April 7, 2025
All good things to those who…pay?
SEO tools are an absolute necessity for any business of any shape or size. They increase your visibility on search engines, help you stand out from your competitors, engage your audiences, and ultimately increase your profits when used right. Without them, you’re just wasting money paying for your domain.
Now, when choosing the best SEO tools for your business, you’ll notice that you have access to both free and paid solutions.
Before we get deeper into the detailed free vs. paid SEO tools comparison, it’s important to dispel the common misconception that all free tools are downright garbage and that paid options are the way to go. It’s simply not true—not always, in any case.
Whether an SEO tool will be effective for you doesn’t depend so much on its price as it does on its capabilities and feature sets, as well as your overall goals and objectives. Some free tools can be a godsend for SEO beginners on a budget, but too limiting to SEO experts who need access to more data—or vice versa!
So, while there are objective differences between the two types of SEO tools, you’ll want to remember that their price doesn’t necessarily determine their worth.
Have a closer look at the free vs. paid SEO tools below and find out which option is better suited to your needs.
Let’s get this party started by going over the basics. What even are SEO tools in the first place?
SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, is the process of making your website more visible and more relevant to your target audience and search engine crawlers. SEO tools are software solutions that can help with one or more aspects of this process.
Many factors can impact your SEO, including the quality of your content, page loading speed, mobile-friendliness, etc. There are also many different SEO tools that you can benefit from.
Keyword research, for example, is a big part of SEO and a common feature among SEO tools. Keywords are the search terms your audience uses when looking something up online. If your website has appropriate keywords dispersed throughout, it has a higher chance of appearing among the search results.
Here’s a real-life example for you—you might’ve looked up something like “difference between free and paid SEO tools” and landed on this page. That’s because I’ve used relevant keywords in this post.
Had you been looking for the “difference between free and paid customer relationship management tools,” this post wouldn’t even appear in your results pages because I’m not using any keywords relevant to that topic (with the present example excluded, of course).
Another key function of both paid and free SEO tools is backlink analytics, giving you insights into the overall volume and quality of all the links that lead from other sites to yours. Your backlinks are critical in shaping your online reputation, as your target audience and search engines will use your backlink profile to determine your site’s value and, subsequently, its rank on SERPs.
You’ll also find many SEO tools that focus on site audits, assessing your meta descriptions, titles, headers, and internal linking structure. This feature is crucial as it will help you uncover potential on-page issues that are negatively affecting your user experience and harming your rankings.
Some SEO tools like Rankioz will have keyword research, backlink analytics, site audits, and comprehensive feature sets to get you covered on all fronts. Others will specialize in just one SEO aspect, so you’ll find:
The better optimized your website is, the higher your ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) will be. And the higher your ranking, the more trustworthy your site will appear, thus drawing in more organic traffic.
Free tools are often the best choice for beginners. They’re commonly lightweight and user-friendly. Depending on your needs, they can be highly insightful, giving you access to all the basic data without overwhelming you with information you won’t understand or know how to put to use.
In most instances, free tools will have just one area of expertise, offering features relevant to keyword research only, for example, or backlink analytics only. Therefore, if you have a more comprehensive SEO strategy, you’ll usually have to rely on a few different free tools simultaneously.
Although highly convenient for those on a budget, free tools aren’t always the ideal choice for everyone. As a rule, they rarely have any advanced features that can present deeper insights into your website’s performance or offer relevant suggestions for improvements.
They also frequently come with data restrictions. You might see popular keywords in your niche, for instance, but you won’t get many semantically related phrases or additional information that can help you put those keywords to better use.
All in all, free tools are easily accessible, budget-friendly, and convenient, but they’re also highly limiting. This generally makes them suitable for beginners and startups, but if you’re looking for more advanced SEO tools for agencies, you’ll probably need to look elsewhere.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular free SEO tools. It’s a comprehensive business intelligence platform that can help you track your content performance.
Unlike most free SEO tools for beginners, it has a bit of a steeper learning curve, but to make up for it, it offers actionable insights and detailed analytics that can help you enhance your entire digital marketing strategy.
With it, you can track your organic traffic and conversions, assess your visitor engagement levels, analyze your referral traffic, and even identify your best landing pages. Overall, it’s a useful tool to have in your toolbox, even if you’re using additional paid SEO solutions.
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Another excellent free tool offered by Google is the Google Search Console. If for no other reason (though there are many), you should use this tool to better understand how Google crawls and ranks your website. You’ll get all the information you need on how Google works and how your site performs, which empowers you to make data-driven decisions that can ultimately improve your rankings.
Google Search Console comes with a long list of convenient features that can be as useful to complete SEO novices as to experienced professionals. You’ll get detailed performance reports, search analytics, and index coverage reports.
You’ll be able to use it to submit your sitemaps, get alerts of any on-page issues that are affecting your rankings, and monitor your core web vitals.
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Ubersuggest is a popular tool for keyword research, backlink analytics, and content optimization. While it does have paid tiers that give you more freedom and flexibility, its free SEO toolset could be enough to get you started with site optimization.
While you’ll be limited to one project only, you’ll get access to all the necessities with your free account—rank tracking, site auditing, competitor tracking, backlink analytics, and keyword research. You’ll even have access to its AI writer, though you’ll only be able to use it for up to 2,000 words per day. It’s not the best AI writer out there, but it’s suitable enough for content brainstorming.
Of course, all the data will be highly limited if you’re using the free version, but that could be a positive if you’re brand new to SEO—you won’t be bombarded with confusing data right from the get-go.
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Ahrefs is generally considered a pretty expensive SEO solution, but it offers a free toolset with some impressive capabilities. As long as you have a website with verified ownership, you can use Ahrefs Webmasters Tools without spending a dime.
With this tool, you can perform three key tasks of SEO—site SEO monitoring, keyword identification, and backlink analysis. You’ll get insights into hundreds of potential issues that might be hurting your rankings on search engines, a complete overview of your backlink profile, and detailed information on all the keywords your site ranks for.
It’s pretty much Google Search Console on steroids, so it could come in handy to users on a budget.
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Screaming Frog is a powerful on-page and technical SEO tool with a generous free version. It works as a website crawler (in a sense, similar to search engine crawlers) and thoroughly assesses your website, looking for any element that might be harming your ranking.
With the free version, you get only the basic features, but they’re often more than enough in the beginning. You’ll get insights into all your broken links, errors, and redirects. You’ll get an assessment of your metadata, uncover duplicate pages, and get site visualizations. You’ll get a lot of useful data that can improve your SEO efforts.
There’s a catch, however. You’ll need to overcome quite a steep learning curve. Unless you have prior experience with similar solutions, you’ll need to give yourself enough time to get accustomed to Screaming Frog and learn how to get the most out of it.
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MozBar is a highly useful Chrome extension that can be as helpful to beginners as it is to SEO professionals. Dubbed a “research assistant,” it offers great insights into your site’s performance. At a glance, you’ll get all the information you need on your page and domain authority, spam scores, and ranking keywords.
Though it’s a lightweight option, it can help you improve your SERP rankings by notifying you of potential on-page issues and helping you find opportunities for improving your SEO strategy.
The biggest issue, unfortunately, is that it’s more of a freemium than a free solution. Though it has some nice features, they tend to be glitchy and not quite as insightful as those that come with a paid subscription.
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Paid tools are typically where it’s at. If you’re more serious about your SEO or have an agency and need to work on multiple different websites at once, you’ll need to pay up.
In most instances, only paid solutions will offer the comprehensive feature set that you’ll need to make a significant impact on the visibility and usability of your site. These tools tend to provide detailed insights into your and your competitors’ performance. They typically come with more advanced features, insightful reports, and, at times, even personalized recommendations that can make quite an impact on your SERP rankings.
Not to mention, many even come with advanced AI capabilities that can help with virtually all aspects of SEO—content grading, content generation, brainstorming, and report creation, to name a few.
Perhaps their most significant advantage is that many paid SEO tools are easily scalable, so you can find options that suit your unique needs and preferences.
On paper, this may all look fantastic. In practice, it isn’t always so. The first and most significant drawback is that many of the best tools tend to be seriously overpriced. Moreover, they can be an overkill for small businesses. You’ll be drowned in data, information, research, reports, and analytics. If you’re not an SEO expert, you could easily get lost in all of this if you’re not an SEO expert.
You’ll potentially find yourself investing hundreds of dollars a month, and in some cases, you won’t get enough in return.
Fortunately, though, you do have some affordable options that deliver great ROI and can be perfectly customized to your business. Rankioz is as cheap as $10 a month and has everything you need for your SEO strategy, regardless of the size of your business or your specific niche. 😉
We’ve already discussed the Ahrefs Webmasters Tool, which is free. However, Ahrefs offers much more than that if you’re willing to pay. With the price tag starting at “only” $129 a month, Ahrefs gives you access to a much more comprehensive set of features—you’ll get all the Webmasters capabilities and then some.
You’ll be able to perform full site audits that can help you uncover all existing issues affecting your rankings. You’ll even be able to identify some opportunities for SEO improvements. You’ll get more detailed keyword research, AI-driven content enhancements, and SERP performance monitoring.
While not the best option for small businesses with tight budgets, it can be useful to more sizable organizations and agencies.
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If you want something with a bit of a higher starting price than Ahrefs but pretty much the same capabilities, look no further than SEMrush, which you can get for just $139.95. Jokes aside, it’s a capable tool that can help SMBs climb through the ranks and find a nice, cozy position towards the top of SERPs.
It’s an all-in-one solution that covers all the essentials. You’ll get your necessary keyword data, on-page SEO recommendations, help with your local SEO, competitor insights—the works.
It’s pretty easy to use, which makes it suitable for SEO professionals of all levels. It comes with some useful integrations and powerful features that can prove to be most useful as long as you can afford its premium pricing tiers.
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Moz Pro rounds up all the key SEO features that can help you improve your rankings and presents them to you in one simple unified platform. With a more reasonable starting price than the first two tools mentioned, starting at $49 per month, Moz Pro gives you all the essentials—keyword research, competitor research, and site tracking, among other features.
Of course, if you want a bit more functionality out of it, you’ll need a bit more expensive subscription. Features like backlink analysis and unlimited scheduled reports are only available with the more expensive plans.
Still, it’s a user-friendly, capable solution that offers a little bit of everything for everyone—from a startup to an agency.
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If you’re looking to perfect your SEO strategy based on all-encompassing details from your competition, SpyFu is the tool for you. One of the top solutions for competitor monitoring, it will give you information on everything you need to know, including your competitor’s top-ranking keywords, their search traffic, and ad history.
Of course, it also gives you access to a wide variety of SEO tools that don’t necessarily rely on competitor insights. With it, you can enjoy detailed keyword research, a convenient backlink builder, thorough SERP analysis, and seamless rank tracking.
With its starting price of $39 a month, it can be a cost-effective solution for smaller teams and businesses with a stricter budget.
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Clearscope can be a highly helpful tool if you’re specifically interested in improving the quality of your content. It’s an AI-driven platform that doesn’t simply tell you which keywords to use to improve page relevancy. It presents you with a complete list of all LSI and semantically related keywords, assesses your content readability, helps you better format your content with appropriate headers, and gives you the key insights you need to ensure you meet user expectations.
The catch? Its pricing prevents independent site owners and small businesses from getting the most out of it. The cheapest plan is no less than $189 a month. The catchier catch? If you want to take advantage of its AI capabilities, you’ll need to get its more expensive plan, which will set you back almost $400.
For larger businesses, the investment could be well worth it—it’s a fine tool with plenty to offer. However, the fact that it’s so inaccessible to those with fewer resources significantly impacts its overall usability.
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If you were impressed with Screaming Frog’s free version, get ready to have your mind blown. The paid version has everything included with the free plan and then some. You’ll get a full-page assessment without any crawl limits—audit as many pages as you need.
Adjust your crawl configuration however you see fit, create a crawl schedule, check your website for mobile usability, and even get grammar and spelling checks if needed.
Of course, the main drawback that comes with the free plan is also present in the paid version. The learning curve is steep. Fortunately, the price tag isn’t. You can get an annual license for just $259 per year, which equates to just a bit over $21 a month.
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At a glance, there doesn’t necessarily seem to be much of a difference between free and paid tools. Okay, free tools can be limiting. Paid ones are more advanced. But what does that mean? At the end of the day, they apparently have more or less the same features, so what’s the deal?
Let’s take a closer look.
By now, you’ve realized that keywords are the bread and butter of SEO. Virtually every SEO tool you come across, regardless of its price, popularity, or type, will come with keyword research capabilities.
Now, to perform keyword research, SEO tools need access to databases. As a general rule of thumb, most free SEO solutions will have access to much smaller (and sometimes outdated) databases. Paid ones typically have more resources to expand and update their databases more frequently.
What that means for you is that with free solutions, you risk missing out on important keywords that could affect your rankings on SERPs. Paid tools usually give you insights into a much larger quantity of keywords, thus giving you more ranking opportunities.
Moreover, paid solutions will often come with more comprehensive keyword management capabilities. They can give you a list of all the semantically related and LSI keywords and help you better understand the user’s search intent.
Additionally, they’ll give you more insights into how difficult it is to rank for a given keyword, its estimated cost per click (CPC), and its search volumes.
Tools that offer site auditing are designed to evaluate different on-page and technical SEO factors that can affect your performance on SERPs. The main difference between free and paid tools with site auditing is which elements they look into and how capable they are of detecting issues.
As you’ve probably gathered so far, free tools tend to be somewhat limited in this regard. They typically look into just a handful of basic factors—page loading speed, your title tags, meta descriptions, image details, internal and external links, and broken pages. Sometimes, they can propose solutions, but in most instances, they just flag issues.
Paid tools tend to be more powerful. They often look into many additional factors, such as your mobile optimization, a variety of page errors, duplicate pages, keyword optimization, and the crawlability of your website—the list goes on and on.
More importantly, however, they usually offer tailored tips and tricks on how to best resolve the issues, and they propose various areas for improvement.
Some even automatically fix technical issues for you. They’re better equipped to identify and handle technical issues and, depending on the tool chosen, can work wonders for improving your user experience.
Backlink analytics is pretty crucial for your rankings and your online reputation on the whole. If you have suspicious websites linking back to yours, and vice versa, your site might seem suspicious. If you have inbound and outbound links with high-authority domains, you’ll automatically be regarded in a more positive light—by your website visitors and search engines.
Free tools can usually perform just a basic backlink analysis. They’ll give you your backlink profile health score and tell you about the number of backlinks you have, while some might even offer insights into their quality. You’ll usually get little additional functionality.
Paid tools, as you’ve come to expect, are more capable in most instances. Instead of just giving you a quick overview of your backlinks, they give you an evaluation of your entire backlinking profile. Many will offer additional info on the anchor text used alongside your links.
You’ll also be able to disavow links that could be harming your reputation and gain deeper insights into how each link affects your SERP performance.
An additional benefit of paid SEO tools is that they tend to uncover more backlinks. With free tools, you might not be able to get a complete backlink profile.
As the name implies, content optimization is all about ensuring that the content you post on your website is relevant, well-optimized, and user-friendly. You have dozens of SEO tools that can help you with that, but naturally, there’s a bit of a difference in how free tools approach content optimization vs how paid ones do it.
Google Search Console, for instance, is a popular free tool frequently used for optimizing your page content. It’s a powerful solution with plenty to offer. It analyzes your pages, looks into what’s driving users to your website, and gives you access to useful keyword clusters that help you better organize your topics.
While all of this is fine and dandy, paid tools take content optimization to a whole new level.
Clearscope, for instance, is one of the most in-demand optimizers, despite its steep price tag. It gives you deeper insights into your keywords and your existing content. With useful readability scores, ideal content length info, and topic coverage assessment, it helps you create better content with relative ease.
Many paid tools will also help organize your content, create brief outlines, recommend useful links to include, automatically insert internal links, and enhance or even paraphrase your work.
All things considered, content optimization is generally something you’ll want to pay for.
What’s the use of SEO tools if you don’t have insights into the performance of your entire strategy? While reporting and analytics aren’t always the most important feature, they’re certainly beneficial.
Like all the features mentioned above, reporting and analytics will be pretty basic with free tools. You’ll usually get just the most essential information on your performance—your total impressions, your average position, and CTR metrics, for instance. Most commonly, you’ll be limited to a pre-set reporting schedule without the possibility of updating or changing it.
With paid tools, you get more flexibility and more versatility.
Your reports will be more insightful, telling you all about the overall health of your website, common issues, key performance metrics, historical changes, and trends. In some cases, you’ll even get the benefits of predictive analytics, getting all the data you need to prepare for changing trends.
Depending on the tool you choose, you can schedule your reports however you see fit and easily extract key data for a more seamless sharing experience.
Although all paid SEO tools come with different price tags attached, you should expect to pay at least around $100 per month, on average.
There are exceptions, of course, with Screaming Frog, for example, setting you back just a bit over $21 a month and Rankioz costing half that. There are exceptions that go in the other direction, with premium subscription tiers over $1k, as with Ahrefs.
Is it all worth it?
I’ll probably give you the answer that you hate the most. It depends. It depends on the type of business you’re running. It depends on your target audience. It depends on your general goals and objectives.
All that said, the fact of the matter is that some paid tools can be well worth it and even ultimately end up costing you less than some free tools, despite how odd that sounds. With free tools, you often have to invest a lot of time and manual work to see any benefits from them.
You’d have to rely on incomplete data and settle for less insightful reports, which gives your competitors who are using paid solutions an edge.
The best SEO tools can offer exceptional ROI, helping you attract more clients and customers and ultimately increase your profits.
The dentist Smileworks in Liverpool, for instance, saw a 24x increase in customers and over 3.5 million in annual revenue by using SEMrush and focusing on improving their SEO strategy. SUSO Digital, an SEO agency, used Ahrefs and saw an increase of 80x in their organic traffic.
So, if you’re serious about your SEO and want measurable results, paid tools are the way to go. You just have to be selective about which tool you settle on.
To make sure that you get a valuable, reliable SEO tool (whether that means a free tool or a paid tool), you need to first assess your business needs.
Start by assessing your budget. Do you have enough flexibility to cover about $100 a month without impacting your entire company and forcing you to cut corners elsewhere? You might not need to settle for free and limited SEO tools if $100 a month is too much for you. If you can’t afford 3-digit subscriptions, can you afford more cost-effective solutions like Screaming Frog or Rankioz?
Next up, you’ll want to identify your goals. What is it that you want to achieve with SEO? If you’re just looking for a more appealing website for the infrequent user who accidentally stumbles upon it, a free tool could be more than enough.
However, if you want to establish a respectable online presence, increase your website traffic, drive conversions, and overtake your competition on SERPs, you’ll need a paid solution that helps you achieve these goals.
Perhaps most importantly, you’ll also want to evaluate your technical expertise. Do you have SEO connoisseurs who can brace the generally steeper learning curve that comes with some free solutions?
Do you have experts who can put the abundance of data that comes with paid solutions to good use? Or are you looking for something helpful, easy, and effective that doesn’t cost much but takes most of your SEO worries out of your hands?
In most instances, the right type of SEO tool for you will depend on the type of business you’re running. Here’s a quick glance into it:
| Business Type | Best SEO Tool | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Small Businesses/Startups | Free SEO Tools | Budget-friendly; Essential functionalities; Suitable for simple SEO needs |
| Mid-Sized Business | Paid SEO Tools | Scalable; More advanced functionalities; Deliver measurable ROI |
| Agencies and Enterprises | Paid SEO Tools | Suitable for complex SEO need; Access to comprehensive, accurate data; Easier project management |
In some instances, it might not be best for you to use free SEO tools by themselves. It might not even be in your best interest to use paid SEO tools by themselves. Instead, you might want to look into combining the two for maximum efficiency.
A free dedicated tool with a more affordable subscription plan from a paid tool can work wonders when used together. It could allow you to stay within budget and still achieve your SEO goals and objectives.
For instance, you can try combining your free Google Search Console account with a paid SEMrush account. GSC can help you better understand what SEO areas to focus on, while SEMrush can help you keep an eye on your competitors and quickly analyze your backlink profile.
GSC can track your performance and help you keep an eye on the technical side of SEO, while SEMrush can give you insightful reports that enhance your strategy. Keyword research insights from these tools combined can help you create a more effective content strategy.
Another good combination could be Ubersuggest and Ahrefs. The free Ubersuggest account can help you perform your initial keyword research, conduct a simple site audit, and get a quick glance into your backlink profile. The paid Ahrefs account can provide deeper insights for your content research and help you keep an eye on what your competitors are doing.
If you want to cast a wider net and cover your SEO bases, you could even use a free Screaming Frog account in combination with Clearscope, for instance.
Screaming Frog can help with the technical side of your SEO, checking your metadata, looking for crawling errors, and identifying on-page issues. Once you’ve ensured that your pages are crawlable and indexable, you can then use Clearscope to optimize the content that’s on them, add the right keywords, and improve your page structure.
The combinations are virtually endless, so don’t be afraid to try using different free and paid tools for different purposes.
You’ve heard the old saying—you can’t please everyone. And it’s entirely true, even when it comes to free and paid SEO tools. Just have a glance at any of the online reviews of any of the tools I’ve mentioned so far. Every single one of them will have countless users singing their praises and countless more promising that their founders will rue the day they were born.
The thing is, neither side is wrong. Not all tools will be useful to everyone.
To make sure that you choose a tool that will be suitable for your site, you’ll want to take into consideration a few factors:
Although independent customer reviews and expert insights can tell you a lot about any tool, you won’t actually know much about it until you’ve tried it. So, if you want to be successful, take advantage of the available free trials and demos.
If you’re using a free trial, try every single feature out and see how it works for you. If you’re signing up for a demo, create a list of your SEO priorities and questions you’ll want answered.
Free SEO tools can be great. They’re budget-friendly and suitable for beginners. They offer essential insights and can help you dip your toes in the SEO waters. However, you’ll likely outgrow them sooner rather than later. They can be highly limiting, letting you just barely scratch the surface of SEO and leaving you with more questions than answers.
If you’re serious about SEO, you must be prepared to cash out. Paid SEO tools give you much more valuable data and allow you to develop comprehensive SEO strategies that make a measurable difference.
Of course, how valuable a free or paid SEO tool will be depends entirely on you. It’s your budget, your goals, and your technical expertise that will determine whether any given tool is right for you.
Perhaps it’s the hybrid approach that would work best? Or maybe it’s an affordable tool like Rankioz that gives you all the benefits of both free and paid solutions with none of the drawbacks.
Whatever the case is, you won’t know what works for you until you’ve tried it. Sign up for a free trial or a demo, test out both free and paid solutions, and see what works best for you.
Free tools can rarely replace paid alternatives. They will always come with some limitations that can significantly impact your site’s performance. If you want a bulletproof SEO strategy, you’ll usually need to pay for the tools you’re using.
In most instances, they are. As a general rule of thumb, paid tools offer measurable results and better ROI than free ones. However, whether they’re worth it depends on your unique needs and preferences.
Beginners will usually get the most benefits from free and affordable SEO tools. Some of the top options include Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Rankioz, and Ubersuggest.
You’ll likely want to use SEO tools daily for the best effect. SEO is an ongoing process and involves continual work on your website. You’ll want to monitor your performance, track your rankings, and improve your pages if you want to climb the SERPs and maintain your position.
Absolutely! You have access to affordable solutions like Screaming Frog and Rankioz, which bridge the gap between free and paid SEO tools. You could also use a hybrid approach and sign up for a free tool and the most affordable tier of a paid tool.
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