Are you just starting out online and need some companions to help your business take off? Take this list of the best free SEO tools as your go-to resource for giving your web pages a boost in rankings.
It’s no shame that, in the early stages, you might not have the funds to invest in expensive tools. We’ve all been there. But don’t worry, there are plenty of fish in the sea for every website owner who wants to be careful with their money!
Here’s our top of the best free SEO tools:
Best free SEO tools for small businesses and website owners that are just starting out
Believe it or not, there are a lot of good SEO tools out there that do not require any money. Sure, it comes without saying that you should not expect to get the full package of features or anything advanced. As you’ll see for yourself, most of the features in these tools come with limitations.
But, depending on your goals, these limitations might or might not be an impediment to you. It’s up to you to decide which ones tick all your needs. You can even combine multiple tools to achieve your desired results.
Why should you care about SEO? Our huge roundup of SEO statistics has your answers! Check it out to learn why every entrepreneur largely relies on search engine optimization to succeed with their business. All these stats will give you a zoom-in on why SEO is crucial for a website.
Here’s the list of the best free SEO tools we propose:
Google SEO Toolbox
Google probably comes with one of the most complete toolboxes for businesses (not only for SEO but for many other purposes). What’s awesome is that you won’t see annoying limitations when using its free SEO tools.
With Google products, you can integrate Google Analytics into your website, check the search trends, get keyword ideas, measure your site’s traffic and performance, and do a lot more things to improve your site’s SEO.
Performance-wise, Google offers even more free tools like PageSpeed Insights, Test My Site, or Lighthouse.
Ahrefs is one of the most popular SEO-related brands. While they offer strong premium services, they do offer a package of free SEO tools, too. What will you find there? Mostly keyword-related tools such as keyword generator, keyword difficulty & rank checker, and various options to discover keywords for YouTube, Amazon, and Bing.
Apart from the keyword-oriented tools, they have tools that check the status of your SERPs, check backlinks, broken links, and website authority. If you don’t mind the limitations on the number of daily searches and results/entries, you will find the free Ahrefs tools useful.
Yoast SEO is among the most popular WordPress plugins. If you are a WordPress fan, it’s very likely that you already use it. But if you don’t, go ahead and install it, because it offers all the essential SEO features for free.
What does this plugin do, more specifically? It analyzes your content and shows suggestions on how to improve it to make it SEO-friendly. It gives you advice on readability, keywords, images, internal links, meta description, and all the important elements for a text to be optimized for the search engines.
Similar to Ahrefs, Moz does offer a free package of free SEO tools for people who are just starting out online. In this package, you will find a mix of features like keyword explorer, competition research, link explorer, domain analysis, and online presence checker. The suite includes MozBar, a Chrome extension that lets you see various page metrics of any site you visit.
These free tools are just great to begin your SEO journey with. While they limit their results to each search, you will still get enough value from them to help your business grow.
This is a cool tool that gives you content ideas about any topic you are interested in. This tool not only gives you suggestions of topics to write about, but it also opens your mind to get to the core of things and understand people’s pain points and needs.
The tool separates the results into three categories based on how people search online: questions, prepositions, and comparisons. The latter is available only in the premium version. You also get an alphabetical list of the main keywords together with a few more related keywords based on your search.
If you want the search engines to love your website, you need a sitemap. It’s one of the best SEO practices. This is one of the best free SEO tools, simply because it lets you create an XML sitemap in a few seconds by just entering your site’s URL.
It’s also nice that this tool doesn’t require any registration beforehand, you can just use it right off the bat. When your sitemap is ready, you can either download it or choose to receive it via mail. On the same site, you will find this sitemap validator, where you can check if your sitemap is correct before submitting it to Google.
With Similarweb, you can take the pulse of local and international online traffic. Right when you land on the homepage, you see a top of the most visited websites in your country. If you want to go deeper and learn more about a certain publication or app, you can just enter the URL and Similarweb will show you a lot of statistics about it.
It’s similar to Google Analytics, but you get to learn about your competition instead. You learn about the company behind the website, global and local rank, total visits, bounce rate, average visit times, audience (location, demographics, interests), competitors, marketing channels, top keywords, outgoing links, tools the site uses, etc.
SERPerator is a cool free SEO tool that shows you the SERPs in any country in the world for a given keyword. This is a nice tool to have if you want to rank locally rather than globally. Moreover, this tool will also display the rankings based on the device.
For example, you can compare how a keyword is doing in a specific city on both iPhone and desktop. The downside of this SERPerator is that it doesn’t allow for more than three searches per day in the free version.
SERProbot is a good alternative to SERPerator.
With this free SEO tool, you can create a robots.txt file for the search engines to recognize and crawl your web pages. Before you create it, you can choose what links you want to crawl and exclude. The tool also lets you include your sitemap in the robots.txt file.
Once you customize your choices, you can just click Create and the tool will generate the file in a few moments.
While Semrush is known for its competitive premium services, the company does offer a free option for hobbyists and marketing newbies. In short, you get access to most features if you sign up, but with some conditions.
For example, you get only ten results per request when you search for keywords or domains and ten keywords with daily rank tracking. You get only ten reports about backlinks daily, 100 pages per month for crawling analysis, and 50 social media profiles to track.
See the pricing plan comparison here.
Exploding Topics is a free tool that promises to help you discover growing topics before they turn hot. Select a period and a category, and let the tool do its magic. If you do not select a category, the tool will suggest the most ascending topics overall.
Exploding Topics does not only suggest topics but also backs them up with stats such as the number of searches per month and the growth rate. They use a 3-color scheme to indicate the rate at which a topic is growing.
One of the best free SEO tools you’ll find out there, Ubbersuggest, gives you ideas on how to improve your website’s growth in different areas. Enter your domain and the tool will tell you how your website is doing.
Create a free account to get keyword suggestions, daily rank tracking, personalized SEO suggestions, site audit, backlink opportunities, traffic overview, your top SEO keywords by country, and more.
Keep in mind, though, that the tool shows only a limited number of results per search and you also get only three free daily searches of any kind (be it domain or keyword).
Keyword Surfer is a Chrome extension that gives you a handful of stats and keyword suggestions every time you search for something in Google.
If you search for “vanilla ice cream,” the extension adds in the SERPs the estimated search volume of this keyword in a given country, its cost per click, and the monthly traffic of all the SERP entries. Moreover, you get to see the word count and all the keywords a page ranks for.
In the right sidebar of Google, you will find the keyword ideas that are related to your search term. Furthermore, Keyword Surfer comes with an integrated AI article outline generator that delivers an outline proposal for the keyword you typed.
CanIRank is a free tool that gives you an overall insight into how well your website ranks. You can ask it to analyze keywords and show you the probability of you being able to rank for that keyword.
The tool gives you content ideas, checks your ranking potential, offers suggestions to improve your SERP position, displays backlinks, finds new link opportunities, and teaches you how to grow your social media presence.
If you’re okay with the limitations that come with the free plan, you might find this tool pretty useful.
Seobility is a tool that delivers an in-depth analysis of your website. It displays SEO reports that you can check to improve your rankings. In each report, expect to find an overall SEO score, with advice on how to fix various errors.
The tool checks metrics like meta specifications, tags, page quality, media list, page structure, links, external factors, robots.txt, search preview, keywords, and a few more interesting metrics. Seobility is free for everyone, but it also comes with a few limitations that you can see here.
This is a tool you can look at from a different perspective. While it’s a keyword research tool, it was built with Reddit in mind.
It is a cool alternative to finding interesting topic ideas for your niche website. If you are interested in a subreddit talk, you can just type the name of the subreddit and the tool will extract all the keywords from there.
It’s good to get the pulse of what people are talking about and also find new not-at-first-hand story ideas for your site. It’s also a good resource if you don’t know much about a topic that’s trending and need to get a grasp on it.
Try these free SEO tools today
To sum it up, one thing is clear. Everyone who’s just starting their online journey can make use of some awesome free SEO tools. Most of them impose limitations, it’s true, but what free tool does not? They are all good resources for professional take-off and can provide you with great value for your business.
The nice thing about free tools is that you can always use a bunch of them to improve your SEO. You don’t have to stick with one or two since there’s no financial commitment involved. So, feel free to make the most of these tools and grow a successful online business!
👉 Once your site starts growing and you have the budget to spend on tools, you can check out our full roundup of the 55+ best SEO tools.
Which of these best free SEO tools are your favorites? Do you happen to use a cool tool that we didn’t feature in this list? Tell us in the comments section below!
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