It is a common issue for small businesses – how do you maintain an internal SEO campaign without spending the big bucks the large agencies do on software and reporting tools?
How do you know which free SEO tools can help you with your optimization efforts?
While a company specializing in Organic SEO will typically use tools that require monthly subscriptions, it is understandable that for a small business owner that is cost prohibitive.
The list below offers some of what we feel are the best free SEO tools on the market to help small businesses, bloggers and even e-commerce website owners complete some of their own SEO tasks. Some of the tools below offer more value than others and many have a subscription model, but do offer limited results which can still be beneficial.
We do recommend that you utilize most of these tools in some way, as each tool really offers various results and the more information you have – the better you can improve your search engine results!
Must Have Tools
Google Analytics
This should actually have a whole post for itself, but we are still amazed how many website owners come to us for either SEO services or a website redesign and have never had Google Analytics installed! This is a MUST and if you are building a website, you should make sure your developer installs this tool for you.
Google Search Console
Yes, another Google product surprise, surprise! If you want to beat the mammoth beast at its own game – you should of course be using their tools to help! Google Webmaster Tools is another must have installation on your website that helps you get a visual on how Google healthy your website is.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing has gained marketshare and it is just as important to make sure your website is friendly for their algorithms. This tool will help you find any issues that Bing (which also powers the Yahoo search) sees with your website in terms of on-site issues.
Keyword Position Tools
KEYWORD POSITION – SMALL SEO TOOLS
A simple way to check a few of your top keywords for where you rank in the major search engines.
SERPLAB.CO.UK
SERPLAB surprised us! A great free tool that has a generous offering and had pretty accurate results. You do need to create an account – but hey, it is free! You can add several domains to track and keywords to monitor and there re a few upgrade options – and of course donation options. This is a fantastic tool well worth a few dollars in donations.
Technical Website Audit Tools
AHREFS Webmaster Tool
Read our Ahrefs Webmaster Tools Overview
A new tool released by Ahrefs that offers a great technical audit of your website as well as other features like keyword rank, backlinks and more. While this free tool does not offer any opportunity to analyze competitors, it can really help you get important insight into your own websites health and movement!
SCREAMING FROG
This is one of our favorite free tools! You do have to download it to your computer and it does have a cap on how many URL’s you can review, but for most smaller sites and blogs it is enough. Or you can break your website down into parts and just work on specific areas. This tool will give you a full analysis of your pages and will check for the following:
- Broken links
- 404 not found errors
- Redirect errors
- Missing meta descriptions, title tags, H1-H6 tags
W3C VALIDATOR TOOL
The validator will help you find technical issues with your website markup – or the core code of your website like HTML, CSS etc. Clean code makes it easier for robots to crawl your website which in turn can improve your SEO.
Page Speed Tools
GTMETRIX
Page speed matters and if you are not using tools to determine your page speed and how to improve it, you are risking rank and also losing visitors. GTmetrix gives you a “grade” and offers insight into how to fix any issues it may find. There are several tools out there that do this , but this one happens to be our favorite.
GOOGLE PAGESPEED INSIGHTS
We also use this to get a quick look at the mobile friendliness and speed of a website. You can get results for your desktop and mobile websites for speed and user experience and it will give you ideas on how you can improve your user experience.
PINGDOM
Another excellent online speed testing tool that offers advanced data to help you improve your page load time.
CLOUD FLARE
A free CDN that helps speed up your website by delivering your website content from areas closer to your visitor location. There is also the additional security that is provided. Base plan is free.
Schema & Structured Data
SCHEMA CREATOR
Visit Schema Creator
A simple and easy to use tool to help create valid Schema markup for your website.
STRUCTURE DATA TESTING TOOL
See if your website has valid structured data like Schema implemented properly.
Image Processing
TINY PNG
Easy to use service that allows you to drag and drop your PNG images to reduce your file size.
Keyword Research Tools
ANSWER THE PUBLIC
Might be our favorite! Put in a term and they will kick back questions that people are asking about that topic.
KEYWORD.io
Visit Keywordio
A variety of keyword ideas from different sources.
UBERSUGGEST
Visit Ubersuggest
A top pick for finding unique keywords, this tool does a fantastic job of delivering a vast amount of keyword queries.
KEYWORD SHITTER
This is a fantastic tool for finding long-tail keywords to use within your posts to further define what your page is about.
KEYWORDTOOL.io
Visit KeyWord Tool
We love this tool for finding key-phrases we may not have otherwise considered. Although the free version will not show you the search volume or other factors, it can still be useful to help you write content that fits today’s user search queries.
GOOGLE TRENDS
Visit Google Trends
This quick search can offer some great insight on whether a term is gaining or losing search volume. Type in a phrase and you will easily see if it is a phrase that is growing, it is – then you know you will want to use that term – if you see it falling, you may want to redo your search to find other term opportunities.
SG.SERPSTAT
The best feature about this is the “only questions” tab you can click after running a keyword search which will allow you to see questions that are searched for around your keyword. This can be very helpful in building relevant content for your readers.
TWINWORD
Twinword offers a variety of options for keyword analysis which includes finding lists of related phrases and words that include user intent and buying terms which is critical for today’s optimization techniques. They offer a free plan and you can upgrade to get more details and information.
SEO Analysis & Reporting
MARKETGOO
Another decent option for a quick overview of how your website is doing from a general SEO perspective. We’ve run our site through the tool and found many of the items were fairly accurate but the backlinks were off. Overall, a good option – not perfect, but a good baseline.
NIBBLER
A pretty good free tool that gives you one of the better overviews of how your website is doing from a variety of aspects. We did find it to give errors on some things that are not critical (like using html for a bold tag) – so it can be a little scary seeing so many things wrong, but overall we think this is a pretty good guide.
QUICKSPROUT
Quicksprout does a decent job of giving you a very broad overview of how your website is doing and where you can possible improve. When we ran our own website through it we did see some metrics that did not seem accurate, but for a base level overview – it is a great resource!
SEO ANALYZER
This free tool provides comprehensive website audit report showing on page errors needed to fix to improve optimization of a website for search engines. It also provides competitor research enabling you to dissect competition.
SEO SITE CHECKUP
Another general SEO Analysis tool that does an OK job of looking for some of the more common issues within a website. When testing our own website it did return a few issues that were not real issues like not having Google Analytics installed (we do), and telling us that we have no Schema in place (we do). But it can be helpful in finding things you may not know about so it is worth the time spent to review all the information it gives you.
SEO REVIEW TOOLS
SEO Review Tools offers a whole arsenal of tools to improve your website from on site technical checks to social media sharing reports – the collection is pretty impressive for a quick overview of how your website is doing. They also offer a Chrome extension so you can easily check up on your competition too.
BROWSEO
This is a great tool to get a visual of your website without any design elements. It helps you see the core text and how it is being presented to the search engines. View your hierarchy, structure, title tags and more in an easy to view way.
Backlinks
Back links are a critical part of your SEO efforts and require a lot of research and analysis to ensure you have a strong profile. Many of the tools below are free versions of subscription based models so offer a limited view of your back links. Because these software programs all use various online resources to pull back link data, you may notice they return different results. This is why it is important to use several tools to get the most accurate data. You should also be utilizing Google & Bing Webmaster tools for back link research as well since they both offer back links in their tools.
SEO SPYGLASS
A great tool that is part of the SEO Powersuite set, this is the perfect backlink checker tool. Their free version offers a limited number of backlinks, but is great for small to medium sized sites that may not have large backlink profiles.
SEO PROFILER
A simple but concise tool to view anchor text, backlinks and whether the links are no-follow or not. One of our favorites for a quick backlink overview.
BACKLINK WATCH
A simple but concise tool to view anchor text, backlinks and whether the links are no-follow or not. One of our favorites for a quick backlink overview.
MONITOR BACKLINKS
Get a general overview with no account – you can register to see more and then there are options to pay for the service.
MAJESTIC
We all know the importance of back links, but do you really have a clue what your back link profile looks like? Majestic is a must have for getting a look at what you have going on with your back link profile. If you create a free account you will have access to a little more in the way of details, so go ahead and create that account!
AHREFS
Another great back link tool that can help give you an overview of your back link profile! They offer a limited report in their free service but you can upgrade to get more data.
OPENLINK PROFILER
This tools offers a pretty decent backlink tool for free, but you can upgrade and get more in-depth details..
BACKLINKWATCH
This tool seems to offer the most back links for a free service.
WEBMEUP
A comprehensive tools that allows registered free account holders run 3 reports per month. You can also signup for a free trial and do a full review and cancel your subscription prior to the free trial ending. Both options offer you some great data.
HELPAREPORTEROUT (HARO)
Help A Reporter Out is a resource that allows you to get press inquiries from the media. You receive an email several times a day and if there is an inquiry that you can offer your insight into, then you can respond with your response. Some of these inquiries are for major online websites which can result in great back links!
Duplicate Content Research
SITELINER
Easy to use, the Siteliner (which seems to partner with CopyScape for some of its data) tool will give you a scan of your website and return results that will show any duplicate content and broken links. The free version allows up to 250 pages to be crawled. There is a pay for service for larger websites.
COPYSCAPE
Because you know that duplicate content is a HUGE no no! CopyScape can help you determine if your content is being used elsewhere on the web. Simply enter your website into their tool and you will get a report of any copy matches. We do recommend you run this a few times throughout the year with several different pages, not just your home page! Look for your most read blog posts or content pages and test those carefully!
Competitor Research
SIMILARWEB
SimilarWeb is a great tool that is helpful in getting am overview of the competition. Simply enter a URL and you will get a look at estimate total visits, traffic sources and more. As with most tools, the free tool is limited in return of information, but it can give you enough for an overview of what your competitors are up to.
Other Free SEO Tools
HEMINGWAY EDITOR
Visit Hemingway EditorHelp’s you determine how well an article is written and what level it is written at. Will help you find weak works and makes recommendations for good grammar.
MOZCAST
Mozcast is a cool “weather forecast” so to speak of the volatility in the search engine algorithms. You view a variety of statistics and see how they are impacting your website.
BROKEN LINK CHECKER
Good SEO starts on-site, this tool will help you find broken links that may be on your website. The free version has a 3,000 page limit.
NINJA OUTREACH BROWSER EXTENSION (Chrome)
Get the Ninja Outreach Extension
The Ninja Outreach toolbar can help you with prospecting and outreach. Go to any website and get some basic information and email addresses for people you may want to reach out to to build relationships and share information. Ultimately using this data can help with link-building tasks.
HEADLINE ANALYZER
Visit the Headline Analyzer
The Headline Analyzer will help you create headlines that drive traffic. Just enter a headline you are considering and it will return a variety statistics that will help you understand if you are delivering a headline that will invoke emotion or encourage people to take action.