We’ve picked the 29 best free SEO tools.
- All tools have been tried and tested by our team in 2024
- No credit card details are required
- Every tool does something different
Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool is a keyword research tool that lets you search our database of over 25 billion keywords from 142 countries.
And you can filter results based on various keyword metrics, including:
- Volume: The keyword search volume—average number of monthly searches in your location
- Intent: The type(s) of search intent (transactional, commercial, navigational, or informational)
- KD %: The keyword difficulty score, which measures how hard it’ll be to rank highly
- SERP features: The type(s) of SERP features (non-standard results) that appear in the results
With your free Semrush account, you can perform up to 10 searches with 10 results each per day. And access a variety of other SEO tools for free.
Position Tracking helps you monitor your Google rankings for target keywords in your specified location. And find out if you occupy any SERP features.
With a free Semrush account, you can track up to 10 keywords in Position Tracking.
The Site Audit tool checks your site for over 140 technical and on-page SEO issues.
These include issues relating to:
- Crawlability
- HTTPS
- International SEO
- Site performance
- Internal linking
Site Audit also provides information on how and why to fix each issue. And integrates with Trello, Zapier, and Semrush CRM. So it’s easy to create tasks for your team.
The Link Building Tool makes it quicker and easier to build backlinks (links from other websites that point to yours) that can benefit your SEO.
The tool identifies link building prospects (sites that might link to you) based on your competitors and target keywords. And as a free user, you can import up to 100 prospects of your own.
To use it, just add the target keywords for your chosen pages.
Then, the tool will compare your content against top-ranking competitors’ and SEO best practices. To provide ideas covering:
- SEO strategy
- Backlinks
- User experience
- Technical SEO
- SERP features
- Semantic SEO
- Content
Plus, the On Page SEO Checker helps you decide which pages to prioritize. Based on their traffic potential etc.
Backlink Analytics allows you to analyze your own and competitors’ backlink profiles. So you can evaluate your competitive standing. And improve your link building strategy.
You can see how the following metrics have changed over time:
- Authority Score: A Semrush metric that measures ranking strength out of 100
- Referring domains: The number of sites that link to the analyzed domain
- Backlinks: The number of backlinks pointing to the analyzed domain
Plus, you can discover:
- What percentage of backlinks are nofollow links (links that tell search engines not to pass ranking authority)
- The most commonly used anchor text
- The most linked-to pages
And much more.
With a free Semrush account, you can make up to 10 requests a day.
Semrush’s Domain Overview tool provides valuable data about competitors’ websites. Which you can use to create benchmarks for your own SEO success.
Among other things, it can show you:
- How much organic traffic they get each month (estimated)
- Where their visitors come from
- How many keywords they rank for organically
- Which SERP features they most commonly rank for
The Topic Research tool helps you find SEO-friendly content ideas you can cover on your website.
To use it, enter a focus topic and target country. Then, the tool will gather popular and trending subtopic keywords.
For each subtopic, you can see:
- Subtopic Volume: The average number of searches for the subtopic keyword each month
- Difficulty: How hard it’ll be to earn a high organic ranking for the subtopic keyword, expressed as a percentage
- Topic Efficiency: A measure of volume relative to difficulty—“High” is best
- Headlines: Pages relating to the subtopic that have the most backlinks
- Questions: Commonly searched questions relating to the subtopic
- Related searches: Related search terms that appear on Google, if applicable
The SEO Writing Assistant helps you write original, SEO-friendly content that’s easy to read and aligns with your tone of voice.
Enter your target keyword(s) and audience to generate recommendations. Then, start writing your content to see how it scores.
- Track your keyword use
- Avoid keyword stuffing
- Add semantic keywords
- Achieve an appropriate readability score
- Reach an recommended word count
And much more.
You can create a maximum of two documents with a free Semrush account.
Listing Management lets you check your local citations for free. So you can ensure your local business is listed on top directories. And that key information is present and correct.
The Semrush Sensor allows you to track volatility in Google’s search results.
High volatility means results are changing more than usual—possibly due to an algorithm update. So, it’s helpful to monitor volatility in your country and category.
Connect your free Semrush account to see these metrics (and others) for each search result:
- Organic position: Where the site ranks in the main organic results
- Authority Score: A measure of the site’s ranking ability out of 100
- Visits: The estimated number of monthly visits to the domain
- Linking domains: The number of sites that link to this page
You install a tracking code that enables the tool to gather data about visitors’ activity. Which you can then analyze through various reports.
Among many other things, you can find out:
- How much traffic comes from organic search
- Which pages drive the most conversions
- Characteristics about your visitors
Log in to GA4 (or create an account) to get started.
Google Search Console (GSC) helps you monitor and manage your site’s performance in Google Search.
It shows your average ranking positions for up to 1,000 top queries. And how many impressions and clicks these results drive.
- Check which of your pages are indexed by Google
- Submit your XML sitemap to Google
- Analyze your Core Web Vitals (metrics that reveal how user-friendly your site is)
- See backlinks to your site
Log in to GSC (or create an account) to get started.
Bing Webmaster Tools helps you monitor and manage your site’s performance in Bing Search.
Basically, it’s Bing’s version of Google Search Console.
You can use it to:
- Check which keywords drive the most impressions in Bing
- Get technical SEO recommendations
- Submit your sitemap to Bing
And much more.
Google Business Profile (GBP) lets you manage your local business listing on Google.
This is the profile that can appear in map-based results. Like this:
- Verify your business location
- Add your contact details, business hours, photos, etc.
- Publish GBP posts about your news, events, and offers
Visit the GBP homepage to get started.
Map Rank Tracker lets you monitor your business’s rankings in Google Maps.
Choose the local keywords and search locations you want to track. And the heatmap will show your ranking for each.
With a free Semrush account, you get 50 credits per month for the Map Rank Tracker. This means you could scan a five-by-five grid for two keywords per month (5 x 5 x 2 x 1 = 50), for example.
My Reports makes it quick and easy to build SEO reports with data from Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, Google Business Profile, and various Semrush tools.
Plus, it lets you customize your report to suit your needs.
Google Trends allows you to analyze search trends anywhere in the world.
You can see what topics are trending right now. And potentially gather some content ideas.
Visit the Google Trends website to start your research.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that lets you check Core Web Vitals performance on individual webpages.
These are page experience metrics that can affect your rankings in search. And impact users’ experience on your site.
Go to PageSpeed Insights to start evaluating your pages.
Google’s Rich Results Test lets you check the validity of schema markup on a webpage. To determine if the page is eligible for rich results.
You can preview ones you’re eligible for in the tool. And see whether there are any problems that need to be fixed.
Here’s how you can use it as a free SEO marketing tool:
- Track relevant topics to get content ideas
- Track relevant topics to get newsjacking ideas
- Track your brand name to check for new backlinks or backlink opportunities
The free version provides on-page SEO recommendations like this:
- Robots.txt: A file that tells search engines which pages to crawl
- XML sitemap: A file that tells search engines which pages to index
- Robots meta tags: Code that tells search engines how to crawl, index, or display a page
- Canonical tags: Code that helps search engines understand which page to prioritize when there are duplicate pages
- Structured data: Code that helps search engines identify different types of information
Visit the WordPress plugin directory to download this free plugin.
Meta SEO Inspector is a Chrome extension that makes it easy to review a page’s metadata.
It can display the following data for any page you visit:
- Title tag: The HTML page title that can appear in search results pages
- Meta description: The HTML page summary that can appear in search results pages
- Canonical tag: The tag that points to the preferred version of the page
- Heading tags: Tags for the main heading and subheadings
- Open graph tags: Tags that contain data for social media sharing
Sloth helps you implement technical SEO fixes on sites with platform or development restrictions.
For example, you can use it to:
- Configure 301 and 302 redirects (which allow you to direct users and search engines from one page to another)
- Implement hreflang attributes (which specify a page’s language)
- Modify your robots.txt file (which tells search engines which pages on your site to crawl)
- Set up A/B tests (which allow you to compare two versions of a webpage)
Sloth uses Cloudflare Workers. So, you’ll need a free Cloudflare account to get started with the tool.
Merkle’s Google SERP Simulator shows what a basic result for one of your webpages might look like on Google.
Simply enter a title tag and meta description. To see what they might look like on desktop and/or mobile.
But this is a good way to test the length and appearance of your text.
Connectively—formerly Help a Reporter Out (HARO)—lets you source media inquiries that can lead to backlinks for your site.
Basically, reporters use the platform to request expert commentary for their articles. And you can search for—and respond to—relevant requests.
If a reporter uses your submission, they may credit you with a backlink.
ShortPixel offers a website plugin that automatically compresses your images.
This is a simple way to improve page speeds (which can influence your Google rankings). Without compromising image quality.
Enter your domain on the ShortPixel website to see how many images you could optimize.
For example, you could ask the tool to:
- "Generate a list of 20 long-tail keywords related to eco-friendly home cleaning products"
- "Create a detailed outline for a blog post about the benefits of remote work, including key points and subheadings"
- "Write a compelling meta description for an article about the best hiking trails in California that includes the target keyword 'California hiking trails'"
- "Provide a step-by-step guide on how to fix broken links on a WordPress site to improve SEO"
- "Draft an outreach email template to request a guest post opportunity on a high-authority travel blog"
Just be aware that the tool has the potential to produce inaccurate information and unoriginal text. So, you should always edit anything it generates.
Your free Semrush account gives you access to many of the best free SEO tools.
But you can achieve even more with a free Semrush trial.