Premium tools are central to high-performance SEO.
When you need advanced functionality, stored data, and, or on-demand support, you can’t avoid paying for a subscription.
However, for many day-to-day SEO tasks, a free tool does the job.
Yet, there are thousands of free SEO tools to choose from.
And they often come with catch:
- They are either not entirely free to use or
- They require a paid subscription after the trial period ends
This is why I compiled this list of the 100 best free SEO tools.
The list is categorized as follows: analytics, crawling and indexing, keyword research, link tools, local SEO, mobile SEO, multi-tool, on-page SEO, research, site speed, research, rank tracking, keyword tracking, and under-the-radar tools.
The criteria for selection:
- One Twitter endorsement by an SEO
- Widely used by the SEO community
Free SEO analytics tools:
Here is the SEOs choice for the best free tools for SEO analytics.
1. Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools may be one of the most overlooked items in an SEO’s toolbox. Not only can you submit your site via Bing to Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo, but you can also use BWT’s free insights to get a better understanding of how Bing crawls and views your site, and get advice on how to optimize for overall SEO performance.
2 Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s performance in Google Search results. It helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.
3. Keyword Hero
You may know some of your search keywords from Google Search Console, but only Keyword Hero shows you all organic keywords including all session metrics, under a separate view in Google Analytics. Find out how much traffic and conversions you get from your target keywords.
4. Enhanced Google Analytics Annotations
Enhanced Google Analytics Annotations extension is a tool that allows you to automate the process of adding new notes to GA reports.
Check confirmed and suspected Google algorithm updates, so you can better understand how the latest update has impacted your traffic along with checking how global holidays in your targeted countries are affecting your performance data.
5. Google Analytics
Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your flash, video, and social networking sites and applications with seemingly endless functions for SEOs. It is still possible to use GA to track keyword conversions once they are unlocked.
6. Data Studio
Use Data Studio to visualize your Google Search Console data. It has the same information as you can find in search console, but with the advantage of viewing it on a dashboard, so you can blend it with your Google Analytics data or add it to an existing marketing report.
7. MozCast
MozCast is an experiment in tracking the ‘“weather” patterns of the Google algorithm. It was built to help you keep track of the day-to-day changes in the Google algorithm.
8. Ahrefs’ SEO WordPress Plugin
This tool helps you perform content audits and monitor your backlinks so you can get more organic traffic to your website.
Best free crawling and indexing tools
Crawling and indexing help your site rank in search results. And there are plenty of free tools to do this.
9. Onpage Hero
Onpage Hero constantly adds more and more useful data points that you can then use in your Google Analytics property to monitor the SEO and grow your website through the powerful GA Dashboard.
10. Link Redirect Trace
Perform advanced, comprehensive, and the correct analysis of links, redirects, and canonical tags. Use this extension for your SEO analysis, on page SEO, off-page SEO, competitor analysis, and more.
11. Redirect Path
Flagging up 301, 302, 404, and 500 HTTP Status Codes, the Ayima Redirect Path plug-in brings attention to potential issues that may not otherwise be seen. As well as flagging up redirects and errors.
12. Screaming Frog
This one is a small desktop application that crawls a websites’ links, images, CSS, etc from an SEO perspective. It tells you what a search spider would see when it crawls a website.
13. Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer
The second tool by Screaming Frog makes it possible to upload log files, verify search engine bots, identify crawled Urls, and analyze search bot data and behavior for invaluable SEO insight.
14. SEOlyzer
By browsing your site, crawling bots (such as Googlebot) leave information in your server’s log files. Log analysis with Seolyzer.io allows you to aggregate all this unused data into efficient SEO KPIs.
15. Xenu
This free SEO tool automatically connects to your website and starts crawling your site as any search engine would crawl it. The great thing about Xenu is that it’s so easy to use. Just pop in the Url and it starts crawling right away.
Free tools for keyword research
A main component of a well-rounded SEO strategy is knowing which keywords to target. These free tools can help you identify which keywords to focus on.
16. AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic listens in to autocomplete data from search engines like Google then quickly cranks out every useful phrase and question people are asking around your keyword.
17. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
Get thousands of keyword ideas, calculate their traffic potential, and find out how difficult it is to rank for them.
18. Moz Keyword Explorer
Do better keyword research in less time. Identify which keywords your site could rank for right now and find high-impact suggestions.
19. Google Trends
Explore how Google data can be used to tell stories. Find out how the world is searching.
20. The Reddit Keyword Research Tool
Start typing in the name of a subreddit and pick one from the auto-generated list. Then click “Get Keywords” to extract keywords from that subreddit. Subreddits with lots of comments have more keywords than those with little activity.
21. AlsoAsked.com
AlsoAsked gives you a view of Google’s people also ask data, showing a breakdown of which questions users are asking about a topic and vitally, how those questions are linked together.
22. Google Keyword Planner
Search for words or phrases related to your products or services. This keyword research tool will help you find the keywords that are most relevant for your business and the monthly search volume. If you also use Google Ads you get more specific data.
23. The Surfer Keyword Research Module
If you need something more convenient than Keyword Planner, the Surfer Keyword Research module is here to take your keyword game to the next level. You’ll have the capacity to find phrases with the same search results in Google.
24. Ubersuggest
This free SEO tool allows you to get insight into the strategies that are working for others in your market so you can adopt them, improve them, and gain an edge.
Free link building tools
Link building still remains a key strategy for optimizing websites. Safeguard against penalties and broken links with these free link tools.
25. Disavow Links Tool
The Disavow tool is part of Google Search Console that allows websites to discount the value of an inbound link, helping to prevent link-based penalties.
26. Link Explorer
Finding new links to a site can not be done accurately using just one tool, however this one should be considered a first choice.
27. LinkMiner
Checks webpages for broken links, and pulls metrics on those links.
LinkMiner takes broken link checking to the next level. You can now find out more about the links you’re checking so you can make smarter decisions.
28. Detailed SEO Extension
Pull back title tag, meta description, meta robots tag and much more with Detailed SEO Extension.
Save hours looking through the source code of a page with this SEO analysis extension.
29. Backlink Checker
Neil Patel’s free backlink checker tool enables advanced filters that make it easy to identify the best link opportunities for your site. You can filter links by location, anchor text, domain score, page score, and Url.
30. Site Explorer
Get an in-depth look at the backlink profile and search traffic of any website or Url.
Free local SEO tools
Businesses have to protect their brand reputation and search credentials locally, as well as across the web. Between Google My Business and Merkle’s review ink generator you can track local SEO metrics.
31. Google My Business
The newest feature within Google My Business allows local SEO practitioners to see recent reviews on their listings in a single place and check the status of reviews they reported to Google.
32. Google Review Link Generator
Use the free tool by Merkle to easily find your business and generate your unique Google Review link. Then share the short Url with your customers and grow your Google reviews.
Best free mobile SEO tools
Mobile users are a growing segment of website visitors. People expect a seamless brand experience from one device to another. The performance of mobile pages will also affect your overall page rank. Use these tools to ensure mobile SEO is optimized. Since mobile-first indexing Google mostly uses the mobile version of content for indexing and ranking.
33. Mobile-Friendly Test
This tool lets you compare your mobile and desktop pages and reports on discrepancies between SEO signals (canonical, meta robots, hreflang tags, etc.), content (page title, links, alt=”text”, etc.) and structured data markups. It also checks if your page is mobile-friendly via Google’s API.
34. Mobile SERP Test
The Serperator tool by MobileMoxie gives you mobile search results at whatever location you want, specific down to an address, or by city, state or postcode / zip code. Most free SEO tools show only desktop rankings, and the best they can do is a postcode. They give you more geo-specificity so that you can see mobile search results as if you were standing in a specific address.
35. Test My Site
Get a site score with Google for the speed of your website to load and get advice on how to optimize it for better results.
36. PageSpeed Insights
Make your web pages fast on all devices by checking Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Best free SEO multi-tools
It’s handy when a free tool does more than one thing. These tools have been vetted by the SEO community.
37. Chrome DevTools
Chrome DevTools is a set of web developer tools built directly into the Google Chrome browser. DevTools can help you edit pages and diagnose problems quickly so you can build better websites, faster.
38. Marketing Miner
It doesn’t matter if you need to get data for dozens of domains or thousands of keywords. Marketing Miner will provide you with exactly what you need.
39. MozBar
MozBar is a free Chrome extension that makes it easy to get link metrics and do all your SEO on the go. It shows link metrics for pages and domains as you search, displaying the domain authority, page authority, and the number of backlinks for sites as you search.
40. Semrush
Track up to five keywords per day for position. Also, you can check the organic traffic for your website. View top keywords. See your top landing pages.
41. SEO Minion
SEO Minion is a Chrome extension that helps you in your daily SEO tasks such as on-page SEO analysis, broken link checking, Serp preview, etc.
42. SEOquake
Is a free plugin for browsers that provides you with key SEO metrics for a specific page, along with other useful tools such as SEO Audit.
43. Sheets for Marketers
Learn how to get your hands around user data, automate your work, and up your marketing game, without ever leaving Google Sheets.
44. SmallSEOTools
Check grammar, images, spelling, plagiarism.
45. Internet Ninjas
Check out their long list of free SEO tools and discover what SEO strategies are working for your site. Identify the most common issues and errors like broken links and images, empty alt text, absent meta tags, etc.
Best free on-page SEO tools
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing web page content for search engines and users.
46. Natural Language API Demo
Natural Language uses machine learning to reveal the structure and meaning of a text. You can extract information about people, places, and events, and better understand social media sentiment and customer conversations.
47. Onpage Hero
Onpage Hero scans your rendered webpage in real-time and sends SEO-relevant data as hits to your Google Analytics account. It turns Google Analytics into an SEO suite.
48. Rich Results Test
Test your publicly accessible page to see which rich results can be generated by the structured data it contains.
49. Structured Data Testing Tool
Search Console provides many useful debugging and monitoring reports and tools to test rendering, availability, and structured data indexing.
50. Google Tag Manager
Use Google Tag Manager to manage tags (measurement and marketing optimization JavaScript tags) on your site. Without editing your site code, you use the GTM user interface to add and update Google Ads, Google Analytics, Floodlight, and non-Google tags.
51. View Rendered Source
Just request the raw source as Googlebot and ensure perfect technical SEO. Works with GatsbyJS and Prerender.
52. SERPSim
The most accurate Serp simulator and Google snippet preview tool.
53. Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator
TechnicalSEO.com has a number of free SEO tools that you can leverage, but my favorite is their schema markup generator.
54. Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar
Ahrefs SEO Toolbar is a free extension for Chrome and Firefox that provides useful SEO data about the pages and websites you visit.
Top SEO tools for research
Keyword research is a necessary step before you can strategically grow key website performance metrics. It will help you to fine-tune your content to increase and improve the quality of organic search traffic.
55. BuzzSumo
Content research doesn’t have to be time-intensive or have an end date. Inform your content strategy on an ongoing basis, with a single click.
56. Hunter.io
Founded in 2015, Hunter’s mission is to give professionals the power to create new connections with the people that matter.
57. SimilarWeb
All in one Website analytics & competitive traffic intelligence platform – Compare website traffic and performance, analyze strategies & grow your market share.
58. Wappalyzer
Wappalyzer is more than a CMS detector or framework detector: it uncovers more than a thousand technologies in dozens of categories such as programming languages, analytics, marketing tools, payment processors, CRM, CDN, and others.
59. Wayback Machine
Use this free SEO tool for researching older links that may have disappeared. Tracking website modifications that resulted in traffic changes and using archived pages as evidence.
60. Bulk Domain Availability Checker
If you create numerous micro-niche websites that are based on popular keywords, it is important to have an effective domain availability checking tool that you can count on time after time.
Best free SEO tools for site speed
Speed is now a landing page factor for Google Search.
Check your site speed with these free tools.
61. Cloudflare
Cloudflare for individuals is built on a global network. Their free SEO package is ideal for people with personal or hobby projects that aren’t business-critical.
62. GTmetrix
GTmetrix was developed by Carbon60 as a tool for customers to easily test the performance of their webpages.
63. Lighthouse
Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more.
64. WP Rocket
Use it to improve the speed of your WordPress site, SEO rankings and conversions. No coding required.
65. SpeedMonitor.io
Track your website speed and performance data every day.
66. WebpageTest
Run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds.
67. Rank Math
Rank Math is a Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress that makes it easy for anyone to optimize their content with built-in suggestions based on widely-accepted best practices.
68. Yoast SEO
Yoast is an awesome, powerful tool that does most of the stuff you need for SEO, even the advanced stuff. And it’s free!
Best free technical SEO tools
This is the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. With technical SEO, you can help search engines access, crawl, understand and index your website without any problems.
69. Google Search Console
The Url Inspection tool provides detailed crawl, index, and serving information about your pages, directly from the Google index.
70. Log Hero
Log Hero makes bots visible in Google Analytics and is the best way to monitor your logs. It makes it easy to understand how search engines crawl and index your webpage.
71. Screaming Frog
SEO Spider is a website crawler that helps you improve onsite SEO, by extracting data & auditing for common SEO issues.
72. Barracuda Panguin Tool
Probably the best go-to tool when your organic traffic has dramatically dropped off, or you are no longer seeing your site in the Serps anymore.
73. Httpstatus.io
Easily check status codes, response headers, and redirect chains.
74. Smush
Let’s you compress any image in any directory so that you can optimize all the images on your site.
75. Wheregoes?
Have you ever wondered: Where does this link go? The Url redirect checker follows the path of the Url. It will show you the full redirection path of URLs.
76. Robots.txt Generator
Search Engines are using robots to crawl your pages. The robots.txt file is a text file that defines which parts of a domain can be crawled by a robot. In addition, the robots.txt file can include a link to the XML-sitemap.
77. Hreflang Tag Generator
Generate the hreflang tags for your multi-language or multi-country site easily and fast.
Free rank checking tools
A core task in daily SEO is monitoring Serp position. These free tools will help you tabs on your progress.
78. Ahrefs’ SERP Checker
This is one of the best free SEO tools to get an accurate ranking difficulty score and detailed SEO stats for the top 10 search results.
79. Local Search Results Checker
A strong tool for anyone serious about local search. Having them on your side is like having full-time local SEO staff!
80. WhatsMySerp’s
WhatsMySerp’s free SERP checker allows you to check the top 100 Google search results for multiple keywords. You can use it to Analyze Serps and to check your website position. It’s free, and available online, no download required.
81. Link-Assistant
Track keywords with no limit, check positions in Serps, see rankings for the exact location, and analyze the ranking performance of any keyword — all in one ranking tool.
Best free keyword tracking tools
If you are serious about SEO you will have a list of target keywords that you want to rank for. These free keyword tracking tools will make your life easier.
82. Dyno Mapper
Automatically import keywords from a domain and receive daily keyword tracking reports about rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing with the ability to track by location or device.
83. SEO Profiler
Track the ranking changes of your web pages on Google, Google Mobile and Bing in 169 countries and languages on desktop and mobile.
84. Woorank
Discover target keywords and hidden opportunities in your market.
85. Advanced Web Ranking
A powerful rank tracking tool that helps you get the most insights out of your ranking data.
86. Authority Labs
Whether you’re tracking one site with a few keywords or hundreds of sites with thousands of keywords, this is a tool that will work for you.
87. RankWatch
The free tools include a website analyzer, mobile-friendly test, and Google algorithm updates.
88. MicroSite Masters
Microsite Masters allows you to stay ahead of the SEO curve with a truly intelligent rank tracker that lets you see the whole picture.
89. GrowthBar
Get billions of keywords, backlinks, and create content in one click with GrowthBar.
90. Sure Oak
Enter your domain along with up to 10 keywords and find their position.
Best free SEO tools (still under the radar )
These less well known free SEO tools have been rated and recommended by the community, but are less popular than some of the previously listed tools.
91. Majestic
Develop backlink strategies with our Link Intelligence data, build the strongest SEO backlink campaigns to drive organic traffic.
92. Clicky
A reliable way to monitor, analyze, and react to your blog or web traffic in real-time.
93. Yandex Webmaster
They track the search queries for the popular Russian search engine Yandex. The service allows you to monitor changes in displays, number of clicks, CTR snippets, and other indicators.
94. JSON-LD Schema Generator
One of the easiest ways to add Schema’s structured markup to a page is to use JSON-LD.
95. Classyschema.org
Check if your structured data was implemented correctly.
96. SerpRobot
See your ranking position for up to five keywords.
97. XML Sitemaps
Simply enter your site’s Url and some parameters, and XML Sitemaps will create a sitemap that you can upload to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
98. Copyscape
Enter a Url for a blog post or website, and Copyscape can tell you where else that content exists online.
99. Exploding Topics
They surface rapidly growing topics before they become popular.
100. Headmaster SEO
Is a small desktop program that can quickly check Urls in bulk for status code, redirect details, response time, response headers and HTTP header fields.
