13 Best Free SEO Tools To Use [2023 Edition]

This post was most recently updated on June 29th, 2023

[This article was originally published in October 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.]

Do you use free SEO tools to help you improve your overall SEO? If yes, what are your best free SEO tools to use?

You know that search engine optimization (SEO) is really important if you want to grow your blog to the next level. You have learned about on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. You know your posts will do better with a little bit of SEO practice.

Practicing and mastering SEO can be really hard, especially if you’re just starting out. Fortunately, finding the best free SEO tools is easy.

Remember, don’t write for search engines but for people. Google is constantly changing its algorithm to show results that people enjoy. Google tracks how long your visitors stay on your website or if they click on more than one link.

How do you keep readers around?

Make your content useful and gorgeous. Style your post with gorgeous stock photos. You can purchase them on Etsy or join an ivory mix membership. They have over 4500 Styled Stock Images currently in the membership and each month they add 100’s more, so there is always something to promote!

And here, I’ve collected the best free SEO tools, with a wide variety of uses and covering a number of common needs. As I also use some of them, these tools are fast and easy to use. So, if you haven’t worked on your SEO game, I hope you find one or two you can put to good use.

Free Keyword Research Tools

Keyword research is foundational for your SEO practice and content creation. This is the first thing to do than others.

There are many great but expensive tools out there to help you with keyword research. But also free ones!

Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator

Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator pulls the top 100 keyword ideas for any keyword or phrase from their database of over ten billion keywords across 170+ countries.

Google Trends, Google, and Pinterest

Google Trends shows the popularity of a topic over time. Use this to catch on to trending topics, and avoid creating content about those with waning interest.

You can also use Google and Pinterest’s search to check what exactly people are actually interested in or to check out who is ranking high in the search results with what content.

KWFinder

If you want a tool that is fully dedicated to keyword research, KWFinder is your best bet. KWFinder helps you in discovering the keyword that will help you in driving highly targeted traffic. It goes without saying that problem-solving content will help us get more targeted traffic and sales. KWFinder helps you find long-tail keywords that have a lower level of competition.

Their Rank Tracker Tools will help you easily determine your ranking while tracking your improvement. The good thing is, if that’s not enough, you still get many new keyword ideas to help you rank your site even higher.

Ubersuggest

You can say that Ubersugest is an all-in-one SEO tool designed to help you win the game of SEO. I mostly use it for keyword research and site audit. Ubersuggest has a lot of features that are usually only found in premium SEO tools. But you can use it for free.

To use it, simply type a keyword that you want to rank and it will give you detailed data on SEO difficulty, monthly search volume, and more.

Best SEO Tools

Moz

I mostly use Moz to check my domain authority ranking. But, whether you’re looking for keyword recommendations or a site crawl, Moz is a full-service powerhouse. You can get great insights into how your website is performing but also how to improve it.

Semrush

Semrush is a paid tool that provides a comprehensive SEO package. Nevertheless, many people are unaware that they have a free plan that does not even require a credit card. Simply enter a URL (or your competitor’s URL) and it will show all of the keywords that are ranking for that page or the entire website.

For new bloggers, the free plan is suitable for testing the power of Semrush and enjoying some of the premium perks for a small website. You will get one project to set up, max. 10 daily requests in Analytic tools, 10 SEO ideas units, 10 rows of data in Analytic reports, and 100 pages crawl limit for the site audit.

Mangools

Mangools is a popular SEO suite, and they offer full suits of SEO tools for 10 days. This SEO suite consists of a few tools such as:

• Keyword finder (Research keywords)
• SiteProfiler (Website audit)
• SERP Watcher
• Linkminer (backlink checker tool)

Rank Math

Here is my favorite WordPress SEO plugin that helps me with SEO.

Many of you will ask ‘What is the difference between Rank Math and Yoast SEO?’

For me, both of them are helpful to improve your SEO practice, and the best part, the free version is enough for you.

Here is the reason why I switched from Yoast to Rank Math:

• Using Rank Math clears out a lot of plugins. Anything you can do to eliminate unnecessary plugins is going to speed up your website, improve the stability of your website, and reduce website management time. And, the Rank Math plugin is about half the size of the core Yoast plugin.
• With the free version of Rank Math, you get a lot of features to use including that you have to pay for with Yoast. For example, you can target up to 5 keywords with Rank Math vs. the free edition of Yoast, just 1.
• With Rank Math, there are also external links management and a built-in SEO audit tool. The external links management tool allows you to automate things like adding a ‘nofollow’ by default to external links.
• My favorite is, instead of Yoast’s ratings of ‘bad,’ or ‘good,’ Rank Math scores your content out of 100. I prefer this one as it provides much more comfortable feedback about the content and what certain changes will do.
• Compared to Yoast, Rank Math only offers basic readability analysis. That said, there are way better tools available to assist with spelling and grammar. I use Grammarly for full content analysis. And if you only want basic spelling and grammar checking, you can do that directly in WordPress (or anywhere else) using the browser plugin.

Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker

Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker shows the top 100 backlinks to any website. It also shows the five most linked pages, the most common anchor texts, the total number of backlinks and referring domains, and more.

Broken Link Checker

Tons of broken links or 404 errors on your website will make it look bad to Google and turn off your readers. I use a free tool like Broken Link Checker to find all broken links and add this to my monthly blogging tasks.

Go through the list of your broken links and weed them out. Keep your blog clean and functional. This will help you rank higher and give your readers a better experience on your blog.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free SEO tool from Google that helps you check and troubleshoot your website’s appearance in search results.

Make sure to submit a sitemap of your blog. You can create one with the Yoast plugin or the free plugin “Google XML sitemaps” which is very easy to use. If you want to learn more about Search Console, check out Neil Patel’s post on how to use the Search Console to grow search traffic to your website.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test checks how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device. It also checks specific mobile-usability issues like text too small to read, the use of incompatible plugins, and so on.

This tool also shows you how you can improve your site’s code. Run it a few times to get accurate results. Also, check your blog’s speed with Google Pagespeed Insights or a service like the Pingdom Website Speed Test.

Woorank

WooRank is a popular Instant SEO checker and SEO audit tool. They offer a free Chrome extension that lets you quickly analyze a webpage’s SEO. Using this free extension, you can do a lot more than what’s listed below:

• Find broken links on the page
• Check the meta title, and description of the page
• Heading tags
• In-page links
• Technologies used
• Traffic rank

As a free website analysis tool, this offers a lot of features that usually should be paid for.

Mastering SEO

Optimizing your posts for SEO sounds boring as it can be and you won’t see results right away. Even when you’re an experienced blogger, the hours you invest in learning SEO now can pull in traffic and pageviews for YEARS to come.

When I took a week for long blogging breaks before, people kept coming to my blog, thanks to SEO! It keeps working when you stop!

Investing in SEO is the best and smart idea. If you can’t invest money in a fantastic course or SEO services, do yourself a favor and invest at least a bit of time.

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If you’re a new blogger with little content, then bookmark this guide to come back later. Focus on creating valuable and quality content first. Get your content out there and promote it on all of your social media platforms.

Now you have the free SEO tools and resources to become a well-educated blogger and benefit from search traffic years down the road. The more you practice SEO, the easier it gets.

If you haven’t got your complete SEO checklist, GRAB IT NOW!

Download this complete SEO checklist to get a full SEO task list of everything you need to optimize your website. It includes 30+ action items related to on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.

Let me know below which free SEO tools are you currently using and why do you like them.