20+ Free SEO Tools to Help You With Your Rankings

1. Google Keyword Planner

This amazing tool often gets a bad rap, perhaps because people don’t realize they can use it for free (i.e. without having to run an ad campaign) or perhaps because it no longer shows the exact search volume number, but rather an approximation. But despite its flaws, Google Keyword Planner remains one of the most essential free SEO tools, as it can be a great tool for learning about keyword research and getting it right.

After setting up your Keyword Planner, you’ll be offered two options: Find Keywords and Get Search Volume and Forecasts.

If you plan on using the Keyword Planner for keyword research, obviously you’ll opt for Find Keywords. The tool takes the term or phrase that you input, and serves you with some keyword suggestions, along with the stats regarding the competition, the average monthly searches, and high and low ranges for the top of the page bid.

If you already have your list of keywords and want to check out how they’ll do, use the Get Search Volume and Forecasts option. It will show you an estimated number of clicks, impressions, costs, CTR and CPC for the keyword you fed the tool with.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics may not be a strictly SEO tool but it is still something that every SEO professional should keep in his or her toolbox. The reason is simple – Google Analytics tells you if your SEO efforts are paying off, and to which extent.

This tool provides insight on your website data such as:

This tool has some unique features, such as Campaign Parameter tracking, allowing you to see how your campaigns are doing. Audience Reports provide valuable insight into who your audience is and what they want, while Goal Tracking helps you track conversions.

The best thing about Google Analytics is that, unlike the other analytics tools, its data comes directly from Google, so you know you can rely on it.

Google is quite generous when it comes to offering free tools for SEO purposes and Google Search Console is one of its best gifts. This amazing tool allows you to monitor how your site is doing in Google search and to troubleshoot it in case something seems amiss.

Google Search Console not only helps you confirm that Google has crawled and indexed your pages, it also lets you fix indexing problems, request re-indexing of your pages, see which sites link to you, which search terms lead to your site, and so on.

One of the things GSC can help you out with the most is structured data (rich snippets). It shows you what needs improvement and also helps you test your live data. It does the same with your rich cards.

In addition, Google Search console sends out an HTML Improvements report highlighting issues like inadequate meta descriptions and tags, as well as non-indexable content.

This amazing tool also helps you get your sitelinks displayed below the search results, and is of tremendous help when it comes to optimizing for AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).

Amazingly thorough Search Analytics reports, data on links to your site (with keywords), internal linking, international targeting, mobile usability, index status, content keywords, blocked resources, crawl stats and errors, robots.txt tester, sitemaps, security issues…these are just some of the areas in which Google Search Console provides valuable input and suggestions for improvements.

Google also offers a very convenient Mobile-Friendly Test, an online tool that is part of the Search Console, for making sure your pages look right on all screen sizes.

4. Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is yet another free and convenient solution from the search engine giant. Basically, it helps SEO experts and digital marketers generate reports with data coming from multiple sources. Specifically, it merges data from 17 products by the Google corporation (Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Sheets, Google Ad Manager, BigQuery, Google Search Console, etc.) It also works with over 90 partner “connectors,” such as Bing Ads, Amazon Seller, Criteo and LinkedIn.

This tool doesn’t provide any insights by itself, but instead helps you process the data from your marketing activities and present them in a clear and efficient way.

5. Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights is a quick and easy web-based tool for checking the speed and performance of any website. It tests the website speed on both mobile and desktop, and assigns a score. More importantly, it suggests optimizations that might increase the page load speed, as well as detailed diagnostics.

The only thing that this excellent speed profiling tool doesn’t do is provide speed data for different locations.

Another aspect in which GPS fares slightly worse than other page speed tools is the fact that without waterfall view it actually doesn’t offer very actionable data.

Other Free SEO Tools

6. Keywords Everywhere

A tool that quickly became one of the favorites both for seasoned SEO experts and for relative novices, Keywords Everywhere boasts one major distinction (and advantage) over the other tools of this kind: it works in your browser, as an add-on.

Compatible with Chrome and Firefox, Keywords Everywhere can be used on any website to provide you with the search volume, CPC and competition data. What this means is that you don’t have to log into anywhere and, more importantly, you don’t have to switch between your keyword tool and your search volume research solution. This saves you a lot of time and also allows you to work on multiple sites.

Basically, you get to continue using your favorite keyword research tool. Keywords Everywhere will simply add metrics like search volume and CPC to the results, providing you with a full set of metrics.

Keywords Everywhere currently works with:

With most tools, Keywords Everywhere displays the data right underneath the search box. You have to agree that this is extremely convenient.

This tool is completely free, with no paid addons.

7. WMS-Everywhere

WMS-Everywhere is a keyword research tool that serves as a free alternative to KeywordsEverywhere. It is in fact a Google Chrome browser extension that can be installed in just a few clicks, for free. Once installed, this tool offers a selection of useful data about the keyword you typed in search. Simply type in your keyword and Google it, and the tool will provide you with recommendations and actionable keyword-related data.

With WMS-Everywhere, you can search from any geo-location, get related searches (“people also search for” results) and metrics such as volume per month and CPC (cost-per-click) for any keyword you type in, no limitations whatsoever.

As we said, WMS-Everywhere is completely free and its creators promise it will stay like that forever. Mozilla Firefox will also be pleased to hear that the extension for their favorite browser is in the works, too.

8. Moz Free Tools

This SEO giant currently rules supreme over the SEO tool landscape, but its most complete solutions don’t exactly come for free (although they do come with a 30-day free trial). Don’t worry, though. Even if you’re on a budget, there are some excellent free tools by Moz for you to use.

9. Open Admin Tools

Open Admin Tools is a set of web tools for tracking any website’s page rank, traffic stats, indexed pages, backlinks, cache history, server analysis and more. It provides instant data and is very convenient to use, since it is web-based and can be accessed from any device.

It also performs DNS record analysis,  HTTP header analysis, offers an overview of site technology (SSL, robots.txt, XML sitemaps, server), link analysis (internal, backlinks, follow and nofollow links), social network analysis and more.

10. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a handy little service for web analytics, aimed at businesses in particular. It provides data on your clients’ and competitors’ website traffic and referrals,  and it analyses their keywords page views, bounce rate and similar data.

SimilarWeb comes both as a free and as a paid tool. The free version is quite limited, though, in terms of results. You get only five results per metric, one month of mobile app data and three months of web traffic data. The paid version of this tool gives you unlimited results per metric, up to three years of web traffic data, up to 28 months of mobile app data, desktop-mobile split, keyword analysis, and several other advanced features.

11. SEO Minion

As its name suggests, this tool is created with the idea of serving as a helping hand to SEO experts, marketers and business owners. SEO Minion is actually a browser extension, ideal for quick daily SEO tasks such as on-page SEO analysis, redirects and broken link checks, as well as hreflang checks.

As for special features, this tool checks your site rankings across multiple locations and has a handy SERP preview tool, too.

SEO Minion is completely free and rather lightweight. At the moment, it is compatible with Chrome and Firefox only.

12. NitroPack

NitroPack is a caching and optimization plugin aimed to improve your website speed. It can be applied to any website, but you will get the best results with WordPress. NitroPack plugin improves different aspects of your WordPress website, and with that, boosts your Google PageSpeed score dramatically. This is especially important now, in the light of recent Google announcements introducing Web Vitals and speed as a ranking factor.

The NitroPack WordPress plugin is packed with features, most notably the Amazon CloudFront integration, HTML compression and minification, CSS minification and JS compression, as well as browser-aware caching and lazy loading.

You will be amazed by the results when putting NitroPack for WordPress to work. And on top of that, it is very easy to install and use. Good news is that if you are running a WooCommerce store, NitroPack is fully compatible.

The plugin is free for smaller websites (up to 200 pages), and membership plans are starting from $19 per month.

13. GTmetrix

GTmetrix is not a strictly SEO solution but rather a tool you can (and should) use in combination with your other SEO and analytics tools. In short, it shows you the speed at which your pages are loading and also offers suggestions and ideas as to how to make them faster.

It monitors pages, sends out performance reports, allows you to set up alerts when a page triggers a certain condition (certain page load and total page size values, etc.), tests for multiple regions and analyzes for mobile.

Considering that speed is a major SEO factor and that Google ranks down slow-loading sites, it’s clear that GTmetrix is an essential addition to any SEO toolkit.

This tool is free, and there’s also a premium version with advanced features and richer options.

14. Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator

Keyword generator is a free tool from Ahrefs that allows you to generate up to 150 keyword ideas for any search term. Besides keyword ideas, it gives you search volume and KD (keyword difficulty) for each keyword. Keyword Difficulty (KD) represents estimated ranking difficulty calculated from the Ahrefs algorithm for given keywords. It ranges from 0 – 100 (lower number – easier to rank).

What’s great about the Keyword Generator is that you can search for keyword ideas not only on Google, but on Bing, Youtube and Amazon too. And on top of that, you can search not only on US, UK and other English-speaking markets, but you can also choose from one of the 170+ countries from the dropdown menu.

15. SERProbot

SERProbot is a free online tool for checking search engine ranking position of any website – your own or the competition’s. It can check for up to five keywords at a time. It doesn’t offer particularly detailed information, but works great for quick checks and easy insights. You don’t even need to register.

16. Answer the Public

When it first hit the market of SEO tools, Answer the Public immediately stood out with its hip, a bit quirky interface and a simple but absolutely brilliant concept. This SEO tool basically taps into the bulk of the Google and Bing autocomplete results to give the user an insight into the motivations behind each query. Starting from the conviction that these results are the most underused source for keyword research, Answer the Public divides them into various lists that are presented in a visually innovative and user-friendly way.

This tool organizes the results into questions, prepositions, comparisons and related keywords, and even sorts them for you in the alphabetical order. And all this can be downloaded for further processing.

As of recently, Answer the Public also comes in a paid version, offering unlimited searches, report saving, hi-res images, and so on. If you’re working on a new project or a brand new website and are looking for quick and easy keyword ideas, then Answer the Public might be just the thing for you. If you don’t mind the weird guy staring at you as you’re typing in your query, that is.

17. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is one of those tools that, although they have a paid version, their free version gets the job done (and does it very well, too) for most small and medium websites. True, it used to be completely free, but ever since it was acquired by the digital marketing and SEO mogul Neil Patel, it added a great number of exceptional SEO features that required developing a paid package as well.

As for the free version, what this tool does is it helps you generate keyword ideas, but it doesn’t stop there. In fact, with the free version, you can track keywords (up to 20 of them), get weekly updates, add up to 20 locations, three site audits per day, ten keyword suggestions and ten content ideas. But the best part about this tool is that it also allows you to see what your competition is up to – thanks to the competitive analysis of their domains. You can learn about your competitor’s top keywords and top-performing pages, and generate up to three reports per day. This way, you get actionable tools for out-ranking your competition and you also get some fresh keyword ideas based on what they’re using.

18. WooRank

Another SEO tool that comes in free and premium versions, WooRank is a simple tool that can provide you with some straightforward, but actionable solutions for improving your SERP ranking. The free version has a keyword feature that allows you to track up to 15 keywords, while the site crawl tool can provide crawl data for up to 50 pages. On top of that, if you want to see what your competition is ranking for, you can compare your site to theirs, although the free version allows just one competition website, while with the pro one you get much more.

WooRank can easily be integrated with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, which is a good thing since this tool alone is nowhere nearly as powerful as the data you can get from these two.

Another feature that is worth mentioning and that we don’t see that often in other free SEO tools are the automatic uptime notifications that alert you in case your website goes down.

Finally, WooRank also has a browser extension you can use for quick insights. Available for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, this extension offers a quick SEO analysis of any website you want, covering the most important on- and off-page factors.

19. Headline Analyzer from IsItWP

Your headline can be the factor that decides whether someone will become a subscriber, a buyer, a customer. It can draw people in or turn them away. But how to tell whether a headline you’ve come up with will do wonders for your traffic and engagement, or turn out to be a flop? That’s where the Headline Analyzer from IsItWP comes in. This terrific free online tool is extremely simple to use, and yet it provides you with some powerful insights.

Headline Analyzer basically dissects your headlines, approaching them from several aspects, most importantly its readability, its SEO value and its sentimental effect. The tool offers a visual representation of a headline in search results, and assigns it a score. The analysis is performed on a number of aspects. You get an overall score from 1 to 100. Ideally, you should aim at 70 or above.

The tool analyzes the language of the headline, its word count, use of uncommon or emotional words, as well as “power words”. Since headlines with emotional triggers are more “clickable,” the tool focuses on that aspect in particular, pointing to possible improvements. It also identifies the sentiment the headline is likely to evoke, positioning it on the scale from positive through neutral to negative.

Finally, the search preview assures your headline doesn’t get cut off in search results.

20. Ardor Metadata Length Checker

Metadata optimization has a tremendous impact not just on your search engine visibility, but on your website’s bounce rate, retention and, to an extent, your brand reputation, too. Meta tags help users decide whether they want to click and access your website or not, so it’s clear that optimizing your meta titles and descriptions can do wonders for your traffic.

The problem is, however, that the rules about the metadata length often change, and can be hard to keep track of, especially when writing your meta descriptions. Fortunately, there is a tool that can help with that. Ardor Metadata Length Checker not only counts the characters and spaces in your meta titles and descriptions, keeping them within the recommended range (currently at 100-160 for meta descriptions and 50-60 for the meta title), but it also provides a pixel count. Since Google actually measures metadata length in pixels, it’s clear why this is such a useful feature.

This tool is web-based and completely free. In addition to meta title and meta description length, it also checks for internal linking suggestions and displays a SERP snippet preview.

Final Thoughts

And there you have it. The best free SEO tools available at the moment. Some of them offer comprehensive all-in-one solutions, while others can be mixed and matched to your liking.

Free SEO tools are a great option for beginner marketers on a budget as well as SEO professionals who don’t need particularly robust and expensive solutions. Especially if combined with some premium SEO WordPress themes, these tools offer valuable insights and can be of tremendous help in your quest to get your business high up on the search result pages.