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Top Free SEO Tools

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This is a list of free SEO tools.

I use paid SEO tools but I also use these tools myself all the time.

With a little practice you could rank your site using just these tools alone.

Good SEO needs good keywords. You want your information to match what people are searching for because more searches indicates a bigger audience. Google aggregate their data to suggest to you the most popular searches. Who knows Google’s audience better than Google? No-one.

This free SEO tool isn’t really an SEO tool. It’s something Google provide to help people search. We can use it to our purposes though. Just go to Google and start typing in words. Google will suggest to the you most popular searches. 

pest control search with google suggest

You can see in the above search, that “pest control ants” is a popular search in the topic of “pest control”. Therefore, if you’re looking to provide content for your pest control website, and article about pest control for ants would be a good place to start.

Another way to use Google Suggest is to complete your search then scroll to the bottom of the page. What you’ll find there are some of the most popular related searches. 

Using this data, a Gold Coast based pest contoller might target Coomera or Ormeau as local searches. 

Neil Patel has put together an amazing range of SEO tools. And they’re completely free. No restrictions, no upsells, no paywalls. (Update 2021: There are now upsells involved in Neil Patel’s SEO tools. You still get an amazing view into the SEO crystal ball here though.)

What’s provided here starts to look a lot more like a paid suite of tools rather than free SEO tools. It can be a bit more intimidating because there is a lot of data to digest. But if you’re prepared to delve then you’ve got loads here to work with. You can get loads of info on your own website and, critically, your competitors.

My main problem with Uber Suggest would be accuracy. I’ve had some results in the domain score that didn’t seem right to me. When I cross-checked them with other SEO tools (Moz, Ahrefs) I got results more consistent with my expectations (and each other).

uber suggest best free seo tool

Uber Suggest is a great source for keyword exploration. It’s also got a site audit feature. You can delve into this to see if there are issues you need to fix. 

uber suggest best free seo site audit

In the screenshot above, you can see that the website, goldcoastpestinspector.com.au, has a good SEO score. Organic monthly traffic is low, at just 200. Organic keywords is high. There are 28 sites linking back to this one.

Niel Patel’s website will help you drill down into each of these categories to find out where you’re wanting. It will also give you basic competitor analysis. Basic SEO isses, like broken links or missing meta, is reported. You will also get approximations of traffic for different keywords, and keyword suggestions.

There is a lot here for anyone prepared to delve into it.

NB: We re-ran this tool for the same domain a year later. On Page SEO is now 89%, organic keywords are 572, and backlinks are 597.  That’s indicative of the work we have done in the last year. The estimate of monthly organic traffic has dropped, according to Neil Patel. That’s not consistent with what we see in our raw stats, which is indicative of the inherent inacuracy you get with these sort of tools. Take them with a grain of salt and cross check them and they’ll be useful to you.

This is probably my favourite domain score tool because it is so quick and easy to use. And accurate to boot.

Domain score has been devalued by Google but it’s still an important way of judging where you stand in the search world. It’s also an important metric by which we might judge potential backlinks. If you’re building your off-page SEO with guest posts then this is a good way to snoop on your potential new friend and decide if they’re worth investing in.

It’s also a great way of checking out your opposition. Snoop on their high Domain Rating backlinks and see if you can get onboard with those links also.

Looking at the backlinks for Pogo, you can see that most are coming from businesses we have dealt with. It would be hard for any competitor to replicate those. 

If we check out a competitor to Pogo, we can see their third listing down is OnTrack Australia. Pogo is also an agent for OnTrack, so getting listed on OnTrack’s directory is an easy way for Pogo to increase it’s backlinks. The DR from OnTrack is high, at 77, so it is a very good backlink.

The whole world of DR (Domain Ranking, Ahrefs) and DA (Domain Authority, Moz) deserves another full article to explain it properly. In theory, the better your DR or DA, the better your site will rank. In practice it isn’t nearly that simple. As a guide though, these metrics are still useful.

I love Google Search Console. It tells you so much about how and what your website is doing. And crucially, it tells you what your website isn’t doing. Or, to think of it another way, what it could be doing.

Let me explain.

Google Search Console has a performance tab. This is where you can find out how your website is ranking. It tells you how many times your website shows up in searches (impressions), your position, and how many clicks you got. This information is useful for you to analyze what is desirable against what is possible. Ideally, you want to target terms that are drawing the biggest traffic, are relavant to your products and/or services, and are realistically achievable.

google search console free seo tool

This search above is a for a new client of ours. We’ve ordered the list by most impressions. These are the terms we want to target because they have the highest traffic. We can see clear trends around the “security systems” and “Brisbane” keywords. Now we know what to target.

But are they achievable? Yes, definitely. We’re already placed around the 6-7 mark for many of these terms. Some SEO work on these would push them toward the 1-5 area, where the bulk of the search traffic actually goes to. We can gain a lot of traffic with a small gain.

On the other hand, “security cameras Brisbane” is ranked 24.1. That is a much tougher propsition. Gaining 20 places is going to need more work. 

I see “home security cameras Brisbane” at 13.3 and straight away that looks like a good target to me. It’s a long-tail keyword (so specificity will pay off here), it’s close enough to top 10 to be achievable, and pushing it into the top 5 will bring with it lots of traffic. 

I assume you’re using WordPress. You are aren’t you? WordPress is a great CMS and proven SEO performer.

Yoast SEO helps you shape your posts and pages into highly focused (but not too focused!) search engine optimized web results. It’ll tell you where you’re lacking, help you dot the I’s and cross the T’s (with things like alt tags), and even control your Google snippets. Yoast is pretty much a one-stop shop for optimizing your content. And it’ll teach you how to write SEO content. 

yoast best free seo tool plugin

Now that you’re moving up the rankings you need some way to measure your success.

That’s where What’s My SERP comes in.

It’s a free tool, has a lovely clean interface, let’s you choose regions, and track and monitor keywords. For a free tool this one is the best SERP tracker I’ve come across. It has premium tools within it but you won’t find the restrictions for the free tools too chafing. The main issue I’d have with this one if I was relying on it is for tracking local search. For instance, many of my clients are Gold Coast and Brisbane based and I need data on how they rank in these markets. What’s My SERP free edition won’t do this.

If you’re new to SEO and want a free tool before all the dollars start rolling in then this is a great place to start. 

what's my serp free seo ranking tool

Even More Free SEO Tools

There are tonnes more tools out there. I didn’t want to make this an exhaustive list. I wanted to make it a definitive list of tools I use and recommend. Each of these SEO tools mentioned here I use weekly and sometimes daily. With a little practice you could do an amazing job of optimizing your rankings with these tools. Good luck. 

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