Free SEO Tools Worth Knowing About
There's no shortage of SEO tools out there, and plenty of them cost a lot of money. The good news is that for most small sites, the free options cover the majority of what you actually need. Here's a straightforward rundown of what's worth using and what each one is for.
Google Search Console
If you only use one tool, this is the one. Search Console is free, comes straight from Google, and shows you how your site is performing in search. You can see which pages are getting impressions and clicks, which keywords are driving traffic, whether Google is having trouble indexing any of your pages, and where your click-through rates are weak.
It's also where you'd go to check on the page titles and meta descriptions we covered in an earlier post. Start here before anything else.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Paste any URL in and it tells you how fast the page loads on both desktop and mobile, along with specific suggestions for what to fix. User experience is part of how Google evaluates pages, and Core Web Vitals are part of how that gets measured. Most of the issues it flags come down to image sizes and scripts that don't need to be there.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
This is a desktop crawler, meaning you download it and it scans your site the way a search engine would. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs, which is more than enough for small to mid-sized sites. It surfaces broken links, redirect chains, missing or duplicate page titles and meta descriptions, and orphaned pages. If you've read the other posts on this blog, you'll recognize all of those.
It's not the prettiest interface but it's thorough and the free version is genuinely useful.
Google Keyword Planner
Technically built for Google Ads, but useful for SEO keyword research. You can see search volume estimates and related keyword ideas without spending anything. The one catch is that exact volume numbers are hidden behind running an active ad campaign. You still get directional data, which is enough to help you prioritize.
Ahrefs Free Tools
Ahrefs has a suite of free tools that don't require a paid account. The keyword generator is handy for finding related terms and seeing difficulty scores. Their free Webmaster Tools account lets you run a basic site audit and see some backlink data for your own domain. The free tier audits up to 5,000 URLs and surfaces issues like duplicate titles, orphaned pages, and crawl problems.
Answer the Public
Type in a topic and it shows you the questions people are actually asking about it, pulled from search autocomplete data. Useful when you're trying to figure out what to write about or how to frame a page. The free version limits you to a few searches per day, which is usually enough for occasional use.
A note on paid tools
Semrush and Ahrefs' full paid versions are genuinely powerful, and if SEO is a significant part of your business strategy it's worth looking at them eventually. But for a small site doing the fundamentals well, the free stack above covers most of what you need. Get comfortable with these before spending money on anything.