It is a fact that people work better and smarter when equipped with the right tools.
The difference a proper tool can make in getting a job done faster, better, and with better results is incredible.
Applying the same thought process to SEO marketing, using some great SEO tools will help you get faster and better results with your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts.
In this blog, I have compiled a comprehensive list of the best free SEO tools in the market, covering a range of applications and several popular uses.
The tools are fast, free, and simple to use, and hopefully, you will find some fantastic tools to help optimize your website.
What are SEO tools?
SEO tools are either desktop or cloud-based (online) solutions that empower you to perform different SEO tasks such as on-page, off-page, and technical SEO on your website.
There are many SEO activities such as keyword research, website analytic, link building, page speed optimization, and more.
For each of these activities, you will find plenty of tools that get the work done faster and make your life easier. These tools are created to ensure that they can do all these tasks in less time and more efficiently.
There are dozens and dozens of free SEO tools available today, and in this list, I bring to the best and most useful to add to your toolbox.
I have classified them into different categories as per the SEO function they are used to.
- Keyword Research tools
- On-page SEO tools
- Link Building tools
- Technical SEO tools
- Rank Checker tools
- SEO Analytics tools
- Local SEO tools
Let us dive into 35 best free SEO tools for 2021.
Keyword research tools
These tools help you with your website’s keyword research
1. Google Suggest
Launched in 2007, Google Suggest is one of the critical aspects of Google search and rapidly became a central feature of Google search.
Any time you search for something on Google, many things happen behind the screen that you don’t see. Google’s advanced algorithm seeks to propose search queries that adequately complement the search term, and suggested keywords are shown under the search bar.
You will typically see 3 – 5 suggestions, and if you are lucky, you might even get up to 10 recommendations.
These suggested keywords are what your target audience is also searching for and are a value add in your keyword research, and it is entirely free.
2. Google Keyword Planner
This is a keyword tool from Google itself. It will help you check the keyword’s average monthly searches, difficulty level, and bid value for the top position, and more. I highly recommend using the Google Keyword Planner to find your target keyword and all other keyword research-related activities.
Try Google Keyword Planner here
3. Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator
One of the free tools provided by Ahrefs is Keyword Generator. It draws the top 100 keyword ideas from its database of more than ten billion keywords for any seed keywords or search terms. You get many keywords related information such as monthly search volume, Keyword Difficulty (KD) for the first ten terms, and more, which are useful for planning your keyword strategy. Not just Google, this keyword generator will also help you find keywords for Bing, YouTube, and Amazon as well.
Try Ahref Keyword Generator here
4. Google Trends
Knowing how popular or used your selected keyword is essential, and this tool will help you do exactly that.
You can search for your brand name or the most important services you offer and find out how often people are searching for it.
You can search for any term’s popularity, and it also shows you the related queries, related topics, and more.
5. Ubersuggest
The next free SEO tool on my list is Ubersuggest, which marketing legend Neil Patel offers. This tool helps you with a hoard of things in the SEO department.
You can research your desired keyword, related keywords, top keywords along with optimization insights and information about paid marketing and ranking difficulties.
You can even add the domain name, and it will give you information about the best backlinks of your competitor’s domain and data such as top-ranking pages of that domain.
You can then easily either replicate a similar process for your website or reverse engineer the strategy to get similar or even better results.
6. SEMrush
SEMrush is the ultimate do-it-your SEO tool that can help you with your keyword research, rank tracking, on-page SEO, backlinks audit, content analysis, and more.
It is a complete tool that enables you to improve your website SEO, competitor analysis, and everything else related to your SEO efforts.
You can get a free 14-day trial, and after 14 days, you can use the limited free version (5 searches a day).
On-page SEO tools
Understanding the rules of On-page SEO, these tools help you rank higher on search engines.
7. Yoast SEO Plugin (WordPress)
This is the #1 SEO plugin for WordPress. It is one of my favorite online SEO tools to implement on-page SEO elements on my WordPress website, and I cannot recommend it enough.
Although it is a paid plugin, they have a limited free version that offers all the basic things you need to get the job done.
If you want features such as more keywords and key phrases, content insights, internal linking, and more, you can opt for the paid version too.
8. All in One SEO Pack (WordPress)
All in One SEO Pack is also a free SEO tool in my top SEO tools list. It is a free WordPress plugin that will help you with everything related to SEO.
It’s the perfect alternative to the comprehensive Yoast SEO plugin. The best thing about this tool is that it auto-generates the meta description tag using your target keywords.
Try All in One SEO Pack here or Get Pro Version of All in One SEO Pack
9. WooRank
WooRank is again one of the best free SEO tools to analyze your website’s performance and quantify the optimization efforts.
It helps in analyzing all necessary SEO components such as the title tag, meta tags, headings, alt tags, mobile-friendliness, backlinks, social media integrations, and more.
10. Seoptimer
Seoptimer also helps you quickly analyze your website’s on-page SEO, usability, overall performance, and more.
Additionally, it offers recommendations on what further steps you should take to enhance your SEO tactics and get better rankings for your website.
In comparison, it trumps WooRank if you want to look at your website’s SEO status.
Test your website on Seoptimer
11. Google’s Rich Results Test
The Google Rich Results Verification tool determines if your website is suitable to be featured on Google’s rich snippets by monitoring the structured markup data on your page.
Try Google’s Rich Results Tool here
12. Google Tag Manager
For all intents and purposes, Google Tag Manager is used to simply integrate ‘tags’ for other tools such as Google Analytics and Google Ads into your website’s HTML code.
Advanced users can use Tag Manager other features such as auto event trigger to fire when certain events occur on the website.
One thing to note is that Google advises not to use Tag Manager to insert necessary items such as structured data; it is still useful for many SEO activities.
Try the Tag Manager Tool for free
Link building tools
A crucial aspect of getting organic traffic, these tools help you with your link building efforts or off-page SEO
13. Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker
If the question is what the best SEO tools are, Ahrefs Backlink Checker definitely makes the list. This free SEO optimization tool helps you by showing you the 100 top backlinks for any website or page.
It also gives you information about the five most-linked pages, popular anchor texts, the number of total backlinks on the page, the domain,
and the domain ranking and URL score, which is unique to this tool.
Try Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker here.
14. Hunter.io
Another great online SEO tools, Hunter.io, fetches all email addresses associated with the website. It is quite useful for building relationships for backlinking purposes.
With up to 50 free searches in a month, you may use this as a tool to improve your outreach via email and get more backlinks for your website.
All you have to do is enter the domain and the name of the user, and voila, you have what you need to contact the person.
15. Scraper
As the name suggests, Scraper is a data scraping tool used to collect data from webpages into a spreadsheet.
The Chrome extension of Scraper is a useful SEO tool for backlinking purposes. It can be used for various reasons, including scraping possible backlinks from search results from Google.
Technical SEO Tools
The Technical SEO tools help you improve the structure of your website for search engine bots to understand your content
16. Ahrefs Webmaster Tool
One of the best free SEO software tools, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, is all you need to manage your website’s technical SEO.
It will help boost the efficiency of your website and drive maximum organic traffic.
Some of the noteworthy features of this all-in-one SEO tool include monitoring your website’s technical health, finding and fixing any SEO issues, identifying interlinking opportunities, and finding the keywords that you rank for, among other things.
17. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a nifty tool for auditing and analyzing the technical SEO for your website.
It crawls your website and allows you to explore the results in real-time, find any technical SEO issues, and make informed decisions on fixing them.
Using Screaming Frog, you can easily find broken links, review your page titles & meta tags, find duplicate content, generate XML sitemaps, and more. You can crawl up to 500 URLs with the free version.
18. Google Mobile-Friendly Test
With Mobile-First Indexing becoming mandatory, businesses have no choice but to ensure that their website is mobile-friendly.
To help implement this change, Google launched its Friendly Test Tool to examine its performance and user experience from a mobile device.
All you have to do is add the URL in the box, and it will show you if your webpage is mobile-friendly or not. You can even do it by copying pasting your code.
Test your website with Mobile-Friendly Test
19. Robots.txt Generator
Robots.txt is a text file that mostly consists of the root directory of your website. This file tells the search engines bots about what pages are to be crawled and indexed on the websites and are not to be crawled. Robots.txt Generator tool helps create correctly formatted robots.txt in seconds.
Try Robot.txt file generator for free
20. Google XML Sitemaps (WordPress)
XML sitemaps help search engines like Google and Bing index your site more efficiently as the search engine bots can view your site’s complete structure and understand it better.
The WordPress plugin of the Google XML site map will automatically create and submit your website’s sitemaps to your Google Search Console.
Learn more about Google XML sitemap
21. Google PageSpeed Insights
Google’s PageSpeed Insights will analyze your website and show you the website’s speed score. It will also offer suggestions on how to improve your page speed by listing down the problems and solutions.
Test your website with PageSpeed Insights
22. Webpagetest.org
It is known in the SEO community that site speed and, as a result, page speed is one of the crucial elements of the technical SEO and greatly impacts your search engine rankings.
A free SEO tool, webpagetest.org, analyzes your website and shows you the breakdown of your website score.
It gives you a complete overview of how your website is loading, where it takes more time, and the lagging areas. You can efficiently address those issues and increase your website speed.
Test your website on webpagetest.org
23. Free Broken Link Checker
The name is enough to tell you that this tool will check all the broken links (dead links) on your website. Finding broken links and replacing them with new ones is excellent for your link building strategy as well.
Try Free Broken Link Checker here
24. FAQ Page Schema Generator
The schema is also known as the semantic vocabulary of tags. You can add schema to your site’s HTML code, and it will enable search engines to better read and represent your page in SERPs.
One of my creations, the FAQ Schema Generator, a.k.a JSON-LD Generator, is a free tool that will help you quickly create the structured data snippet for your website page and display a rich snippet in the Google SERP.
Try my FAQ Page Schema Generator for free
Rank Checker Tools
As the name suggests, these tools allow you to check how your website ranks at different locations.
25. SERPfox
When it comes to tracking website rankings for the given keywords, I use Serpfox. You can add keywords for your website and locations, and it will monitor the outcome as per the location specified. It is a great free SEO tool for checking ranks.
26. Ahrefs’ SERP Checker
Ahrefs’ SERP Checker provides the top 10 rankings in over 170 countries for each keyword. You can also see significant SEO approaches such as the number of referring domains, backlinks, an average of search traffic, etc., for the first three search results.
Try Ahrefs’ SERP Checker for free.
SEO Analytics tools
Digital marketing is incomplete without an analysis of the results. These tools collect your SEO campaign data and help you measure and analyze it.
27. Google Analytics
What is SEO without the ability to track and analyze the result of the efforts? Keeping that in mind, Google Analytics is a must-have tracking tool for anybody who runs a website or blog. You can track your visitors, channels, behavior, and more using Google Analytics.
28. Google Data Studio
Not just tracking and analyzing, Google is there to help you create exciting reports for all your campaigns. A new entry in our list of best free SEO tools, Google Data Studio, is all about collating data and generating informing and interactive dashboards and reports with it.
The best thing is, it integrates with Google’s suite of tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics to easily blend data from endpoints.
Try Google Data Studio for free.
29. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is one of the most powerful tools for SEO. It is much helpful in increasing website visitors- especially organic traffic.
It shows you the website’s position, impressions, clicks, CTR (Click-Through Rate), and more, which helps determine your site’s performance on Google search engine and take measures needed to improve the ranking.
Local SEO tools
Understanding the process of Local SEO, these tools help you optimize your site for local search results
30. Google My Business
Google My Business allows you to efficiently manage your business profile on Google Search and Maps. Claiming and optimizing your GMB profile is likely the most important thing you can do in local SEO. According to Moz’s 2018 study, GMB is one of the top local ranking factors for both “snack pack” and organic results.
31. Moz Local Online Presence Tool
Are you sure that all your business information and local citations on the Internet are accurate and up to date?
Moz Local helps you to quickly review how your organization looks on the important data aggregators used by Google and others to rate local search results across the Internet. It’s instrumental in understanding what your vulnerabilities and strengths are.
Other Tools
32. Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine by Archive.org reveals how sites looked in the past.
This is beneficial for several activities such as, if you’re rebuilding broken links, seeing what was initially on the dead page is useful so that you can reproduce it.
You can see how the website appears on the Google Search Result Page using this user-friendly content review app.
The free tool also tells you how the content appears as it is posted on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other networks by individuals.
33. MetaTags.io
This user-friendly content analysis tool helps you see how your page would look on Google Search Result Page. The free tool also shows you how your content will look when people share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more platforms.
34. Google Alerts
You can track mentions of your name or organization online with Google Alerts. You can also use this excellent free SEO tool for competitor analysis as you will get regular updates about your competitors.
35. Spyfu
An excellent tool for keeping a tab on what others are doing in your field. I use Spyfu to analyze the competitors.
The tool offers a unique feature of competitor shared keywords that give you a good insight into the competition and comparisons.
You can even check the ads that you are running for your rivals. There are many other features like Competition, Paid competitors, Top keywords, Adwords history, ranking history and more.
Are the SEO tools worth it?
Ah! The million-dollar question, is it worth investing money in SEO tools?
The short answer is Yes.
SEO involves many things that need reviewing regularly, and these tasks demand the efficiency offered by SEO tools.
A lot of the SEO tools are free so that they won’t cost you money. Therefore performing your task via a free tool without spending money and, at the same time, you are reducing your efforts.
So definitely worth it.
Conclusion
There you go!
These are the 35 best Free Audit SEO tools that you can use to improve your website rankings. These tools help me a lot, and I hope this will help you get started with your SEO.
If you don’t have a budget and still want to perform SEO, this is a list that you want to explore.
Did I miss any awesome free SEO tools?
Do you have better tools that you use?
Let me know in the comments, and I will add it to the list.