There are so many SEO tools available for use on the internet and the premium tools are very valuable in SEO when you need to have higher limits, advanced functionalities, data storage, and customer service voice support. Apart from the above-mentioned features of paid SEO tools, there are a lot of completely free SEO tools which provide other major functions.
What Are SEO Tools?
Search engine optimization tools are tools that provide data and alerts regarding the overall success and functioning of your website. The SEO tools help to identify weaknesses or issues in your website, which can prevent your website's ranking and earning visibility on the search engine results page (SERPS).
What Are The Functions Of The Best SEO Tools?
Best SEO Tools perform the following functions -
- Analytics
- Keyword Research
- Links
- Local SEO
- Mobile SEO
- On-page SEO
- Research
- Rank Checking
- Site Speed
Which Are The Best Free SEO Tools?
1. Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster offers a full suite of website and search analytics. Bing Webmaster Tools are useful for keyword reports, keyword research, and crawling data. Bing is only for organic search words and not for Google Ads.
2. Answer The Public
A majority of the SEO tools get their data from the Google Keyword Planner but Answer The Public is a little unique. Answer The Public is an SEO Tool that finds questions of what people ask on forums, blogs, and social media sites, and those questions are turned into keywords.
3. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is not an SEO tool but it is the most widely-used web analytics package by people. It gives you information if your data such as organic traffic, bounce rate, traffic sources, page speed, and time and on-site features are working and providing good results. The best feature of this free tool is that it provides the user to combine Google Analytics with Google Search Console. By linking these free tools you can get useful information such as the keywords which people use to find your site, your organic CTR, etc.
4. Google Search Console
The Google Search Console is the most useful tool for information on how Google drags itself and ranks your website. Google search console limits your downloads to 1000 rows and provides users an index coverage report that gives you a list of pages on your site that aren’t getting indexed.
5. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is the most popular desktop-based crawler which is available for users. Most people do not know that there's a free version of screaming frog which allows up to 500 URLs per crawl. Although it is not as fully functional as the paid version of screaming frog, the free version is excellent for small projects and smaller site audits. The best thing about this tool is that it provides the discover duplicate content feature, which allows you to identify pages with duplicate content.
6. Google Keyword Planner
The Google Keyword Planner was set up for only those people who buy Google Ads and it provides a lot of useful information for SEO keyword planning by using Google's data. It is a free keyword research tool and the most useful function of this free tool is that it has country filtering which allows the user to select the country and find the most used keywords in that country.
7. Backlink Checker
Ahrefs has the second most active web crawler after Google and they have the best backlink database in the SEO field. It is paid backlink checker and also provides a free version of the SEO tool. The free version of the backlink checker has a limited number of limitations when compared to the paid version tool. For example, if your limited number of backlinks is 100, you can't search by prefix or folder, but it is very useful for quick link checks, or if you're doing SEO with a very tight budget.
8. Google My Business
This is a tool that you should have for local SEO if you are located in a market that is dominated by Google. This free SEO tool allows you to declare your business, manage the listing information, and most importantly respond to your reviews. By claiming your business profile you have laid the foundation for the other local SEO activities to take place, hence it is very important to declare your business.
9. Mobile-Friendly Test
Google has recently changed its algorithm and if your site is not optimized for mobile devices your page will not pass the test. For your site to pass the test you need to run it through a mobile-friendly test tool and if your page is not friendly it will show you areas that need to be fixed. The best feature of the mobile-friendly test tool is that it has a feature called page loading issues which will show you how you can improve your site's code.
10. Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin and if your site is running on WordPress it is recommended for you to install Yoast SEO.
The best feature of Yoast SEO is that it uses an XML sitemap generator which helps Google and other search engines find, crawl, and index all of the pages on your site.
11. Rank Math
RankMath is a very new free SEO tool which is quickly gaining a huge amount of followers among certain SEO experts. It's a fully functional free SEO tool which comes with features like built-in redirection, which means needing to install fewer plugins or pay for upgrades.
12. Google Data Studio
This free SEO tool from Google can be used if you need to combine data from different sources such as Google search console and Google analytics to combine, visualize and share the data.
13. Chrome DevTools
There is a great number of free SEO tasks that one can perform with Chrome DevTools. it is a free SEO tool that provides users features such as javascript auditing, page speed, and on-page SEO.
14. Keyword Explorer
This is a free tool that is offered by Moz, which provides users 500 million keyword suggestions that have the most accurate volume ranges in the SEO industry. Users will also get Moz's keyword difficulty score along with CTR data.
15. Google Trends
Google Trends allows you to sort multiple websites based on the located country, see related topics, regional popularity, frequently used terms and compare other terms.