Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is a popular topic for those who plan on using the web as an online marketing platform.
There are several online SEO tools you should know to help your website become more visible to search engines. In this article, we list down the top 10 best free SEO tools that should be very useful for those who plan on improving their business site’s rankings in search engines.
GrowthBar.
GrowthBar is one of the easiest to use SEO tools on the market. They enable users to see millions of keyword results, your competition’s backlinks, Google Ads data and generate blog content in one click.
GrowthBar is a tool that is built using Open AI — the most sophisticated language model ever made. That means the results and recommendations are as good as it gets. It’s slick, sleek, and 100% intuitive.
Because of the simple user interface and robust data sets, it’s becoming a favorite choice for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and freelancers. But GrowthBar counts bigger companies like Minted, MagicJack, Square, Spekit, and Teepublic among its customers as well.
GrowthBar also has a free Chrome Extension so you can get SEO insights while you surf the web.
KEY FEATURES:
- Organic Research — See millions of keyword suggestions along with their competitiveness score.
- Competitiveness Metrics — See your competitors’ top organic keywords, top backlinks, and export any of the metrics into an Excel-friendly CSV.
- Content Generation — Generate blog post outlines with proper keywords, headlines, word count, links, tone, and more — all with one click of a button.
PRICING:
You can test out GrowthBar for 5 days for free, before upgrading to a paid subscription. It’s an all-in-one super powerful SEO tool for $29/mo — which makes GrowthBar significantly cheaper than most other quality tools out there.
USED FOR:
- Content generation for bloggers.
- Competitive research: understand your competition’s top organic keyword, Google Ads keywords, backlinks, and Facebook Ads.
- Get word counts, difficulty scores, keyword suggestions, backlinks, and much more to build your content strategy.
CONS:
- Lacks technical SEO metrics
- Lacks historical tracking data
- Lacks SEO audit feature
For the best new SEO tool, get started with a 5-day free trial of GrowthBar.
SEMrush.
SEMrush is a leading competitor analysis tool that helps users evaluate their competitors as well as their own content. It provides robust metrics and allows users to get top-performing pages, content, and keywords.
SEMrush has been successfully helping many website owners and ecommerce entrepreneurs to understand the SEO strategies of their competitors. This makes it one of the most popular SEO tools among small and medium-sized enterprises.
The SEO tool offers the best help for SEO, PPC, ad campaigns, backlinks, keyword research, SERP, and much more.
KEY FEATURES:
- Organic Research – This feature allows the users to see the top keywords used by their competitors, and comp the changes of domains.
- Advertising Research – It helps you run better ad campaigns by analyzing the ad budgets of the competitors. You can also localize your ad campaigns.
- Product Listing Ads – SEMrush allows the users to see competitors’ Product Listing Ads and product feeds.
- Traffic Analytics – SEMrush accurately tells about the online performance and traffic of a website. It also helps you understand the behavior and media consumption of potential customers.
PRICING:
SEMrush offers three paid plans. The Pro plan is $99.95, the Guru plan is $199.95, and the Business plan is $399.95. There is also a quote-based Enterprise plan that you can customize according to the specific needs of the entrepreneurs.
USED FOR:
- Creating guest blogging strategies
- Analyzing the strategies of the competitors
- Tracking past and current website ranking
- Performing technical SEO audits and gauge user experience
- Finding good advertising opportunities for CPC
- Doing robust keyword research to make your content rank higher
CONS:
- Newbies might find it a bit complicated
- You have to pay a hefty tag for more advanced features
- Instances of inaccurate data regarding advertisements and backlinks
Get started with SEMrush today.
Ahrefs.
Ahrefs is one of my favorite SEO tools on the market. Not only is it the second-fastest web crawler (only behind Google) but it has the best user interface out of all tools on this list.
It’s primarily used for backlink audits, competitive analysis, URL rankings, keyword research, and more. Like SEMrush, Ahrefs also offers organic search reports to analyze the traffic of your competitors’ sites.
Users then use that extracted data for link building, keyword research, SEO strategies, rank tracking, and content marketing.
I use Ahrefs every day to check on new backlinks, my keyword’s search positions, and check out competitor insights.
I especially love their keyword explorer tool, which allows you to see keyword difficulty and related keywords that “also rank” for target phrases.
All these impressive features make Ahrefs a highly competitive SEO tool used by numerous SEO professionals and entrepreneurs worldwide.
KEY FEATURES:
- Amazing Keyword Tools – Ahrefs generates millions of keywords on a single research query.
- Ranking History – You can see the ranking history of any keyword used on any page of your website.
- Content Explorer – You can do a content search within the Ahrefs database that contains more than 1 billion web pages.
- Monitor Outbound Links – Ahrefs shows outgoing links report in the site explorer. This helps you keep proper track of where your guest posts are linking.
PRICING:
You can test out the product by opting for the 7-day trial for $7. After that, you can upgrade to the subscription plans start from $99 and range up to $999.
USED FOR:
- Getting website improvement tips for increased visibility and ranking
- To get a clear backlinks analysis report
- To know the URL rating
- To get historical backlink data analysis
- To build a content strategy
CONS:
- Lack of automated client-facing reports if you’re running an agency
Google Search Console: Top SEO Tool
Offered for free to everyone with a website, Google Search Console lets you monitor and report on your website’s presence in Google SERP. All you need to do is verify your website by adding a code to your website or going through Google Analytics and you can submit your sitemap for indexing. Although you don’t need a Search Console account to appear in Google’s search results, you can control what gets indexed and how your website is represented with this account. As an SEO checker tool, Search Console can help you understand how Google and its users view your website and allow you to optimize for better performance in Google search results. It’s especially useful for new websites as it lets site owners submit web pages for search indexing.
KWFinder: SEO Keyword Tool
An SEO keyword tool like KWFinder helps you find long-tail keywords that have a lower level of competition. The experts use this SEO tool to find the best keywords and run analysis reports on backlinks and SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Their Rank Tracker tool helps you easily determine your ranking while tracking your improvement based on one key metric. Plus, if that’s not enough, you’ll get a ton of new keyword ideas to help you rank your website even higher.
Authority Labs.
Authority Labs is another highly useful SEO tool that comes with a super-easy user-friendly interface. With Authority Labs, you can easily set up multiple sites and optimize your SEO campaigns. It also helps you acquire location-specific rank tracking to laser target your audience.
Users can also track the SEO campaigns and strategies used by their competitors in the market.
KEY FEATURES:
- Global Tracking – You can easily do both local and global tracking for different countries and cities.
- Keyword Targeting – Effective keyword targeting with keyword research tools.
- Free Trial – Authority Labs also offers 30 days free trial.
- Daily Reporting – Receive in-depth reports with daily rank checking that help you analyze where you are standing.
PRICING:
Authority Labs offers four different pricing plans. The Plus plans costs $49, and the Pro plan is $99. Other more advanced plans include Pro Plus at $225 and the Enterprise plan at $450. Apart from this, you also get a 30-day free trial; no credit card required.
USED FOR:
- Tracking competitor domains
- Tracking product ranking on various sites
- Comparing mobile ranking to desktop results
- Offers in-depth analytical reports automated reports into the reporting process
CONS:
- Sorts keywords in alphabetic order, and there is no option to change this filter setting.
Woorank’s SEO & Website Analysis Tool
Get a list of SEO improvements in seconds.
This is a very handy Chrome extension.
First, you get an overall SEO score.
Then, the tool shows you EXACTLY how to improve your site’s on-page and off-page SEO.
Best Feature: “Marketing Checklist”
Most SEO tools only tell you about problems… not solutions.
But with Woorank you get a detailed SEO checklist that you can use to fix any issues that you run into.
And now it’s time for our next free SEO tool…
Animalz Revive
Improve and update old content.
Animalz Revive helps you find older content on your site that needs an update, an upgrade… or both.
Before this tool, you had to manually comb through your Google Analytics account to find these pages.Which was a giant pain.
Fortunately, this tool tells you exactly which articles on your site need the most attention.
Best Feature: “Traffic Loss Since Peak (Views)”
This feature lets you know exactly how many visitors that a piece of outdated content is costing you.
CanIRank
Quickly answer the question: “Can I rank for this keyword?”.
CanIRank is a super-detailed keyword difficulty tool.
And unlike most free SEO tools, CanIRank doesn’t give you generic advice like:
“This keyword is really competitive”
Or
“This keyword has low competition”
Instead, it tells you whether or not YOU can rank for that keyword.
Very cool.
Best Feature: “How can you better target this keyword?”
CanIRank isn’t just for sizing up the first-page competition.
It also gives you suggestions that can help you rank for a specific term.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Get your site ready for Google’s Mobile-first Indexing.
You might have heard that Google recently made a big change to its algorithm.
(This change is officially called “Mobile-First Indexing”.)
The bottom line is this:
If your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you’re in big trouble.
Fortunately, you don’t need a full-time developer to make your site mobile-friendly. All you need to do is run your site through the Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
And it tells you whether or not Google considers your site mobile-friendly.
Best Feature: “Page loading issues”
This feature shows you how you can improve your site’s code. That way, Google’s mobile crawler can find and index all of the resources on your site.
Seed Keywords
Find completely fresh keyword ideas.
Most keyword research tools work the exact same way:
- Enter a seed keyword into the tool.
- Get a list of closely-related terms.
The problem with this approach is this:
Everyone types the same seed keywords into these tools.
Well, Seed Keywords takes a completely different approach.
Instead of pulling seed keywords out of thin air, you ask your customers how they’d search for you online.
Then, type those seed keywords into your favorite keyword research tool.
Best Feature: “Submit Query”
Once the results come in, you can use SeedKeywords to do a Google search for the keywords that people gave you.
That way you can quickly scan the search results… and see how competitive those keywords are.
Exploding Topics
Find popular keywords before they get competitive.
This free SEO tool does one simple thing:
It bubbles up topics that are just starting to trend.
That way, you can create content around these emerging trends (or optimize your old content around a new keyword).
The tool currently has about 2k topics in its database. And they’re adding more every week.
Best Feature: Categories
Categories let you drill down to a specific topic category that’s important to your business.
For example, let’s say you run marketing for a skincare brand. Well, you’d hit “beauty” and get a list of emerging topics in that space.
Nice.
Seobility
Get a deep-dive SEO site analysis.
SEObility crawls your entire site and lets you know about search engine optimization issues like:
- Slow loading pages
- Blocked pages
- Sitemap problems
- Technical SEO issues
- Lots more
You usually only get this type of stuff from paid SEO tools. So it’s really nice that Seobility gives you this data for free.
Best Feature: Content Report
This report hands you a list of pages that have content-related SEO issues.
(Things like: thin content, missing meta titles, keyword stuffing, and duplicate content.)
Conclusion
Why do you need the best tools for SEO? What is the best SEO optimization tool? How can I get top ranking on Google search? SEO tools are as diverse as the workings of the internet itself. It covers a very wide range of instruments and services. Try them and see what works best for your site and business needs.