May 5, 2025
As far as the majority of your target audience is concerned, if you’re not online, you don’t exist. Better said, if you’re online but your site’s not optimized, you don’t exist.
After all, most people will first do a quick Google search for products, services, or specific business types before choosing which option to go for. If you aren’t among the top results when they do these little Google searches, you won’t be on their radar.
The good news is that all you need is one of the best free SEO tools and a well-thought-out strategy to get to the visible part of the search results.
SEO is what makes your site more user-friendly, what boosts your organic traffic, and what ultimately gets you higher conversion rates by simply lifting your rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
While getting fully immersed in SEO can get expensive and require some expertise, getting started doesn’t have to cost you a dime. There are plenty of excellent free solutions that cover essentials like keyword research, site auditing, and technical SEO and that can help introduce you to the world of site optimization.
Let’s see what those tools are, explore their capabilities and limitations, and check when (if ever) you should upgrade to more comprehensive paid alternatives.
To actually see any changes in your rankings, you don’t want to use any random free tool. You want to use the best one available. The only question is, how do you know whether a tool is good or bad?
Well, you’ll never really know until you’ve tried it, if I’m being completely honest. Every site is different, and every site owner has different needs and priorities—a tool that’s fantastic for one person could be completely useless to another, and vice versa!
That said, some tools are clearly universally better than others. What differentiates the best ones are:
Many free tools can deliver all of this—accuracy, ease of use, data freshness, and even feature variety. However, keep in mind that paid tools will typically outperform them in every area. The reason behind this is simple: paid tools have access to more resources, which, in turn, gives you access to more resources.
That’s why paid tools typically have more extensive databases, more accurate analytics, and much wider feature variety.
This isn’t to say that free tools aren’t worth your time. Quite the contrary. They can be excellent for introducing you to SEO and familiarizing you with all its essentials. Many of them offer access to all the SEO basics you might need in the beginning.
They can make for a great testing ground where you can try out different strategies, learn what works and what doesn’t, and understand how minor tweaks to your SEO can impact your performance on SERPs. It’s only after you’ve mastered the basics with the best free SEO tools that you might want to broaden your horizons and explore paid alternatives.
Of course, there’s a middle ground if free tools aren’t enough and paid ones are a bigger bite than you can chew.
Rankioz is a cost-effective, all-in-one alternative that delivers more than free tools ever could and yet keeps your wallet happier than many paid tools out there. Starting at just $30 a month, it gives you everything you need to perfect your SEO strategy and make a positive change in your SERP performance.
Some of the best free SEO tools for beginners fall under the categories of keyword research, on-page, and technical SEO. From the hundreds of tools available that belong to dozens of different groupings, it’s these three categories that are generally considered to be the essentials.
They’re the foundation of all your subsequent SEO strategies and will shape how your users and search engines perceive you.
Even if you don’t want to bother with SEO and increasing your SERP rankings, you’ll still want to perform thorough keyword research. It’s an absolute necessity that will help you understand what it is that your target audience is searching for online and what their overall search intent is. It helps you gain a competitive edge, attract targeted traffic, develop your content strategy, and ultimately boost your conversion rates.
The best free SEO keyword tools will typically give you insights into all the most popular keywords and keyphrases relevant to your industry (or the specific seed keyword you provide) and tell you the basic information on each keyword’s search volumes and overall competitiveness.
The one and only Google Keyword Planner is a must-have. Even if you’re an expert in SEO and already have advanced premium SEO tools in your arsenal, you want this little beast by your side.
It comes with your Google Ads account and is absolutely free to use. The only catch is that it’s better optimized for PPC advertisers than those who want to give organic marketing a try. So, some features like keyword bidding might be useless to you. Others, however, can be a godsend.
You’ll gain insights into the average monthly searches and even get individual keyword’s historical performance as well as its future forecasts. Most importantly, there will be thousands of keyword suggestions that can help you optimize your SEO strategy and better target your content.
Now, even for a free tool, Google Keyword Planner is pretty basic. It doesn’t have any especially attractive features and comes with no bells and whistles. All it does is help you research and plan your keywords, that’s it. However, it does do this job pretty effectively, so it’s always a great tool to have.
Pros:
Cons:
Ubersuggest started out as a simple keyword research tool before Patel took it over, and the free tier now sticks to these roots. You don’t even have to sign up to use the free version, though it’s certainly easier if you do.
Its keyword research tool is simple—just provide your seed keyword, choose your language and location, and then click “search.” You will get recommendations for all the most popular related phrases together with their key metrics—traffic volumes, trends, and difficulty levels.
Traffic volumes tell you about the keyword’s popularity and number of searches. Trends give you insights into volume changes over time, while difficulty scores indicate how competitive the keyword is.
Though it’s not the most insightful free tool, it can help you uncover low-competition keywords that are much easier to rank for. Still, if you want more out of Ubersuggest, you need a paid plan.
Pros:
Cons:
Want to know what your target audience is searching for? Want to provide answers to all their burning questions? AnswerThePublic might just be the tool for you.
It pretty much works this way—you give your seed keyword and specify your region and language, and then AnswerThePublic gives you a list of all the related questions that your target audience searches for on Google, Bing, YouTube, or other platforms.
The questions are organized by categories like “Why, How, Will, Can, etc.” but if you prefer, you can also check out the alphabetical list.
While it’s not enough for comprehensive keyword research, this approach is excellent for improving your content strategy. You can easily find out what questions your target audience may have and create insightful content to answer them.
Keep in mind that the free version has a limit on the number of keywords you can look up daily. If you aren’t registered, you can only look up one, and if you have a free account, you can only look up three keywords per day.
Pros:
Cons:
Keyword Surfer is a highly popular free Chrome extension developed by none other than Surfer SEO. It works directly in the Google search results. All you have to do is type in the search term you’re interested in learning about in your Google search, then activate the extension.
It will pull info straight from the results you get, giving you a short list of related keywords you could explore and generating fresh ideas that can help you come up with useful content for your own pages.
Of course, it’s not just a list of keywords. You’ll also have access to the important metrics that give you a better overview of their value, with search volumes, estimated CPCs, visibility metrics, and even on-page data. It might not be quite as comprehensive as you’d like, but hey, for a free tool, it’s quite impressive.
The best part is that you can save your favorite keyword lists and extract them as a CSV file if you need insights to develop your overall SEO strategies.
Pros:
Cons:
If you need deeper keyword insights than all these tools provide, you know where to look. In addition to offering extensive keyword data and competitor insights, Rankioz also has AI-driven suggestions that can help improve your strategy with the utmost ease. While it isn’t among the best free AI tools for SEO (since there aren’t really any free AI tools), it’s certainly the best affordable option for SEO.
On-page SEO includes all the elements that improve the user experience on your website and make it easier for search engines to put your pages in context. It involves optimizing your meta tags and URLs, publishing high-quality content, structuring your headings, properly placing your keywords, developing an internal linking strategy, and cleaning up your images, among other things.
With paid tools, you can usually complete every item on your on-page SEO checklist without issues. With free tools, you might come across some limitations, but you should still have access to useful features that make a difference in your performance.
So, let’s take a look at some of the best free SEO tools for beginners that come with helpful on-page capabilities.
If you’re hosting your website on platforms like WordPress, Shopify, or similar, Yoast SEO can be a great option for improving your on-page performance. Often regarded as the best free SEO plugin, it’s mainly designed to ensure your content is top-notch.
As you’re creating your content, you’ll be getting real-time feedback on your readability scores, as well as convenient suggestions for improving your sentence length or paragraph structure.
Yoast will keep track of your primary keyword and its density throughout your content, so you can ensure that you’re neither spamming with your keyword nor seemingly avoiding it like the plague. It will also help you enable breadcrumb navigation on your site, generate XML sitemaps, allow canonical tag creation, etc.
For a free tool, it’s pretty feature-packed (though its paid version is certainly more so).
The only word of caution I’d like to add is that you shouldn’t try to optimize your content 100% the way Yoast SEO would want you to. It can take away a lot of “personality” from your website and make things seem a bit too robotic and dull, which will have a negative impact on your user experience and your ultimate SERP performance. Use the tool as your guide, not as your dictator.
Pros:
Cons:
RankMath is a fairly robust WordPress plugin with a generous free version that’s suitable for all independent site owners, bloggers, and freelancers. It offers excellent content optimization suggestions that can help you improve your readability, enhance your pages, and make your site more user and search-engine-friendly.
It assesses all important on-page elements, from your title tags to meta descriptions, and it even looks into your keyword usage, presenting you with tailored recommendations on where and how you can improve.
The best part is that the free version lets you optimize your content for up to five keywords, ensuring that you can easily target your posts and provide more context for both your audience and search engines.
With RankMath, you can easily implement your schema markups for better chances of appearing in rich snippets, automatically generate XML sitemaps for easier content discovery, add breadcrumbs for easier navigation, and so much more. It’s quite a capable little tool that’s sure to offer excellent value.
Pros:
Cons:
If it’s your first time coming across and using Screaming Frog, you might turn into a shrieking amphibian yourself. It’s a bit of an overwhelming tool, with a crowded interface, lots of confusing data, and an abundance of highly detailed metrics. It’s not for the faint of heart.
However, underneath that rough exterior lies a highly helpful tool that gives you everything you need to improve your SERP performance.
It’s a downloadable desktop tool that works somewhat similarly to search engine crawlers. It crawls through your pages to uncover broken links, errors, and redirects, analyze your meta tags, and review your directories, among other things.
It presents detailed information on your site’s performance, notifying you of any potential issues that could be harming your rankings. Screaming Frog doesn’t have many automated tasks, requiring you to manually fix most website problems you may have, but it does flag everything of importance and helps you pinpoint areas for improvement.
It takes some getting used to, but it could be well worth your while.
Pros:
Cons:
Another great free tool from Google is the Google Search Console. It’s your base of operations. It provides you and your website with direct contact with Google itself, helping you better understand how this search engine crawls and indexes your pages, as well as just how much of an effect little things can have on your SERP performance.
GSC lets you keep a close eye on your site performance, helping you monitor your rankings, troubleshoot common issues, and work on your strategy.
It gives you comprehensive page reports, getting into the minutes of your CTRs, average position, impressions, and clicks. GSC also notifies you of any crawling and indexing issues your pages might have and how to solve them. It flags UX issues, keeps track of your core web vitals, and even tells you about any schema markup issues you need to solve.
Whatever other SEO tool you’re using, you’ll still want to have your trusty GSC by your side, as it offers indispensable insights and helps you keep an eye on all important metrics.
Pros:
Cons:
Technical SEO helps you make sure that all your keyword research and on-page efforts actually pay off by keeping your site and the content on it visible and accessible. It deals with all the background elements that enhance user trust and allow search engines to crawl, index, and render your pages.
Some of the critical factors technical SEO focuses on include your page speed, mobile optimization, and structured data. Your use of robots.txt and XML sitemaps, your site security, and redirects and broken links.
Technical SEO tools thoroughly analyze your pages, assessing these factors and bringing your attention to any problems that need solving.
As you’ve learned to expect by now, even the best free website SEO analysis tool will leave some stones unturned, but you should still expect it to cover its bases.
Google PageSpeed Insights is a pretty self-explanatory name. It’s a free tool that primarily looks into your site’s loading time. It assesses your first contentful paint, largest contentful paint, total blocking time, cumulative layout shift, and speed index, giving you the essential details and flagging potential issues alongside their common fixes.
You get a diagnostics rundown with tailored suggestions on where you can improve and how.
In addition to dissecting your loading time, Google PageSpeed Insights also looks into your overall performance and accessibility. You’ll get scores of between 0 and 100 for each of these factors and recommendations on what to keep an eye on.
It’s all highly useful information that will give you a clear overview of your site’s health.
Keep your scores on PageSpeed Insights high, but there’s no reason to chase the 100 mark—everything will be good as long as you’re over 90. Instead, focus on the recommendations underneath your scores. Even if they don’t bring your scores up, following them will improve both your performance and your user experience, so it’s always a plus.
Pros:
Cons:
GTmetrix is your second-best choice after PSI for keeping an eye on your site’s loading speed. It gives you real-world data from your actual website visitors and performs lab tests from servers around the globe to give you a clearer picture of your loading times.
Similarly to PSI, you’ll also get to track your core web vitals with GTmetrix and get scores based on how your site does. All scores are expressed in percentages, and you want to have at least 90% to ensure a positive user experience.
What’s especially interesting, however, is that GTmetrix also gives you a score based on your site structure, which can provide you with highly convenient information on how you can optimize your pages.
Unfortunately, though, much of the information that GTmetrix looks into is locked behind a paywall. You get only a basic overview with the free plan. For deeper insights and better recommendations, you’ll need to pay up.
Pros:
Cons:
Ahrefs Webmasters Tools (AWT) is often considered one of the best free tools for SEO audit. It’s free for all website owners and has most of the things you need to ensure great site health. It will look into your backlink profile, tell you which keywords you’re ranking for, and, most importantly, it will track technical SEO issues that might be harming your performance.
Its site audit feature will flag any major issues like broken links, crawl errors, mobile optimization problems, missing tags, and duplicate content and help you pinpoint the most important things to work on. As a bonus, it will offer advice on how to solve these issues and improve your performance.
Of course, AWT only gives you a small taste of all the data it accumulates. To unlock better, more useful insights, you need to upgrade.
Pros:
Cons:
Sitebulb isn’t technically free, so it won’t be very useful in the long run if you’re looking to save money. However, it does have a pretty useful free trial that can serve as your jumping board for figuring out what to do with your website.
During the 14-day free trial, you get access to unlimited HTML and JavaScript crawls that enable you to thoroughly analyze your website. You can get a clean visualization of your site’s structure and all potential issues—orphan pages, internal linking errors, etc.
You can assess your site for missing or duplicate metatags, broken data, duplicate content, and mobile optimization issues, among other things. Sitebulb will even give you useful hints on how you can solve common problems and ensure your site remains search-engine-friendly.
Pros:
Cons:
SEMrush SEO Checker has been recently renamed to SEMrush On-Page SEO Checker. However, despite the name change, it’s a highly useful tool for technical SEO, in particular. It gives you an analysis of all your site basics that need to be flawless.
During your audits, it checks for any broken internal links you may have, issues with your canonical tags, mobile optimization problems, and meta-tag concerns. It even offers page speed insights that can tell you whether your site needs to up the ante on its loading speed for an enhanced user experience.
Though not the most comprehensive technical SEO tool out there, for a free solution, it does have all the essentials you need to get right in the beginning if you want to improve your accessibility and visibility.
Similarly to Ahrefs which I talked about a moment ago, this free tool mostly serves as a preview of what SEMrush’s paid plans can offer. So, sooner or later, you’ll likely want to either upgrade to a paid plan or look for a more powerful option. That said, it’s a worthwhile tool that’s excellent for small sites and startups.
Pros:
Cons:
When it comes to free SEO tools, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s slim pickings. Most free options only exist as a way to give you a taste of what the paid, full-featured product can do, with the aim of nudging you to upgrade to a more expensive plan.
That said, there are still some shining gold nuggets that could be well worth your while, offering surprisingly powerful free features that can help you get started with SEO. You just have to be careful with how you choose your go-to free tools.
The primary things to keep in mind are your traffic growth goals, the ability of the tool to help you fix technical issues, as well as its features for content optimization—those are the essential three elements that will help you make your site more visible on SERPs.
In general, all the tools I’ve talked about so far perform best in specific scenarios, so here’s a quick overview of when to use each:
Considering that each of these options is free (or at least free to try), it would be in your best interest to give each of them a try and see for yourself which one suits you and your needs the most.
Free tools are incredibly convenient when you’re just getting started and don’t yet have the resources to invest in your SEO. However, considering that they come with major limitations, often having usage caps, data restrictions, and inadequate integrations and support, you’ll want to upgrade to paid tools sooner or later.
The question is, how do you know when’s the time to make the switch?
Here are some signs that will clue you in:
In most instances, the sooner you switch to a more powerful paid tool, the sooner you’ll see a difference in your SERP performance, visibility, and organic traffic. So, don’t be afraid to make the switch.
Sure, free SEO tools do come with some limitations. They might not give you access to all the data you need, and they might not have all the functionalities to make them as convenient as can be. Still, the best of them can certainly make a difference in your performance and help pave the way for your future SEO strategies.
Whether you go for Google’s free tools like the Keyword Planner and GSC or decide to try your luck with more demanding options like Screaming Frog, you can always find ways to make these free tools pay. Assess your needs, see which tools can address them, and test out a few different options before committing.
However, if free tools just won’t cut it for you and if you don’t have the resources for the professional-grade $100-something tools, you have a better alternative.
Rankioz is an affordable all-in-one SEO solution that covers keyword research, competitor tracking, and comprehensive on-page audits that will keep your site in tip-top shape. For just $30 a month (or $300 a year), it gives you access to powerful features that will take your SEO to a whole new level. Sign up and experience firsthand what Rankioz can do for you.
If you’re not optimizing your WordPress website for SEO, you’re basically leaving traffic (not to mention money) on the table....
You’ve decided to try your luck with an e-commerce business. You’ve set up your online store, you’ve got an inventory...
Imagine you started a business from home but didn’t tell anyone you were doing it. You didn’t put up any...
Paid marketing can only take your online store so far before it starts obliterating your budget and minimizing your ROI....
Are you trying to make it on YouTube? Here’s some food for thought: Whatever type of following you’re trying to...
On-page SEO is all about creating a better user (and search engine crawler) experience on your website. It’s the practice...