23 Best Free SEO Tools For 2024 (Top Picks)
Want to rank in the search results but not ready to invest in a paid tool just yet? We’ve got you covered.
In this post, we’ll be looking at the best free SEO tools on the market.
We’ve made sure to pick out a good mix of SEO tools that help with all aspects of search engine optimization and have included both completely free solutions as well as freemium platforms.
1. SEO PowerSuite
SEO PowerSuite is a free all-in-one SEO software solution (with a premium version also available). Anyone can download it for free and get access to the complete gamut of SEO tools, from keyword research and rank tracking to backlink checking and more.
Unlike most SEO tools, SEO PowerSuite is downloadable. You access it through your desktop rather than your browser, but some of its features like the backlink checker run in the cloud.
There’s a lot you can do in SEO PowerSuite but some of the highlights are its content optimization tool, sitemap generator, auditing tool, and local track tracking.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| True all-in-one solution | Requires download |
| Very broad feature set | Projects cannot be saved unless upgrading to the premium version |
| Excellent rank tracking and keyword research capabilities | |
| Fully integrated |
Pricing
You can start out with the free edition of SEO PowerSuite. For premium benefits, you can purchase a paid license starting from $299/year.
2. Hunter.io
Hunter.io is a simple but very useful outreach tool. It lets you find the email addresses behind any website in seconds, which you can then use in your link-building campaigns.
One of the most important parts of SEO is acquiring backlinks, which help you to boost your authority and ranking power. And one of the most effective ways to build backlinks is through blogger outreach.
The idea is to reach out to other website owners in your niche in order to boost your exposure. This might mean asking if you can contribute a free guest post in exchange for a link, or asking them to share your content with their audience.
But to do that, you need to have contact details. And on many websites, contact details are hard to find.
Hunter.io solves that problem by searching the web to find a list of people working in the company behind the website, along with their email addresses. Once you have that information, you’ll know who to reach out to.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Easy to use | Limited use cases |
| Find email addresses behind websites | |
| Great for SEO outreach campaigns and link building |
Pricing
The free version of Hunter is limited to 25 monthly searches. Paid plans with higher usage limits and premium features start from $49/month.
3. Semrush SEO Writing Assistant
Semrush SEO Writing Assistant is a smart writing editor that helps you write the best possible SEO content. Use it to give your content the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.
It integrates with WordPress, Google Docs, and MS Word 365. Once you’ve connected it, it’ll check your content as you write it and provide suggestions to help you optimize it for SEO and user engagement.
Semrush SEO Writing Assistant analyzes your content in detail and grades it on readability, originality, SEO, and tone of voice. You’ll be awarded a score from 1% to 100% in each area depending on how well optimized it is and given a checklist of steps you can take to boost it.
It uses real-time data from top-ranking results for your target keyword in order to suggest specific keywords that will enrich your content and boost topic coverage.
The SEO Writing Assistant is part of the wider Semrush digital marketing platform, which also includes lots of other useful tools.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Great for content optimization | Only one Content Template on the free version |
| Optimize for readability and SEO | |
| Checks for plagiarism (originality) | |
| Integrates with WordPress and Google Docs |
Pricing
You can use Semrush Writing Assistant for free. However, with a Free Semrush account, you can only create one Content Template.
To unlock more Content Templates and full access to all of Semrush tools, you’ll need to upgrade. Paid plans start from $129.95/month.
Read our Semrush review.
4. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is another website crawler. Their SEO spider tool crawls website pages and extracts all the data you need to improve your onsite SEO.
You can use Screaming Frog for advanced site auditing of both small and very large sites. Find broken links that are harming your optimization, analyze your page titles and meta descriptions, etc.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Advanced site auditing | No monthly subscription option for paid version |
| Crawl 500 URLs for free | |
| Great for big and small sites |
Pricing
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is free but it’s limited to 500 URLs. If you need to crawl more than that, or you want to access premium features, you can upgrade for £149.00 per year.
5. Answer The Public
Answer The Public is a search listening tool for SEO and content research. You can use it to find topics that your target audience is asking about and discover new question-related keywords.
It’s essentially a keyword research tool with a cool interface. All you have to do is type in a topic (or seed keyword) related to your business (e.g. ‘chocolate’). Then, Answer The Public will listen in to autocomplete data from search engines around the web to crank out a ton of related keywords.
It sorts these keyword ideas into different sentence types (i.e. ‘what’ questions, ‘why’ questions’, comparative vs phrases, etc.). Because so many of the suggestions are question-related search terms, it’s great for compiling ideas for long-string keywords to include in your FAQ sections.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Goldmine of content ideas | Free version has low daily limit |
| Great supplementary tool for keyword research | |
| Find ideas for FAQ sections | |
| Easy to use |
Pricing
You can try Answer The Public out for free with a limited number of daily searches. Paid plans start from $79/month (billed annually).
6. Keyword Tool
Keyword Tool is a keyword research platform that uses data from autocomplete to provide suggestions.
You can use it to find popular global search queries, or pull suggestions from specific countries.
You can also specify that platform you want to find keywords on. It can grab suggestions from Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, eBay, Google Trends, and even social network sites like Instagram and Twitter.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Simple and easy to use | Limited access unless you subscribe to Pro |
| Powered by search suggestions | |
| Supports multiple platforms and regions | |
| Provides parameters like CPC and search volume |
Pricing
You can try Keyword Tool out for free but you won’t be able to see all the results unless you upgrade. Paid plans start from $69/month billed annually.
7. Rank Math
Rank Math is a powerful, full-featured WordPress SEO plugin. The free version is very generous and includes the most important SEO tools.
Rank Math can help with all kinds of SEO tasks. The instant indexing feature pings search engines to get your new content indexed in the SERPs quickly, and the built-in content analysis tool helps you make sure all your pages are perfectly optimized.
You can also use Rank Math for social tags, XML and HTML sitemaps, titles and metas, etc.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| All-in-one SEO plugin for WordPress | Not many other SEO plugins have the option to import data from Rank Math |
| Powerful content analysis tool | WordPress only |
| Extremely lightweight considering the features | |
| Supports Open Graph, schema markup, and more | |
| Free version offers features that other SEO plugins include on paid plans |
Pricing
You can use Rank Math for free. Paid plans with premium features start from $59.
8. Clicky Analytics
Clicky Analytics provides privacy-friendly website analytics that you can use to measure your website’s SEO performance.
You can use it to monitor and analyze your website traffic in real-time. View metrics like page visits, average time per visit, bounce rate, etc. Plus, get advanced metrics like heatmaps to see how visitors interact with your pages.
Clicky is fully GDPR-compliant and privacy-friendly.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| GDPR compliant analytics | Outdated UI |
| Lots of metrics tracked | |
| Heat mapping tool |
Pricing
You can use Clicky for free on 1 website for up to 3,000 daily page views. Paid plans with premium access are available.
9. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is the original keyword research tool. You can use it to find and analyze keywords to inform both your SEO and PPC campaigns.
Unlike many other keyword research platforms, Google Keyword Planner is completely free. It also provides fairly accurate data and is where most other platforms pull their own data from.
It’s great for getting a rough idea of search volumes and finding keyword ideas, but the interface is a little clunky and built for PPC advertisers, rather than SEOs.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Accurate and reliable keyword data | Built primarily for PPC campaigns (not SEO) |
| Powered by Google | Monthly search volume ranges (not exact figures) |
| Find tons of keyword ideas in minutes | |
| Completely free |
Pricing
Google Keyword Planner is 100% free.
10. Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free website analytics tool powered by Google. It provides you with information on your website visitors and performance in the Google SERPs, as well as other important data.
You can use GSC to see which keywords are driving the most visits, and which pages those visitors are landing on. You can then use this information to guide your SEO strategy.
Aside from basic analytics, GSC can also be used to submit your sitemaps (for faster indexing) and check your Core Web Vitals (an important SEO metric pertaining to the user experience).
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Completely free | Basic keyword ranking data only |
| Easy to use | Not possible to distinguish where you are ranking by location |
| Submit sitemaps | |
| Track search rankings, traffic and Core Web Vitals |
Pricing
Google Search Console is a free tool.
11. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is another keyword research tool worth checking out. You can use it to find new keyword ideas and see those that are driving the most traffic to your competitors.
It’s super simple to use. Just enter a seed keyword to generate a list of related terms and analyze them, or enter a competitor’s domain to reverse engineer their SEO and content marketing strategy.
In recent years, more features have been added such as rank tracking.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Easy to use | Limited free use |
| Generate tons of keywords | |
| Competitor analysis |
Pricing
You can try out Ubersuggest for free with limited access. Paid plans start from $29/month.
12. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most popular analytics tools. It provides more in-depth data than Google Search Console and can help you track your SEO performance.
You can use Google Analytics to track site visitors in real-time, see what actions visitors take on your website, and uncover a ton of other useful insights. It’s completely free and an essential tool for all website owners.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Detailed analytics | Might be overkill for users that only need basic analytics |
| Behavior flow reports | Incredibly complex for beginners |
| Measure ROI | |
| 100% free |
Pricing
Google Analytics is a free SEO tool. However, there is a premium version for enterprise customers. You’ll need to request pricing for that.
13. SEOPress
SEOPress is another awesome WordPress SEO plugin. Like Rank Math, it’s an all-in-one tool that can help with all aspects of your SEO campaigns.
You can use the SEOPress toolkit to optimize your content, add schema markup, generate smart sitemaps, add Open Graph tags and more.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Lots of useful SEO features | WordPress only |
| All-in-one solution | |
| Generous free plan |
Pricing
You can start with the free version of SEOPress. Paid plans start from $49/year.
14. Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools is a collection of free SEO tools from Bing.
It’s essentially Bing’s answer to Google Search Console (but arguably, even better). You can use it to monitor search performance, submit sitemaps, analyze your backlink profile, conduct keyword research, audit your site, and more.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Easy to use interface | Built to improve performance on Bing’s search engine (not Google) |
| Lots of SEO tools rolled into one | |
| Completely free |
Pricing
You can use Bing Webmaster Tools for free.
15. Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio is a tool that lets you convert data into customizable reports and dashboards.
It’s available as part of the Enterprise Google Analytics 360 suite. You can use it for free to create easy-to-read, beautifully visualized reports. If you’re running an SEO agency, this will come in useful when preparing reports for clients.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Ideal for SEO reporting | Limited use cases (only for data/reporting) |
| Create interactive, eye-catching data visualizations | |
| Powered by Google | |
| Completely free |
Pricing
Google Data Studio is free.
16. Measure
Measure is a developer tool powered by PageSpeed Insights. It lets you test and measure your page quality and provides recommendations on how to improve.
While Measure is powered by PageSpeed Insights, it’s not exactly the same. Unlike PSI, Measure isn’t performance-focused. It checks the overall quality of the web page and provides insights including performance, accessibility, and SEO.
It’s a great way to measure and optimize your site pages for a broader range of SEO quality signals.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Measure your page quality | Developer-heavy (hard to understand for beginners) |
| Provides custom recommendations | |
| Deeper analysis than PageSpeed Insights |
Pricing
It’s completely free to run an audit with Measure.
17. Google Trends
Google Trends is a fantastic complimentary keyword research tool to use in addition to Google Keyword Planner. It helps you find trending search terms around the world.
Unlike Google Keywords Planner, Google Trends won’t tell you the average monthly search volume of a keyword. Instead, it tells you how search interest for that keyword has changed over time. It also generates a list of related trending topics or queries that can inform your SEO strategy.
To use Google Trends, start by typing a keyword into the search bar. Next, select the time period region you want to draw data from. If you’re running a local SEO campaign, choose the country you’re interested in ranking in. If you’re targeting a global market, just choose worldwide.
You’ll then see a graph showing search interest for that keyword over time. If the line is trending upward, it’s potentially a sign that the monthly search volume is going to increase over the next year or vice versa.
Below that graph, you’ll see a list of related topics and queries. You can use this to find new keyword ideas to use in your SEO campaigns.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Great for finding trending content topics in different geographical regions | Doesn’t show search volume or competition |
| Validate keywords based on search interest trends | |
| Discover new keyword ideas | |
| Compare two search terms side-by-side |
Pricing
Google Trends is a free tool.
18. MozBar
MozBar is a free SEO toolbar and Google Chrome extension. It’s super popular with over 800,000 installations and is the best way to check Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) in your browser.
Website authority is an important ranking factor. The more authoritative search engines like Google think a website is, the better chance it stands of ranking in the SERPs.
As a result, high-authority sites are super hard to outrank. When you’re putting together your SEO strategy and trying to figure out which keywords are worth targeting, it helps to know how much authority the sites already ranking for those keywords have.
That’s where MozBar comes in.
All you have to do is add it to your browser (for free) and it’ll show you the DA and PA of any domain while you browse the internet. Moz calculates DA and PA based on various factors, mostly related to the number and quality of backlinks the domain or page has.
If you see a bunch of 80-90+ DA sites ranking on page one of the SERPs, you know it’s probably a difficult keyword to rank for. If you see a bunch of 10-20+ DA sites, you know it’s probably low competition.
Aside from DA and PA, you also get access to a bunch of other metrics while viewing any website page or SERP. You can view the page’s spam score, the number of backlinks, referring domains, etc. at a glance or open up a Link Analysis to take a closer look.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| View DA/PA and link metrics in the SERPs | Can be buggy/glitchy sometimes |
| Analyze any domain in one click | |
| Useful for keyword research and link building |
Pricing
You can download and use MozBar for free.
If you want to unlock additional features and more metrics, you can upgrade to MozBar Premium for $179 per month.
19. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular free WordPress SEO plugins on the market. Add it to your WP site to optimize your site and content for search.
Yoast offers an incredibly generous free plan. Anyone can install and activate it without spending a penny and get access to a suite of powerful SEO tools.
It will take care of all the most critical technical SEO tasks for you. You can use it to submit XML sitemaps to Google (to help with indexing), automatically manage redirects to avoid 404 errors, customize titles and meta descriptions, etc.
But where Yoast really shines is its content optimization feature. The built-in content checker makes it easy to make sure your content is optimized for search before you hit publish.
That said, I would recommend a dedicated content optimization tool like Surfer or Frase being used in addition to Yoast.
Underneath the WordPress editor, you’ll see the Yoast content checker toolbar. It uses a simple traffic light system to score content and provides a checklist of what you’ve done well, and what you still need to improve.
All you have to do is turn red items green to boost your chances of ranking well in the SERPs. When your overall score is good, you can publish with confidence.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Powerful content checker tool | Free version limited to one target keyword |
| Full-featured SEO plugin | Has slowly moved free features into their premium version over the years |
| Takes care of the backend, technical tasks | WordPress only |
| Generous free plan |
Pricing
You can use the basic version of Yoast SEO for free.
To unlock the full power of the plugin, you can upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium for $99 per year.
20. Keyword Surfer
Keyword Surfer is a keyword research chrome extension by Surfer SEO. It’s one of the only free chrome extensions that provides estimated monthly search volumes as you browse the internet.
Let me know if this sounds familiar: You’re working on your SEO strategy and researching potential keywords to target. You’re using Google search suggestions to brainstorm ideas and when you find one that has potential, you note it down.
Then, you open up Google Keywords Planner (GKP) or another keyword research tool and paste it in to find out its average monthly search volume so you know whether or not it’s worth targeting.
There are a lot of steps in that process, don’t you think? Wouldn’t it be easier if you could see the search volume right there in Google as soon as the suggestion pops up? That way, you can instantly validate its potential without having to open up GKP first.
Well, that’s where Keyword Surfer comes in handy. All you have to do is install it in your Chrome browser. Then, whenever you search for a keyword in Google (or on any other search engine), it’ll display the search volume and the CPC right there in the search bar.
And that’s not all. It’ll also display other useful metrics below the pages ranking in Google for that search term, including the domain’s monthly traffic and the number of words on the page, which can help you to analyze the competition. Keyword Surfer is the only extension we’ve seen that offers all of this for free.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Easy keyword research | Occasional bugs |
| Time-saving benefits | |
| Competitor analysis | |
| Provides CPC, search volume, and more in your browser |
Pricing
Keyword Surfer is 100% free. Plans start from $89/month with annual discounts available. Try with a 7-day free trial of their features.
Read our Surfer SEO review.
21. All In One Schema Rich Snippets
All In One Schema Rich Snippets is a free WordPress plugin that makes it easy to implement schema markup.
Schema markup is a structured data vocabulary that you can use to give search engines more information about your website pages and improve your visibility in the SERPs.
Once you add schema to your pages, Google can use it to serve up rich results. Rich results (rich snippets) are short summaries of your page that appear in the search results. They provide more information to searchers than regular results and often have eye-catching, interactive elements (like star ratings and FAQ lists).
Having your website pages appear alongside rich results in the SERPs has also been shown to improve click-through rates (CTR), which makes schema an important SEO strategy.
The only problem is that adding schema is a technical process that involves messing around with HTML code. As such, non-tech-savvy bloggers and small website owners may feel it’s out of their reach.
Fortunately, All In One Schema Rich Snippets makes it easy. Instead of editing your code, you can just install and activate the plugin and let it take care of everything for you.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Easy schema markup | Use old MicroData that affects front-end design (Schema data is visible on the website) |
| Beginner-friendly | |
| Improve SERP visibility |
Pricing
All In One Schema Rich Snippets is a free plugin. However, it uses MicroData, so it affects the front-end design of your site.
Schema Pro is a premium alternative that costs $79 per year. It uses JSON-LD technology and won’t affect your site design.
22. PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a developer tool by Google. It enables website owners to analyze the performance and Core Web Vitals of a web page and then offers suggestions on how to improve.
Ever since Google’s Page Experience update, user experience has become very important from an SEO perspective. Google’s algorithm now places a lot more importance on ‘Core Web Vitals’ — a set of metrics/ranking factors that measures the user experience.
Core Web Vitals are made up of three different metrics: largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift. These roughly correlate to loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) analyzes your website and tells you how you’re performing in these three metrics. All you have to do is enter your website URL in the bar and click Analyze.
Based on your performance, you’ll be given a ‘passed’ or ‘failed’ assessment so you know whether or not you need to take action urgently.
At the bottom of the page, you’ll see a deeper diagnostics analysis and a list of ‘opportunities’, which tell you what you can do to improve your score.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Analyzes Core Web Vitals | Suggestions can be difficult to understand for non-developers |
| Provides suggestions on how to boost performance | |
| Measures three metrics | |
| Deep diagnostics |
Pricing
PageSpeed Insights is completely free.
23. Smush
Smush is a free image optimization plugin for WordPress. It can help you boost your site speed (and with it, your SEO) by compressing and resizing your images.
We’ve already talked about how site speed is an important SEO ranking factor. But did you know that the images you use in your website posts and pages have a huge effect on speeds?
Large, bulky images can take a long time to load when your visitors open your website. This not only harms the user experience but also increases your average page loading speeds, which sends the wrong kind of signal to Google and can hurt your organic ranking position.
The solution: Smush. It’s one of our all-time favorite WordPress plugins and a must-have for any blogger or website owner concerned about SEO.
It’s super simple to set up and can have a dramatic impact on your search performance. All you have to do is install and activate it on your WP site, then configure the settings for automatic image optimization.
Smush uses lossless compression to reduce the file size of all the images you use without reducing the quality. You can bulk optimize and compress all the existing images that are slowing down your site with one click, and use the built-in automation to automatically compress new images as soon as you upload them to your media library.
And if that wasn’t enough, Smush also offers a neat feature called ‘lazy loading’. Once you enable lazy loading, Smush will defer offscreen images so that they don’t load for your visitors until they’re visible on the screen (i.e. when they scroll down the page). This reduces initial page loading times for further speed gains.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Optimize images to improve speeds | Intrusive advertisements unless you upgrade |
| Lazy load feature | |
| Automatic compression and optimization | |
| Bulk image optimization |
Pricing
The regular version of Smush is completely free. You can upgrade to Smush Pro for $5/month to unlock premium features.
Final thoughts
As you can see, there are plenty of free SEO tools out there. You probably don’t have time to try them all out, so here’s a recap of our favorite:
- SEO PowerSuite is a free downloadable all-in-one SEO software solution. It comes with everything you need for your SEO marketing campaigns, including a powerful keyword research tool, local and global rank tracking, site auditing, backlink research, etc. While you can’t save projects in the free version, the functionality you get access to is extremely good.
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