15 Top Free SEO Tools to Use to Gather Insights, Conduct Research, Collect Data & Do Much More
When you are starting out with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or when you want to up your game, having the right collection of SEO tools could prove to be a game-changer for you.
So, here we are, with a compiled list of best and 100% free top 15 SEO tools that every online marketer must make use of.
What are SEO Tools?
These are programs and platforms, web and application based that help to delve deep into SEO data, delivering insights, conducting research, identifying issues, tracking your SEO process, and much more. These tools work to collate data about the entire SEO health of a site and campaign success, helping to know where you stand and what you need to do.
SEO tools work effectively to give an in-depth analysis of your SEO, and plan your SEO strategy, based on insights and metrics at your disposal.
What Purpose SEO Tools are Used For?
SEO practice combines a lot of activities and techniques. For this purpose, SEO tools come handy helping with a lot of aspects:
- Audit
- Analytics
- Keyword research
- On-Page SEO
- Site Speed Optimization
- Link Research
- Link Building
- Mobile SEO
- Local SEO
- Rank Tracking
- WordPress SEO (as a plug-in tool)
- And much more ion research, data collection, insight and so forth
Should You Use SEO Tools?
In one-word answer – yes.
Putting in manual effort for each task would not only be time-consuming but may also not yield the same and effective results that potent and smarty tools can do for you. In fact, it is always better to use your resources wisely. So, instead of having the resources slugging it out with the tasks and activities for long, better to carry these out with tools easily, fast and smartly.
And when you have a plethora of free SEO tools, why not make the best use of these.
And there are tasks that become quite impossible manually and tools will do that for you in real-time, with ready data to access anytime. Without SEO tools, you won’t be able to know:
- How many people are visiting your site or a page?
- How much the traffic has dropped or increased for a defined time period, or a certain query/search?
- How many links you have generated and which are working fine and which are not?
- What keywords could be most beneficial for you to target?
How to Use the SEO Tools?
Not just when your ranking and traffic is going down, but for regular tasks, as we have mentioned in the above sections, you should be using SEO tools. These are incredibly helpful, but you have to know which one to use for what purpose and when.
An SEO practice involves a lot of activities and measurements, and therefore, you should have a list of which tools to use at what step and in what degree. Ensure that you not only use the tried and tested but new ones as well, assessing the features, aligning with your objectives and work-process.
In fact, there are SEO tools that do multiple activities and therefore should be bookmarked as these can help you out with multiple tasks all-at-once, saving you time and effort.
While there are surfeit of SEO tools out there, it doesn’t make sense either to run all. Selected, best and reliable ones would do the job for you. This is where our compiled list of top free SEO tools would help you in planning your SEO strategy.
How We Have Curated Our Free SEO Tools List?
Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service process involves getting a good a look at our strategy, planning ahead and having the best technological resources to employ and work with.
With a thought-out process, we researched, analyzed and compiled this list of best free SEO tools for you, based on some key metrics:
- Widely used by the top marketers across the industries for their SEO process
- Recommended by the SEO community
- Tools which incorporate highly advanced features, functions, delivers actionable data, and provides above-board value
- Are easy to use without too much of complexity, which can make extracting useful data much more hard
- Tools which are actually, and truly 100% free
Now, as we are done with the importance of SEO tools, and how to use these, let’s get down discussing the top 15 free SEO tools.
Top 15 Free SEO Tools
It goes without saying that Google Analytics is the most widely used free and Google tools that does a lot for web-analytics. Whether you are an experienced campaigner or just starting out, it will help you amazingly. Robust, reliable, it works integrated with several other Google tools and programs including Search Console, Optimize, Data Studio and much more.
2. MozCast
Google’s search algorithm brings updates and changes time and again. It could be hard for you to keep track of that. For which MozCast is the perfect tool to do that. It helps you keep track of whether there is a big update or a small one, along with making use of up-to-date SERP tracking features.
Another one from the Google library, this becomes highly helpful when you want work on some key insights. It helps to merge data from different resources – including Google Analytics, Search Console, which you can visualize as well as share.
4. Keyword Hero
Now as the name suggests, you would have an idea of what this tool would be used for. It brings the smartness of machine learning and math to help you resolve your missing keyword data issue. This way you will have a keyword data that you can match with on-site metrics and conversion tracking. One aspect with this tool is that you can use this for free for up to 2000 session only per month.
One of the best and widely used SEO tools today, Screaming frog lets you check your website for crawl errors fast, effectively and thoroughly. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop-based application which provides a free version using which you can analyze 500 URLs per crawl – ideally for small site audits.
This one is another from the giant Google. While the initial intention was to create this for marketers utilizing PPC ads marketing, this tool works effectively to help in SEO keyword planning. It extracts information from Google’s own data. You can leverage the functionality of country filling as well to make your keyword planning more geo-specific.
When it comes to content marketing every expert, Google and all the top leaders in the industry talk about keeping search intent in mind. This is the tool that brings you insights into what data people are searching for or asking online. With each query, it fetches popular queries which is represented in a cool visual graphic, categorized into different question sets that, along with keyword suggestion using prepositions. This enables you to have a bundle of valuable data to plan your content creation and marketing strategy.
8. Disavow Tool
When you want to fight off negative SEO by removing toxic backlinks, this tool comes at your rescue. However, ensure that you assess its usage with features and after knowing how and when to use this, it should be utilized.
Google isn’t the only search engine that you are targeting. Next one comes Bing. And Bing webmaster tool is an effective and handy tool that provides a comprehensive collection of search and website analytics. Make use of this tool for your keyword research, keyword reports and crawling data.
Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool is the gold standard for the majority of marketers and developers to check if the site is mobile responsive or not. It determines and delivers result into what level your site meets the Google’s mobile-friendliness requirements. In today’s times, when you are getting most of the traffic from mobile devices, this tool becomes important to check for your web page’s mobile-friendliness and make the changes accordingly.
11. BuzzSumo
While Google says that it doesn’t count social signals as ranking factors, you know how important it is for your brand engagement to create a popular presence on social platforms. Its Chrome extension is free to use, and delivers key insights into social share count for any specific piece of content.
12. Ubersuggest
Right after Neil Patel took over Ubersuggest, he did a major overhaul to this tool, which has now become a favorite tool for many marketers for keyword research. It extracts data from Google to help you in your keyword planning, measuring the metrics like competition level, search volume, and CPC. Not only that, but it also helps in other SEO capabilities such as insights into link metrics.
13. Backlink Checker
This one from the Ahrefs is a great free tool that does great to research and assess about a particular URLs’ backlink. The result you get gives you insight into backlink numbers, referring domains, URL and domain rating, Ahrefs rank, and much more.
However, remember that it comes with certain limitations compared with a paid tool. You can try this for 100 links and the free version doesn’t allow for folder or prefix search capability.
For your local SEO practice you just can’t ignore this tool at all. This is the must have for your local SEO strategy planning and execution. Using this tool, you create your presence amongst the local searchers who rely on Google to find products, goods, services and businesses nearby, in their region. Google My Business enables you to claim your business, list information related to your business, manage and respond to Google reviews and much more.
15. Link Explorer
The Moz Link Explorer boasts of a staggering 40 trillion + links, and thus you can understand how much large influx of data and insight you can gather with this tool. It would not be wrong to say that this tool is the most precise backlink profile and Domain Authority (DA) checker tool. It is relied upon for its high-accuracy, largest link index. Check domain authority. The only consideration is that the free version lets you conduct 50 rows of data and 10 query search per month.
Conclusion:
These are just some of the very best, finest and most widely used free SEO tools that we have mentioned above. There are many more as such that you can use, specific to your SEO strategy and planning, like:
- Link Miner
- Mobile SERP Test
- SEO Minion
- SEOquake
- Panguin Tool
- Siteliner
- KWFinder
- YoastWordPress Plugin
- Keyword Surfer
- Google Trends
- XML Sitemaps
- SEOlyzer
- And many more
And apart from this list, there are many more that you can search for, assess the features and functionality and use accordingly.
So, is there any tool from what we have mentioned above that you are already using? Which tool you are planning to use for your SEO strategy?
If you have any doubt deciding on which free SEO tool to try, and how to use that for maximum gain, you can always get in touch with the SEO experts for complete, transparent and reliable guidance.
