When you want the best SEO possible for your site, there are plenty of paid tools, but there are also some great SEO tools that are free. Some of the most helpful SEO tools are completely free and give you a wealth of insight into your SEO strategies.
Table of Contents
Google Analytics
This popular tool gives you site data that is highly in-depth and invaluable for SEO. It’s particularly useful for analyzing the traffic to your site over the long term. Even if you have some paid tools, it’s important to also use this free tool. The amount of data given about your site and its traffic has made this tool a standard for use in the marketing industry.
It delivers a wide range of important data points that can help you to change or just tweak your SEO as needed. It’s the most popular web analytics tool in the world for its robust data and the fact that it’s free. It works well with a number of other Google tools such as Search Console and Optimize. It can even tell you where your audience is, the demographics and which type of device they are using. It’s great for telling you where you’re doing well as where you could use some improvement.
Google Search Console
This tool allows you to see the same issues that Google will see when it assesses your site and indexes it. You can use it to find out how specific URLs are interpreted by Googlebot as well as submit a helpful sitemap of your site. You can use this tool to request for a URL to be indexed, and you can get data like impressions, clicks, keyword positions, etc. It’s the best place for when you need reliable information about how the search engine is crawling and ranking a site.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Google tools get a lot of attention, but Bing also has a full list of site and search analytic tools. It has helpful keyword research, keyword reports and even crawling data. You can use it to see just how people are interacting with your website. It’s much like Google Search Console but for Bing. It isn’t as advanced as Google Search Console, but it is effective for when you want to optimize for Bing and not just Google. It can be helpful to remember that a significant number of people use Bing instead of Google.
Yes, there is more than one search engine out there.
Bing Webmaster Tools has improved a lot over the past few years, and this tool is extremely helpful for keyword research among the SEO reporting tools. There are different ways to filter the results, such as looking for question keywords, that can help you get the results you’re looking for. If you want your site indexed in Bing, as well as ranked, you need this tool.
Screaming Frog
This free tool allows you to find technical SEO problems and to fix them, and it does it fast. It can take a lot of time and be highly annoying to try to find all of your technical SEO issues, and this can make it a whole lot easier. Screaming Frog uses a crawler that is much like the Google crawler to find potential problems on your site and gives you a report of them all.
The feature that allows you to find duplicate content is especially helpful for many sites. Google doesn’t like duplicate content to put it mildly, and your site can be penalized for having it.
This tool will quickly tell you which of your pages has duplicate content on it. Screaming Frog is a popular tool for desktop-based crawling of your site. The free version gives you as many as 500 URLs for each crawl. And, you can always upgrade to a paid version if you want more functionality.
CanIRank
It also has a feature that tells you how you can target better for a keyword. This gives you specific information about how you can rank for it. It’s an unusual SEO tool that can be extremely helpful when you are choosing your keywords.
FREE 30-Min SEO Strategy Session
Virtual Meeting with our Team
Answer the Public
A number of people search for “vs.” keywords, such as A vs. B. This SEO tool has a section that is all about those vs. keywords. Many people also like the tool because of the rebellious vibe that it has. If you are looking to generate a question list, this is a great tool to have in your arsenal. It uses the data from Google’s autocomplete to see what people are really asking about. The data is available as either a list or a mind map. It’s an easy tool to use and to conduct topic research in.
Seed Keywords
This tool works a bit differently. It knows that most people try the same keywords, so it uses a different approach. It doesn’t require that you come up with keywords. Instead, your customers are asked how they would search for your site. Then, you can take those keywords and put them into a keyword tool.
Once you have those results, you can have Seed Keywords do a search on Google for the keywords you were given. This allows you to have fresh keywords and to see just how competitive each of them is.
Google Business Profile
The first step is to claim your business and to optimize its Google Business Profile. Check all of the information and make sure things like the address and hours of operation are correct. You can also add photos to the listings as well as videos, and you can write responses to your reviews.
Taking charge of the listing will help your business to rank in local searches. This is especially key for small businesses. When you put in the time to optimize this listing, it can help you to be highly competitive in the area. Many businesses fill in the information and then forget about the listings. However, by adding new content to it over time, such as answering questions, your business can stand out from the crowd. It’s a must-have tool for any business that has a brick-and-mortar component.
Exploding Topics
Every week this tool adds in new, emerging topics that are just starting to get popular. One of its most useful features is the categories function. This lets you find out what is trending within your industry. If you choose an industry like food, you can find out which topics are emerging in that category.
Google Data Studio
This allows you to take data from other Google Tools and combine them to make interactive reports. It can use Google Search Console and Google Analytics to give you more information than by using those alone. Utilizing this tool is crucial for providing your clients with 24/7 access to their campaign results and can easily be rebranded for white label reports.
It’s a reporting tool that will show you both historical comparisons and real-time data. This can often reveal relationships that exist between your data sets and may not have been visible without this tool. It can make you blended charts that can help to save you both time and effort. When you want to merge data from different tools, this will allow you to visualize it as well as share it.
The best part about this tool is the way you can combine data from multiple sources and create white label reporting dashboards for yourself or your clients. We build a custom dashboard for every client we onboard to keep track of their campaign improvements in real-time.
Google's Mobile-Friendly Test
This tool can show you how your site’s code can be improved. With those improvements, the whole site can be better found by Google’s mobile crawler. This test is a must-have for all sites that are trying to rank better. If your site passes this test, Google is telling you that it considered your site to be mobile-friendly, and this is a certain ranking factor. If it says your site fails the test, it will tell you what you need to address to pass it. It’s user-friendly and reports on a wide range of mobile-usability problems.
Keyword Hero
If you are engaging in SEO, this is a must-have tool. It will show you organic keywords, and that includes the session metrics. It uses nine data sources and analyzes it all. It then uploads this helpful data into a new property of Google Analytics. It shows everything from rankings in the SERPs to helping you get a better organic ROI to the analysis of traffic and keywords.
Google Keyword Planner
It’s the most useful for those who are buying Google Ads, but you can use the keyword information anywhere. When you’re optimizing for Google, or you’re planning for Google Ads, it helps to get data that is directly from Google in order to make it all easier.
SEObility
It will tell you if you have pages that load slowly, pages that are blocked, issues with your technical SEO, problems with your sitemap and more. Usually, information like this is only available from paid tools, but it’s free with this one. Use it and you’ll get a content report that delivers to you a list of any pages that have problems with your content-related SEO as well.
Google Trends
One of the more useful features is that you can take a topic that is relevant to your business and track its popularity. This helps you to stay up to date on the most current trends. It also helps you to avoid wasting time and money on content that is about topics that are fading away from popularity.
Keyword Explorer
Keyword Explorer also includes a Keyword Difficulty Tool as well as having CTR data. A free account is available that allows you to conduct 10 searches per month. However, each of those queries will give you a full thousand keyword suggestions as well as delivering a SERP analysis.
Keywordtool.io
This tool also has an option for Keyword Tool API so that you can conduct your keyword research on a bigger scale. If you like the free account, you can upgrade to a paid account for even more functionality.
Reddit Keyword Research Tool
Just like the sites mentioned above, Reddit is an important site online. As one of the internet’s most popular sites, a lot of discussions take place there, and these can be clues to what people want to see online.
The content feature will actually take you to the specific thread where it is being discussed on Reddit. This allows you to see just how your keyword is being used among those in the discussion.
Ubersuggest
It has basic link metrics as well as showing you the top pages of competitors. This can help you in a number of ways to stay competitive and perhaps just beat that competition.
BROWSEO
It shows you all of that data in a way that is easy to see and understand. It also has a SERP preview feature that helps you see what your site will look like in the actual search results. This is extremely useful for finding out whether your title and your description are too long and/or are SEO friendly. It can help you to optimize both so that you can get more organic traffic to your site.
Detailed
With this tool, you can get info about your competition. It gives you a list that is highly curated that names the sites that are the most popular ones in your specific industry. This allows you to take a look at your most popular competitors to see how you measure up. The mentions feature also lets you see who linked to your competition’s sites as well as who has tweeted about it recently.
Local Search Results Checker
This is helpful if you are trying to target specific locations or you are doing local SEO. Need more traffic from certain areas? See how your rankings stack up there.
SAVE THIS PAGE
We are going to be coming back to this list and adding more as we continue to add more tools to our toolbox. As Always don’t be afraid to reach out if you have any SEO questions or want a FREE site review from one of our SEO Expert Team members – we’re happy to help!
