The 10 Best Free SEO Tools in 2022

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, refers to the process of organically attracting visitors to your site, based on your ranking on popular online search engines like Google, Bing etc. With the right SEO strategy , you can get your site to the top of the search engine results so that you can attract the right kind of traffic to your platform.

However, most business owners find SEO optimization too confusing for them to understand and use, especially because it’s constantly being updated to meet Google’s ever-changing algorithms. That said, before you give up and decide to hire someone else to handle your SEO, check out some of these SEO tools which are built to simplify and demystify online marketing.

In this article our SEO agency specialists take you through 10 free tools that any marketing professional can benefit from.

 

1. Yoast SEO

The Yoast SEO tool is designed to automatically analyze your content and optimize it for SEO. It works exceptionally well on WordPress sites and will provide you with everything you need to create SEO friendly content, from meta descriptions to image tags.

Dynamic XML Sitemap

Yoast SEO provides an XML sitemap indexing service that allows you to submit your site to search engines like Google and Bing. This sitemap is fully dynamic and will update according to what pages you have added to your website. At the same time, if you choose to insert a no-index tag on any page, Yoast automatically removes the url from the sitemap. This makes sitemap management a breeze.

Page Titles & Meta Description Management

A 2nd feature of Yoast is the ability to generate page titles and meta description templates for various category pages, posts, or tags. This is especially useful for ecommerce websites where it is too time consuming to manually create custom page titles and meta descriptions on each page. Furthermore, if your business has seasonal offers, these taxonomies allow you to easily switch out offers in your snippets. These features make Yoast highly useful for ecommerce SEO strategies.

Canonical Tag Management

Canonical tag implementation can also be done through Yoast. This setting is found at page level, where under “advance settings”, you will find a field related to it. Simply inputting the main variant URL here will create a canonical tag pointing towards it. Conversely, should you leave this field blank, then by default, the page will have a self-referencing canonical tag.

 

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs offers 3 simple and free SEO audit tools for anyone to use. These are “Backlink Checker”, “Website Authority Checker”, and “Broken Link Checker”.

Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker

The free backlink checker checks backlinks against your domain name and shows you all the links pointing to your site. Data displayed includes the referring domain, referring page, DR and UR of the referring page, estimated organic traffic, and anchor text used. Essentially, you get to see your website’s link profile in 1 concise report. Definitely consider scanning your website with this tool if you are currently performing link building strategies.

Ahrefs Free Website Authority Checker

The free website authority checker is a powerful free SEO tool that allows you to get a preview of how strong is your website’s SEO presence. This includes the website’s Domain Rating (DR), quantity of backlinks, number of referring domains, and percentage of which are do-follow links.

Ahrefs Free Broken Link Checker

The free broken link checker is a great way to identify backlinks to your website that have been lost. This could be due to previously linked pages returning a 404 response or if the links have been removed entirely. Based on the data, you stand a chance to recover high quality backlinks that have been lost.

Ahrefs Paid Version

The Ahrefs paid suite of tools includes several additional detailed reports and features to help you perform more comprehensive SEO efforts. A favourite of many digital marketing agencies, the suite provides almost any feature you could want for SEO analysis.

For starters, Ahrefs Site Explorer tool allows you to input a domain and find data such as backlink profile, organic search performance, and paid search data. In particular, the organic search provides search rankings for the inputted domain, the estimated traffic, and any change in position for the search term over a period of time. These tools can be used for both your own domain as well as for competitive analysis.

One standout feature is Ahrefs Keyword Explorer Tool (SEO Keyword Tool). Simply input your seed keyword and Ahrefs will return you plenty of suggested organic keywords. Keyword suggestions made here have a bonus keyword difficulty statistic which gives you more insight into which to target. Afterall, marketers do need to prioritise keywords based on their value as well as the current state of their website.

Another interesting feature of the paid Ahrefs suite is the CCTLD and IP address features when analysing backlinks. This offers you an easy way to understand the origin your backlinks and thus find if there is any low quality or bad links.

 

3. Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) offers you one of the easiest ways to monitor how your site performs for Google Search. You just have to log in to Google Search Console, enter your UR, verify ownership of your website and you instantly get plenty of juicy data on your website.

Performance Report

For starters, GSC informs on what keyword phrases your website is appearing on Google SERPs and which ones are delivering clicks to your website. You may further customise displayed data by filtering for country, dates, terms, or page paths. This allows you to quickly find organic searches that are on the rise or pages that are under performing. In turn, you can use this to find new content ideas.

At the same time, the interface allows you to display additional parameters such as click through rate and average position of your search terms.

Technical Data

For more seasoned marketers, GSC offers massive amounts of data on technical SEO issues from page response codes, loading speed, core web vitals, backlink profile, mobile optimization, internal links, and crawl log file. I definitely recommend that you spend time diving into the several reports on the tool.

 

4. Google Keyword Planner

Google keyword planner is a free keyword research tool  that helps you to identify relevant keywords based on Google Search. Once you’ve identified these keywords, you can then use them to build a list of keywords that you can use to attract search traffic to your website.

To start, you simply need to input a first seed keyword that represents your topic. Thereafter, Google Keyword planner offers several keyword ideas and their monthly search volume in order for you to determine their value.

 

5. Copyscape

Make sure that you post 100% original and non-plagiarised content by putting everything through Copyscape before you post it. Sites that have plagiarised content tend to have lower search engine rankings than those with original content, which makes Copyscape a very valuable tool for site owners.

This helpful tool lists pages on the website that have a high level of duplication with your own website’s pages. Paired with it is a content duplication percentage and the function to see what sections of the page have highly similar content.

 

6. Google Analytics

At this point, you’ve probably heard of Google Analytics, and as the name suggests, GA is all about giving you insights into your web traffic which will help you get better acquainted with your audience and how your site visitors think.

For starters, Google Analytics allows you to find page views and entrance pages on your website. In turn, this gives you a strong idea of how visible these pages are on search engines. Naturally, as your website’s SEO improves, you should expect to see an increase in numbers shown in Google Analytics.

Conversely, if organic traffic is not picking up for particular new pages, then it could be an indicator of SEO issues there. For instance, you may not have chosen the right set of relevant keywords or does not meet the search intent of your audience.

 

7. Page Speed Insights

Page Speed Insights is another useful tool that provides information on your website’s performance. It checks your website against Google’s recommendations for page load speeds and tells you whether or not they’re meeting the standards. Measured against metrics such as LCP, FCP, CLS, and TBT, the tool will highlight any technical issues on your website. Thereafter, additional recommendations will be made to help improve the resource loading process for your website.

 

8. Google Mobile Friendly Test

If you want to make sure that your website looks great across different devices, including smartphones and tablets, then you’ll need to ensure that it is mobile friendly. To do so, you can visit Google’s mobile friendly test and check whether your website meets its standards.

The Google Mobile Friendly Test finds issues such as:

  • Content exceeding width of screen
  • Text being too small
  • Clickable elements being too close to each other
  • Viewport not set correctly for mobile devices

Given the current emphasis on mobile SEO practices, we highly encourage anyone performing an SEO audit for the first time to include this test.

 

9. SEO Quake Chrome Extension

SEO Quake is a free chrome extension that provides a fuss free SEO report for a page’s onsite. This includes your page title, meta description, internal link count, headings, canonical tag, image alt tags, text to html ratio, and keyword density.

On the SERP, SEO Quake provides a SEO report card of sorts for all listings on the SERP such as the webpage’s domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA). This makes for easy comparison amongst all results on the SERP. Should you wish to get data in a CSV format, SEO Quake also has a feature to export all results on the SERP.

 

10. Google Structured Data Helper

Google Structured Data Helper is a simple yet powerful tool that helps you create structured data markup for your website. It’s a great way to ensure that your website meets the requirements of Google’s rich snippets.

You’ll need to first choose the type of data you want to add to your website. Once you do so, you’ll be able to enter the required information or highlight the relevant data on your page. No coding knowledge is required here as the tool helps to generate all formats while guiding you to have the standard fields for the schema type chosen.

 

Bonus: Screaming Frog (Frog SEO Spider)

Screaming Frog is a web crawler that helps you crawl through websites and extract their content. You can use it to perform tasks such as finding broken links on your site, unoptimised page titles, orphan pages, wrong canonicals, and more. This is especially useful for large websites that run enterprise SEO strategies as the problems present here can be hard to discern.

Furthermore, Screaming Frog can use APIs from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and more! These provide a premium on top of the standard data presented in Screaming Frog.

Technical SEO professionals swear by this tool, using it to perform high level professional SEO audits. Having said this, it should be noted that this tool has a very high skill ceiling and can require plenty of time investment in order to realise its full potential.