46 of The Best FREE SEO Tools To Improve Your Online Marketing
Updated January 2019
Do you want to drive more visitors to your website?
Of course you do.
An important part of getting people to your website includes your ranking in organic search results, which is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.
Put simply, SEO is about making sure that your website appears prominently on a search engine results page (SERP) when a person types in keywords related to your business.
As a business owner, it’s vital that you understand the importance SEO plays in your online presence, and how best to optimize your content for online success. But with SEO an ever-changing field (as Google’s frequently shifting guidelines can attest to), it can seem daunting if you don’t know where to start.
You could always outsource the work to an SEO agency but this option can be expensive and out of reach for the average small business owner.
The good news is that there are search engine optimization tools available to help you do your own SEO — and many of them are free.
I’ve put together this list of the best free SEO tools out there right now to help you instantly improve your online marketing.
1. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a super tool to help you focus your link building efforts. It allows you to perform competitive backlinks analysis and identify quality links your competition is getting. Use it to see who links to your website because sometimes spam sites link to you and the danger with this is that Google will consider you spammy then too and push you down in rankings. Although this tool is not actually free, I’ve included it on this list as it’s such a great tool. You can try it free for 7 days for $7 to see if it’s useful to you.
2. Browseo
This tool allows you to view your website the way a search engine sees it. What’s particularly helpful is that you see a bare-bones version of your site, which can be helpful in showing you the hierarchy you’ve given particular elements.
3. Check My Links
Check My Links is a link checker that crawls through your webpage and looks for broken links. Available as a Google Chrome extension.
4. Copyscape
Copyscape is an online plagiarism checker which lets you detect duplicate content and check whether similar text content appears elsewhere on the web. Having unique content is essential in a website or blog post to rank higher in search engines. Simply enter the URL for a website or blog post and Copyscape can tell you where else that content exists online.
5. DataBlip
Provide your website URL and keywords, and DataBlip will provide you the dashboard URL with all essential SEO statistics. Not free but the starter plan starts as low as $5 per month.
6. Find Broken Links
This link report from Ninja Internet Marketers combs through your whole site and highlights a number of link insights, including the internal and external links that need fixing.
7. Free SEO Analysis (Kostenlose SEO Analyse)
As its name suggests this tool is geared towards a German market, but even with my rusty school-girl German, I could understand how easy it is to use it. You simply enter your domain’s URL and the tool’s crawler examines 20 subpages within 10 to 90 seconds for the most relevant on-page factors in SEO.
8. Google Adwords Keyword Planner
This is a free Google AdWords tool that gives you insight into the volume of monthly searches for a particular keyword, and how much and how much competition there is, based on advertising spend for sponsored links. It also returns suggested terms you could use instead or alongside your original keyword.
9. Google Keyword Suggest Tool
Google Keyword Suggest Tool allows you to dig into auto-suggest results from Bing, Amazon, and YouTube. Simply enter your base term and the tool will create a list of the most popular keyword phrases that all start with your core term — using Google, Amazon, YouTube, and Bing “Suggest” databases.
10. Google PageSpeed Insights
This SEO tool measures the performance of both your desktop and mobile site in terms of speed. With mobile search queries surpassing desktop searches, page speed is becoming increasingly important to businesses that want to hold on to their visitors.
11. Google Safe Browsing Test
This tool tests if there is any malware on a site.
12. Google Search Console
Jeff Bullas highly recommends this tool, explaining in this article, how “it allows you to see which queries bring users to your site, analyze your site’s impressions, clicks, and position on Google Search. It also allows you to submit your XML sitemaps and individual URLs to Google and review your index coverage to make sure that Google has the freshest view of your site. Finally, you can receive email alerts when Google identifies issues on your site, see which URLs are affected by these issues, and tell Google when you’ve fixed them.”
13. Google TestMySite
This site auditing tool offers two metrics:
- Estimated loading time on a 3G mobile network
- Estimated visitor loss due to poor loading time.
This is a good tool for obtaining a quick snapshot of the speed health of a website.
14. Google Webmaster Tools
Perhaps the best way to understand the way Google sees your site is to ask Google. Google’s Webmaster Tools are novice-friendly resources that explain the fundamentals of Google search.
The Fetch as Google feature enables you to test how Google crawls or renders a URL on your site. You can use Fetch as Google to see whether Googlebot can access a page on your site, how it renders the page, and whether any page resources (such as images or scripts) are blocked to Googlebot.
See also Bing Webmaster Tools which lets you view how your site performs in the Bing search engine.
15. Hubspot Website Grader
Website Grader is an online tool that generates personalized reports based on key metrics such as performance, mobile readiness, and security. Simply enter your URL and you will receive a score and detailed report via email.
16. Keyword Clarity
Keyword Clarity is a free keyword grouping tool that makes it easy to identify keyword clusters. The interactive tree visualization and built-in keyword manipulations surface semantic keyword groups without writing a single spreadsheet formula.
17. KWFinder
KWFinder is an easy-to-use keyword research tool for long-tail keyword ideas.
18. Keyword.Guru
Free and instant keyword research with loads of brand new keyword ideas for AdWords, SEO, PPC or your content marketing strategy.
19. Linkminer
LinkMiner is an easy-to-use backlink checker tool with limited totally free features. You will need to upgrade to do more with it.
20. LongTail Pro
This site promises that it will provide you with thousands of profitable, targeted keywords and calculate keyword competitiveness for almost any niche.
21. Metatago
Another handy keyword density tool. It has a tiered pricing plan with the free plan available on one domain for one year.
22. MozBar
Click on the MozBar, and you generate an instant report on the website you’re visiting. It’s also available as browser extension for Firefox and Chrome.
23. Open Site Explorer
Open Site Explorer is a complete link analysis tool by Moz. This tool allows you to research backlinks, discover potentially damaging links, find link-building opportunities, view social activity, analyze anchor text and more. You can also use this tool to discover all pages indexed by search engines and get a huge amount of information concerning your website.
24. Remove’em
Remove’em generates a report that helps to identify your anchor text diversity and highlight those areas where you are at risk for anchor text over optimization. Over-optimization can sometimes result in your site being penalized algorithmically for that specific anchor text.
25. Screaming Frog
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a small desktop program you can install locally which fetches key onsite elements for SEO and allows you to export them to Excel so it can easily be used as a base to make SEO recommendations from. It’s particularly good for analysing medium to large sites, where manually checking every page would be extremely labour intensive
26. Search Simulator by Nightwatch
Simulate search engine queries from any location on Google and easily check and track your website or your competitor’s rankings. Download to your device and/or add to Google Chrome.
27. Seed Keywords
Seed keywords are those keywords that spawn other suggestions or ideas. and form the basis of long tail keyword search. This tool is different from other keyword tools in that it lets you first set a search scenario, then ask your friends to answer it as if they were using a search engine.
28. SEMRush
While this tool isn’t totally free, you can try out up to 10 free keyword searches to see if this is the right tool for your marketing. Particularly helpful is the keyword difficulty feature to find out how difficult it’s going to be to rank for the keywords you want to target.
29. Seobility
Seobility checks your complete website, by crawling all linked pages. All found pages with errors, problems with the on-page optimization or problems regarding the page content like duplicate content are collected and displayed in each check section.
30. SEO Chat
SEO Chat’s keyword tool incorporates searches across the main search engines, plus YouTube, and Amazon.
31. SEO Quake
A handy browser extension which allows you to check any webpage for SEO parameters and export the data into a file.
32. SEOWorkers Analysis Tool
Provides a detailed report quickly, with the added benefit of background information on SEO best practices. It’s also available as a Firefox extension.
33. SE Ranking
This is an all-in-one SEO software that includes all the tools you need for daily work, such as rank checker, website audit, competitors SEO/PPC research, and much more (This is not a free tool but it comes with a free trial).
34. SERPSim.Com
A google snippet tool with which you can share, save and copy a single snippet or multiple in bulk.
35. SERPs Rank Checker
This is another effective SEO tool. By using this tool, you can check your keywords rankings position in google or yahoo.
36. Serpstat
Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform with paid plans; however, there’s also a free version that allows you to customize your search related to your country.
37. Site Analyzer
Get a complete diagnosis of your landing pages one by one: content, keywords, design, performance, accessibility, etc. You can analyze any page, on any website as often as you wish. No installation required.
38. Soovle
Soovle lets you search not just Google, Bing, and Yahoo, but also Amazon for sales info, Wikipedia for educational articles, and YouTube for video content.
39. Spyfu
The clue is in the name. SpyFu exposes the search marketing secret formula of your most successful competitors. See every keyword they rank on. Uncover the exact content and backlinks that lets them outrank you. Paid plans but you can try it for free (no sign-up required).
Recommended Reading: Which of My Competitor’s Keywords Should (& Shouldn’t) I Target?
40. Text Optimizer
This is a cool tool. Enter your search term and it will look at Google search result page, extract search snippets and apply semantic analysis to generate the list of all related topics, terms and concepts that form your topic cluster.
41. Surfer
Currently free in beta, this is a super SEO tool that compares key on‑page factors of top 40+ ranked websites. Surfer breaks down top websites by the most significant ranking factors in seconds, so you can immediately compare how you and your competition are doing. For a super in-depth review of this tool click here.
42. Übersuggest
This tool will generate some comprehensive lists of long tail keywords for you.
43. UpCity’s SEO Report Card
The SEO Report Card lets you analyze your website to determine how it stacks up against your competitors.
44. Varvy SEO Tool
This SEO auditing tool provides information regarding a domain’s strength, links, image SEO, social counts and mentions, page speed, and much more.
45. Viral Mafia SEO Audit
Check and analyse your website with this free tool from Viral Mafia.
46. Yoast
If you’re creating your content in WordPress, I recommend using the SEO Yoast Tool, which analyzes how SEO-friendly your content is. This tool incorporates many features to help you optimize your content for search results, such as snippet generator, images titles, meta descriptions. (The All In One SEO Pack is a similar plug-in tool by WordPress).
These are just some of the many tools out there to help you optimise your web content. Are there any other tools you would recommend?
