In this post, I’ll discuss the top 13 free SEO tools to help you improve your Google search engine results page rank. I would be unable to execute SEO without these tools.
I use them daily. In case we haven’t met previously, my name is Matt Dignity. I’ve been in the SEO industry since 2015 and presently run many seven-figure SEO firms.
I can assure you that, regardless of the size of your SEO operation, every SEO success story relies heavily on free tools. We’ll go through all of the free SEO tools that my team and I use for each stage of our SEO operations in this piece.
You’ve undoubtedly heard of some of these well-known free tools. Some of them are less well-known, and I’d be delighted to expose you to them. In any event, I’m delighted to provide my thorough list of the finest free SEO tools that you can add to your toolkit.
There are two different kinds of free SEO tools available. Our freemium tools come first. Tools that are free to use but have a premium price for additional functionality are known as freemium tools.
You usually get a better-built tool with freemium tools, which is fantastic. Since paid tiers enable them to continuously expand and scale, you can frequently count on businesses using freemium models to be continuously innovating and improving their tools.
That won’t be a terrible side venture that has been gathering digital dust for a long. Therefore pay great attention as I share my best selections for freemium games.
Then some tools are free and will probably always be free, but don’t let that deceive you into believing they aren’t valuable. The free tools I’m going to provide you are incredible powerhouses on their own. Let’s start with the greatest free tools.
1. Keyword Surfer
Let’s begin with these awful bastards. There are several SEO extensions available, but these are my top recommendations. Keyword Surfer is without a doubt my favorite tool on this list.
Keyword Surfer allows you to collect keyword suggestions and SEO stats when surfing Google. That comes in helpful when you’re looking for low-competition keywords to include in your content strategy.
You may create a list of terms linked to your search using the sidebar function. Then, with a single click, you can export that list as well as the monthly search volume numbers. You may also collect stats for many nations without disrupting your workflow.
Keyword research is such a critical task for SEO success, and it can be so easy to get slowed down by clunky tools. That is why I love how intuitive Keyword Surfer is.
2. SEO Minion
SEO Minion is the next free SEO plugin on our list. Have you ever researched on Google and wished to obtain information about the top-ranking pages right from the search results page?
For example, you might scrape the top 20 titles from the search results to obtain good ideas for title optimization, or you could conduct some fancy-pants subject research by scraping the ‘People also ask’ results. I’ll show you how in a moment.
SEO Minion is the man for the job. My favorite use of this strong plugin is how easily it exports all of the ‘People also ask’ data.
You may download every ‘People also ask’ question connected to your search query with a few mouse clicks. This is excellent for filling in any gaps in your text.
Content gaps occur when a topic related to your niche is not entirely covered by your website (dramatic music), which is not good! You may also obtain a lovely tree diagram of how these Queries connect if you are a visual thinker. The majority of SEOs I know use SEO Minion.
3. GMASS
The second free tool on my list assisted me in creating my first outreach link, and I still suggest it today. It’s called GMASS, and it’s a free browser extension, much like the others.
If outreach link building is an important aspect of your SEO strategy, GMASS can assist you in organizing cold outreach campaigns right from Gmail.
It sends emails to your outreach list regularly and schedules follow-up emails. A noteworthy bonus is that GMASS has excellent delivery.
Because GMASS is a lightweight add-on to Gmail, it helps you avoid using an additional tool layer, which email deliverability algorithms frequently dislike. If you are new to SEO or simply want to get started for free, GMASS is the way to go.
4. Detailed SEO extension
The Detailed SEO plugin is the final free browser extension I’d like to recommend to you. Detailed provides a one-click bird’s-eye view of any public website on the internet’s on-page and technical specifications.
I like to utilize it in our Q&A process to ensure that my content uploader has used the correct header structure, picture alt text, and HTML elements for a solid foundation for on-page SEO.
You may also utilize it while evaluating a client’s website or doing a thorough review of a competitor’s material. What you see on a page may not be the same as what is represented in the code.
5. Google Search Console
The tools I’m about to offer are essential for your site’s general SEO health. The greatest data typically comes directly from search engines, and you’d be a fool not to tap into it. Besides, Google search console is the most popular free SEO tool out there, so let’s have a look at it.
GSC does a great deal (beep). You may upload your site map straight to Google Search Console to be crawled. You may also address technical SEO issues with Google’s bot crawling and indexing your material.
When you need your material indexed as fast as possible, Google Search Console is the greatest tool to use. When indexing is not broken, you can force indexing on new material and pages that have undergone major changes.
You can also learn what keywords your website ranks for and how well it performs organically in Google searches. This data is an amazing goldmine. Forget gold; Bitcoin is worth its weight in gold.
Because we’re already discussing how effective Google data can be, there is a slew of additional free tools available from Google that may help you improve your SEO.
Google free search bar, Google analytics, tag manager, Google trends keyword planner, Google sheets, and the NLP API are among them. These tools have all played an important role in my SEO success thus far, and I know many other SEO professionals who agree with me.
Bing Webmaster Tools, a lesser-known search engine tool that can also provide you with strong data, can also provide you with free access to Microsoft Clarity heat map software, how do you like that?
6. Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools includes a lot of the same functionality as Google Search Console, plus a few more. Not many people are aware that Bing Webmaster Tools has an SEO part where you can obtain information on backlinks, and fresh keyword prospects, and even perform a technical assessment.
If you’re just getting started with SEO, you won’t have to spend a dime to have access to all of this useful knowledge. To sweeten the bargain, Bing is far more liberal with the data it provides to SEO specialists than Google.
As previously stated, Bengal grants you free access to Microsoft Clarity, a heat mapping application. If you don’t have a heat mapping tool (dramatic music) stop, just stop.
But in saying this, both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools don’t get into the super detailed technical items we need to fine-tune our optimization.
7. Schema
I suggest you investigate the following free schema tools. Schemata is like a translator between what we understand as humans to concepts that a search engine can understand too.
Now, remember, no matter how’s mart Google seems like it is, it still can’t read and understand content as well as we humans can. Schema helps you tell Google that your article is about a review of a network router, instead of forcing them to guess.
If you are looking for free tools to help create a schema, most SEO plugins will already do a basic level of it for you, but their output schema is often generic and basic.
So, if you want a competitive edge, I’d suggest starting with Merkel’s free schema generator, which walks you through how to create different types of schema.
Combine it with the free schema validator offered by schema.org, and you can handcraft your custom schema, whether that be for e-commerce websites, review websites, or service websites.
This alone is a competitive edge over your competition that relies on SEO plugins to auto-generate their schema. Besides, you get a nice boost on people clicking through to your site if you implement things like review ratings that stand out on the search results page.
8. Screaming Frog
While we are looking at tools for technical SEO, Screaming Frog deserves a mention here. Screaming Frog has long been a staple tool used for technical audits by SEO nerds all over the world.
Technically, it’s on a freemium pricing model, but if you have a site with less than 500 URLs, you unlock a decent amount of essential functions for free.
Screaming Frog is great to use in combination with Google Search Console, and it’s fairly easy to operate, and it also offers to about on more technical data than the search console does.
We use it to gather the following data: pages with no internal links pointing to them, slow loading pages, the indexability status of all pages, checking all pages with missing on-page elements, such as heading tags, meta titles, and descriptions, and a bunch of other nerdy (beep).
It makes large-scale auditing so much more efficient since you gather all your data in bulk with only two clicks. Here are some more freemium SEO tools that I find very helpful for improving rankings and traffic.
9. AHREFS
Let us kick these off with AHREFS. Many people know AHREFS for their Swiss army knife SEO solution that powers many Subprofessional around the world, including me.
Most people know AHREFS as a paid tool. What is not as well known is that AHREFS also has a stack of free tools available, most noteworthy AHREFS Webmaster Tools.
It is like a cross between Google Search Console and Screaming Frog, with a similar level of data but a much more user-friendly experience. You can also get access to the same version of AHREFS Site Explore and site auditing tools that paid members access.
The only drawback is you cannot use these on competitor sites on their free tier, just the ones you verify ownership of, but that is an insane amount of value anyways, for free. You can also leverage all these free tools by AHREFS as well.
10. Answer the Public
Answer the Public is the next Premium SEO product we’re looking into. Answer the Public created ripples in the SEO field because of its capacity to extend and illustrate a topic.
It may not only provide ideas for subheadings in your content, but it can also provide ideas for keyword research, ensuring that you do not leave any holes in your content strategy.
You have restricted data consumption on the free tier, but it is adequate for most individuals. If you want to learn how to utilize tools like these to construct a topical map, watch the interview I recorded with Cory after you finish reading this post. Please bear with me.
11. Uber suggests
For the next few tools, I’ll be sharing our freemium tools that you can plug into your topical mapping process too. Uber suggests a decent tool for most people starting since it has similar functionality to AHREFS.
You can do keyword research, and basic competitor research and access your website’s SEO performance stats. The level of data is not as great as AHREFS by a mile, but if you are looking for a free tool to start learning with Ubersuggests is a good one to go with.
12. Rankmath
Rankmath is a fantastic SEO plugin for performing critical SEO adjustments on your website. It’s a freemium WordPress plugin that lets you edit essential on-page SEO elements including titles, tags, and descriptions.
Remember that it is not a comprehensive on-page optimization tool like Surfer SEO. You may also create an automatically produced site map, but where Rank math shines is its inbuilt support for various schema types. It will be as near to personally constructing your schema as you can go using a generator like Merkel.
13. Keyword Hero
Keyword Hero is another excellent freemium tool to add to your arsenal. Who hasn’t wanted to unlock those not-yet-provided keywords in Google Analytics? You can access those values using Keyword Hero to gain additional insight into how people locate your content.
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