This post was last updated on November 22nd, 2020 at 09:31 pm
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Do you use free SEO tools to help you improve your overall SEO? If yes, what is your best free SEO tools to use?
You know that search engine optimization, SEO, is really important if you want to grow your blog to the next level. You have learned about on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. You know your posts will do better with a little bit of SEO practice.
HOW do you do SEO if you have no SEO tools everybody recommends? How do you optimize posts for search traffic on your WordPress?
Practicing and mastering SEO optimization can be really hard, especially if you’re just starting out. Fortunately, finding the best free SEO tools is easy.
Remember, don’t write for search engines but for people. Google is constantly changing its algorithm to show results that people enjoy. Google tracks how long your visitors stay on your website or if they click on more than one link.
How do you keep readers around? Make your content useful and gorgeous. Style your post with gorgeous stock photos! Here trustable sites where you can find stunning stock photos – free and paid!
Here I’ve collected the best free SEO tools – with a wide variety of uses and covering a number of common needs. As I also use some of them, these tools are fast and easy-to-use. So, if you haven’t worked on your SEO game, I hope you find one or two you can put to good use.
Table of Contents
Free Keyword Research Tools
Keyword research is foundational for your SEO practice and content creation. This is the first thing to do than others.
There are many great but expensive tools out there to help you with keyword research. But also free ones!
Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator
Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator pulls the top 100 keyword ideas for any keyword or phrase from their database of over ten billion keywords across 170+ countries.
Google Trends, Google and Pinterest
Google Trends shows the popularity of a topic over time. Use this to catch on trending topics, and avoid creating content about those with waning interest.
You can also use Google and Pinterest’s search to check what exactly people are actually interested in or to check out who is ranking high in the search results with what content.
KWFinder
KWFinder helps you find long-tail keywords that have a lover level of competition. SEO experts use this tool to find the best keywords and run analysis reports on backlinks and SERP.
Their Rank Tracker Tools will help you easily determine your ranking while tracking your improvement. The good thing is, if that’s not enough, you still get many new keyword ideas to help you rank your site even higher.
Ubersuggest
You can say that Ubersugest is an all-in-one SEO tool designed to help you win the game of SEO. I mostly use it for keyword research and site audit.
Ubersuggest has a lot of features that are usually only found in premium SEO tools. But you can use it for free.
To use it, simply type a keyword that you want to rank and it will give you detailed data on keyword difficulty, monthly search volume, and more.
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Free SEO Tools
Moz
I mostly use Moz to check my domain authority ranking. But, whether you’re looking for keyword recommendations or a site crawl, Moz is a full-service powerhouse.
You can get great insights into how your website is performing but also how to improve it.
Rank Math
Here is my favorite WordPress SEO plugin that helps me with on-page and technical SEO.
Yoast SEO
Yoast is also one of the best free SEO tools for WordPress other than Rank Math. You can use it for free.
Many of you will ask ‘what is the difference between Rank Math and Yoast SEO?’
For me, both of them are helpful to improve your SEO practice, and the best part, the free version is enough for you.
Here the reason why I switched from Yoast to Rank Math:
- Using Rank Math clears out a lot of plugins. Anything you can do to eliminate unnecessary plugins is going to speed up your website, improve the stability of your website, and reduce website management time. And, the Rank Math plugin is about half the size of the core Yoast plugin.
- Rank Math is completely free, at least for now. You get a lot of features to use included that you have to pay for with Yoast. For example, you can target up to 5 keywords with Rank Math vs. the free edition of Yoast, just 1.
- With Rank Math, there is also external links management and a built-in SEO audit tool. The external links management tool allows you to automate things like adding a ‘nofollow’ by default to external links.
- My favorite is, instead of Yoast’s ratings of ‘bad,’ or ‘good,’ Rank Math scores your content out of 100. I prefer this one as it provides much more comfortable feedback about the content and what certain changes will do.
- Compared to Yoast, Rank Math only offers basic readability analysis. That said, there are way better tools available to assist with spelling and grammar. I use Grammarly for full content analysis. And if you only want basic spelling and grammar checking, you can do that directly in WordPress (or anywhere else) using the browser plugin.
Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker
Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker shows the top 100 backlinks to any website. It also shows the five most linked pages, most common anchor texts, the total number of backlinks and referring domains and more.
Ahrefs’ Broken Link Checker
Ahrefs’ Broken Link Checker shows the top 10 broken inbound and outbound links for any domain, subdomain, or URL.
Broken Link Checker
Tons of broken links or 404 errors on your website will make it look bad to Google and turn off your readers. I use a free tool like Broken Link Checker to find all broken links and add this to my monthly blogging tasks. Go through the list of your broken links and weed them out. Keep your blog clean and functional. This will help you rank higher and give your readers a better experience on your blog.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free SEO tool from Google that helps you check and troubleshoot your website’s appearance in their search results.
Make sure to submit a sitemap of your blog. You can create one with the Yoast plugin or the free plugin “Google XML sitemaps” which is very easy to use. If you want to learn more about Search Console, check out Neil Patel’s post on how to use the Search Console to grow search traffic to your website.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test checks how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device. It also checks specific mobile-usability issues like text too small to read, the use of incompatible plugins, and so on.
This tool also shows you how you can improve your site’s code. Run it a few times to get accurate results.
Also check your blog’s speed with the Google Pagespeed Insights or a service like the Pingdom Website Speed Test.
Mastering SEO
Optimizing your posts for SEO sounds boring as it can be and you won’t see results right away. Even when you’re an experienced blogger, the hours you invest in learning SEO now can pull in traffic and pageviews for YEARS to come.
Even when I took a week for long blogging breaks before, people kept coming to my blog, thanks to SEO! It keeps working when you stop!
Investing in SEO is the best and smart idea. If you can’t invest money for a fantastic course or SEO services, do yourself a favor and invest at least a bit of time.
Recommended resources for you: An All In One SEO Tool Suite, Serped and Long Tail Pro – The Most Popular Keyword Research Tool On With Rank Tracker Included Free.
Wrapping Up
If you’re a new blogger with little content, then bookmark this guide to come back later. Focus on creating valuable and quality content first. Get your content out there and promote it on all of your social media platforms.
The more you practice on SEO, the easier it gets. Now you have the free SEO tools and resources to become a well-educated blogger and benefit from search traffic years down the road.
AND if you haven’t got your complete SEO checklist, GRAB IT NOW! FREE!
Download this complete SEO checklist to get a full SEO task list of everything you need to optimize your website. It includes 35+ action items related to on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.
You need a complete SEO guide checklist that hits all of the best practices for SEO if you want to boost your site’s overall ability to rank in search and grow your domain authority ranking.
Please let me know if there is a free SEO tools you would love to see included in this list!
Photo credit: Karen Alves
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Not only me, but most bloggers also spend a lot of time running their blog, researching, creating, and writing valuable content, and not to mention shooting and editing the photos you see. So, I want to say thanks to the support of people like you who help me keep running this blog and I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart.
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This is such a great resource! I was just looking for some more keyword tools and this is coming in super handy. Thanks so much for sharing!
This is a really helpful post. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for reading, Lauren xxx
Thank you for this informative post. I am a relatively new blogger and I have only just started using keyword tools to help with my SEO. All this is like a foreign language to me that I am trying to learn little by little! I will pin this to refer back to, thanks!
You’re right! When starting my blog, I also find SEO and keywords are like alien words that I don’t understand how it works. Good luck to you, Julie! Thank you for reading xxx
Thank you so much for sharing these SEO tools. I’m working on improving my DA score at the minute and there are quite a few resources that I wasn’t aware of! I’ve added this to my favouirtes so I can refer back to it x
Me too! I’m working on improving my DA this month and it always been my goal every month now lol ~ good luck, Kelly! Thank you for reading xxx
Thanks for the fab advice! Definitely going to use this❤️
Thank you for stopping by, Demi xxx
This is a brilliant resource bank! Finding free SEO resources can be intimidating, particularly if you’re a newer blogger. Thanks so much for putting this together!
Definitely agree with you! Thank you for reading ❤️
Very informative. I didn’t know about the broken link checker, how cool! Thanks so much for sharing these great tools!
Me too! I usually only use Ubersuggest until I research more and find this broken link things. Thank you for reading, Sarah xxx
What a great resource! Thanks for sharing!
Wow, this is so useful! I’ve just bookmarked so I can hopefully make the most out of all of these resources! Thank you for sharing!
Tash // <a href=”http://www.agirlwithview.co.uk/”>A Girl with a View</a>
Thank you, Natasha! Glad that you found this helpful 😀
Oh my goodness, this is fantastic. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve only recently started thinking properly about my SEO, and this list is full of great resources. Just bookmarked this so I can check back with them – thank you!
That’s good! I also still working on improving my SEO ~ learn, learn, and learn 😀 Thank you for reading, Lindsey xxx
These are such great tools to take advantage of as a blogger. I’m glad you shared such an extensive list! I can’t wait to begin trying some of the new ones for myself.
Thank you for always stopping by, Stephanie! I hope I can find more tools in the future and update this as many as I can 😀
ah this is soooo helpful thank you so much!!! defo need to look at some of these and start boosting my SEO haha x
Good luck, Katy! Happy SEO-ing 😀 Thank you for reading xxx
All the tools are great to use fixing SEO but some have a bit learning curve. I personally use ubersuggest for basic keywork optimization
I also use ubersuggest the most but I need to find other tools to help me with everything 🙂
Thank you for stopping by, Emily xxx
This is really helpful! I’ve been meaning to work on my SEO for ages and have been doing some small tasks to boost it xx
http://www.dellalovesnutella.co.uk/
Good luck, girl! You can do it! Thank you for reading 😀