25 Best Free SEO Tools in 2021

Find 150+ keyword ideas in seconds.

Most SEO tools get their data from the same place: The Google Keyword Planner.

Answer the Public is different.

This awesome tool finds questions that people ask on forums, blogs and on social media.

And it turns those questions into awesome keywords:

Answer The Public – "keto diet"
Best Feature: “Vs. Keywords”

You’d be surprised how many people search for “X vs. Y” keywords in Google.

(For example: “iPhone vs. Android” or “SEMRush vs. Ahrefs”)

And Answer the Public has a section of the results dedicated to “Vs. Keywords”.

Get a list of SEO improvements in seconds.

This is a very handy Chrome extension.

First, you get an overall SEO score.

Then, the tool shows you EXACTLY how to improve your site’s on-page and off-page SEO.

WooRank – Chrome extension
Best Feature: “Marketing Checklist”

Most SEO tools only tell you about problems… not solutions.

But with Woorank you get a detailed SEO checklist that you can use to fix any issues that you run into.

Improve and update old content.

Animalz Revive helps you find older content on your site that needs an update, an upgrade… or both.

Before this tool, you had to manually comb through your Google Analytics account to find these pages.Which was a giant pain.

Fortunately, this tool tells you exactly which articles on your site need the most attention.

Animalz Revive Advice
Best Feature: “Traffic Loss Since Peak (Views)”

This feature lets you know exactly how many visitors that a piece of outdated content is costing you.

Get your site ready for Google’s Mobile-first Indexing.

You might have heard that Google recently made a big change to their algorithm.

(This change is officially called “Mobile-First Indexing”).

The bottom line is this:

If your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you’re in big trouble.

Fortunately, you don’t need a full-time developer to make your site mobile-friendly. All you need to do is run your site through the Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

And it tells you whether or not Google considers your site mobile-friendly.

Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Best Feature: “Page loading issues”

This feature shows you how you can improve your site’s code. That way, Google’s mobile crawler can find and index all of the resources on your site.

Find completely fresh keyword ideas.

Most keyword research tools work the exact same way:

Enter a seed keyword into the tool.
Get a list of closely-related terms.
The problem with this approach is this:

Everyone types the same seed keywords into these tools.

Well, Seed Keywords takes a completely different approach.

Instead of pulling seed keywords out of thin air, you ask your customers how they’d search for you online.

SeedKeywords – Scenario
Then, type those seed keywords into your favorite keyword research tool.

Best Feature: “Submit Query”

Once the results come in, you can use SeedKeywords to do a Google search for the keywords that people gave you.

That way you can quickly scan the search results… and see how competitive that keywords is.

Copy your competitor’s best keywords.

SEMRush might be my all-time favorite SEO tool.

Yup, it’s got a paid plan with lots of great features.

But the free version is pretty cool too.

Whether you go with free or paid, SEMRush works the same way:

It finds the exact keywords that your competitor’s rank for.

SEMrush – Organic search positions
Best Feature: Keyword Magic

Enter a keyword…and get a list of 78,350 keywords!

SEMrush – Keyword Magic "content marketing"
Insane.

Get a deep-dive SEO site analysis.

SEObility crawls your entire site and lets you know about search engine optimization issues like:

Slow loading pages
Blocked pages
Sitemap problems
Technical SEO issues
Lots more
SEOBility
You usually only get this type of stuff from paid SEO tools. So it’s really nice that Seobility gives you this data for free.

Best Feature: Content Report

This report hands you a list of pages that have content-related SEO issues.

(Things like: thin content, missing meta titles, keyword stuffing, and duplicate content)

Get keyword suggestions and competition data.

Ubersuggest has a lot of features that are usually only found in premium SEO tools.

But it’s 100% free.

To use it, type in a keyword that you want to rank for (or a competing website that you want to rank above).

Ubersuggest – Search
And Ubersuggest will give you detailed data on keyword difficulty, monthly search volume, and more.

Ubersuggest – Results
Plus, you get a list of suggested keywords that are based on the keyword you typed in.

Ubersuggest – Keyword suggestions
Best Feature: "Comparisons"

This feature shows you “X vs. Y” keywords.

Ubersuggest – Keyword comparisons
In my experience, X vs. Y keywords are super untapped.

Sure, they may not get as many searches as traditional keywords. But they’re SUPER targeted and high-converting.

And to my knowledge Ubersuggest is the only tool that specifically bubbles up X vs. Y keywords.

See your site through the eyes of a search engine.

As it turns out, search engines see your site VERY differently than you do.

And BROWSEO gives you the type of x-ray vision that search engines have.

BROWSEO
Best Feature: SERP Preview

Get a sweet preview of how your page appears in the search results:

BROWSEO – SERP preview
This is helpful for figuring out if your title and description tag are SEO-friendly (or too long). And optimizing your title and description can also help you get more organic clicks.

Get intel on your competition.

Detailed gives you a curated list of the most popular sites in your industry.

That way, you can size up your biggest competitors.

(And copy what they’re doing)

Detailed
Best Feature: “Mentions”

This features shows you who recently linked to (and tweeted about) your competition.

Get SEO help straight from Google.

No list of free SEO tools would be complete without the Google Search Console.

Why?

The GSC is a VERY feature-rich piece of SEO software. And unlike pretty much every other tool on the market, you know the data is legit.

(After all, it comes from Google)

For example, you can use the Google Search Console as a rank tracker to check your site’s rankings in the SERPs.

Using Google Search Console as a rank checker
Best Feature: Index Coverage Report

The Index Coverage Report gives you a list of pages on your site that aren’t getting indexed.

You can also see how you can get things back on track.

Find and fix technical SEO issues in seconds.

Let’s face it:

Finding technical SEO problems on your site can be a HUGE pain.

Enter: Screaming Frog.

This nifty tool crawls your site using a Google-like crawler. And it generates a report of potential issues (like HTTP header errors, javascript rendering issues, bloated HTML, and crawl errors).

Screaming Frog
Best Feature: Discover Duplicate Content

As you might have heard, Google HATES duplicate content.

Fortunately, you can use Screaming Frog to quickly ID pages with duplicate content.

See how people find and interact with your site.

OK, OK. Google Analytics isn’t really an SEO tool.

But it’s almost impossible to run an SEO campaign without it.

Why?

The data in Google Analytics tells you whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off.

I’m talking about data like:

Organic traffic
Bounce rate
Traffic sources
Time on site
Page speed
Google Analytics
Best Feature: Google Analytics and Google Search Console Integration

Google Analytics is super powerful on its own.

But when you combine it with the Google Search Console?

It’s even MORE powerful.

Linking your GSC account with GA hooks you up with helpful info, like the keywords people use to find your site, your organic CTR, and more cool stuff.

Generate a list of untapped keyword ideas.

Keys4Up uses a proprietary algorithm to generate “lateral” keyword ideas

For example, when you type “Content Marketing” into the tool, you DON’T get a list of variations of that term.

(Like: “Content marketing strategies”).

Instead, you get keywords that people would associate with that term:

Keys4Up
Best Feature: Keyword Export

The one downside of Keys4Up is that you can’t see how many people search for the keywords that it gives you.

Fortunately, you can export your keywords to a CSV… and upload that CSV to another SEO tool that does provide monthly search volume.

The best SEO plugin for WordPress.

If your site runs on WordPress, you need to install Yoast ASAP.

It’s by far the most robust SEO plugin on the market.

The best part? It’s 100% free.

Yoast SEO WordPress plugin
Best Feature: XML Sitemap Generator

Sitemaps help Google and other search engines find, crawl and index all of the pages on your site.

And with the Yoast plugin, you don’t have to tinker with your sitemap every time you add a new page to your site.

That’s because Yoast updates your sitemap automatically. Cool.

Get to the bottom of a rankings drop.

This tool correlates your search traffic with known Google updates.

Why is this helpful?

Well, if you notice that your rankings dropped around the time of a big Google update, you can figure out what went wrong… and fix it.

Panguin
Best Feature: Switch Updates On/Off

Panguin makes it easy to zero-in on a specific update.

For example, if you’re a local business that focuses on local SEO, you can only have Panguin ONLY show you Google updates that impacted local results.

Steal your competitor’s keywords.

Wordtracker scout takes a unique approach to keyword research…

Instead of entering keywords into a tool, Wordtracker shows you the most common terms on a page.

That way, you can go over to one of your competitor’s pages… and grab the keywords they’re using in their content.

WordTracker Scout
(Note: This is only available as Chrome extension and isn’t supported for Firefox)

Best Feature: Opportunity

Shows you which keywords on your list has the best ratio of search volume and competition.

Powerful website analyzer.

Lipperhey is a full-featured SEO analyzer that doesn’t cost a penny.

LipperHey
Best Feature: Keyword Suggestions

Get a list of keywords to add to specific pages on your site.

(Which can help you get more organic traffic from long tail keywords).

Optimize your site for Bing.

Bing Webmaster Tools is basically the Google Search Console… but for Bing.

So if you want to get your site indexed (and ranked) in Bing, Bing Webmaster Tools is a must-have.

Bing Webmaster Tools
Best Feature: Keyword Research Tool

Get keyword ideas (and data) straight from Bing.

And unlike the Google Keyword Planner, the data from Bing is strictly for organic search (not Bing PPC or Adwords).

Analyze your site for speed, SEO, security and more.

Dareboost isn’t strictly an SEO tool.

But it does analyze your site for things that indirectly impact SEO, like your site’s loading speed and security.

Dareboost
Best Feature: Priorities

Let’s you know where to start first. Helpful if you’re strapped for time.

Get a full SEO report for free.

Siteliner scans your site for SEO problems (like blocked pages, messed up redirects and broken links).

Siteliner
Best Feature: Comparison with Other Sites

This lets you compare your site’s loading speed and page size to other site’s in Siteliner’s database. Helpful for benchmarking.

No-nonsense keyword research tool.

The best part of KWFinder is how darn easy it is to use.

But don’t let this fool you into thinking KWFinder isn’t powerful. It’s a legit keyword tool that lots of pros use.

KWFinder
Best Feature: LPS

LPS=Link Profile Strength.

This feature basically tells you how many links you’ll need to rank for that keyword.

So if you find a keyword that has a LPS of 50+, you know that you’ll need to do some serious link building to rank for that term.

Get a free SEO site checkup.

Varvy is an extremely cool SEO audit tool.

Most SEO analysis tools only give you surface level info.

But with Varvy, you get access to data that most other free tools don’t show you… including mobile-friendliness, missing alt text, HTTPS setup, robots.txt analysis and more.

Varvy
Best Feature: Google Guidelines

Varvy doesn’t just hand you a list of SEO problems.

It also gives you specific recommendations that you can implement to fix them… straight from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Credit goes to Backlinko

Listed by Aspireideas

Quickly answer the question: “Can I rank for this keyword?”.

CanIRank is a super-detailed keyword difficulty tool.

And unlike most free SEO tools, CanIRank doesn’t give you generic advice like:

“This keyword is really competitive”
Or
“This keyword has low competition”

Instead, it tells you whether or not YOU can rank for that keyword.

CanIRank
Very cool.

Best Feature: “How can you better target this keyword?”

CanIRank isn’t just for sizing up the first-page competition.

It also gives you suggestions that can help you rank for a specific term.