Best free SEO tools [Shortlist]
- SEO.com — Best comprehensive SEO audit tool that’s 100% free
- Google PageSpeed Insights — Best free SEO tool for auditing your site’s Core Web Vitals
- Google Lighthouse — Best open-source SEO audit tool
- GTmetrix — Best for analyzing your page elements’ loading behavior
- SimilarWeb Chrome Extension — Best for looking at your competitors’ traffic and engagement data
- Semrush — Best for analyzing your competitors’ keywords
- Ahrefs Backlink Checker — Best for spying on your competitors’ backlinks
- KeywordsFX — Best for identifying questions related to your keywords
- Ahrefs’s Keyword Difficulty Checker — Best for determining what you need to do to rank in a particular keyword
- Keyword Surfer — Best for gathering keyword data in the SERPs
- Google Trends — Best for finding popular search queries related to your topic
- WebFX’s Google Preview Tool — Best for checking how your page title and description appear in SERPs
- Yoast SEO Plugin — Best for getting recommendations on optimizing a page’s content
- FAQFox — Best for generating FAQ content ideas for your blog
- ChatGPT — Best assistant to generate an outline draft or writer’s brief
- Copyscape — Best for checking duplicate or plagiarized content
- Gumlet — Best for image optimization and compression to improve page speed
- SERP Snippet Optimization Tool – Best for optimizing title and meta description tags
- Moz Local Listing Score — Best for checking your website’s local citation
- Screaming Frog — Best for finding broken links and redirects
- Hunter.io — Best tool for finding email addresses for link building
- Google Analytics — Best for tracking important SEO metrics
- Google Search Console — Best for monitoring your rankings
- XML Sitemaps Generator – Best for helping search engines index your site pages
- Bing Webmaster Tools — Best for assessing your performance on Bing
- Robots.txt Generator — Best for creating a robots.txt file
- Classy Schema Structured Data Viewer — Best for checking your page’s schema markup
- Google Rich Results Test — Best for identifying the potential items for rich results of a page
Want to improve your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs)? A robust set of search engine optimization (SEO) tools can help you with tedious SEO tasks and streamline your processes.
If you’re new to SEO or not yet ready to invest in paid tools, the best free SEO tools can do wonders for your strategy. Check them out below, sorted according to these categories:
- Free SEO audit tools
- Free competitor research tools
- Free keyword research tools
- Free on-page SEO tools
- Free off-page SEO tools
- Free SEO analytics tools
- Free technical SEO tools
Feel free to jump into the top free SEO tools you’re looking for!
Best free SEO audit tools
An SEO audit enables you to examine your site’s overall performance.
How are you ranking for your target keywords? What are the opportunities for optimizing your pages? A regular SEO audit can answer these questions.
Below are the best free SEO tools for auditing your website or your competitors’:
1. SEO.com
Key feature: Free SEO tool that details your site’s estimated traffic, traffic value, top keywords, and top pages.
SEO.com is one of the best free SEO tools you can use to perform regular audits on your site. It provides your website’s SEO performance, which summarizes its overall SEO health.
Type in your URL in the dashboard, and you get a report that details your website’s organic traffic, traffic value, keywords, and more.
You can also use this tool to check your competitors’ websites to see how you fare against them. This is accessible within the SEO.com dashboard.
2. Google PageSpeed Insights
Key feature: Examines your site’s Core Web Vitals
Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that assesses your page’s Core Web Vitals, which measure user experience and are SEO ranking factors.
Just enter your URL, and it will provide a score on your site’s performance on both mobile and desktop based on various metrics, including Core Web Vitals, accessibility, and SEO.
3. Google Lighthouse
Key feature: Audits a page’s performance, web accessibility, SEO, and more.
Google Lighthouse is a free, open-source SEO tool built into a Chrome web browser.
On Google Chrome, go to a page and access Lighthouse under “Tools.” It then audits the page’s performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more.
4. GTmetrix
Key feature: Waterfall chart, which shows your site elements’ loading behavior
How is your page’s load speed? Get this information and more using the free version of GTmetrix.
Type in your URL, and this free SEO tool gives you a GTmetrix grade. The grade considers how fast your pages load and how it performs for the end user.
It also analyzes your website’s vitals, enabling you to identify areas for improvement.
Top free SEO tools for competitor research
Who are your competitors, and how can you outrank them in the SERPs? To inform your decisions regarding optimizing your site to knock out your competition, you can use cheap SEO tools to examine your competitors’ pages, backlinks, and more.
Here are the top free SEO tools you can use to spy on your competitors:
5. SimilarWeb Chrome Extension
Key feature: Shows your competitors’ traffic and engagement data
This free Chrome browser extension gives you an overview of any website’s traffic and user engagement. You can see metrics like:
- Bounce rate
- Pages per visit
- Average visit duration
- Monthly visits
It also shows you the global and country rankings. Thus, this free tool lets you peek at your competitor’s site performance.
6. Semrush
Key feature: Keyword gap analysis that looks at your competitors’ ranking keywords and identifies keyword opportunities
While Semrush has a suite of paid SEO tools, it also has plenty of free features that can spy on your competitor.
Its competitive research tools include a keyword gap analysis tool that compares your keyword profile with your competitors.
Want to look at your competitor’s organic traffic? Its domain overview checker lets you look at their:
- Domain authority score
- Organic search traffic
- Number of backlinks and referring domains
Another handy feature is the backlink analysis tool that analyzes your competitors’ backlinks and identifies link-building opportunities for your site.
7. Ahrefs Backlink Checker
Key feature: Looks at your competitors’ backlinks
Link building is not a walk in the park. With top free SEO tools like Ahrefs Backlink Checker, you can research your competitors’ backlink strategies and identify link-building opportunities for your site.
Type in any URL, and this tool shows you the site’s:
- Domain rating
- Number of backlinks
- Number of linking websites
The free version shows you the top 100 backlinks with details like the domain rating. You’ll also discover the anchor text and target URL.
Best free SEO tools for keyword research
Keyword research is a crucial first step in your SEO efforts. Use any of these free SEO tools for keyword research:
8. KeywordsFX
Key feature: List of questions related to your primary keyword
KeywordsFX is a free keyword research tool that lists related long-tail keywords to a primary keyword you type in.
In addition, KeywordsFX provides you with questions related to the topic of your target keyword and modified versions of keyword phrases.
Keep a list of all the keywords it generates by downloading a CSV copy. That way, you can keep track of which ones you’ve used!
9. Ahrefs’s Keyword Difficulty Checker
Best feature: Keyword difficulty score
While Ahrefs has a suite of paid and powerful tools, it also offers free SEO tools like Keyword Difficulty Checker.
Input a keyword, and this tool shows you a score from zero to 100 that tells you how competitive the keyword is. It also gives you an estimate of what you need to do to rank for the keyword.
The top three ranking pages are also shown in its SERP overview to give you an idea of their:
- Domain rating
- URL rating
- Number of backlinks
- Traffic
- Number of keywords ranking for
10. Keyword Surfer
Key feature: Keyword data in SERPs
Keyword Surfer is a Chrome browser extension that shows you the following keyword data in the SERPs:
- Estimated monthly search volume
- Google Ad campaigns’ cost per click
- Related keywords and their search volume
It’s a handy free SEO tool for marketers looking for related keyword suggestions.
Top free on-page SEO tools
The best on-page SEO tools can help you optimize copy on your page and identify popular topics you can write about. Here are the top free on-page SEO tools you can use to do just those:
- Google Trends
- WebFX’s Google Preview Tool
- Yoast SEO Plugin
- FAQFox
- ChatGPT
- Copyscape
- Gumlet
- SERP Snippet Optimization Tool
Let’s discuss each one:
11. Google Trends
Key feature: Find popular search queries in Google related to your topic
Google Trends is a free, handy SEO tool for checking the popularity of a keyword and other related keywords or topics. You can also compare the search volume of different terms over time.
This free SEO tool lets you look at the search term’s popularity per region and other related search queries on Google.
12. WebFX’s Google Preview Tool
Key feature: Shows you a preview of your page title and description
To entice searchers to click on your page in the SERPs, you must optimize your page title and description. With WebFX’s Google Preview Tool, you can see what your page title and description will look like SERPs. You can then rewrite your tags to ensure they’re displayed correctly.
You can use this free SEO tool in two ways. First, type in a URL to check how your live page appears in the SERPs. The second way is by typing in a page meta title and description.
13. Yoast SEO Plugin
Key feature: Provides recommendations to improve your ranking for your target keyword
If your website is on WordPress, a free SEO tool you can use is the Yoast SEO plugin.
Type in your focus keyword for a page, and Yoast will provide recommendations to improve your chances of ranking for the search term. It may suggest updating your meta title or URL slug.
It also tells you the good characteristics of the page for ranking, so you keep them as is.
14. FAQFox
Key feature: Provides content ideas about a particular keyword
Are you running out of content ideas for your blog? FAQFox is a free SEO tool that can scrape the Internet for questions your target audience might be asking or searching.
After you input your keyword and select your category, FAQFox can suggest Reddit discussions that it can scrape for you. This helps you uncover topics and questions your customers may be discussing online or searching for in forums or other websites.
You can also type in your competitors’ websites in the field to get other ideas!
15. ChatGPT
Key feature: Generate content outlines and briefs
ChatGPT is one of today’s most popular generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Digital marketers can use it as an SEO tool to create:
- Blog post outlines
- Content briefs for your writers
- Meta titles and descriptions
- Content draft
Note that AI tools may hallucinate and generate incorrect information. Verify any information you get from AI tools before using them.
16. Copyscape
Key feature: Checking for duplicate content
Copyscape is a free tool that can check for duplicate content. Enter your URL to see if a malicious website has copied your content or is pretending to be your brand.
While your ranking may not drastically decrease, you may lose potential customers who find the other website instead of yours. You can then take the necessary actions, such as contacting the web admin or reporting the site to gain back your traffic.
17. Gumlet
Key feature: Image optimization and compression
Are your site’s images slowing their load time? An SEO tool like Gumlet lets you check your site’s images and get recommendations on improving your site speed by optimizing images for free.
It gives you a report with an image speed grade for both mobile and desktop. Gumlet also tells you the total file size of your images and its weight after Gumlet optimization.
18. SERP Snippet Optimization Tool
Key feature: Find out how your meta title and meta description will look in actual search results
Snippets are your opportunity to grab your audience’s attention and drive them to choose your site to satisfy their needs. This SERP Snippet Optimization Tool facilitates meaningful snippet visualization to know how your title and meta description tags will look in the results. The better your rich snippet is, the more visitors you’ll likely have.
Best free off-page SEO tools
Your off-page SEO efforts involve optimizations outside your site. The top free off-page SEO tools can help you get local citations and earn backlinks. Here are some of them:
19. Moz Local Listing Score
Key feature: Check your business’s online citation
Moz Local Listing Score is a free feature that looks at your citations on various directors and local search engines like Google Maps, Yelp, Bing, and Facebook.
Input your business details, and you’ll get data on the quality of your company’s data online. Equipped with this intel, you can optimize your online presence by adding details or photos to your Google Business Profile or updating directories with your store hours.
20. Screaming Frog
Key feature: Finds broken links
Screaming Frog can crawl your site like a search engine spider. It can tell you potential crawl issues, which hinder your pages from ranking.
The free version can also find broken links and redirects so that you can troubleshoot them right away.
21. Hunter.io
Key feature: Finds professional email addresses associated with a domain for link-building
So you’ve found a website you’d like to contact for link building. How do you find a contact person?
Hunter.io is an SEO tool that enables you to find an email address. Type in a domain, and you can find professional email addresses associated with the domain.
22. XML Sitemaps Generator
Key feature: User-friendly tool that collects your site’s URLs and turn them into XML sitemaps
XML sitemaps are files that allow search engines to find and understand your website, making it possible to index and show your site to searchers. Every page you want to show up on Google or Yahoo must be in your sitemap, which means creating a map can become tedious if your site has a lot of pages. XML Sitemaps Generator simplifies this process by creating a customized map for you.
This free SEO tool is extremely user-friendly and only requires your website’s URL to start. It will then scan your entire website to collect the URLs of each page. The generator will then send a file directly to your email, which you can copy and upload to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.
Top free SEO analytics tools
They say what you can measure, you can improve. SEO analytics tools enable you to monitor the performance of your SEO efforts. These tools identify strategies that work and inform you of your next steps to achieve your goals.
The best free SEO tools for this job are the following:
23. Google Analytics
Key feature: Tracks important SEO metrics
Are your SEO efforts paying off? Google Analytics can help you answer this question by monitoring your site’s key metrics, such as:
- User engagement metrics (like time on page and bounce rate)
- Conversions from organic search
- Traffic sources
You can also use Google Analytics to track pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns.
24. Google Search Console
Key feature: Monitors your rankings
Google Search Console is one of the best free SEO tools for analytics. It shows you how Google and most search engines see your site.
It can perform the following:
- Troubleshoot indexing issues
- Track your rankings and page impressions
- Evaluate your site’s internal and external backlink data
- Provide SEO insights
25. Bing Webmaster Tools
Key feature: Analyzes your performance data on Bing
Bing Webmaster Tools is a suite of SEO tools that looks at your performance data and analyzes them so you can optimize your pages on Bing search results.
It can analyze your site’s backlink profile and troubleshoot its indexing issues. You can also use its keyword research tool to discover the keywords searchers use.
Best free technical SEO tools
Technical SEO ensures that search engine crawlers can find and index your site. Here are the top free technical SEO tools you can use:
26. Robots.txt Generator
Key feature: Generates a robots.txt file for your site
A robots.txt file tells search engine spiders which pages they can crawl so they won’t overload your site.
Ryte’s Robot.txt Generator is a free SEO tool that can easily create a robots.txt file for you. You can provide it with instructions on which pages robots must skip.
27. Classy Schema Structured Data Viewer
Key feature: Checking your page’s schema markup
Structured data (or schema markup) is code that informs search engines about a page’s content and how to categorize it. Search engines like Google use structured data to show rich results.
Classy Schema Structured Data Viewer is a free SEO tool to help you create structured data. You can also use this tool to check your schema markup for errors.
28. Google Rich Results Test
Key feature: Identifying the potential items for rich results of a page
Which rich results can your page generate? Use Google’s Rich Results Test to find out.
This free SEO tool will inform you how many valid items it has detected for rich results and if the page has been successfully crawled.
Power up your strategy with one of the best free SEO tools — the SEO.com app
SEO is a big undertaking. Use the free SEO.com app, one of the best free SEO tools, to get started and conquer SERPs. Try it for free today to start tracking your SEO performance, discovering keyword targeting opportunities, analyzing your competitors, and more!
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