In a world where so much is done online, the SEO of your site has never been so important. It’s how potential clients or customers discover you and potentially order from your business, increasing revenue. Luckily, there are plenty of SEO tools out there that are free, with easy to follow step by step guides to apply and improve your site. Below are 25 free SEO tools for 2024, if you enjoy using them and find them useful, there are premium options for some of them to unlock extra benefits.
Yoast SEO
One of the go to plugins to improve your SEO on a WordPress site is Yoast SEO. Yoast gives you tips and tricks to improve your on-page SEO, as well as adjust the meta titles, descriptions of your post. It’s easy to install and is free to all users, although there is a paid version that unlocks extra features. The extra features are useful to have but aren’t essential, the free version will do enough.
Google Pagespeed Insights
Google Pagespeed insights is simple to use and is great for checking page speed and the usability on multiple devices, such as mobile and desktop. It’s free to use, all you need to do is type in your URL and google will do the rest. Once Google has scanned your site it will give you some recommendations on how to improve your site. Things it may suggest is an SSL certificate, Image size too large etc.
Google Analytics
Another one from Google, Google Analytics is a must and if you aren’t using it already, install it instantly. Not only will it track your visitors to your site, but it can also go in a lot more detail, from the time on a page to your keywords. From a click of a button it will show you what keywords people are searching to land on your site. To locate your keywords, look under the acquisition section.
Ahrefs Keyword Generator
With a simple click of a button, Ahrefs Keyword Generator will generate the top 100 keywords, from a simple phrase or word that you type in. If you are doing some keyword research, it’s simple to use and will help find the keyword you should target for your website page or article. You can also see things like the amount of backlinks you are receiving as well as a competitor.
Moz Link Explorer
The free version of Moz will give you a certain amount of searches for not only your own domain but also your competitors. With these searches you can discover their domain authority, page authority, keywords that they rank for and the articles they have written to rank for this keyword. The paid version unlocks the door to plenty more SEO tools but the free version still gives you a lot of information.
Screaming Frog
Within the world of marketing and seo, Screaming Frog is a well known tool used by many experts. On it’s free version, you can scan up to 500 URLS, analyzing their on page SEO. It’s desktop based and they do offer other services such as PPC.
GTMetrix
If you want to know how your site performs, then GTMetrix is the go to. By using GTMetrix you can scan your site and see how it performs. After running your scan you will be presented with a variety of data from loading speed, to the performance and how big your site is. Here they will score you and make suggestions on how you can improve your site which will improve how Google reads your website.
Smush
Another WordPress plugin, Smush will automatically reduce the size of your images across the site, without reducing the quality. The bigger your image sizes are, the slower your site will be and Google can penalise you for this. There is a premium version of Smush that you can purchase if you would like to reduce your file sizes even more, however this may not be necessary for you.
Answer The Public
If you are struggling for relevant topic ideas, then try, Answer The Public. Answer The Public uses Google and presents the main searches, people are searching for with the keyword you enter. It allows you to streamline your content and make it more relevant to what people are currently searching. As well as this, you may discover ideas that will help you rank highly.
Google My Business
Google My Business is ideal for companies who have a physical presence, like a restaurant or barbers. It allows you to list your business, presenting it on Google Maps, search results and links directly to your site. It can improve your SEO rankings and allows customers to give you reviews which if positive Google may favour. For anyone, it helps customers find your business.
CloudFlare
Cloudflare is a free global CDN that can be used with most hosts and on most websites. It can help with improving your site speed as well as protect your site from unwanted attacks. The quicker your site loads, the better Google will see it. This is why it’s always important that you pay attention to how your site is performing. CloudFlare does have a premium version if you are looking for a CDN that will protect your site more than a free version.
Google Search In Incognito Mode
If you are looking for search terms for an article, or for your new webpage, then a google search in incognito mode could help you. When you start writing out a certain word, Google autofills and gives you suggestions of what to type next. These suggestions are not random, they are calculated suggestions using the most popular terms that people are searching after that word.
Can I Rank
Can I Rank is a free SEO tool that does what it says in its name. Can I Rank scans keywords and tells you how difficult they are to rank for and whether you will be able to rank for them yourself. It’s great for keyword research and allows you to do competitor analysis so that you can see how your competition is doing.
Google Trends
Enter a search term or topic and Google Trends will present to you popular search terms. From here you can compare them to other terms and see what people are searching for. If you think something is popular at the moment, you can do a quick search and it will show you the interest, allowing you to decide if it’s worth writing about.
XML Sitemaps
By submitting a sitemap to Google and Bing, it helps them crawl your site and know what pages to look at. XML sitemaps allows you to generate a sitemap for free, for up to 500 pages. All you need to do is simply insert your URL, change the parameters to your preference and XML Sitemaps will do the rest.
Copyscape
If you’ve ever had duplicate content on your site, you may already know that Google can penalise you for this and knock you down a few rankings. If you run a blog, then this can easily be done, especially when you may write a lot of posts monthly. Copyscape allows you to enter the URL of your blog posts and see if it exists anywhere else online. From the results you can then edit the piece and make it more SEO friendly.
Alexa SEO Tool
Alexa SEO tool is owned by Amazon, hence it being called Alexa. You can sign up for a free trail and use Alexa to help with your keyword research, content, SEO and PPC strategy. If you like the software, their premium features are great and will really help you improve your website’s rankings. The whole process is simple to use but if you have any questions you can always speak to their team.
Bing Webmaster Tools
A Lot of people concentrate on Google and forget that they could be getting some traffic from other providers like Bing. Bing Webmaster Tools is Google’s competitor, offering a similar service to them. By signing up to Bing Webmaster you can get your site indexed by them, increasing your search traffic.
Google Keyword Planner
Search for keywords, generate ideas from other websites or track the ones you may want to use. Google’s keyword planner is a great tool that helps you find keywords that other keyword providers may not. It’s completely free to use and will present data like search volume, competition and keywords that you may not have thought of.
Hunter.IO
If you are looking to contact certain people and need to find an email address then give Hunter.IO ago. Hunter.IO will search the site and find email addresses of specific people. You can do 50 requests a month and they have a plugin that you can install from the Chrome extensions section. There is also a Google Sheets add-on.
Imagify
An alternative to Smush, Imagify is another image compression software that you can add to your wordpress site. As mentioned above, by reducing your image size it will improve the overall performance of your site, helping improve your SEO, will Google prioritise your site over a slower one. You can use their free version, alternatively if you have a biggersite there is a paid version.
Uber Suggests
For a free software, Uber suggests is extremely powerful due to the fact it includes a lot of premium features in it’s free version. Similar to Moz, Uber suggests allows you to search for keywords and see the monthly traffic for them, how difficult they are to rank for and competitor analysis. It’s simple to use and allows you to plan an SEO strategy just from using the free version.
Mozbar
The Mozbar is a google plugin that quickly gives you information about a particular website when browsing the web. At a click of a button it will give you a report on how that site is going and tell you about key performance indicators such as domain authority or page authority, Page Elements, Page Attributes, and Link Data. It is run by Moz, allowing you to switch between their main dashboard and this plugin.
Where Goes?
If you have any broken links on your site, Google may penalize you as this is not good for a users experience. Where goes is a free tool that will scan your links and let you know of any broken pages. If you have a lot of redirects, this can slow down your site so it will tell you how many you have. There isn’t a premium version of this software so if you are looking for a more indepth scanner, you could look at Ahrefs.
Chrome Devtools
From a technical SEO point of view, the Chrome Devtools are extremely useful. If you don’t have experience in this particular area it may seem complicated, but there are experts out there who you can get in touch to help you. The Chrome DevTools can be used to improve issues such as your page speed or rendering performance.
We hope the above 25 SEO tools are useful and help improve the performance of your website. Take your time to go through them and decide which ones work best for you and your site. What SEO tools have you been using? Have we included any of them in the above? Let us know in the comment box below, we would love to hear from you.
