Running a blog can be both fun and challenging. It requires you to keep the content up to date, optimize it for search engines, and find the best way to monetize it.
Ranking algorithms constantly improve, and webmasters must adapt to new changes.
To make running a blog easier for you, we have put together a list of 15+ free SEO tools that efficiently help with all aspects of blogging.
Some of these free SEO tools are famous and used by the majority of bloggers, while others are less known.
Important: We aren’t affiliated with the following tools, and we don’t get any money for showcasing them. It is simply a list of the tools we use to run our blogs.
15+ Free SEO Tools
Google Analytics and Google Console Search
If you don’t periodically visit Google Analytics (GA) and Google Console Search (GCS), you can’t call yourself a blogger. Many plugins fetch data from GA and GSC and provide actionable data directly in your dashboard. Indeed, it’s nice to have some traffic insights.
However, plugins bloat your site database, and, as a result, it takes more time for your site to load. Hence, you’d better visit GA and GSC – you don’t impact the site performance and get considerably more data.
Both these free SEO tools provide consistent, much-needed information for running a blog.
For example, the number of visitors, time spent on site, the devices and the operating system used, backlinks, search engine position for particular keywords, and the visitors’ countries of origin are all available by checking GA and GSC.
Combining data from GA and GSC provides an accurate and complete bird’s-eye perspective of your blog.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools – Google is the leading search engine by a large margin. Unsurprisingly, people equate search engine optimization with Google optimization. However, Bing has a reasonable market share and considerably fewer people fighting for Bing searches’ top position.
Bing and Google have many ranking factors in common, so Bing optimization isn’t different from Google optimization. Check Bing Webmaster Tools to get actionable data about your site performance.
Every time you check GA and GSC, you should also take a look at Bing Webmaster Tools.
Google Trends
Google Trends – Perhaps Google Trends isn’t a pure SEO tool, but it’s a treasured tool offering much-needed strategic information for running a blog. Ideally, you should use Google Trends before launching your blog.
Check the keywords you want to rank for and determine whether it’s profitable to focus on them. For example, a topic in constant deflation for a few years should raise a big question mark. The chances are that people are losing interest in this topic. Conversely, a topic that is in huge demand is the perfect start for a blog.
Google Trends isn’t valuable only in the early stages. Consult it any time you want to broaden your blog’s coverage. For instance, your blog about networking, is mostly tips for beginners.
Check Google Trends to identify the topics that are adjacent to yours that attract people. One of those keywords is cybersecurity – a keyword that is constantly growing in people’s searches.
Exploding Topics
Exploding Topics – Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, is part of the team behind this tool, which means that Exploding Topics deserves your attention. Like Google Trends, Exploding Topics isn’t an SEO tool per se, but it may help you discover new attractive keywords.
Still, Exploding Topics does more than Google Trends. It provides insights about the best-performing topics, so you are always updated on the latest trends.
There’s no need to check this app every day. I subscribed to the newsletter, and I get a weekly email with the coolest trends. You get more suggestions by subscribing to a premium plan.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest – The same as Brian Dean, Neil Patel is a leading marketer. He is the mastermind behind Ubersuggest – an unparalleled tool to evaluate your site, and your competitors and find useful keywords for your content strategy.
It’s not entirely free – it comes with serious limitations for unregistered visitors, but registered users get a wealth of helpful information. It’s free and simple to register, so you have every reason to do it. People needing more data and extra functionality should upgrade to a paid subscription.
Ubersuggest can do a lot of useful things like:
- Keywords analysis and suggestions.
- Traffic overview.
- Keywords and top pages by traffic.
- SEO in-depth analysis.
- Backlinks breakdown.
GTmetrix & Pingdom
You have no choice but to improve your site performance constantly. The site speed matters a lot, and your blog must be blazingly fast.
GTmetrix and Pingdom are two excellent resources to optimize the loading speed of your site. Both offer similar data, so it’s a matter of personal choice which one you use.
Starting in May 2021, the Google algorithm will favor fast-loading sites by analyzing Core Web Vitals. GTmetrix and Pingdom are the perfect choices to analyze the key indicators of your site. Both provide invaluable tips to improve site speed, so use them confidently.
Moz Toolbar
Moz Toolbar – Most SEO tools are complex and take time to provide simple information. Moz Toolbar differentiates itself from competitors through its simplicity. It’s a Chrome extension provided by Moz that helps marketers and SEO practitioners to find out the basic link metrics.
Install it, create a Moz account, and you instantly get access to Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Spam Score for each visited website. In addition to these, Moz Toolbar generates page analysis and highlights the links.
Thus, paying customers to get more data like keyword difficulty and page optimization tips.
Yoast & Rank Math
Nowadays, you can’t run a WordPress site without having installed an SEO plugin. These plugins do a plethora of things to improve your site’s ranking position.
For example, an SEO plugin creates and submits XML sitemaps, improves the written content, checks its readability, and notifies webmasters about adding alt tags to the images used.
Yoast and Rank Math are different generations of plugins, but they have many similarities. Millions of WordPress users rated both highly, so their efficiency and ease of use go without saying.
We strongly recommend Yoast or Rank Math, but there are many other competitive alternatives. You know better which one fits your project, but clearly, you must use an SEO plugin for your site.
Configuring both Yoast and Rank Math is relatively simple, and tons of detailed tutorials are on YouTube. In addition, the plugins have premium versions that include lots of useful features.
SEMrush (Free trial)
SEMrush – The cheapest SEMrush premium subscription is $100, billed annually. Unfortunately, it’s not an amount accessible to every budget. However, despite the money invested against the value provided, a SEMrush subscription is a real bargain.
Webmasters running small websites can use a limited number of queries a day by creating a free account. However, even in this scenario, SEMrush is a valuable tool. It does, amongst other things, the following:
- Traffic analysis.
- Backlink audit.
- Search position tracking.
- Brand monitoring.
- Topic research.
- Keyword analysis.
Simply put, SEMrush covers all the needs of a webmaster. Even the owners of free accounts may get limited but actionable data about the keywords targeted, and the backlinks earned.
Free SEO Tools by Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another tool widely used by SEO practitioners and marketers. As with SEMrush, Ahrefs isn’t for tight budgets, but you get real value for the money spent.
Ahrefs provides a couple of free SEO tools offering precious data to manage your blog better. Create an account for free, add your websites, and get access to the Ahrefs dashboard.
Would you be interested in paying $1 to test all the Ahrefs options? You may use the $1 trial to get the most from this tool for seven days. The chances are that you will become a paying customer because you will enjoy their impressive set of tools.
AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic impresses with its original and suggestive name, but we endorse it for its utility. Finding the proper keywords for your blog posts is a tedious task. AnswerThePublic does a great job by offering tens of keyword suggestions.
A particular feature is the visual representation of the keyword alternatives. Alternatively, the keywords are grouped alphabetically. Google tends to favor content-answering questions, so use the questions suggested by this tool for your keywords. It’s an absolute goldmine accessible to everyone at no cost.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog – All the above free SEO tools are web-based, but Screaming Frog is an interesting exception. You have to download it to use Screaming Frog. It’s a powerful crawler aiming to audit websites. A complete and detailed audit is the basis of a solid SEO strategy.
Hence, Screaming Frog is a proper start to improve your site substantially. It’s not entirely free; Screaming Frog spiders crawl only 500 URLs for free. However, it might be enough for small to medium sites.
Both free and premium versions audit the website and identify the broken links and other errors, create XML sitemaps and discover duplicate content. It also analyses the page titles and metadata.
The paying customers have access to professional support, Page Speed Insights, GA and GSC integration, and crawl configuration. All these data combined provide a bird-eye perspective of your site.
Dareboost
Dareboost is a useful and powerful tool that can help you analyze your site for speed, SEO, and optimize website performance.
Dareboost is an easy-to-use tool that creates a comprehensive quality and performance report with valuable information about what should be prioritized and things to improve. It also highlights the most important and optimized features.
With a free Dareboost account, you can analyze up to 5 web pages per month, and the reports are saved for a month, and it is possible to download the reports in PDF format.
I find Dareboost to be a useful tool in terms of getting valuable information about a website. In addition, it’s free, and we all appreciate well-working freebies!
Furthermore, there are more comparison tools such as Competitive comparison, Mobile vs Desktop version, Cache testing, and more in the dashboard that can be useful for analyzing your site with your competitors’ websites.
Keyword Surfer
Keyword Surfer is a free Chrome extension developed for content and keyword research. With Keyword Surfer, you can easily see the monthly search volume for your keywords, as well as similar keywords you can use for your SEO strategies.
With this tool, you can easily discover new keyword ideas for more ranking opportunities. You can also discover and uncover a domain’s monthly traffic, word count, and keywords for your competitors.
Furthermore, the content editor helps you generate a set of guidelines based on your competitors’ pages. By using it, you can create content faster and increase your chances of ranking well.
Meta Tag Analyzer
Meta Tag Analyzer is a free online tool from the guys behind the well-known SEO WordPress plugin Rank Math.
With this easy-to-use tool, you can check out how search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo visualize how your URL appears in real time.
This tool allows you to preview and optimize your SEO title, description, and meta tags. Furthermore, the Meta Tag Analyzer tool checks your meta tags for errors.
In order to rank better in search engines, you can optimize your SEO title and description with the Meta Tag Analyzer tool.
Over to You
This post targets webmasters and bloggers with very limited financial resources. Indeed, you have to pay for quality. Still, these free SEO tools help run a successful blog.
Most of them aren’t entirely free – the free version is only to attract leads, impress them with the premium features and convert them into paying customers. So it’s a win-win strategy for both sides.
What do you think about the free SEO tools we suggested for you? Have you ever used any of these free SEO tools? Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment.
