Among the eight options we reviewed, Moz Keyword Explorer is our favorite free SEO tool. This tool delivers a user-friendly platform for keyword tracking, competitor analysis, and link research to boost your SEO efforts. There are several other tools worth considering, though, based on your specific wants and requirements. Read on for our reviews of the best free SEO tools.
Top Free SEO Tools: Golden Eggs
These are our Golden Eggs, the crème de la crème of SEO tools that you can use for free among the dozens we researched and considered.
Moz Keyword Explorer makes it easier than ever to discover and prioritize the best keywords to maximize your organization’s visibility. Start searching keywords for free today.
Yoast SEO helps you identify and fix technical errors on your WordPress site, as well as optimize content and assets to rank higher in search. Download Yoast’s WordPress plugin for free to get started.
Ahrefs Backlink Checker allows you to keep tabs on your competitors, as well as do light backlink checking. Check backlinks and sign up for free.
BuzzSumo is a comprehensive content marketing software that’s also useful for keyword research, tracking backlinks, and doing competitor research. Use it for free for up to 10 searches per month.
Free SEO Tools Review Process
Instead of giving generalized recommendations, we’ve split our reviews into different categories of use cases to help you choose the best free SEO tool based on your unique requirements.
During our research, we identified the following four use cases as the common needs for readers who are looking for free SEO tools:
By sorting our reviews this way, you can zoom in on the use case most relevant to your situation and focus on the SEO tools we’ve deemed best suited for it. Or scroll through this post to better grasp what these tools each bring to the table for various uses.
In each brand’s review, you’ll find out why we think it’s a top option for that specific use case, along with other benefits you can expect.
The Best Free SEO Tool for Keyword Research
Thorough keyword research highlights the best keywords to focus on in your SEO objectives to get a higher ranking in search and more organic traffic. The tools below provide insight into search queries your target audience is actually searching for on Google and help simplify and streamline keyword planning. These free tools can start your strategic SEO campaigns on the right foot.
Moz Keyword Explorer
Among the many tools in Moz’s highly effective suite of SEO offerings, their free Keyword Explorer stands out the most because of how much it simplifies the overwhelming world of keyword research and planning.
Search any keyword you want to see valuable metrics such as its monthly traffic volume, a difficulty score that tells you how tough it will be to rank on the first page of a search, and organic click-through rate (CTR). You’ll also get suggestions for similar keywords, so you can identify SEO opportunities you’ve overlooked.
The Moz Keyword Explorer also shows a priority score for each keyword you enter, with a score closer to 100, meaning the keyword has high search volume, high CTR, and low competition. Use it to quantify the keyword’s importance for your business and spot new inroads.
You can also add more details about your business into Moz’s Keyword Explorer to understand whether a keyword relates to your products and services and get more relevant information.
Semrush Keyword Magic Tool
Semrush is another big name in the SEO space, with a wide variety of tools and services to tap into. But its Keyword Magic Tool deserves special mention for the wealth of information you can glean without having to pay a dime.
With the click of a button, you get over one million keyword suggestions. All you need to do is enter one seed keyword and that’s it. Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool analyzes an entire search market, niche subtopics, and groups to provide you with insightful data that’ll help you actively get ahead of your competition.
There’s also a handy “Questions” filter that shows you question-based keywords to build out any search marketing plan. Use it to generate ideas to create relevant SEO-focused content, including campaigns, blog posts, and featured snippets to target.
The Best Free SEO Tools for Competitor Analysis
A key part of your SEO strategy is keeping tabs on where your competitors stand, which gives you a roadmap for what you need to do to improve your site and rank higher than them. SEO tools that deliver competitor analysis put you in a better position to identify your website’s strengths and weaknesses compared to your closest competition and where you have opportunities to leapfrog them.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a provider that excels at taking the complexity out of SEO and providing you with digestible insights to facilitate data-driven decision-making. Use their tools to find what kind of content is working the best in your niche.
Enter industry keywords to find articles with the highest social engagement, or enter your competitor’s domain to identify their best-performing articles. You also get access to influencer searches, allowing you to spot who the big sharers are of your content and your competitors’ content.
Aside from competitor research, BuzzSumo is also handy for generating content ideas, analyzing keywords, and monitoring backlinks. The only caveat is the limited premium plan that only gives you 10 free searches a month, so make sure you use your credits wisely.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb tells you everything you’d want to know about the sites your target audience is visiting. Get details on those sites’ traffic sources, location, top pages, engagement, preferred marketing channels, and more.
We particularly like how SimilarWeb streamlines the analysis of marketing strategies for competing sites. Not only does it let you benchmark your competitors’ channel performance and identify their channels bringing the highest traffic share, but it also evaluates the quality of this traffic using engagement metrics like bounce rate, visit duration, and pages per visit.
This ultimately helps you identify the most pertinent tactics to maximize your ROI and allocate marketing resources more effectively.
The Best Free SEO tools for Link Building
Link building involves getting other quality websites to link to your website’s content. Building links is a proven SEO tactic that signals to Google your website is a quality resource worthy of citation. SEO tools for link building help you build and execute a strategy to generate links and assess their quality, eventually building your site’s authority.
Ahrefs Backlink Checker
Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker is hands-down our favorite free SEO tool for building quality links, and there’s a solid reason for that. It shows you the top 100 backlinks to any website you want, whether you want to focus on a single URL or a domain and its subdomains.
The tool uses Ahrefs’ index of over 15 trillion live backlinks, which is twice the number of all pages on Google, enabling you to check for links, find link sources, and analyze relevant keyword phrases to drive traffic.
You can use the Backlink Checker for free for your own site and pages or those of your competitors or inspirational brands in your industry. No matter what you’re focusing on, all you have to do is enter the site’s URL into the search bar, and Ahrefs will display its domain rating, the number of backlinks, and several referring domains within seconds.
Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
HARO is one of the more unconventional SEO tools. It aims to connect journalists with authoritative sources. While it may not immediately scream SEO to you, this gives you access to trusted sources or journalism outfits that can boost your backlink-generating campaigns.
Whether you want to serve as an expert source for a news outlet and gain backlinks through that content or find experts to give your own content more authority, HARO provides serious opportunities through this level of direct access.
Here’s how it works. Reporters, journalists, and other outlets can post questions seeking answers from experts. If you’re looking for a source, you can take this route to find authoritative individuals to bulk up your content’s efficacy. These questions are then sent to HARO subscribers via email. If you’re acting as a source, you can respond and potentially become a source for the journalist.
HARO can be used for free unless you want to get keyword alerts, which will require you to pay for a subscription ranging from $19 to $149 per month.
The Best Free SEO Tools for Website and Content Optimization
The fundamentals of SEO start on your site. There are several free SEO tools to analyze your site content and elements, like blog posts and product descriptions, but we recommend going a step further and looking for options that also help with accessibility, optimization of visual elements, and technical SEO elements such as URL analysis and sitemaps.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins on the market, and you can use a version of it for free forever.
It has a built-in content checker that makes sure your writing is optimized for search before you hit the publish button, including a traffic light system that scores your content and provides a checklist of things you’ve done right and things that need improving.
Yoast SEO also takes care of crucial technical SEO tasks. It allows you to submit XML sitemaps to Google for indexing your web pages, manages redirects to avoid 404 errors, and customizes meta descriptions and titles, among several other things.
Keep in mind that this tool is only available for WordPress websites. If you’re using any other CMS, you’ll need to look elsewhere for this level of built-in monitoring and assistance.
Screaming Frog
You can use Screaming Frog for free to perform advanced site auditing for up to 500 URLs.
This nifty SEO tool crawls your entire website to generate a report of potential issues. Screaming Frog can spot everything from broken HTML and crawl and HTTP errors to JavaScript rendering issues and more. It can also identify pages that have duplicate content, helping you avoid getting penalized by Google.
There’s also a standalone Log File Analyzer that allows you to upload your log files, verify search engine bots, and analyze search bot data and behavior to enhance your SEO strategy. All in all, if you are comfortable sifting through technical SEO reports and audits, Screaming Frog is the most cost-effective tool you could ask for.
Further Reading
There’s a lot to learn in the world of SEO, from the types of tools you should use to the concepts and factors you need to be aware of when building an SEO strategy. We at Crazy Egg have covered this topic extensively from several different angles. So, if you want to boost your knowledge and confidence about this category, dive into our sampling of other Crazy Egg posts below.
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