15 Top Free SEO Tools for Your Website

SEO tools are online platforms, or pieces of software, that help your business optimize the content you write for success on search engines, such as Google and Bing.

With the right SEO tool, you can equip your content – your blogs, your website, your how-to guides, and ebooks – with everything it needs to rank well in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). That means more eyes on your content, which – if everything else is done right – should lead to more clicks and conversions.

SEO tools can help you:

• Identify keywords – those words and phrases most commonly entered into search engines by your audience.
• Improve your website – fixing broken links, and cutting down the time it takes for your pages to load.
• Analyze your site’s performance – as well as help you improve how you write your content and structure your website, SEO tools can track the success of your endeavors: telling you how you’re performing for particular keywords, and where your site’s biggest areas for improvement lie.

The best free SEO tools are:

1. Moz Toolbar
2. Ahrefs
3. Semrush
4. WordStream
5. Answer The Public
6. BrightLocal
7. Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin
8. Rank Math WordPress Plugin
9. Google Analytics
10. Merkle
11. Google Trends
12. Google Search Console
13. Qwoted
14. Bing Webmaster Tools
15. Keyword Tool

Sound good? Let’s dig into them!

Moz, a leading provider of SEO software and services, isn’t just known for its cult-status head honcho, Rand Fishkin. It’s also known for the Moz Toolbar – a browser extension allowing you to get a quick snapshot of a website.

The Moz Toolbar offers at-a-glance insights into a site’s SEO metrics, such as domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA), as well as deep dives into the number and quality of the links pointing to a website. You’ll also benefit from top-tier on-page analysis features, on top of a Spam Score checker.

The Moz Toolbar is customizable and integrates seamlessly with Moz’s range of other SEO tools.

For a more comprehensive toolkit of SEO features, Ahrefs is worth a look. There is a free plan but, unlike the Moz Toolbar, you’ll need to pay to get the most out of Ahrefs’s features. Prices start from $99 per month, and progress to $999 per month for enterprises. But rest assured – you absolutely get what you pay for.

Ahrefs provides detailed backlink analysis features, allowing you to delve deep into the number of backlinks pointing to your website – and to those of your competitors. Ahrefs also includes content analysis and keyword research features as standard, while its popular “Site Explorer” feature lets you inspect any website’s organic search performance.

If you can stomach the ongoing monthly cost, Ahrefs is worth every dime!

This author’s free SEO tool of choice, Semrush should be one of the first ports of call for any online business looking to improve rankings and boost traffic – at no cost.

Semrush’s keyword research feature – dubbed the “Keyword Magic Tool” – is exactly what it professes to be: magic! While its wide breadth of competitive analysis and content marketing features are among the best on the market.

Plus, Semrush isn’t for optimizing organic content alone. It also provides tools to help research, track, and optimize your pay-per-click campaigns, and coordinate your marketing efforts across every top social media platform.

Semrush’s free version is limited, but you can unlock more functionality with one of its paid plans. Prices start at $119.95 per month and top out at $449.95 per month.

Need to find the right keywords and boost your website’s rankings – without breaking the bank? Free keyword tool WordStream is easy to learn, simple to use, and perfect for businesses on a shoestring budget.

On top of everything you’d expect from a self-respecting SEO tool – including PPC campaign management, performance tracking, and multi-user access – WordStream throws some neat extra functions into the bargain.

Our favorite? Its ad copywriting feature. If you’re short on creativity, WordStream will help you write effective ad copy for your website, blog, or latest PPC campaign.

ChatGPT, eat your heart out!

While you might confuse its name for something more often heard uttered in a political debate, Answer The Public is a smart, cost-effective content management and SEO tool. And is spearheaded by one of the SEO world’s biggest celebrities – Neil Patel.

Answer The Public can generate content ideas, discover keywords for you, and unlock key insights into your audience’s goals, needs, and pain points. Better still, it takes the toughness out of coming up with compelling headlines for your blogs and articles. Answer The Public can create headlines for you, based on selected keywords.

You can get started for free, or with a basic plan for just $9 per month. Alternatively, you can take advantage of Patel’s “lifetime offer” for the best value.

As the name suggests, BrightLocal specializes in local SEO – so it’s ideal for businesses looking to grow their presence in a particular town, city, or state, and capitalize on those coveted “near me” searches.

It’s no one-trick pony, though – BrightLocal also offers online reputation management, competitor analysis, and multi-location management tools. So, even if your business operates from several different physical locations, you can still manage and track your local SEO efforts from a single, centralized location.

Popular WordPress plugin Yoast is a simple, convenient solution for WordPress users looking to pay more attention to SEO. It’s hassle-free, and what it lacks in frills it makes up for in sheer ease of use.

Some of Yoast’s impressive capabilities include readability analysis – which checks your content and audits how easy it is for readers to parse and understand – and snippet preview. This latter feature helps you understand how your website will appear in the SERPs, and optimize the length of your content’s meta descriptions accordingly.

Popular WordPress plugin Yoast is a simple, convenient solution for WordPress users looking to pay more attention to SEO. It’s hassle-free, and what it lacks in frills it makes up for in sheer ease of use.

Some of Yoast’s impressive capabilities include readability analysis – which checks your content and audits how easy it is for readers to parse and understand – and snippet preview. This latter feature helps you understand how your website will appear in the SERPs, and optimize the length of your content’s meta descriptions accordingly.

If you run a website, you’ll almost certainly be familiar with Google Analytics – and in that sense, the tool used by over 28 million websites needs no introduction.

Google Analytics is free to use and enables you to explore your site’s traffic, bounce rate, and how much time your users are spending on each page. You can understand where your website’s traffic is coming from, which devices your users are accessing it on, and what kind of journeys they’re taking once they land on your site.

Essentially, it’s the “Godfather” of SEO tools – and a must-have for any online business!

Not to be confused with the former Chancellor of Germany, Merkle is a leading digital marketing agency offering a stunning set of free SEO tools for growing businesses.

Among the benefits? Strong mobile and technical SEO prowess, a wealth of industry expertise, and a set of customized, proprietary toolkits that include Voice Active Listening (VAL) and TechnicalSEO.com.

However, unlocking the full breadth of all that functionality comes at a price – and as such, Merkle is better suited to larger brands with more budget to spend, rather than smaller businesses and solopreneurs.

For a quick exploration of what the world is searching for – right now, and historically – Google Trends is your best bet.

Simply search a word or phrase, and get instant data, at your fingertips, about how many people are Googling it around the world. Be warned, though, that Google Trends is a bit of a rabbit hole… if you’re not careful, it’ll consume hours of your time!

The third in the search engine giant’s trilogy of quintessential SEO tools, Google Search Console (GSC) is another non-negotiable – for businesses of all sizes.

With GSC, you can quickly get on top of which queries are bringing users to your website, and where your clicks and impressions are coming from. Better still, you can analyze and audit your site’s performance, fix issues, and quickly act on opportunities to improve your site’s rankings.

In Google’s words, GSC helps you “understand how Google Search sees your pages” – and that’s something no business can afford to overlook!

Qwoted is a free tool designed to boost your business’ SEO by enhancing your PR efforts. Via Qwoted’s global network of experts, you’ll be able to build relationships with your industry’s top influencers and media outlets – growing your rankings, and your reputation.

Remember Bing? Well, one of Google’s top competitors (now under the Microsoft umbrella) is still around – and, as it turns out, is producing impressive free SEO resources.

Bing Webmaster Tools empowers you to monitor your site’s performance and crunch the numbers behind its clicks, impressions, and search engine rankings. You can submit a sitemap to Bing, view which of your website’s pages are being crawled by Bing, and get to grips with your backlinks.

Bing Webmaster Tools is completely mobile-friendly, and – for a free tool, at least – boasts some impressive security functionality, as well.

Despite its generic name, Keyword Tool is far from bland. For small and growing businesses, in fact, it’s quite brilliant.

Simply enter a keyword you’re interested in, select the location you’d like to view results for and click the button. In an instant, there’ll be hundreds of long-tail keyword suggestions starting back at you. There are no questions around reliability, either – according to Keyword Tool, it works 99.9% of the time!

Keyword Tool is completely free – you won’t even need to create an account to get started.

Once upon a time, SEO was seen as a domain reserved solely for the tech-savvy – something the everyday business owner didn’t have to think about.

The bad news is that’s not so. The good news, as we’ve realized, is that thanks to SEO tools, staying on top of your SEO is easier – and cheaper – than ever before.

With the above 15 tools, you have everything you need to write better content. Manage your site more effectively. And engineer higher rankings, more traffic, and – hopefully – even more clicks and conversions.

Good luck!