SEO is an essential part of any digital marketing strategy, but doing all of the research, optimization, and reporting work yourself can be time-consuming. Fortunately, there are plenty of SEO tools online that can help! Here are some of the best free SEO tools on the market.
Best SEO Research Tools
Competitive research, keyword research, topic research, and an accurate SERPs analysis are the first steps to creating optimized online content. These SEO research tools can help you rank higher in search against your competitors so you’re more likely to be found online.
WordStream Free Keyword Tool
- Type of Tool: Website
- Uses: Keyword Research
- Level of Expertise: Beginner
- Best For: On-Page SEO
The WordStream Keyword Tool is a free SEO tool that lets you see related keywords, monthly search volume, the high and low bids for ranking in SERPs, and level of keyword competitiveness. This keyword research tool also allows you to refine a keyword search by industry.
The WordStream Keyword tool is one of the best keyword research tools because of its simple, easy-to-navigate user interface and the ability to download your entire keyword list. The results are simple to understand and automatically sorted by monthly search volume in descending order.
Similar paid SEO tools: KWFinder, Wordtracker Scout
Seed Keywords
- Type of Tool: Website
- Uses: Keyword Research
- Level of Expertise: Beginner
- Best For: On-Page SEO
Seed Keywords provides a different way to perform keyword research and optimization by sending scenarios to your contacts and asking what search terms they would use to find a solution. An example of a scenario provided by Seed Keywords: “You fancy getting away for a few days. What would you search for?”
Creating a scenario generates a unique link that you can send to your contacts through social media, email, forums, and more. Seed Keywords will then generate a keyword list when people begin entering their answers.
Similar paid SEO tools: KWFinder, Wordtracker Scout
Ubersuggest
- Type of Tool: Browser Extension, Website
- Uses: Keyword Research, Competitive Research, SERPs Analysis, Link Building
- Level of Expertise: Intermediate
- Best For: On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO
Ubersuggest gives users the opportunity to search keywords and domains. Keyword search results will show you search volume, competition difficulty in rankings, cost per click, search volume over time, related keywords, and links to related articles. Domain search results show you the number of organic keywords a site ranks for, as well as organic monthly traffic, domain authority, backlinks, and where a site ranks for different keywords.
This free keyword research tool gives great insights, and the domain search provides a useful analysis of your competitors’ pages and rankings. However, for business owners and marketers in the beginning stages of SEO, some of the information provided may be difficult to understand without prior marketing knowledge or may not be relevant.
Similar paid SEO tools: KWFinder, Wordtracker Scout, Ubersuggest Individual, Business, or Enterprise
Answer the Public
- Type of Tool: Website
- Uses: Keyword Research, Topic Research
- Level of Expertise: Intermediate
- Best For: On-page SEO
Answer the Public is a great free SEO tool that will provide you with a variety of related search terms, along with how often the related items are searched. The search terms are structured in a wheel and color-coded by search volume, making the results graph easy to read.
Answer the Public recommends searching short, one-to-two word keywords for the best results. The resulting graph will fill in short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. The site has a good interface, but the amount of information can be overwhelming for beginner marketers, and some of the topic research elements Answer the Public provides won’t be useful until you have an established online presence.
Similar paid SEO tools: Answer the Public Individual, Pro, or Expert
Exploding Topics
- Type of Tool: Website
- Uses: Topic Research
- Level of Expertise: Advanced
- Best For: On-Page SEO
Exploding Topics is an excellent topic research tool for marketers with an established online presence looking for ways to expand their existing content. The site shows charts of growth for topic search volumes over time, and you can sort by recency, category, or do a more specific search of their topic database.
This website is one of the best free SEO tools because it makes finding popular topics that are relevant to your business easy. It has a simple user interface, but you will want to have an established, optimized online marketing presence before conducting new topic research for other content.
Similar paid SEO tools: Exploding Topics Pro
Best SEO Reporting Tools
Once your website, blog, or other digital marketing content is live, you’ll need some way of monitoring how your keyword optimization is performing. These SEO reporting tools can help crawl your website for errors and broken links, check the speed your site is operating at, give you analytics reports, and more.
Siteliner
- Type of Tool: Website
- Uses: Website Crawling
- Level of Expertise: Beginner
- Best For: Technical SEO
Siteliner is a simple website crawler that checks for duplicate content, compares your site with other scanned sites, and checks for broken links. You’ll be able to download the results of your scan and click on the available links for additional information.
With a simple user interface and easy-to-read summary of results, Siteliner is a perfect free SEO tool for marketers of any level. Based on your internal linking structure between different pages on your site, it’ll even tell you which pages are most prominent to search engines!
Similar paid SEO tools: Siteliner Premium
Panguin Tool
- Type of Tool: Website
- Uses: Analytics
- Level of Expertise: Beginner
- Best For: On-Page SEO, Technical SEO
Panguin Tool uses your Google Analytics data to tell you whether or not any recent Google algorithm updates have affected your content. This is one of the best free SEO tools for marketers or business owners who rely heavily on organic search in their marketing strategy.
Panguin Tool is very easy to use and only requires that you have an existing Google account that’s connected to Google Analytics, making it perfect for marketers of any level. If your business has a Google Business Profile set up, simply use the associated email.
Similar paid SEO tools: Market Brew AI, Sistrix
CanIRank
- Type of Tool: Website
- Uses: Website Crawling, SEO Analysis
- Level of Expertise: Beginner
- Best For: On-Page SEO, Technical SEO
CanIRank is a limited free SEO tool that reports on the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. It also has the ability to give you some content ideas and link opportunities, as well as a marketing audit.
While the free version of CanIRank has its limitations, it’s still a great way to check the effectiveness of your SEO strategy and get some extra suggestions for your digital marketing content. CanIRank also provides actionable content rather than data that you have to create insights from, so marketers just starting out will have useful information to help plan future marketing strategy.
Similar paid SEO tools: CanIRank DIY Individual, DIY Pro, and DIY Agency
Woorank
- Type of Tool: Browser Extension
- Uses: Website Crawling, Competitive Research
- Level of Expertise: Beginner
- Best For: On-Page SEO
The Woorank browser extension can crawl any website and give an SEO score, making it one of the best free SEO tools for analyzing your own website and your competitors’ websites. The extension will report on overall health, as well as the quality of individual elements like your title tag and backlinks.
Woorank is simple for anyone to use, and you’ll be able to install it off the Woorank website with a click of a button. Then it’s simply a matter of finding a website you want to analyze!
Similar paid SEO tools: Woorank Pro, Premium, Enterprise
GTmetrix
- Type of Tool: Website
- Uses: Website Crawling, Site Speed Test
- Level of Expertise: Beginner
- Best For: Technical SEO
Site speed is an important part of ranking in SERPs, and GTmetrix makes it easy to check your site’s speed and optimize it. This free SEO tool will test your website for different browsers, connection speeds, and even different countries.
GTmetrix can be used at any level, and while some of the information in the report is pretty complex, there are great explanations and resources that make it easy to understand. In addition to the Summary section, the Top Issues section is particularly useful and links to pages that tell you how to improve.
Similar paid SEO tools: GTmetrix Individual and Business
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Type of Tool: Website Crawler
- Uses: Website Crawling
- Level of Expertise: Beginner, Intermediate
- Best For: On-Page SEO, Technical SEO
One of the best free SEO tools with robust crawling capabilities is the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It does everything a simple website crawler can, such as identifying duplicate pages, broken links, and more. However, it also generates XML sitemaps, which list essential pages on a website and make sure Google is able to find and crawl all of them.
Screaming Frog’s complex information can be hard to understand for beginners, but it provides teaching materials for their software, with an extensive User Guide and Tutorials. The tutorials are even sorted by complexity, making it easy to accommodate the tool and its uses to different skill and knowledge levels.
Similar paid SEO tools: Screaming Frog SEO Spider Paid Version
Animalz Revive
- Type of Tool: Website
- Uses: Analytics
- Level of Expertise: Intermediate
- Best For: On-Page SEO
Animalz Revive is one of the best free SEO tools for fighting content decay and finding website content that’s ready for updating. This site takes your Google Analytics data and looks for posts that are trending negatively, meaning they need an update.
This is another tool that requires access to Google Analytics, so you must have an active account with an attached email to use it. Signing up is easy, and your results will be sent by email. However, since this tool has to analyze existing content, you’ll want to wait until your online presence is pretty well-established to use it.
Similar paid SEO tools: SEOtesting.com
BROWSEO
- Type of Tool: Website
- Uses: Raw HTML Viewer
- Level of Expertise: Advanced
- Best For: On-Page SEO, Technical SEO
BROWSEO is a powerful SEO tool that breaks down websites into raw HTML and lets you view page elements relevant to SEO without the distraction of “styles,” which are the pieces of code that add design elements to a page. You’re even able to highlight internal, external, or nofollow links.
While this is one of the best free SEO tools, it won’t be useful for all marketers and business owners. BROWSEO gives you insight into how search engines read your webpage, but the information given may be confusing if you don’t have much prior knowledge of HTML.
Similar paid SEO tools: Small SEO Tools
Best Multipurpose SEO Tools
Specialized SEO tools are great if you have specialized SEO needs, but it can be more convenient to access many tools from the same source. The following are the best free SEO tools that serve multiple purposes.
- Type of Tool: Website
- Uses: Keyword Research, Website Crawling, Analytics, SEO Analysis, Site Speed Test, Link Checking
- Level of Expertise: Beginner
- Best For: On-Page SEO, Technical SEO
Google has so many different free SEO tools that it’s difficult to create a comprehensive list. And considering Google leads the search engine market with an 85% share, using Google SEO tools is a great way to help you rank better in SERPs.
The only requirement for using Google SEO tools like Google Analytics is an active Google Business Profile business listing. However, Google Search Console and similar tools just require you to have an active website to check.
Ahrefs
- Type of Tool: Website
- Uses: Keyword Research, SERPs Analysis, Website Crawling
- Level of Expertise: Beginner
- Best For: On-Page SEO, Technical SEO
The suite of free Ahrefs SEO tools includes keyword generators and tools geared for multiple search engines, link building, website checking, SERPs checking, and more. You can also sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free as long as you can verify you own your website.
Ahrefs offers the ultimate all-in-one SEO toolset from a reputable source that makes your results easy to understand. The suite of free SEO tools also sets itself apart by working with multiple search engines.
Paid version: Ahrefs Lite, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise
Semrush
- Type of Tool: Website
- Uses: Competitive Research, Keyword Research, Link Building, Website Crawling
- Level of Expertise: Beginner
- Best For: On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, Technical SEO
Semrush offers a great SEO tool that allows you to do plenty of the basic things necessary for a good SEO strategy for free. This tool both helps with the research process and gives good analysis and insights for your active marketing strategy.
The Semrush SEO toolkit offers one of the best user interfaces for navigability. Every SEO tool and service they offer is sorted into Competitive Research, Keyword Research, Link Building, and On Page & Technical SEO categories. Each SEO tool is described on the main page, and you can access them easily from the navigation bar on the side of the page.
Paid version: Semrush Pro, Guru, and Business
Moz
- Type of Tool: Website, Browser Extension
- Uses: Keyword Research, Competitive Research, Link Building, SEO Analysis
- Level of Expertise: Beginner
- Best For: On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO
Moz is a fantastic source for free SEO tools. They’re easy to access on the Moz website by opening the “Free SEO Tools” drop down menu in the top navigation bar.
Moz free SEO tools are considered some of the best in the marketing industry. While you will need to create an account to use them, they’re great tools from a reputable source that are easy to use and give a good variety of information.
Paid version: Moz Local, Pro, and STAT
Bing Webmaster Tools
- Type of Tool: Website, Browser Extension
- Uses: Keyword Research, Website Crawling, SEO Analysis, Site Speed Test
- Level of Expertise: Beginner
- Best For: On-Page SEO, Technical SEO
Bing may not have as much of a search engine market share compared to Google, but it’s still the second largest search engine and steadily growing in daily use. Microsoft offers a free suite of Bing Webmaster Tools that help you optimize your website.
Bing Webmaster Tools’ optimization capabilities are Bing-specific, which is unique to most SEO tools that will cater only to Google or to multiple search engines. Since these SEO tools come straight from Microsoft, you can be sure you’re getting the most accurate information and the best insights for effective Bing SEO. All you need is a Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account, and verification that you own your website.
Yoast
- Type of Tool: WordPress Plugin
- Uses: Keyword Research, SEO Analysis, SERPs Analysis
- Level of Expertise: Beginner
- Best For: On-Page SEO, Technical SEO
The Yoast SEO Free plugin helps take care of all your website SEO needs as you create new pages, blogs, and more. The plugin integrates directly into your WordPress website builder and gives some insight into how your page metadata will perform.
The free Yoast SEO plugin is one of the only free SEO tools to come with a number of courses included, making it accessible for marketers of any skill level. They also offer free “SEO for beginners” training that’s great to use even if your website isn’t based in WordPress.
Paid version: Yoast SEO Premium plugin and Plugin subscription
Need help with SEO? Hurrdat Marketing offers SEO services and free website audits to help your digital marketing strategy. Contact us today to learn more!
