In this blog, we will be discussing the best free SEO tools that you can use to optimize your website.
SEO is an important part of any business’ marketing strategy. It’s also one of the most cost-effective ways to increase traffic to your website, but it’s not always easy for beginners to get started with SEO. The good news is that there are tons of free SEO tools available online that can help make the process easier.
In this blog post, we’ll go over some of the best free SEO tools available today so you can learn more about what they do and how they can help improve your website’s search engine ranking!
Best Free Seo Tools
Most SEO tools get their data from the same place: The Google Keyword Planner.
Answer the Public is different.
This awesome tool finds questions that people ask on forums, blogs and on social media.
And it turns those questions into awesome keywords:
Answer The Public – “keto diet”
Best Feature: “Vs. Keywords”
You’d be surprised how many people search for “X vs. Y” keywords in Google.
(For example: “iPhone vs. Android” or “SEMRush vs. Ahrefs”.)
And Answer the Public has a section of the results dedicated to “Vs. Keywords”.
Answer The Public – “keto diet” – Versus section
This brings us to the 2nd tool on our list…
- Woorank’s SEO & Website Analysis Tool
Get a list of SEO improvements in seconds.
This is a very handy Chrome extension.
First, you get an overall SEO score.
Then, the tool shows you EXACTLY how to improve your site’s on-page and off-page SEO.
WooRank – Chrome extension
Best Feature: “Marketing Checklist”
Most SEO tools only tell you about problems… not solutions.
But with Woorank you get a detailed SEO checklist that you can use to fix any issues that you run into.
WooRank – Marketing checklist
And now it’s time for our next free SEO tool…
- Animalz Revive
Improve and update old content.
Animalz Revive helps you find older content on your site that needs an update, an upgrade… or both.
Before this tool, you had to manually comb through your Google Analytics account to find these pages.Which was a giant pain.
Fortunately, this tool tells you exactly which articles on your site need the most attention.
Animalz Revive Advice
Best Feature: “Traffic Loss Since Peak (Views)”
This feature lets you know exactly how many visitors that a piece of outdated content is costing you.
Animalz Revive
- CanIRank
Quickly answer the question: “Can I rank for this keyword?”.
CanIRank is a super-detailed keyword difficulty tool.
And unlike most free SEO tools, CanIRank doesn’t give you generic advice like:
“This keyword is really competitive”
Or
“This keyword has low competition”
Instead, it tells you whether or not YOU can rank for that keyword.
CanIRank
Very cool.
Best Feature: “How can you better target this keyword?”
CanIRank isn’t just for sizing up the first-page competition.
It also gives you suggestions that can help you rank for a specific term.
CanIRank – Keyword probability
- Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Get your site ready for Google’s Mobile-first Indexing.
You might have heard that Google recently made a big change to its algorithm.
(This change is officially called “Mobile-First Indexing”.)
The bottom line is this:
If your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you’re in big trouble.
Fortunately, you don’t need a full-time developer to make your site mobile-friendly. All you need to do is run your site through the Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
And it tells you whether or not Google considers your site mobile-friendly.
Google’s mobile friendly test
Best Feature: “Page loading issues”
This feature shows you how you can improve your site’s code. That way, Google’s mobile crawler can find and index all of the resources on your site.
Mobile-Friendly Test – Issues
- Seed Keywords
Find completely fresh keyword ideas.
Most keyword research tools work the exact same way:
Enter a seed keyword into the tool.
Get a list of closely-related terms.
The problem with this approach is this:
Everyone types the same seed keywords into these tools.
Well, Seed Keywords takes a completely different approach.
Instead of pulling seed keywords out of thin air, you ask your customers how they’d search for you online.
SeedKeywords – Scenario
Then, type those seed keywords into your favorite keyword research tool.
Best Feature: “Submit Query”
Once the results come in, you can use SeedKeywords to do a Google search for the keywords that people gave you.
That way you can quickly scan the search results… and see how competitive those keywords are.
SeedKeywords – Results
- Exploding Topics
Find popular keywords before they get competitive.
This free SEO tool does one simple thing:
It bubbles up topics that are just starting to trend.
exploding topics Homepage
That way, you can create content around these emerging trends (or optimize your old content around a new keyword).
The tool currently has about 2k topics in its database. And they’re adding more every week.
Best Feature: Categories
Categories let you drill down to a specific topic category that’s important to your business.
For example, let’s say you run marketing for a skincare brand. Well, you’d hit “beauty” and get a list of emerging topics in that space.
exploding topics Category Page
Nice.
- Seobility
Get a deep-dive SEO site analysis.
SEObility crawls your entire site and lets you know about search engine optimization issues like:
Slow loading pages
Blocked pages
Sitemap problems
Technical SEO issues
Lots more
SEOBility
You usually only get this type of stuff from paid SEO tools. So it’s really nice that Seobility gives you this data for free.
Best Feature: Content Report
This report hands you a list of pages that have content-related SEO issues.
(Things like: thin content, missing meta titles, keyword stuffing, and duplicate content.)
SEOBility – Content report
- Ubersuggest
Get keyword suggestions and competition data.
Ubersuggest has a lot of features that are usually only found in premium SEO tools.
But it’s 100% free.
To use it, type in a keyword that you want to rank for (or a competing website that you want to rank above).
Ubersuggest – Search
And Ubersuggest will give you detailed data on keyword difficulty, monthly search volume, and more.
Ubersuggest – Results
Plus, you get a list of suggested keywords that are based on the keyword you typed in.
Ubersuggest – Keyword suggestions
Best Feature: “Comparisons”
This feature shows you “X vs. Y” keywords.
Ubersuggest – Keyword comparisons
In my experience, X vs. Y keywords are super untapped.
Sure, they may not get as many searches as traditional keywords. But they’re SUPER targeted and high-converting.
And to my knowledge Ubersuggest is the only tool that specifically bubbles up X vs. Y keywords.
- BROWSEO
See your site through the eyes of a search engine.
As it turns out, search engines see your site VERY differently than you do.
And BROWSEO gives you the type of x-ray vision that search engines have.
BROWSEO
Best Feature: SERP Preview
Get a sweet preview of how your page appears in the search results:
BROWSEO – SERP preview
This is helpful for figuring out if your title and description tag are SEO-friendly (or too long). And optimizing your title and description can also help you get more organic clicks.
- Detailed.com
Get intel on your competition.
Detailed gives you a curated list of the most popular sites in your industry.
That way, you can size up your biggest competitors.
(And copy what they’re doing.)
Detailed
Best Feature: “Mentions”
This feature shows you who recently linked to (and tweeted about) your competition.
Detailed – Backlinko
- Google Search Console
Get SEO help straight from Google.
No list of free SEO tools would be complete without the Google Search Console.
Why?
The GSC is a VERY feature-rich piece of SEO software. And unlike pretty much every other tool on the market, you know the data is legit.
(After all, it comes from Google.)
For example, you can use the Google Search Console as a rank tracker to check your site’s rankings in the SERPs.
Using Google Search Console as a rank checker
Best Feature: Index Coverage Report
The Index Coverage Report gives you a list of pages on your site that aren’t getting indexed.
You can also see how you can get things back on track.
Google Search Console – Index coverage report
- SERPerator
This awesome tool lets you check the SERPs across different locations and devices.
As you probably know, the search results change dramatically depending on where you are and what device you’re using.
(Especially for local searches, like: “pizza shop” or “landscaper”.)
And this tool lets you see exactly how the results will look for someone searching on a particular phone from pretty much any major city in the world.
SERPerator – iPhone results
Best Feature: Compare Devices
See how the results look on two different mobile devices… side-by-side.
SERPerator – iPhone, compare devices
- Screaming Frog
Find and fix technical SEO issues in seconds.
Let’s face it:
Finding technical SEO problems on your site can be a HUGE pain.
Enter: Screaming Frog.
This nifty tool crawls your site using a Google-like crawler. And it generates a report of potential issues (like HTTP header errors, javascript rendering issues, bloated HTML, and crawl errors).
Screaming Frog
Best Feature: Discover Duplicate Content
As you might have heard, Google HATES duplicate content.
Fortunately, you can use Screaming Frog to quickly ID pages with duplicate content.
Screaming Frog – Duplicate content
- Google Analytics
See how people find and interact with your site.
OK, OK. Google Analytics isn’t really an SEO tool.
But it’s almost impossible to run an SEO campaign without it.
Why?
The data in Google Analytics tells you whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off.
I’m talking about data like:
Organic traffic
Bounce rate
Traffic sources
Time on site
Page speed
Google Analytics
Best Feature: Google Analytics and Google Search Console Integration
Google Analytics is super powerful on its own.
But when you combine it with the Google Search Console?
It’s even MORE powerful.
Linking your GSC account with GA hooks you up with helpful info, like the keywords people use to find your site, your organic CTR, and more cool stuff.
Google Analytics – Google Search Console
- Reddit Keyword Research Tool
This is one of my favorite little keyword research tools.
Why? Because it can bring up terms that I probably wouldn’t find with any other tool.
This tool scrapes Reddit words and phrases that tend to crop up in specific subreddits.
Reddit Keyword Research Tool
So if you know where your target audience hangs out on Reddit, this is a goldmine of keyword and content topic ideas.
Best Feature: Context
This feature takes you to the actual thread on Reddit.
That way, you can see exactly how that keyword is used in discussions.
- Yoast WordPress Plugin
The best SEO plugin for WordPress.
If your site runs on WordPress, you need to install Yoast ASAP.
It’s by far the most robust SEO plugin on the market.
The best part? It’s 100% free.
Yoast SEO WordPress plugin
Best Feature: XML Sitemap Generator
Sitemaps help Google and other search engines find, crawl and index all of the pages on your site.
And with the Yoast plugin, you don’t have to tinker with your sitemap every time you add a new page to your site.
That’s because Yoast updates your sitemap automatically. Cool.
Yoast – Sitemap
- Panguin Tool
Get to the bottom of a rankings drop.
This tool correlates your search traffic with known Google updates.
Why is this helpful?
Well, if you notice that your rankings dropped around the time of a big Google update, you can figure out what went wrong… and fix it.
Panguin
Best Feature: Switch Updates On/Off
Panguin makes it easy to zero in on a specific update.
For example, if you’re a local business that focuses on local SEO, you can only have Panguin ONLY show you Google updates that impacted local results.
Panguin – On/Off
- Wordtracker Scout
Steal your competitor’s keywords.
Wordtracker scout takes a unique approach to keyword research…
Instead of entering keywords into a tool, Wordtracker shows you the most common terms on a page.
That way, you can go over to one of your competitor’s pages… and grab the keywords they’re using in their content.
WordTracker Scout
(Note: This is only available as Chrome extension and isn’t supported for Firefox)
Best Feature: Opportunity
Shows you which keywords on your list have the best ratio of search volume and competition.
WordTracker Scout – Opportunity
- Lipperhey
Powerful website analyzer.
Lipperhey is a full-featured SEO analyzer that doesn’t cost a penny.
LipperHey
Best Feature: Keyword Suggestions
Get a list of keywords to add to specific pages on your site.
(Which can help you get more organic traffic from long-tail keywords).
LipperHey – Keyword suggestions
- Bing Webmaster Tools
Optimize your site for Bing.
Bing Webmaster Tools is basically the Google Search Console… but for Bing.
So if you want to get your site indexed (and ranked) in Bing, Bing Webmaster Tools is a must-have.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Best Feature: Keyword Research Tool
Get keyword ideas (and data) straight from Bing.
And unlike the Google Keyword Planner, the data from Bing is strictly for organic search (not Bing PPC or Adwords).
Bing Webmaster Tools – Keyword Research tool
- Dareboost
Analyze your site for speed, SEO, security and more.
Dareboost isn’t strictly an SEO tool.
But it does analyze your site for things that indirectly impact SEO, like your site’s loading speed and security.
Dareboost
Best Feature: Priorities
Let’s you know where to start first. Helpful if you’re strapped for time.
Dareboost – Priorities
- Siteliner
Get a full SEO report for free.
Siteliner scans your site for SEO problems (like blocked pages, messed up redirects and broken links).
Siteliner
Best Feature: Comparison with Other Sites
This lets you compare your site’s loading speed and page size to other site’s in Siteliner’s database. Helpful for benchmarking.
Siteliner – Comparison with other sites
- KWFinder
No-nonsense keyword research tool.
The best part of KWFinder is how darn easy it is to use.
But don’t let this fool you into thinking KWFinder isn’t powerful. It’s a legit keyword tool that lots of pros use.
KWFinder
Best Feature: LPS
LPS=Link Profile Strength.
This feature basically tells you how many links you’ll need to rank for that keyword.
So if you find a keyword that has a LPS of 50+, you know that you’ll need to do some serious link building to rank for that term.
KWFinder – LPS
- People Also Ask
This free tool pulls questions that appear in the “People Also Ask” section of Google’s search results.
Usetopic – People Also Ask
My only gripe with the tool is that it takes a while for the results to load. But I understand that’s because it has to actually run the search and grab questions from the PAA box. Which takes a while.
Overall, a very cool tool for finding question keywords.
Best Feature: Related Questions
People Also Ask shows you questions that you’d usually have to get by manually clicking on the PAA box in the SERPs.
For example, one of the questions the tool showed me was “What is a good keyword?”. And I also got a handful of questions that were closely related to the original question.
best free seo tools 2022
There are constantly new tools being created to help make our lives easier as bloggers, businesses and social media creators. Whether you’ve built your own website from scratch or used a service similar to Linktree, you want to create and share content people are interested in and searching for.
Luckily, in 2022, there are many search e tools you can use for free. Whether you’re a beginner or are more advanced, you’ll likely find these tools very helpful.
What Are the Best Free SEO Tools in 2022?
Below is my list of the best free SEO tools in 2022. These tools will not only help you define new opportunities to rank for certain keywords but will also help you be more creative, follow Google’s guidelines and provide you with more data/insight.
- Ahrefs Suite of Free Tools
Ahrefs is an extremely powerful tool for SEO. Their massive database of search queries holds 12 billion keywords over 10 search engines in 229 countries. That’s a lot of data!
If you’re going to go with their paid tools, you’ll get access to an incredible amount of information; however, a paid subscription to Ahrefs can get costly fast.
With the minimum monthly package costing $99, it’s likely out of the price range of most beginners.
That being said, Ahrefs does offer a suite of free tools. These include:
Backlink Checker
Broken Link Checker
Website Authority Checker
Keyword Generator
YouTube Keyword Tool
Amazon Keyword Tool
Bing Keyword Tool
SERP Checker
Keyword Rank Checker
Keyword Difficulty Checker
Although there are limitations with the free tools and you will need to solve a captcha every time, it can certainly help those without a budget.
Out of all 10 free SEO tools Ahrefs offers, my two favourite are their backlink checker and keyword generator.
Ahrefs Backlink Checker
ahrefs-backlink-checker
The Ahrefs backlink checker is great for a few reasons. First off, it gives you the domain rating (DR) of the site you search for. This can be great when evaluating if you want to collaborate with a site or not.
A link from a site with a higher DR will pass on more authority to your site as opposed to a site with a low DR.
Second, this tool tells you how many backlinks and referring domains a site has and their percentage of do-follow links.
Third, this tool gives you an overview of a site’s top 100 backlinks sorted by URL rating and their top five anchor keywords and top five pages.
All of this information can be useful for competitive analysis to see where a particular website is getting links from.
Ahrefs Keyword Generator
ahrefs-keyword-generator
My second favorite Ahrefs free SEO tool is their keyword generator. This tool is great for doing keyword research because it gives you the keyword difficulty and search volume and other keyword ideas for related terms.
For example, if I type in “best credit cards” into their tool, I’ll see that this term has a volume of 66,000 searches per month with a keyword difficulty of 80.
This can be extremely valuable for determining which keywords you might have a shot at ranking for.
That being said, Ahref’s keyword difficulty score is not the only number you should consider when determining whether you should try to compete on the first page for a keyword. But more on this another time.
- Exploding Topics
exploding-topics
Exploding Topics is an awesome free tool for figuring out which new keywords are starting to gain popularity.
This tool gives you the ability to select a time range and a topic (e.g., 1 month and software).
Then you can go through and see which keywords are trending up in that particular niche.
This is a great way to get new ideas for topics that haven’t been covered time and time again. Thus, giving you a better chance to rank on the first page.
I like to scroll through a few pages of Exploding Topics and write down any keywords that stand out to me. Then I’ll go over to the Ahrefs keyword generator tool, input the keyword and see what the keyword difficulty and search volume is for each keyword.
If it looks promising, I’ll then do a bit more research into each website on Google’s first page and make a decision whether to write about it or not.
- Copy.ai
copy-ai
If you’re stuck in a creative rut and don’t know what to write about, you’ll be glad to learn that modern-day artificial intelligence (AI) has a solution.
Copy-ai is a tool I’ve been using to get ideas for blog posts that I otherwise wouldn’t have thought about.
Let’s take the keyword “wordpress” for example.
Simply enter that keyword into Copy.ai and click “Create Copy”.
This will create a whole list of blog post title ideas for the keyword “wordpress”.
Go through the initial list and if you don’t like any of them, just click “Make More” and you’ll get a whole new list of ideas.
So next time you have a keyword in mind but don’t know what to write about, try out this tool and you’ll likely get tons of inspiration for new blog post ideas.
It’s a great way to separate yourself from your competition while still staying on topic for a particular keyword.
- Google Keyword Planner
google-keyword-planner
Google Keyword Planner isn’t new, but it’s still very relevant in 2022 as a free SEO tool. With 5.6 billion searches performed each day on Google, they know a thing or two about keywords and search volume.
Google’s Keyword Planner tool will require that you set up a Google ads account which is completely free. Once done, head over to Tools and settings > Keyword Planner.
This will take you to a page that gives you two options:
Discover new keywords
Get search volume and forecasts
If you only have one keyword in mind and want Google to give you more keyword ideas relating to that topic, click the first option. Alternatively, if you have a big list of keywords already, click the second option to copy-paste them and get each keyword’s search volume.
Google’s Keyword Planner can only be used as a means to get keyword search volume. You can’t use it as a keyword difficulty checker like Ahref’s tool. That being said, it’s great to get new ideas for keywords that might be worth writing about.
Once you’ve played around with Google’s Keyword Planner and drafted a list of potential keywords, I recommend using Ahrefs keyword checker tool to determine the difficulty for each.
Using Google’s Keyword Planner tool is great to use in conjunction with some of our other free SEO tools in this article. Whether you want to use it for post inspiration or just want to check the search volume of a bunch of keywords quickly, it can do both.
- Keywords Everywhere
keyword-everywhere-related-keywords
Keyword Everywhere is a tool I like to use in conjunction with the Ahrefs keyword generator tool for determining which keywords I can likely compete for.
Keyword Everywhere uses Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) score. According to Link Building HQ, Moz DA is used to calculate how well a site will rank, while Ahrefs uses Domain Rating (DR) to measure the overall strength of a backlink profile.
Although these two numbers mean different things, I still like to use Keyword Everywhere’s Moz DA tool to identify weak websites that are ranking on the first page for a keyword.
Once I find the website with the lowest Moz DA on the first page for a search term, I do more research. I look into that site’s post to see where I can improve it and their backlink profile by using Ahref’s backlink checker tool.
Keyword Everywhere also provides you with keywords related to your topic so that you can get even more ideas on what to write about.
Unfortunately, unless you buy credits, you won’t easily see the search volume for each word.
But no worries, we can just copy-paste their additional suggestions into Google’s keyword planner and get the average search volume for each keyword there.
- Yoast SEO
yoast-seo-analysis
Yoast SEO is a tried and true WordPress plugin that has been around for years. Although they do offer premium features, the core of the plugin still remains free and is all you need as a beginner.
Yoast SEO is great for providing you with tips on how to improve your article for search engines. You can check directly with your WordPress post if your title is too long or too short, if you have enough internal/external links, if you mention your target keyword enough, and much more.
Additionally, they configure your sitemap so that crawlers like Google and Bing and other search engines can clearly see the content you’re publishing and properly index it.
If you’re looking to get started on the right foot with search engines but don’t know much about where to begin. Yoast SEO is a great free SEO plugin.
- Google Search Console
google-search-console-performance
Google Search Console is another one of Google’s invaluable free SEO tools. With this tool, you can gain more insight into which of your pages are generating clicks and for which keywords.
Take the screenshot above for an example of one of my websites.
You can see the total clicks, impressions, click-through rates and average position all over the past 28 days. You can also see which keywords the page is ranking for as well as drill down into the countries, devices and more.
This is a great tool for SEO as it allows you to get more insight into how people are actually finding you, which allows you to optimize your posts for keywords you never even knew existed.
Besides that, Google Search Console also gives you a lot of insight into any coverage issues, page experience issues or security issues. Having these details available can help you improve the overall user experience for your visitors, which helps boost your ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Conclusion
Although not all of these tools are completely free, due to limited functionality in some cases, they offer a great starting point for beginners.
You really shouldn’t need much more than the free versions of all seven of these tools until you start growing your blog and publishing more and more content.
At that point, you should be generating revenue and likely can afford premium features that will unlock even more functionality.
But for now, take advantage of these free SEO tools in 2022 to help you rank for the keywords in your niche.
Conclusion
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