerous plugin options available to improve SEO.
While this post isn’t a WordPress-specific list of plugins, it is worth mentioning a handful of key plugins worth considering.
108. RankMath
A newer SEO suite for WordPress, RankMath has 15 modules and provides SEO guidance using 30 different types of improvements.
109. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most installed SEO suite for WordPress, with regular updates and new tools.
110. Ahrefs WordPress SEO Plugin
The Ahrefs WordPress SEO plugin will provide you with content audits, backlink checking, and tools to monitor and grow your organic traffic.
Here are additional lists of Google Analytics plugins, Twitter plugins, and plugins to improve site speed.
Hitting the SEO Highway Today & Beyond
Getting started with SEO has never been easier than it is today.
There are numerous free SEO tools such as the ones above that are available to SEO newbies and digital marketers on a tight budget.
These tools offer a lot of great features and when used properly, can produce remarkable results.
So find a tool that works for you and make the best of it.
More Resources:
Image Credits
All screenshots taken by author
