20 Best Free SEO Tools For 2023

If you’re looking to grow your website traffic, you can’t do it on your own. You’ll need to rely on some SEO tools as part of your SEO strategy to help you monitor your traffic, the keywords you rank for, and how to improve your SEO posture throughout your website.

Fortunately, we have a lot of experience in SEO, so here’s a list of some of the best free SEO tools we know! They’ll help you with search engine optimization marketing which will result in an increase in organic traffic for your website.

While all of these tools offer free services, most of them also offer premium services which will further strengthen the SEO posture of your website.

We hope you’ll find our favorite free SEO tools useful and if you do, remember to comment and share this post.

Best Free Essential SEO Tools

1. Google Analytics

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered by Google that helps website owners track and analyze their website traffic. It provides insights into how visitors interact with a website, including metrics such as page views, bounce rate, time on site, and more.

How does Google Analytics improve SEO?

By using Google Analytics, website owners can identify areas where they can improve their website’s performance and make data-driven decisions to enhance their online presence. For example, they can identify which pages on their website are performing well and which ones are not, where their traffic is coming from, what keywords visitors are using to find their site and more.

In terms of SEO, Google Analytics can be a valuable tool to help website owners improve their search engine rankings. By analyzing user behavior data, website owners can identify which keywords and pages are driving the most traffic to their site and optimize their content accordingly.

For example, they can use this information to identify high-performing keywords and create more content around those topics. They can also analyze the behavior of users who arrive at their site through search engines and optimize their landing pages to improve their conversion rates.

2. Google Search Console

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) is a free tool provided by Google that helps website owners monitor and improve their website’s performance in search results.

How does Google Search Console improve SEO?

Google Search Console provides website owners with valuable insights into how their site is performing in search results, including information on which search queries are driving traffic to their site, which pages are being indexed by Google, and any technical issues that may be impacting their website’s performance.

By using Google Search Console, website owners can identify opportunities to improve their website’s SEO, including optimizing their content for high-performing keywords, fixing technical issues such as broken links or crawl errors, and ensuring their site is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate.

3. Google Keyword Planner

What is Google Keyword Planner?

Google Keyword Planner is a free tool offered by Google that helps website owners and marketers research and analyze keywords related to their business or industry. The tool is primarily used for creating and optimizing Google Ads campaigns, but it can also be useful for improving SEO efforts.

How does Google Keyword Planner improve SEO?

Google’s Keyword Planner enables website owners to identify relevant keywords and phrases that are being used by people searching for information related to their business. By analyzing these keywords, website owners can create targeted content that is optimized for the keywords and phrases that are most likely to drive traffic to their website.

In addition, Google Keyword Planner provides website owners with information on the average monthly search volume for each keyword, as well as the level of competition for each keyword. This information can help website owners identify high-value keywords that are relevant to their business and have a low level of competition, which can be easier to rank for in search results.

By using Keyword Planner to identify and optimize content for relevant keywords, website owners can improve their SEO efforts and increase their visibility in search results. This can lead to increased traffic to their website, higher engagement rates, and ultimately, increased conversions and revenue.

Read our tutorial on how to use Google Keyword Planner to conduct Keyword Research for SEO.

Free Site Analysis and Report Tools

4. Nibbler

What is Nibbler?

Nibbler is a free online tool that can help website owners improve their SEO efforts by providing a comprehensive report on their website’s performance.

How does Nibbler improve SEO?

The tool analyzes various aspects of a website, including accessibility, user-friendliness, advertising, and design, and provides a score out of 100.

In addition to providing an overall score, Nibbler provides an in-depth SEO review based on many on-page and off-page SEO factors. This includes an analysis of a website’s content, keywords, meta descriptions, headings, and more.

Nibbler also checks for technical issues such as broken links, missing sitemaps or robots.txt files, and page load times, which can impact a site’s visibility and search rankings.

Based on the analysis, Nibbler provides recommendations on how website owners can fix any SEO-related problems that it finds. These recommendations may include optimizing content for relevant keywords, improving website load times, fixing broken links, and more.

By using Nibbler to analyze their website’s performance and identify areas where they can improve their SEO efforts, website owners can increase their website’s visibility, drive more traffic to their site, and ultimately, increase their conversions and revenue.

5. SEO Analyzer

What is SEO Analyze?

The SEO Analyzer is a free online tool created by Neil Patel, a well-known online marketer, that helps website owners improve their SEO efforts. The tool analyzes various aspects of a website, including content, keywords, meta tags, headings, links, and more, and provides feedback on how to optimize the site better for SEO.

How does SEO Analyzer improve SEO?

The SEO Analyzer provides a comprehensive report on a website’s SEO performance, including an analysis of on-page and off-page SEO factors. The tool checks for technical issues such as broken links, missing meta tags, and page load times, which can impact a site’s visibility and ranking in search results.

Based on the analysis, the SEO Analyzer provides recommendations on how website owners can improve their website’s SEO. These recommendations may include optimizing content for relevant keywords, improving website load times, fixing broken links, and more. The tool also provides suggestions on how to improve the website’s user experience, which can impact its ranking in search results.

By using the SEO Analyzer to analyze their website’s performance and identify areas where they can improve their SEO efforts, website owners can increase their website’s visibility, drive more traffic to their site, and ultimately, increase their conversions and revenue.

Free Competitor Research Tools

6. Semrush

What is Semrush?

SEMrush is a comprehensive SEO tool that offers a range of features to improve SEO. The tool provides an extensive suite of tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink analysis, and site audit, making it a one-stop-shop for SEO professionals.

How does Semrush improve SEO?

SEMrush allows users to conduct in-depth keyword research by analyzing the search volumes, competition levels, and ad value of specific keywords. This tool also provides keyword suggestions and helps users identify long-tail keywords with less competition.

SEMrush also allows users to analyze their competitors’ online strategies, including their backlinks, top-ranking pages, and advertising campaigns. Users can track their competitors’ performance and make informed decisions to improve their own SEO.

Another useful feature of SEMrush is its site audit tool, which checks for technical issues that may be impacting a site’s SEO performance. It provides users with a list of actionable steps they can take to improve their site’s performance.

In addition, SEMrush also offers social media management and advertising tools that help users improve their social media presence and manage ad campaigns across multiple channels.

7. Similar Web

What is Similar Web?

SimilarWeb is a digital marketing tool that provides an overview of a website, including information on site traffic, demographics, and website rank. The tool can be used to compare a website to its competitors and identify areas where improvements can be made to improve SEO.

How does Similar Web improve SEO?

By entering any website into SimilarWeb, users can obtain information on the website’s traffic sources, including organic search, direct traffic, and referral traffic. The tool also provides demographic information such as age, gender, and location of the website’s visitors.

One of the most useful features of SimilarWeb is its ability to identify websites that are similar to the one being analyzed. This nifty tool can help website owners identify their top competitors and analyze their SEO efforts through competitive analysis. By comparing their own website to their competitors, website owners can develop a competitive analysis and a strategy to improve their own ranking in search results.

Free Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) Tools

8. SerpLab

What is SerpLab?

SERPLab is a digital marketing tool that provides ranking positions of keywords on the Google search, for a given domain.

How does SerpLab improve SEO?

By entering a domain and up to 5 keywords at a time, users can obtain the ranking position of each keyword and see where they stand in the search results for specific keywords or search phrases.

This tool is particularly useful for improving SEO efforts as it helps website owners identify which keywords they are ranking for and where they are positioned in search results. By using keyword ideas and analyzing their ranking positions, website owners can develop a strategy to improve their visibility for certain keywords and drive more traffic to their site.

SERPLab is also helpful in monitoring SEO progress over time. By tracking keyword ranking positions over time, website owners can see whether their SEO efforts are paying off and adjust their strategy accordingly.

Free Keyword Research Tools

9. Keyword.io

What is Keyword.io?

Keyword.io is a digital marketing tool that helps improve SEO efforts by using keyword suggestions and providing a list of relevant keywords for a given seed or focus keyword.

How does Keyword.io improve SEO?

By typing in a seed keyword and running the tool, users can obtain a list of keyword phrases that are relevant to their topic or niche.

This tool is particularly useful for content creation as it helps website owners identify which keywords to target in their posts. By using relevant keywords, website owners can improve their chances of ranking higher in search results and driving more traffic to their site.

Keyword.io also allows users to export the list of relevant keywords and import them into Google Keyword Planner for more information on each keyword phrase. This provides additional insights into the search volume, competition, and other metrics for each keyword phrase, allowing website owners to make more informed decisions when selecting keywords to target in their content.

10. WordStream

What is WordStream?

Wordstream is a digital marketing tool that helps improve SEO efforts by providing free keyword research tool, and management services. The tool allows users to search for popular search phrases by category and provides them with the search volume for the keywords.

How does WordStream improve SEO?

The tool is particularly useful for content creation as it helps website owners identify which keywords to target in their posts. By using relevant keywords, website owners can improve their chances of ranking higher in search results and driving more traffic to their site.

However, the free version of Wordstream only provides users with 10 keyword suggestions. This may be limiting for some users, but it can still be a useful starting point for keyword research.

In addition to the keyword research tool, Wordstream also offers services for keyword management and page optimization too. The tool allows users to group and organize their keywords, monitor their performance, and make adjustments to their keyword research strategy as needed.

Free Page Speed Tools

Speed is super important for SEO because if your site is too slow, it provides a negative experience for readers. Search engines don’t like that. Here are a few free SEO tools to help you fix your speed issues:

11. Google Pagespeed

What is Google Pagespeed?

Google PageSpeed is a digital marketing tool that helps improve SEO efforts by analyzing a website’s speed and providing insights into how to optimize it. The tool uses many Google factors to give a breakdown of a site’s speed, giving a score out of 100 and recommendations on how to decrease page load times.

How does Google Pagespeed improve SEO?

Website speed is an important factor in SEO as it can impact user experience and search engine rankings. Slow page load times can lead to high bounce rates and lower engagement, negatively affecting a site’s ranking.

Google PageSpeed is particularly useful for optimizing mobile SEO as it provides a mobile page speed analysis. With the increasing number of mobile users, optimizing for mobile site speed has become crucial for SEO success.

By using Google PageSpeed, website owners can identify and fix issues that are slowing down their site, improving user experience and search engine rankings. This tool provides valuable insights into website speed, allowing website owners to develop a strategy to improve their website’s performance, drive more traffic to their site, and ultimately, increase their conversions and revenue.

12. GTmetrix

What is GTmetrix?

GTMetrix is a digital marketing tool that helps improve SEO efforts by providing insights into website speed and optimization. The tool analyzes a website’s performance and provides a grade and percentage to indicate how well the website is doing in terms of speed.

How does GTmetrix improve SEO?

GTMetrix provides a breakdown of the requests a site makes when it loads, allowing website owners to identify and fix any optimization issues. The tool also gives recommendations on how to optimize a website’s performance, such as compressing images, minimizing requests, and reducing page size.

Website speed is an important factor in SEO as it can impact user experience and search engine rankings. Slow page load times can lead to high bounce rates and lower engagement, negatively affecting a site’s ranking.

By using GTMetrix, website owners can identify and fix issues that are slowing down their site, improving user experience and search engine rankings. This tool provides valuable insights into website speed and optimization, allowing website owners to develop a strategy to improve their website’s performance, drive more traffic to their site, and ultimately, increase their conversions and revenue.

13. Pingdom

What is Pingdom?

Pingdom is a website performance monitoring tool that helps improve SEO by identifying issues that can negatively impact a site’s speed and uptime. It provides detailed information on page load times, performance insights, and uptime monitoring for websites, allowing webmasters and site owners to make informed decisions to improve their website’s performance and user experience.

How does Pingdom improve SEO?

With Pingdom, you can test your website’s load time from multiple locations around the world, which gives you a more accurate representation of how fast your website loads for users in different regions. The tool also provides recommendations for performance improvements, such as reducing the file size of images, optimizing code, and improving server response time.

Pingdom also offers uptime monitoring, which alerts you in case your website goes down or experiences performance issues. This feature helps you identify and quickly resolve any downtime issues, ensuring that your site remains available to users.

In addition, Pingdom offers detailed reports on website performance and uptime, including historical data, trends, and insights. These reports help you understand how your website is performing over time and identify any long-term issues that need to be addressed.

To hit super high scores on all of these page speed sites, we recommend switching to Siteground Web Hosting.

Free Site Speed Optimization Plugins for WordPress

As mentioned before, speed is a big part of SEO, so here are some plugins you can install on WordPress to speed up your website.

14. W3 Total Cache

What is W3 Total Cache?

W3 Total Cache is a caching plugin for WordPress that helps improve website performance, which can ultimately boost SEO efforts. By storing frequently accessed files in a cache, the plugin reduces the time it takes for a page to load, which can improve user experience and increase engagement.

How does w3 total cache improve SEO?

When a user visits a page on a website that uses W3 Total Cache, the plugin retrieves the page’s content from the cache, rather than from the server, which can significantly reduce the load on the server and improve the site’s performance. This can help decrease page load times, resulting in a better user experience, and potentially leading to increased traffic, higher engagement, and better search engine rankings.

W3 Total Cache also offers a range of other features, such as browser caching, minification of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, and content delivery network (CDN) integration. These features can further improve website performance, leading to better SEO outcomes.

15. WP -Optimize

What is WP-Optimize?

WP-Optimize is a WordPress plugin that improves website performance by optimizing the database files.

How does WP-Optimize improve SEO?

WP-Optimize helps to remove unnecessary data such as spam comments, trashed data, and revisions that accumulate over time and take up valuable space.

By removing these files, WP Optimize helps to reduce the database size, which leads to faster website load times and better overall website performance. This, in turn, can improve the website’s search engine optimization (SEO) by providing a better user experience for visitors and potentially increasing search engine rankings.

16. WP Smush Image Compressor

What is WP Smush?

WP Smush is a WordPress plugin that helps to optimize website images by compressing their file size. By reducing the size of images on your site, WP Smush can improve the overall page load speed of your website, which is an important factor for search engine optimization (SEO).

How does WP Smush improve SEO?

Slow-loading pages can negatively impact user experience and lead to higher bounce rates, which can ultimately harm your search engine rankings. By compressing images with WP Smush, you can improve the speed and performance of your website, providing a better user experience and potentially improving your SEO.

Free Backlink Tools

17. Monitor Backlinks

What is Monitor Backlinks?

Monitor Backlinks is a free backlink checker tool that helps to improve SEO by providing a comprehensive overview of the backlinks of a website. The tool checks the first 300 backlinks for a free account, but premium services are available to check for more.

How does Monitor Backlinks improve SEO?

The tool provides information on the domain authority of the linking website, the anchor text used for the link, and whether the link is a do-follow or no-follow link.

By analyzing the backlinks, users can identify opportunities for link building and improve their website’s search engine ranking. Additionally, the tool allows users to monitor their backlinks and receive alerts if there are any changes to the backlink profile.

18. Moz Link Explorer

What is Moz Link Explorer

Moz Link Explorer is a search engine optimization (SEO) tool that allows users to see the backlinks pointing to any website. It is one of the most popular link analysis tools used by SEO professionals and website owners.

How does Moz Link Explorer improve SEO?

The tool helps users to understand the link profile of a website. It provides important metrics such as domain authority, page authority, and spam score that are used to evaluate the quality of a website’s backlink profile. Users can enter the URL of any website and see the list of backlinks that are pointing to that website. The tool also shows the anchor text of each link and the domain authority of the linking website.

One of the most useful features of Moz Link Explorer is the ability to analyze the backlink profile of a competitor’s website. By understanding the backlinks that are pointing to a competitor’s website, users can identify new opportunities to build backlinks for their own website. This is a valuable strategy for improving a website’s search engine rankings.

Moz Link Explorer also allows users to track the backlink profile of their own website over time. This feature helps users to monitor the effectiveness of their link-building efforts and identify any potential issues with their backlink profile.

19. Backlink Checker

What is Backlink Checker?

Backlink Checker is a tool that allows you to quickly analyze up to 100 backlinks to your website and view the sources. The tool provides a report that shows the URL of the backlink source, the anchor text used in the link, and the page authority of the linking page.

How does Backlink Checker improve SEO?

Backlinks are an essential component of search engine optimization (SEO) as they signal to search engines that other websites find your content valuable enough to link to it. However, not all backlinks are created equal, and some may harm your website’s ranking if they come from spammy or low-quality sources. This is where backlink checker tools come in.

By using Backlink Checker, you can identify the quality and relevance of your backlinks, which helps you determine whether you need to disavow any links that may be hurting your website’s ranking. Additionally, you can use this tool to perform competitor analysis by entering the URLs of your competitors’ websites and analyzing their backlinks.

Other Free SEO Tools

20. Broken Link Check

What is Broken Link Check?

Broken Link Check is a tool that helps improve SEO by checking a domain for broken links and identifying where they are located. Broken links, or links that lead to pages that no longer exist or give 404 errors, can negatively impact the user experience and harm your website’s SEO.

How does Broken Link Check improve SEO?

The tool works by scanning your website and identifying any broken links, after which it provides a report that lists the location of each broken link. The report includes the page where the broken link is located and the link’s URL. You can then go through the report and fix the broken links by either removing the link or updating it with a working URL.

By removing or fixing broken links on your website, you can improve the user experience and reduce the likelihood of visitors leaving your website due to frustration.

Additionally, search engines view broken links as a negative signal and may lower your website’s ranking as a result. Therefore, regularly using a tool like Broken Link Check to identify and fix broken links can have a positive impact on your website’s SEO.

Conclusion

If you’re serious about growing your website traffic, be sure to adopt some of these best free SEO tools. When used properly, they’ll help you discover new keywords you can rank for and track your progress as well.

Want to learn more about SEO? Check out our SEO for Bloggers guide.