This post has been updated on the 17th of January, 2019.
You might be a one-man band, a lean startup, or an SEO working within a marketing team. Either way, you understand the importance of a solid strategy and the right tools to do the heavy lifting. Of course, it makes it even easier if that tool is free! Below are 150 SEO tools that are either free or have free trials to pro versions you can check out before you buy. We found most free SEO resources online were generally outdated, contained broken links or recommended methods that have since been hit with Google penalties. We hope this collection of the 150 Best Free SEO Tools serves you well in your 2019 SEO efforts.
To get the most out of a free trial, there are a few things you should think about:
- Make a plan beforehand for what you want to use the tool for and have your information prepared. Want to check on your competitors? Get a list of URLs together first. Most of the tools have export functions so make sure you extract all the data that you can before the end of your trial so that you can spend time analyzing it after.
- Some of the tools which have free trials require payment information. Make sure that you set a reminder to consider whether you want to continue the subscription after the free trial has ended to avoid paying for a service you do not intend to carry on using.
A/B Testing and Conversion Rate Optimization
Much resources go into driving traffic to a website through SEO and other methods but Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is just as important, and A/B testing is the best way to measure and improve CRO. Are you enhancing the customer journey after they have clicked through to your site from Google?
Here are some of the best tools for A/B testing out there.
This tool allows you to see what users are doing on your site through heat maps. Crazy Egg is very limited in scope for testing, but it does have a simplistic interface that produces very easy to digest visual data. 30-day trials are available for all their price plans.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
Five Second Test is now part of UsabilityHub which offers a suite of tests to help optimize your website. If you’re happy to have UsabilityHub branding on your test, there is a free-forever plan on offer. The Five Second Test helps you finetune your landing pages and calls to action by having testers view your site for five seconds and answer the questions you’ve set. Keywords from the feedback are collated in a graphed report too.
Once you have learned the basics of Google Analytics, you can use its extensive data pool to conduct A/B testing. Google Analytics allows you to split-test different pages by using the ‘content experiments’ function. This is a 100% free option that is integrated nicely with other analytics features, but it does have the drawback of having a steep learning curve.
Another valuable free tool from Google, Optimize gives you the ability to A/B test two different web pages, or you can get granular and test individual page elements against each other.
Featuring eight different fully-customizable popup apps, GrooveJar promises to turn your visitors into leads and your leads into customers. The most popular app, GrooveUrgent, utilizes the psychological principle of urgency to incentivize visitors to heed your CTAs.
Lucky Orange offers a suite of conversion rate optimization tools, but perhaps the most useful and impressive is its ability to record, in real-time, a user’s visit to your site from the moment they arrive, to the moment they leave. As Lucky Orange says, it’s like a DVR for your website, and it can be invaluable in examining why visitors are failing to convert.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
Optimizely is considered the gold standard for A/B testing, but it comes at a price. Though it’s not easy to find on their site, Optimizely still offers a 30-day free trial, after which you must contact them for pricing. Pricing is tiered based on what features you’re looking to use. If you’re just starting out with A/B tests, you may want to utilize one of the free options first, but if you need the most powerful solution on the market, Optimizely is it.
Unbounce is arguably the king of landing page optimization. They offer a host of pre-made landing page templates that can be easily customized by dragging and dropping page elements. Technical knowledge needed for this is minimal and you can also A/B test these pages.
Although Unbounce is limited to purely landing pages, website popups, and sticky bars, it does this job very well. There is a 30-day free trial available for both the Premium and Essential plans from Unbounce.
VWO offers a 30 day free trial to its full suite of testing tools. Functionality includes multivariate testing, targeting, usability tests, and heat maps. Once the trial period is up, VWO is a significant investment at $299 per month for the entry-level plan.
Analytics
Analyzing your data regularly ensures that you can keep track of what your site visitors are doing, how they are engaging with you and what their possible pain points might be.
If there is one tool on this list that every online business owner needs, it’s Google Analytics. While many of the tools listed here aim to extend its functionality, there is simply no substitute for Google Analytics. From tracking where your traffic comes from to measure which pages are garnering the most views and engagement, Google Analytics is vital not only for measuring your website’s performance but also for creating a historical, verifiable record of key data points that will prove invaluable should you ever choose to value or sell your online business. If you don’t have Google Analytics set up and optimized for your website, stop whatever you’re doing and address this oversight immediately.
Open Web Analytics is another open source web analytics software that is free if hosted on your own server. It has features that Google Analytics does not have such as click heatmaps and mouse movement recording. One possible downside to Open Web Analytics is that it can take time and technical knowledge to install.
Matomo is an open-source web analytics solution that must be hosted on your own server for it to be free. You can track multiple websites, customize your dashboard and also access your reports using both Android and iOS apps. Hosting on your own server is free, but the Cloud version has a 30-day free trial. Matomo is very similar to Google Analytics.
Panguin works in concert with Google Analytics to correlate dips in organic traffic with changes to Google’s search algorithm. This can help pinpoint when and if your website has been penalized by Google or affected negatively by an algorithm update.
Raven offers a 14-day free trial for its suite of tools which include SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing tools as well as automated custom branded reports.
Open Web Analytics is another open source web analytics software that is free if hosted on your own server. It has features that Google Analytics does not have such as click heatmaps and mouse movement recording. Possible downsides to Open Web Analytics is that it can take time to install.
StatCounter is free for analytics on your first 500 page views. Pricing scales up based on volume from there. StatCounter is very easy to set up and use. It is basic, lightweight, and a convenient analytics alternative for someone who doesn’t want something too technical.
Just enter your domain and chosen database, e.g., Google.com, and this tool uses SEMrush organic traffic data to display a handy graph with each Google Panda and Penguin update to see which one your website may have been penalized by. It is completely free to use and does not require access to your own analytics software or website.
StatCounter is 100% free and very easy to setup and use. It is basic, lightweight and a nice alternative for someone who doesn’t want something too technical.
Just enter your domain and chosen database e.g. Google.com and the tool will use SEMrush organic traffic data to display a handy graph with each Google Panda and Penguin update to see which one your website may have been hit by. It is completely free to use and does not require access to your own analytics software or website.
Woopra offers a tiered pricing plan based on usage. The first tier is free, and the next tier is $79.95 per month. Woopra’s website analytics software which offers real-time reporting, detailed customer profiles, and funnel reports to check for conversion issues. Woopra may be a bit overwhelming for beginners, but it comes with helpful and extensive documentation.
This free analytics tool is a must for any YouTube publisher. It offers video specific analytics data for YouTube videos.
Competitor Analysis
Get an insight into your competitors with these free tools. Do they have software you don’t? What are their traffic sources? Use these tools to find out!
BuiltWith is a free tool that allows you to lift the curtain on a competitor’s website and see what technology is being used. The free technology profile allows you to see information like what hosting provider, content management system, framework, and widgets are being used to name just a few.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
Using the Ghostery browser extension (available for all popular browsers) allows you to see what ad networks are in play on any web page. Though primarily designed to speed up your browsing experience by selectively blocking ads and trackers, Ghostery is free, and it can be used to work out what ad campaign strategies a competitor is using.
SimilarWeb (for free) delivers comprehensive analysis on any website or app either on the site or as a downloadable PDF. Enter a competitor URL and receive information such as engagement, traffic sources, geographic search traffic, and referring sites. Going pro unlocks more information, but the free version still provides a wealth of knowledge.
SpyFu is one of the oldest and still one of the best competitor research tools for both SEO and PPC. Just enter a competitor’s URL, and you can see every keyword they’ve ever bought on Google. SpyFu also boasts a variety of powerful SEO competitor analysis tools.
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In exchange for registering, SpyFu offers a free account that gives you limited access to features and a fixed number of searches.
Take a peek at what tech some of the best software companies in the world are using. See which tools they are implementing and how they utilize them. Stackshare prides itself on being a developer-only community, so you’ll need a Github, Bitbucket or Gitlab account to sign up.
Wayback Machine is a way to get nostalgic about the past history of your website or can be used more fruitfully to track historical changes on a competitor’s website.
Who really runs that review website? Find out the registration details and contact information for any domain by using this Whois Lookup tool.
Content Creation and Optimization
Whether you are producing content to make your own website more engaging or as part of an SEO-fueled content marketing strategy, these free tools will help greatly with content conception, creation, strategy, and optimization.
The free version of Buzzsumo allows you to find the most popular content for any topic or competitor: a must-use tool for any content marketer.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
This is a very clever free tool created by Built Visible for helping to generate content ideas. The tool is in the form of a Google doc. Make sure you are logged in and make a copy of the tool. Enter your keyword in the cell indicated, and a list of related content from around the web is generated.
Copyscape offers a free plagiarism checker that allows you to search for copies of your webpage online. Copyscape also offers two premium paid anti-plagiarism and anti-fraud solutions. With Copyscape, you no longer have to worry if your content is original or if it’s being duplicated without permission by your competitors.
If you need data for reports, research or infographics, Google Public Data pulls information from a vast array of public sources.
This free tool helps you tweak your website’s title and description to fit within Google’s character limit, helping you avoid those ineffective ellipses in search results.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
Even the most prolific content creators sometimes get stuck in a rut. While this fun tool from Hubspot is no substitute for genuine inspiration, it can help to break up creative logjams when they inevitably occur.
This no-frills free tool measures keyword density for up to three keywords. It helps ensure you’re not overusing your keywords which can damage your SEO efforts.
StoryBase is a reverse search engine that aims to show you how people actually search for the keywords you specify. This can help you uncover long-tail keywords, brainstorm content ideas, and build buyer personas. Storybase offers a 14-day free trial, as long as you provide your credit card info.
This free web-based tool is a quick way to clean text and remove formatting when copying and pasting between applications. TextCleanr also works on tablet and mobile devices.
Text Tools uses the TF-IDF formula to analyze and optimize content. Fortunately, you don’t need to know what that means to put it work for your website. Think of it as Keyword Density 2.0. It’s a great tool for uncovering hidden and related keywords that you can use to better optimize your content for search.
Text Tools also does competitive analysis by comparing your content to the highest ranking competitors. Text Tools offers a free 14-day trial.
Aimed at content creators who want to make sure their content is SEO-friendly, Webtexttool offers suggestions while you write. This speeds up the process of creating content that is more likely to rank highly in SERP results.
Word to Clean HTML is a free converter tool for documents produced by Word and similar software that strips out unwanted formatting like empty paragraphs and proprietary tags to facilitate easy copy and pasting for use in web pages.
Need some visual word inspiration? Paste in words or a blog post URL and create a word cloud visualization.
Diagnostic
Make a habit of running diagnostic tools on your website. Problems can go unnoticed for a long time without adequate and recurring investigation.
Bing Webmaster Tools is very similar to its Google counterpart, and it provides tools, reports, and scanning capabilities to improve your site.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
Studies now show that consumers spend more time online using mobile devices than desktop computers. That alone should be incentive enough to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. This coupled with the fact that Google now penalizes sites that don’t perform well on mobile means that you risk being left behind if your site isn’t mobile-friendly. This free tool from Google assesses your site’s performance on mobile devices and gives you recommendations for improvement.
If you want to check that you have a healthy, Google-friendly website, Webmaster Tools is the tool for you. The interface has all the data and diagnostics to check your website’s status. Best of all, this service is completely free.
Offering a suite of powerful tools designed to optimize the user experience, Optimal Workshop aims to take the guesswork out of UX design. They offer a generous free plan so you can get started right away.
Generate a free technical SEO audit report for any domain.
Inbound marketing giant Hubspot’s free Website Grader tool generates personalized reports based on key metrics such as site performance, mobile-readiness, SEO, and security. Simply enter your URL and email address and see how your site measures up
It might not be the most attractive SEO tool, but it is free and checks for broken links, rechecks them in case of temporary errors, detects redirected URLs, and creates sitemaps.
Email Outreach
Email is essential for any outreach and link building campaign. Check out these free tools to streamline and improve your processes.
Boomerang is an e-mail tracker and scheduler that can be used in conjunction with Gmail and Google Apps email. You can get a 30-day free trial of Boomerang Professional or the Basic version is free and allows 10 message credits per month.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
If you’re a Gmail user, check out GMelius. It offers a wide range of features that extend Gmail’s core functionality including email tracking and scheduling. Their “Hobbyist” plan helps you get started for free.
Sales Hub from Hubspot offers a powerful suite of tools to make your email outreach more effective. Sales Hub integrates with Hubspot’s other industry standard inbound marketing tools, many of which are available for free to start.
If you want to check that an e-mail address is valid before you send it, this simple yet effective free tool will verify an email address for you.
You should also check out NinjaOutreach – blogger outreach software for digital marketers and small businesses interested in growing their presence online. It is a complete CRM, allowing for prospecting, relationship management, and analytics. With a simple keyword search, you can find online influencers in your niche, uncover valuable data about them, connect with them through email and social media, and partner with them to promote your brand to their audience.
NinjaOutreach offers a 14-day free trial, as well as a 30-day money-back guarantee for all of their plans.
Infographics
Conveying a significant amount of data through words alone is often impractical and ineffective, but so is the time you might spend crafting an infographic masterpiece in Photoshop in the hope that it generates backlinks and shares. Not to worry, here are some free infographic tools to achieve the same result with minimal effort.
This free tool is fantastic for creating high-quality infographics. If you are proficient with PowerPoint, using Easel.ly will come easily. There is a good selection of templates to choose from, and you get access to a range of objects to play with. You can also upload your own images.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
The free version of this tool offers 30 different chart types. Customizing the data to create the infographics is done in a spreadsheet for easy editing. A great free infographic resource that allows you to create graphics and data visualizations quickly.
The free version of Piktochart comes with limited templates and a watermark, but this tool is excellent for creating graphical elements to present data in an engaging way. Paid plans start at $12.50 per month.
Vizualize is limited in its applications, but this infographic resume generator creates a visual representation of your professional accomplishments that could land you more work, clients or serve as an intriguing “about” page. Log in with LinkedIn and see your professional history made graphic.
Keyword Research
Whether you’re coming up with your next blog post idea or researching new areas to expand your PPC campaigns, keyword research is crucial. Try these free tools out.
This simple yet very handy tool asks you to enter lists of keywords into three different columns. It then generates different keyword permutations. Great for brainstorming new keyword combinations.
An entertaining and powerful free tool, AnswerThePublic aggregates autocomplete data from Google and Bing to show you what questions are asked about a keyword that you input. This gives great insight into the intentionality of users when they search for your selected keyword.
AnswerThePublic outputs the data as a visually appealing one sheet that’s perfect for brainstorming.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
CanIRank harnesses the power of AI to give users actionable recommendations on how to rank higher and faster for selected keywords. It’s geared towards small business and startups that are focused on seeing results quickly.
An innovative keyword research tool from Google, Correlate helps pinpoint search trends that correspond with real-world events, such as location and seasonality. Correlate can also show you which keywords are commonly searched for together. For example “losing weight” is commonly searched along with “burn fat” and “cardio” as additional keywords.
Keyword Planner is a free Google AdWords tool that allows you to search by keyword or a group of keywords and provides stats such as monthly search volume and competition level.
Through Google Trends you can see the rise and fall of search volume for key terms and anticipate SEO opportunities.
Keys4Up harnesses the power of latent semantic imaging (LSI) to come up with keywords related to your input. Incorporating these keywords into your content can make it more SEO-friendly.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
Keyword Eye Basic is another free keyword brainstorming tool. It creates a word cloud of related keywords for the keyword you input. Best of all, it color codes them by volume of PPC competition.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
Highly recommended by commenters on an earlier version of this article, Keyword Tool is a powerful alternative to Google Keyword Planner. It utilizes Google autocomplete data to help you uncover long-tail keywords.
A keyword research tool with a difference, Keyworddit scrapes data from one of the web’s most vital online communities: Reddit. Just enter the name of a Subreddit, and Keyworddit shows you the most popular keyword combinations by monthly search volume. This tool can help you find low competition keywords, and help you determine audience intent in your particular niche.
Keywords Everywhere turns brainstorming for new keyword ideas into second nature by subtly displaying search volume, CPC, and competitor data virtually everywhere you search.
A unique keyword tool, Seed Keywords asks you to create a scenario, for example: “You would like to find a restaurant for a group birthday dinner, what would you search for?”
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
Seed Keywords then provides you with a dedicated URL that you can then forward to your contacts, asking them to input the search phrase they would use in this scenario. Seed Keywords then compiles a downloadable list of all the keywords used in the search. You can also encourage your contacts to answer multiple times: there’s no limit.
SEMrush is a paid service that we use here at FE International, but there are 14-day free trial coupons available with a quick Google search (SEOBOOK is a good source for these). We love SEMrush for its competitor analysis, organic traffic history, and range of data provided.
Billing itself as the “All-in-One SEO Platform,” Serpstat does indeed put an impressive array of keyword research tools at your disposal. Their unique “Search Questions” feature sets Serpstat apart from its competitors, providing you with the most popular search questions asked using your keyword.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
Registering for Serpstat is free, unlocks additional features, and gives you more free searches.
Soovle allows you to research keywords on multiple search engines at the same time and also looks at sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia, and Amazon. It auto-generates keyword combinations as you type.
This free tool uses Google Suggest and other search suggestion services to generate keyword ideas from user queries. Use this tool to generate keyword lists for campaigns or even fuel for blog post ideas.
WordStream offers a selection of free tools including the free keyword tool, the keyword niche finder, and the keyword grouper which can be used for PPC or SEO campaigns.
A powerful keyword research suite used by many top marketers, Wordtracker offers a 7-day free trial option for each of its plans.
Link Research and Link Building
Here is a mixture of free and free trial tools for link research and link building. We use Ahrefs in the FE International office but feel free to give them all a try.
Ahrefs no longer offers a free trial but $7 for seven days gains you access to Ahref’s complete suite of research tools. Use Ahrefs to do keyword analysis, create backlink reports, domain comparisons, competition analysis, and domain overviews.
It may not be free, but it’s an invaluable tool integral to the keyword strategy, and we think you’ll agree that it’s worth including on this list.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
Buzzstream aims to be your Swiss Army Knife for link building outreach. You can research prospects, email them, manage responses and reminders, and report on your campaign’s success all within one app. Buzzstream offers a 14-day free trial for all of their plans.
CognitiveSEO offers similar functionality—such as keyword and content optimization—to several of the other tools listed here. Where it really shines is its focus on unnatural link detection for both algorithmic and manual Google penalties. CognitiveSEO scans your entire backlink profile and identifies unnatural links. You then have the option to create an outreach list so you can email site owners hosting links detrimental to your site, or you can export a ready-to-send disavow file for upload to Google Search Console.
Detailed ranks websites in 10 different niches—for example, Business, Cryptocurrency, and Tech—by the number of “mentions” (quality backlinks or Tweets) each site gets. The rankings are updated in real time. Not only that, Detailed gives you the article title and URL of each mention and even the anchor text. Detailed is a fantastic free resource for identifying influencers and link building.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
A directory of directories. Find free and paid directories here along with stats and ratings.
A no-frills tool for compiling a Google Search Console-friendly list of spammy links to your site that you want to disavow.
With all of the focus on link building, backlinks, and outreach, it’s easy to fall under the misapprehension that any link back to your site is a win. Nothing could be further from the truth. Google’s algorithms punish your site for what they determine to be “unnatural,” or spammy, links. This can have an extremely detrimental effect on your SERP rankings.
The Google Disavow Links Tool allows you to upload a text file of URLs whose links you want to disavow. This should stop your site from being penalized for these links in future. Proceed with caution though. Disavowing links can have the opposite of the intended if done improperly. Google warns you prominently about this before letting you upload your disavow file. Make use of the other tools in this article to help ensure that only harmful links are disavowed.
Just add a little snippet of code to your site, and Linkstant sends you an alert whenever someone links to your site instantly. An excellent tool for outreach and managing incoming links.
Use this tool to see what backlinks a website has developed over time. Majestic really drills down on link building and has an intuitive interface, downloadable data, and summary data for link building strategies but lacks rank checking tools. Sign up for a free account to get limited access to their tools.
Does that backlink look fishy to you? Check the domain against Marie Haynes’ comprehensive blacklist of spam websites.
Brought to you by Moz, Open Site Explorer shows you an impressive array of metrics from inbound links and their page authority, to a website’s top pages, and the anchor texts used in their backlink profile. The free version of Open Site Explorer allows you to do a limited amount of searches and access some of the data. You can get a 30-day free trial of Moz Pro here which give you full access to Open Site Explorer and much more.
A valuable tool for removing bad backlinks. It is free for members of the basic plan, which includes up to 250 URLs.
Speed up your work by opening a whole list of URLs with one click. Paste in your URLs and open all. Simple.
URL Profiler can conduct numerous different checks on a list of URLs. Why is this handy? You could reverse engineer a competitor’s link building campaign or conduct a penalty audit. You can import data from a whole host of SEO tools such as Moz, Ahrefs, Google Webmaster, and SEMRush. A free 14-day trial for this tool is available.
Local SEO
While It may be called the World Wide Web, SEO is becoming increasingly important for local businesses. Use the free tools below to ensure your business is getting the attention it deserves online.
The sheer volume of data in this tool can be quite daunting, but it could be very useful for finding out information on your customer base in your local area.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
GeoRanker offers a variety of SEO tools, but local SEO is where it truly shines. GeoRanker gives you real-time local SERP rankings for every city or country worldwide.
This free tool allows you to search for keywords you should target within a radius of a US zip code. This is great for finding new keyword variations for PPC campaigns, or they could form the backbone of blog post content.
A simple but effective tool, this allows you to change your Google search location by city or zip code, giving you insight into the SERP ranking for local businesses based on location.
The free listing score search shows you what search engines your business listings appear on and where you’re missing out. The Moz Local service is $99 a year per location, but the initial search is free.
Another free tool from Whitespark that allows you to keep track of your customers offline. Create a customizable form within the tool and use it to record “how did you hear about us” information when customers call or visit your business. The data is stored in a database and can then be linked to and stored in Google Analytics as well.
If you want to encourage customers to leave a Google review of your brick-and-mortar business, this free tool by Whitespark allows you to create customized printable instructions, for both desktop and mobile, on how to leave reviews. Customers are often happy to leave a review if you make it easy for them and following these printable PDFs does just that.
Resources
These aren’t “tools” but here are some excellent free resources to help you brush up on your skills and learn new techniques.
This free guide links to a variety of topics on various sites from how to set up goal tracking to setting up custom alerts.
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A great free resource for anyone starting out in SEO.
SERP Tracking
You need to track your SERP rankings over time to see if your SEO activities are bearing fruit. One of these free tools can help you with that.
Get a free 30 day free trial of Authority Labs which is a simple service allowing you to track your keyword rankings on several domains.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
Gserp is currently free while it is in beta. You can track up to 2000 keywords and the rankings are updated daily. You also get custom reports and ranking warnings too. Gserp allows you to track up to 1000 domains.
MozCast gives you a ‘weather forecast’ of the last 5 days or 30 days of how turbulent SERP rankings have been.
You can use Search Latte for free checks of international SERPs. A must-use tool for international SEOs.
Unlike many of apps listed here, SerpFox does one thing, and it does it well: SERP rank tracking.
This free Google SERP Snippet Optimization tool allows you to see how your listing will appear in Google search results.
SERPmetrics 30 day flux charts show SERP volatility for Google and Bing.
Wincher is a powerful SERP rank tracker that gives you daily updates on up to 100 keywords per domain. There’s a 14-day free trial, and the monthly plan is excellent value at under $8.
Social Media
Since the original version of this post was written in 2014, the importance of social media to digital marketers has grown significantly. Actively engaging with customers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other platforms not only helps to build your brand, but it also helps drive organic traffic back to your site. Social media also offers a valuable distribution channel for the content you create.
Here are some free tools to help ensure you get the most out of your social media marketing.
Just getting started on Twitter? If your Twitter community (the sum of your followers plus the people you follow) is less than 5,000, Audiense’s free plan lets you explore your audience’s location, interests, and influence. Audiense can also help you determine the best time to tweet.
Another powerful and popular social media management platform, Buffer offers similar functionality—and a similar Free Forever plan—to Hootsuite. One great feature of Buffer is its Chrome extension which makes sharing third-party content on Facebook and Twitter a breeze. Buffer automatically shortens the link and enables you to track the performance of your Tweet or post.
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When it comes to Facebook Page analytics, it’s best to start at the source. Facebook Insights— available to all business page owners and admins from the Pages menu—puts detailed analytics at your disposal.
Ever wanted to know more about your Twitter followers? Then Followerwonk is the tool for you. Followerwonk puts detailed information about your followers, or your competitor’s followers, at your fingertips.
It’s unlikely you’d be reading this article if you weren’t somewhat familiar with the concept of SEO. But, what about SMO? Knowem’s SMO tool helps ensure that content on your site is optimized for sharing on social media. Enter your URL, and Knowem SMO reports on whether your site’s HTML is optimized for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other popular social media channels.
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One of the most established social media marketing platforms, Hootsuite is used by over 80% of the Fortune 1,000 to manage their social media campaigns. Their limited Free plan allows you to manage three social profiles and schedule up to 30 messages.
Would you like a free report card on how your Facebook page, or your competitor’s, is doing? Likealyzer gives you just that. If you give Likealyzer access to your page, it will even offer detailed suggestions on how you can improve it.
This great tool gives you a graphical and interactive way to see which influences are engaging with each other on Twitter.
Social Blade is a powerful free analytics tool for YouTube, Instagram, and other video platforms. See how your video offerings stack up against your competitors.
Another contender in the social media management field, Social Pilot offers a similar free plan and functionality to Buffer and Hootsuite. Depending on your needs, it may be the most cost-effective of the three.
If you use hashtags in your Twitter campaigns, Talkwalker gives you free access to a range of valuable metrics. It works for keywords too.
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Twitter’s built-in analytics gives you access to detailed reporting on how users are engaging with your Tweets. It can also give you access to the interests, locations, and demographics of your followers.
If your business relies heavily on Pinterest for its marketing efforts, then ViralWoot is a must. You can schedule and promote Pins, and gain new followers. The free plan offers basic analytics, but you’ll need to upgrade to get the most out of ViralWoot.
Speed
A website’s page speed directly impacts both search engine rankings and user engagement. Significant gains in website speed can often be achieved with relative ease. This can have a positive impact on SEO and usability. Employ the relevant tools below to help you turbocharge your page speed.
CloudFlare is a content delivery network (CDN) that promises to boost your site’s performance by distributing your content to servers around the world. This means your content is served from multiple locations based on closer physical proximity to the user. CloudFlare also doubles up as security tool protecting your site from online threats. CloudFlare offers a free plan as well as upsells to pro, business, and enterprise.
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PageSpeed Insights by Google is a free tool that conducts speed tests on both mobile and desktop versions of a website. It also provides feedback and suggested fixes for problem areas of your site.
GTmetrix offers similar functionality to Google’s PageSpeed Insights by providing a Page Speed Grade and recommending areas of improvement by priority.
Easily optimize your images for the web without sacrificing quality.
Pingdom is a free speed tool that analyses page load speed, connectivity, and DNS issues by displaying a waterfall graph so you can easily see where there might be a bottleneck.
Pulno is an on-site SEO analysis tool which detects a website’s optimization and development issues (i.e. broken links, page speed, broken images, issues with sitemap and more). Those issues are listed and presented to website owners in comprehensible reports. In addition to that, Pulno offers several unique features, which set it apart from its competition.
reSmush.it is the most widely used image optimization API available, and it’s free! Plugins are available for many popular platforms including WordPress and Magento.
The venerable SEO Spider from Screaming Frog is a powerful free desktop app for onsite SEO. It’s a reliable tool for spotting technical issues such as redirects and duplicate content which can negatively impact your SERP ranking.
Quickly compress and reduce the file sizes of your PNGs to help lower your site’s load speed.
Another simple to use page speed tool which allows you to simulate results from a wide variety of locations and devices.
Technical SEO
Ensure that you are giving all your SEO activities the best platform to launch from by utilizing these technical SEO tools on your website. We’ve also included several free SEO auditing tools here.
Use this free robots.txt analyzer from SEOBOOK to check search engines are correctly crawling your website.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
This free tool displays your anchor text diversity and highlights areas in which you are at risk of over-optimizing the anchor texts in your backlink portfolio.
Ever wonder what Google’s spiders see when they visit a website? Browseo strips out styles and visual distractions, showing you exactly what search engines “see” when visiting a website.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
Duplicate Page Finder examines content on two given URLs and provides an assessment of how similar they are. This free tool is great for resolving duplicate content issues.
An official Google tool that verifies the validity of any structured data that is used on your website.
Another robots.txt checker that uncovers hidden errors that may cause crawling issues for your website.
A useful tool that generates valid Schema data from your information. They also developed a great Schema WordPress plugin.
Upcity’s SEO Report Card lets you know how you measure up against your competitors in a variety of metrics including SERP Ranking, inbound links, website accessibility, and more. This tool gives you a valuable snapshot of your site’s performance for free in exchange for an email address and phone number.
Upcity’s SEO Report Card lets you know how you measure up against your competitors in a variety of metrics including SERP Ranking, inbound links, website accessibility, and more. This tool gives you a valuable snapshot of your site’s performance for free in exchange for an email address and phone number.
Siteliner specializes in scanning for duplicate content on your site and also provides benchmark comparisons to content on other sites scanned by Siteliner. The free version allows you to scan 250 pages per URL, an upgrade to Premium boosts that number to 25,000.
A handy free tool for analyzing various HTTP server responses. It is useful for checking server capabilities during development.
Varvy’s SEO tool gives you a real-time snapshot of how your website measures up to Google’s search guidelines. It’s free – no email address required.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
A comprehensive SEO Audit and website review tool, Woorank looks at over 70 metrics and suggests how you can make improvements. It even lets you download reports as PDFs and presentation slides with your own custom branding.
Quickly generates basic sitemaps for submission to search engines.
Toolbars and Extensions
Gathering information on-the-go whilst you are browsing can significantly speed up your SEO activities. Try out these free toolbars and extensions for a variety of browsers.
Check My Links is a time-saving tool does what it says on the box. The free Chrome extension quickly crawls every link on any selected webpage and reports if any of the links are broken.
This extension for Chrome checks broken links on a page. It informs you if the domain is available for purchase and lets you know how many links there are to both the page and the domain.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
The MozBar provides at a glance metrics for websites as you surf. Along with providing key SEO data, you can also see keyword difficulty and social metrics for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+..
This browser extension for Chrome puts a wealth of SEO stats on whatever website your browsing at your fingertips. Highlights include Alexa ranking, backlinks, and much more.
SEOQuake is an SEO analytical tool for Firefox and Chrome. The toolbar has over three million downloads to date and provides data such as Google index and Alexa ranks, as well possessing a keyword density tool.
Wordtracker Scout is a nifty free Chrome extension that creates a word cloud showing the most used keywords on any webpage you visit. Here’s an example from our How To Build, Value and Sell an App post:
WordPress Plugins
With 75 million websites using WordPress, plugins that help with SEO, content optimization, and security are incredibly useful.
This is the most popular SEO plugin out there with over 14 million downloads. All In One SEO Pack is a free plugin with a professional version offering advanced features and premium support.
(Source: Author’s Screenshot)
A simple and straightforward plugin with powerful features. This plugin by BestWebSoft allows you to create and submit your sitemaps to Google Webmaster and also generate a .gzip file. This plugin is a step above the rest as it also supports custom styles such as video and galleries and includes them in your sitemap.
A plugin no WordPress site should be without, Jetpack backs up your entire site so you can restore it at the push of the button. You can use Jetpack’s content delivery network (CDN) to serve your images faster around the globe. Jetpack also offers spam filtering and brute-force login protection to keep your site safe.
As discussed in the Speed section, images can be a real performance and speed killer. This can have extremely adverse effects on SEO and usability. Smush takes all the hard work and guesswork out of image optimization. Simply install the plugin, and you’ll never have to worry about bloated images again.
This is one of the most popular SEO plugins on WordPress with over 5 million active installations. The plugin includes everything from snippet previews and an SEO meta box, to content analysis and XML sitemaps.
SureOak creates free marketing and SEO tools for a variety of different scenarios so you don’t have to worry about paying any subscription fees. They have tools for building UTMs, checking Domain Authority, creating Roboots.txt files, checking keyword rankings and much more. Take a look through their tools and see what you can find.
What is the best free SEO tool that you use?
We use many free and paid tools in the FE International offices. We hope that this updated list of free tools is helpful to you in your 2019 SEO efforts.
Were there any that we missed?
Comment below and let us know!