Mastering SEO optimization can be hard, especially if you’re just starting out. I started learning SEO and optimizing my website sometime in August, and I scourged SEO master blogs, reddit communities to come up with a list of free tools to get some hands-on experience and to also judge what works and what doesn’t.
So I tried and tested the tools and then grouped them by categories. Personally, as a beginner, I do not believe you will be needing the odd 100 SEO tools of wildly varying quality, I see mentioned in comprehensive blog posts, I feel like 100 SEO tools is a ridiculous amount to process as a user. You will just need two or three really good tools to run an SEO experiment (I will write a detailed article on how to run an SEO experiment in a different article)
I am sharing the best SEO tools that are free but you will probably need to create account/login to access most of them
Keyword Research
I am a big proponent of using multiple keyword tools and using them synergistically. I do not believe in using just one tool, as together they help me generate content that I need.
Keyword Tool - This is great for discovering variations of keywords to build pages around. Frequently, I use this the most for developing content.
Keywords Everywhere - The good thing is you won’t have to spend time searching and copying data from different sites, which is huge. You can also download your metrics as a PDF or Excel document for data storage.
SEMRush - Pretty useful for generating competitive insights, even at domain-level.
On-page SEO
Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator - Luckily, one can implement structured data on your website at no cost (and with little technical know-how).
Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar - It generates an on-page SEO report for the visited page with important elements. read
Link Building
Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker - It shows the top 100 backlinks to any website or web page for free.
SEMRush Link Building - Can help anyone to find and acquire the highest quality relevant backlinks.
Technical SEO
Screaming Frog - Screaming Frog is a great SEO tool. Their free version offers a lot of great insights about specific sites and seeing what H1, H2 tags, Alt Tags, Meta Descriptions and more.
Lighthouse Chrome plugin - The most useful part of the tool is the number of technical issues and actions it highlights.
Analytics
Google Analytics - There is no other data source that provides high quality and detailed information like Google Analytics, this is a must.