The 42 Best Free SEO Tools For Just About EVERY Purpose (2024)

You’re going to want to bookmark this page! That’s a fact.

In this incredible guide, we’re going to cover 42 tools every SEO ought to know.

Are you instead looking for tools that specifically help with competitor analysis? Check out our other post, 20 Awesome SEO Tools For Competitor Analysis.

Here’s a summary of some of the free best SEO tools available online.

 

Keyword Research

The stack of tools I use every day for keyword research consists of both free and paid tools. I’d say 80% of the ideas generated come from the free tools. I mostly use the paid tools for validating the ideas and comparing the various data around those terms.

There are so many good, free keyword research tools. It seems like a developer is creating a new one every day. Below are some of my top choices.

Let’s start with what free SEO tools Google offers! First, the search engine itself.

Google Auto-Suggest

This one is so simple & one of the best SEO tools to explore long-tail keywords. Simply enter your keywords into the search bar and you’ve got your suggestions.

The suggested keywords are predictions of what Google thinks you’ll write based on previous searches for this keyword.

Try to be really specific with your searches and play around with the terms. Plenty of great keywords to be found using this free tool alone. Some of the other free keyword research tools we’ll mention actually make use of auto-suggestions to generate keywords.

But more on that later…

Google Related Searches

Related Searches differ from Auto-Complete because the lated search doesn’t always include the full search term as entered into the search engine.

After searching for your keywords, scroll down the page and you’ll be presented with the related searches section. There are usually some great terms to investigate here.

Google People Also Ask

Another area to investigate is the “People also ask” section. This pops up in various places in the SERPs and gives you an idea of the questions users are asking. It’s particularly useful for your FAQs on your website.

Do note that if you click one of the results, new questions will display, leaving you with endless suggestions.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a great free SEO tool which has had a bit of stick. A while ago they restricted their data so only people with active Adwords campaigns could view accurate monthly search volumes (free users would see a range of estimated traffic).

The Keyword Planner is still a worthwhile tool for idea generation. You can find some tremendous long-tail terms by browsing the “10-100” monthly searches keywords.

FATRANK

Ever visit a page and need to know its rankings for a particular keyword?You can check the rankings of any page for any keyword with FATJOE’s very own free SEO tool, FATRANK.

Well, in less time than it takes you to Google the term yourself and try to spot out your listing, this tool lets you plug in a keyword and instantly see where you stand!

Let me tell you, it’s a real life saver when it comes to your page 2+ keywords. Without any hassle, you want to see if there’s been any movement for a particular term. It makes the whole process a lot quicker.

If your website is based in a country other than the US, not a problem! Just select your country from the dropdown before performing a search.

All keywords you search for are kept track of in the “Session Report”. After searching up a batch of terms, you’ll have no problem at all exporting them (and their rankings!) to a CSV spreadsheet.

Moz’s Keyword Research Tool

Moz offers a very generous free keyword research tool. After inputting a seed term, you’ll be presented with 1,000 different keyword ideas. They even let you export them as a CSV for free!

An added benefit is the “Explore by site” feature. This is something that you’d typically need a paid tool like Ahrefs to accomplish. Just enter the URL of your competitor’s website and it will spit out all of their top keywords.

Answer the Public

Answer the Public is ideal, not only for keyword research, but also for blog topic ideas. It works off of Google’s auto-suggested questions. When you feed it a keyword, it will give you groups of different questions, neatly organized into a graphic.

If you’re more of a just-give-me-the-data kind of person, all of these questions can be exported to a CSV file for further analysis.

Uber Suggest

UberSuggest is a very easy-to-use keyword research tool and free SEO report planner. Unlike the free Google Keyword Planner tool, it gives you more concrete search volume data, as opposed to a broad range.

It gives you both a paid and organic search difficulty metric. It’s a number on a scale from 1-100. In addition to that difficulty score it also estimates the number of backlinks one would require to rank for a particular term.

Another great feature is it actually lets you view the SERPs for each keyword.

It will display the first 99 search results as well as various metrics about them. Like the others above it’s completely free to download this data as a CSV spreadsheet!

Keyword Sheeter

Keyword Sheeter, formerly “Keyword Shitter”, can be explained in five words:

Google. Auto-suggest. On. Steroids.

That’s right. It saves you the legwork of having to manually experiment with auto-suggest to find new keywords.

Just input a seed term…and voila!

It will keep sending you new keywords until the cows come home.

Marketing Miner

Marketing Miner is a free bulk SEO tool designed for data-driven marketers.

By using Marketing Miner, you can get valuable data insights and analyze up to 100,000 keywords or URLs with just a single click, allowing you to enhance your SEO strategy.

Marketing Miner allows you to conduct a technical SEO audit and competitor analysis, monitor brand mentions and crucial keywords in your niche, uncover new link building opportunities to fortify your backlink profile, and craft a winning content marketing strategy.

Key Features You Will Love:

Keyword Research
SEO Audit
Rank Tracking
Competitor Analysis
Brand Monitoring
Link Building
Bulk Data Analysis
API

 

Page Speed & Performance

The first SEO task you do on a website is a good site audit. Here are some great free SEO tools to monitor the performance of your site and find improvements.

Google PageSpeed Insights

What else to start with than Google PageSpeed Insights! It’s a great tool that can be super brutal at times…

Who would’ve guessed a multi-billion dollar brand putting boatloads of cash into their website would have such a low score?

Anyway, as you can see, you have the opportunity to view your performance score on both mobile and desktop devices. You’ll always get a worse score on mobile, so try to work on that first!

Most of the changes it will suggest are quite technical. A few could be fixed by reducing images or a quick phone call with your web host. Others will require you to enable cache, modify how your static assets are delivered and more.

If you’re a WordPress user and aren’t very tech-savvy, always audit a potential WordPress theme using PageSpeed Insights before buying. This will help you avoid the extra cost of having to hire a developer to improve your score down the road.

Google Mobile-Friendly Test

In a similar vein as PageSpeed Insights, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test will give you a simple yes/no answer to whether or not your website is mobile-friendly.

In addition to that, it lets you dive deeper on mobile usability problems.

Your mobile site matters more than ever now since mobile-first indexing was implemented so you best get checking!

Pingdom

Sure, Google offers some great web performance tools. However, they focus most on best practices and efficiency rather than plain-and-simple load time. Pingdom lets you dial in more on the actual load time of your site.

You’re able to see the load time of your site, its file size, the assets that are holding your speed back the most, and you even get a nice Gantt chart to get a clear breakdown of how your page loads. Additionally, you can control over what country the test is performed from which is very nice

GTMetrix

GTMetrix is similar to Pingdom. I recommend using both tools and comparing results. What’s great about this one is it runs multiple tests – PageSpeed and YSlow.

Pro Tip: Create a free account. It gives you control over what server you test from. It also lets you see the waterfall breakdown of your load time.

On-Page SEO

Have no fret! There are plenty of free tools that make checking on-page SEO easier than sifting through HTML. Here are some of the best!

Google Chrome’s Lighthouse SEO Audit

Most people have never heard of this one! Well, it’s pretty hidden to be fair.

The SEO portion of the test is quite basic. It makes sure the site is mobile-friendly, checks that you have a canonical meta tag, and parts of HTML structure.

The other available audits are useful as well and actually still relate to the big picture of SEO. A major area that sites miss out on is accessibility (optimizing for screen readers and legibility). Their accessibility audit will break down exactly what you should implement.

Site Checker Pro

Site Checker Pro is an incredible free site auditing tool. Just punch in your domain name and you’ll be able to go through the many problems it picked out.

It starts off by crawling 20 of your pages. You could have it crawl more if you invest into a premium account, but this is a “free SEO tools” article after all!

It gives you all of the basic information you would need when beginning an audit. Information such as titles that are too short or long, descriptions that are too short or long, whether or not a page has an h1 tag, and more.

WooRank

Another useful free tool to try is WooRank. Right off the bat, you can tell that their SEO score is not as strict as Site Checker Pro. So, it did miss out on certain criteria that Site Checker Pro found. This is why it is important to use multiple site auditing tools.

On a positive note, I do find the information a little easier to consume with the way WooRank is laid out.

I did appreciate the technology report that WooRank provides. If your job is not only managing SEO but also being a webmaster, you could see the entire tech stack and see if any components could be swapped out for better performance.

SEO Site Checkup

The final tool I wanted to mention is SEO Site Checkup.

It presents information to you in a very clean layout. It’s neatly organized into six categories: Overview, General SEO, Speed, Server & Security, Mobile Usability, and Advanced SEO.

An area that really sets it apart is its security information.

• It will tell you if all versions of your URL (https, non-https, www, non-www) redirect to the same page
• It will let you know if your mail server SSL is properly configured
• It will ensure email addresses are not written on the pages in plain text (to prevent spammers from finding them!)
• It even checks your SPF records, not that that matters at all for SEO!

The cherry on top of this SEO tool is that it lets you email off this report (or download it as a PDF) for free. The report contains great information that documents why the changes should be made. It’s very developer-friendly as well.

Technical SEO

The next two free SEO tools have been grouped together. They pretty much have the same offering, but are specific to the search engine.

Here we go:

Google Search Console

Bing Webmaster Tools

Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools give you an inside look to how search engines are seeing your site. Most importantly, they let you receive notifications whenever there are problems affecting your website’s visibility in search. Think server errors, blocking of critical pages, link penalties, and more.

For most webmasters, Google Search Console is something they check religiously to see search traffic trends, issues, and the rate their site is crawled. Bing Webmasters is more of a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ tool once it’s all set up.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog has been the most highly recommended crawling tool for many years.

A free version is available that allows you to crawl up to 500 pages of a website. That’s a perfect amount for most small sites.

With the free features, you could detect broken links, redirect chains, take a look at titles and meta descriptions, find duplicate pages, and even find thin pages. There’s the added feature of being able to visualize your entire site in a tree visualization. Super handy for getting a birds-eye view of URL structure!

View Rendered Source

Many of us know how useful it is to check the HTML source of a webpage. However, many sites have rich, interactive content that manipulates the HTML structure with Javascript.

In order to view the source code of a website the same way a Google bot does, View Rendered Source will actually run the Javascript first and then show you the source.

This is a massively helpful little tool that will save you some major headaches.

Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer turns minutes of investigation as well as back and forth emails, asking the client “what’s your site hosted on” into a single click.

Wappalzyer tells you about front-end toolkits used to build the site (like jQuery), what CMS/platform is in use, and what programming languages are used.

SEO Reporting

Perhaps you want to have your reports generated automatically every single month. Maybe you want to spend a lot of time customizing them and making them truly valuable.

Whichever style you prefer, I have two tools for you!

Google Data Studio

The first choice you should be aware of is Google Data Studio. The big selling feature is that it not only allows you to create really custom, visually impressive reports, but it also allows you to pull in data from many Google products – from Analytics, to Search Console, to YouTube analytics.

But what’s really great is that you could pull info from Google Sheets. This makes it possible to visualize any kind of data you want. Want Ahrefs or SEMRush data in Google Data Studio? Create a Google Sheet and input the data. It still requires a little bit of manual action unless you use the Ahrefs/SEMRush API to automate all of this.

Canva

I’ve been a big fan of Canva for a while! Everything from social media graphics, to eBooks, to flyers are a few clicks away.

Better yet, they have a great variety of Report templates available. As long as you don’t mind manually entering your analytical data, this is not a problem.

Multi-Tool Browser Extensions

Mozbar

If you know about one SEO extension, it has to be MozBar. It requires you to have a free Moz account to view certain metrics, so I recommend quickly creating one.

So many different tasks you could use it for…

First, it lets you know the domain authority and page authority of a site. These are unique metrics, created by Moz, that estimate a website’s (or page’s) authority based on backlinks.

Ahrefs has its own metrics that are similar (Domain Rating and URL Rating). So does SEMRush and other big data SEO companies. I’ve personally found Moz’s to be the most telling.

Using these metrics make it quite easy to understand the competition of a search term. Take a look at the below search result screenshot:

As you can see, Amazon, being a massive web giant, has a very high Domain Authority (DA). Even the authority of that particular page (PA) is high (although they only have a single link pointing to it).

Brute Magnetics below has a much lower domain authority, being a small niche business.

In addition to gauging your competition, it’s a great tool to have around for on-page SEO. You could quickly pick out the title and meta description, the headings, whether it has canonicals set up, whether any structured data is implemented, and more.

SEOQuake

An alternative to Mozbar is SEOQuake. Try both and see which you like better.

This extension is made by SEMRush and features more SEMRush-related data points. In general, it gives you more information about a page out of the box, such as an Alexa score for example.

Couple this with SEMRush’s keyword reports and domain reporting and you’ve found yourself one of the best SEO automation tools out there.

Redirect Path

It’s easy to miss out on redirect issues. Redirect Path shows this little icon in Chrome whenever a URL you visit redirects.

Give it a click and you’ll find all the information you need to know about the redirect.

Just be careful about redirects that are cached in your browser. I’d recommend allowing this extension to display in incognito windows and using it from there to double-check your redirects.

Mangools

 

Thought I’d feature one more SEO bar extension in case you weren’t satisfied with Mozbar or SEO Quake.

Mangools is a paid service, but their browser extension is free. It has limited functionality, but may be just enough for you.

• For free, it will show you…
• The Alexa rank of a page
• Its social media stats
• Referring IPs (Similar to “referring domains” but limiting one domain per IP)
• Page speed score
• And all sorts of on-page info (title, meta description, schema, and more)

Link Building

The next category of tools will cover are for link building. We’ve got a tool for analyzing competitors, tracking data, and sending cold email.

FATREL

The ultimate link highlighter extension; curious what links on a page are nofollow? Which are marked as sponsored? Or even which are marked as user-generated content?

FATREL turns this tedious code-sifting task into something you don’t even have to think about. It puts a nice, colour-coded outline around the links you desire to see. It’s subtle enough to not annoy you when you’re doing your regular browsing (unlike some extensions!)

Moz Open Site Explorer

The first free tool to cover is Moz’s Open Site Explorer. Just input a website to view all kinds of metrics.

You have your typical Moz Domain Authority and Page Authority metrics. You could also browse a domain or page’s backlinks. They make it easy enough to filter by “dofollow” or whatever criteria is important to you.

The amount of backlinks it discovers is not as impressive as a paid tool like Ahrefs’, but it is still quite impressive for a 100% free utility.

Google Sheets

Yeah, yeah, we all know about Google Sheets. However, if you don’t take it seriously for a tool that you can track all of your campaigns with, you may want to reconsider. It could save you a lot of money in paid tools and offers unparalleled flexibility.

I swear that your life will change if you take the time to…

• Learn the basics of spreadsheets and formulas. (formulas like SUM and AVERAGE. How to create charts from a data table. How to create a filter or remove duplicate data.)
• Take it a bit further. (Learn pivot tables. Learn how to create time-saving integrations by using free tools like Zapier and IFTTT.)
• Learn more advanced, Google-specific formulas. (Fetch data from other sheets with IMPORTRANGE and get website data using IMPORTXML)

Seriously. Learning the above, I am able to manage the most important parts of my campaigns from a single sheet. It’s easy to keep track of team member training material, team member efficiency, the status of a campaign and how well its performing, task lists, and much much more.

GMass

If you’re on a budget and just need a simple program that can send out mass emails, why not give GMass a try?

The free version limits you to sending 50 emails per day. It hooks into Gmail and is very easy to use.

Link Klipper

If part of your link outreach strategy consists of finding leads through Google, this extension, Link Klipper, will be of great use to you.

It’s effortless to use. Go to a page you’d like to extract links from and press “Extract all links”. It will then export them to a CSV.

Need to only select a handful of links? You may be better suited for LinkClump.

Content Creation

There are two content creation tools in particular I use for SEO. Both are completely free (although Grammarly offers paid plans as well with additional perks).

Small SEO Tools Plagiarism Checker

If you’re hiring writers, you always run the risk of plagiarism. There aren’t a whole lot of good, free plagiarism checkers, but Small SEO Tool’s plagiarism checker is a favourite.

Just add up to 1,000 words of your content and it will check sentence-by-sentence for plagiarism.

Grammarly

Grammarly does an excellent job at helping you check for spelling and grammar. It’s not as good as a human proofreader, but is a great aid.

They also offer a free plagiarism checker here, but from my experience, it is pretty terrible. I copy and pasted an entire Wikipedia article about grapes but it did not find any plagiarism. If you’re cheating on a school essay, you better hope your teacher uses this tool to check for plagiarism!

Local SEO Tools

Google My Business

Bing Places

Yahoo business listings via YEXT

The three free local SEO tools above are Google My Business, Bing Places, and Yahoo business listings. These are only important for local businesses. Signing up through these tools will help you rank for terms like “plumbers near me”. Example below:

While we’re talking about free ways to show up for local search terms like the above, I should also mention Yelp. Although I don’t want to dive too far deep here as this isn’t a “best free local citations” article! Niche search engines like Duck Duck Go (as well as many business-finder tools) make use of Yelp’s API, so it’s totally worth it to sign up.

To close off this section, I should mention a brief note about Yahoo’s business listings tool. They’re a little cheeky!

As you go through the sign-up process, they’ll try to sell you on a variety of monthly plans. You do not need this! Just search around for the “Claim your Basic Listing only on Yahoo here” link and you won’t have to pay a dime.

Now that the basics are out of the way let’s get to the good stuff!

Spoofing your Location

Working with local SEO clients in your backyard is a piece of cake! But work with a client from the other side of the country (or world!) and it becomes more difficult to see their local rankings.

Thanks to this quick Google Chrome trick, it is not that hard.

Well…maybe a little bit tedious, but once you try it a few times it’s no big deal, you can also use VPNs like NordVPN to spoof your location.

1. Ideally, you’d want to open a new tab in incognito. Not required, but recommended
2. Open the developer console (Ctrl+Shift+c, or follow the above GIF to do it the graphical way)
3. Go to the “Sensors” section
4. Change the geolocation to what you prefer
5. Search something in Google
6. Allow location access
7. Refresh the page (You may have to refresh twice)

Google Review Link Generator

This tool makes it wayyyyyyyyy too easy to generate a link to your Google My Business review page.

It’s worth noting that this generates an official Google link (your reviews will not pass through some third-party).

It takes two seconds to generate a link. Hand it off to your client. If they share it proactively, it could make a huge difference in the number of reviews they receive.

NAP / Local Citation checking

This tool by Moz is a real blessing! Without any signup required, just enter the basic details of your local business.

It will tell you if you are on all of the major local citation sites, if your information is consistent and accurate, if you have your hours listed, and if you have uploaded photos.

The best part is that it lets you export a PDF report that has zero Moz branding whatsoever.

Infographic Design

Infographics are a fantastic way to complement your SEO strategy.

You can keep your readers interested in your materials by creating an infographic visually engaging, memorable, and easy to understand.

As a result, your users will spend more time on your page, have a high tendency to share the infographic, especially through social media, and can also improve your brand awareness.

You can browse thousands of infographic templates for free using a tool like Venngage.

Final Notes

We’ve covered so many great, free SEO tools and free SEO software!

I hope a few of them are new to you. Remember, if you are new to SEO, you do not have to go on a buying spree getting all of the top tools. There is so much you can do without touching your wallet.