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Top 10 Free SEO Tools

Many small businesses and recent SEO initiates don’t have a huge budget for fancy tools and software subscriptions. And sometimes even seasoned experts need to operate on a shoestring of funds. Thankfully there’s plenty of great free SEO tools available for you to use! Check out my top 10 free favorite SEO tools, first here’s a TL;DR list:

  1. Screaming Frog
  2. Free Google Tools
  3. Semrush
  4. Ahrefs
  5. TechnicalSEO.com (Merkle)
  6. GTmetrix
  7. AlsoAsked
  8. Answer the Public
  9. Featured.com
  10. Ayima Redirect Path

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog allows you crawl up to 500 URLs for free. For many small business owners that’s more than enough to help audit and improve their SEO. Below is a great breakdown from Screaming Frog on the features offered with their free version:

Free Google Tools for SEO

Google has five free tools that are particularly helpful for SEOs:

Learn how to setup Google Search Console & Google Analytics 4 to get started!

Semrush

Semrush offers a great collection of free SEO tools. Many of the report and much of the data is capped for free users, but there’s still a lot you can do. Semrush free provides:

  • 10 Domain Overview analyses per day
  • 100 results in the Keyword Magic Tool per month
  • 1 project with 10 keywords tracked keywords
  • Site audit up to 100 URLs

The Domain Overview tool alone has a wealth of information that’s great for understanding your website performance, analyzing competitors and pitching clients. Learn how to take full use of all Semrush’s free features in their (very lengthy) article.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs has a full suite of free SEO tools to help with keyword research, on-page SEO, backlink monitoring and more. One of my favorite free Ahrefs tools is their free backlink checker. Also, their Webmaster Tools platform is great for monitoring your site health, backlinks and keyword rankings. Although it is worth calling out that in order to use Ahref’s Webmaster Tools you have to agree to sharing your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data with them. Some webmasters aren’t comfortable with this and while I don’t have many concerns myself – wouldn’t blame anyone that does.

TechnicalSEO.com (Merkle)

Merkle created a site with a bunch of free SEO tools that every digital marketer should have bookmarked. TechnicalSEO.com (and more specifically /tools) has a great selection of tools. And with Google retiring their mobile-friendly tool, Merkle’s is a great alternative. The sitemap generator is also a lifesaver if you need to create a hreflang sitemap for international SEO.

GTmetrix

GTmetrix is a get performance testing tool that can help analyze, monitor and report out on page load speed. Recently they started requiring an account to run reports, but it’s still free to use.

AlsoAsked

AlsoAsked is a great keyword research tool that provides questions related to your query visually mapped out. They provide 3 free searches a day and allow you to download a PNG of the tree graph. Clicking on the plus symbols next to questions will queue up a map for that keyword (uses an additional search). Personally, I love the simplicity of AlsoAsked. It reminds me a lot of Answer the Public before it was acquired by NP digital, but even cleaner.

Answer the Public

Answer The Public is a great keyword research tool for SEOs and content strategists. With a free account you get 3 daily searches which provides a surprising amount of data. This use to be one of my favorite free SEO tools, but then Neil Patel put his face on the homepage. All jokes aside I strongly recommend checking this tool for keyword and content ideas.

Featured.com

Signing up as an expert on Featured.com is a great way to build backlinks for SEO. And the best part is that they offer 3 answers (potential backlinks) free each month. Once you sign up you can search from questions waiting to be answered. Answer questions with quality responses for a chance to be selected to be quoted in a publication. I really like the dashboard and workflow of Featured.com. And more importantly, I’ve been able to get a few quality backlinks for free using it!

Ayima Redirect Path

OK, this probably is the only time you will ever see this on an SEO tool top 10 list. But hear me out. This is the BEST chrome extension for SEOs to use. And it’s free. Ayima Redirect Path is just a chrome extension that checks HTTP headers flagging redirects and errors. It’s super simple, but incredibly helpful. I can’t count the number of times it’s helped me catch issues others had missed or diagnose a problem to understand the root cause. I also regularly use and recommend the Wappalyzer and BuiltWith Chrome extensions. These tools can help you understand the tech stack of the website you’re working on which I find super useful.

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