Top 20+1 Free SEO Tools to Quickly Improve Your Marketing Efforts

Updated! This is an updated version of the original article. Last Update: July 06, 2021

Search engine optimization is irrefutably one of the best marketing strategies for both new and experienced site owners. Content optimization is a core factor for an improved online presence. Web pages that broadcast easy-to-digest messages are recognized by search engines and prioritized in search results pages. Although it is humans who turn SEO into a key factor, the bulk of this process is aided by AI and tools build around complex algorithms. Knowing how important the combined effort of humans and AI is, we rolled our sleeves and synthesized a list of top SEO 21 tools. We think those are a must-try, whether you consider yourself an SEO guru or a novice.

One effective SEO strategy is to promote the flow of potential customers. However, even average business owners quickly learn that manual content optimization, although essential, is a very daunting task. In the context of aiding brands that have the potential to benefit from increased exposure, we have compiled a list of 21 most wanted SEO tools and highlighted their main advantages. These instruments are ideal for new websites and site owners; primarily because they are free to try: and can potentially boost your business influence without the omnipresent danger of commitment.

Important! Although any website owner or online page can use these tools, their use brings no guarantee that your website will perform better in search results pages. SEO is most effective only when paired with other equally important factors like careful pre-action analysis of trends and statistics. For example, content marketing will be pointless without knowing if your site provides the visual experience your clients expect, or if your product pages load fast enough and look good enough when viewed from various mobile devices.

The excellent news is that we compiled this SEO tools selection to help you make the best of your new or ongoing marketing efforts. At the bare minimum, these are the instruments that will help you identify critical areas for improvement and how to plan and resolve them.

1. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is reliable and great for identifying key factors that are hindering your site performance. The free version suffices for crawling and analyzing up to 500 URLs. For most websites, unless you run a big portal, this is more than enough to canvas and fix issues on all of your SEO-relevant pages.

Screaming Frog analyzes page titles, meta description, and will ultimately be your wingman when tackling conversion rates.

You can use this tool to uncover duplicated content and keep all types of page titles and tags between the recommended word or character length.

creaming Frog also finds potential broken links, audits redirects, generates XML sitemaps, and more. We especially like the visualization plugin - it makes a site “tree” graphic where all site pages show as tree branches, and you can quickly see how they relate to each other.

2. Woorank SEO Checker Tool

Woo Rank screenshot

This is a simple SEO tool used to monitor and support existing marketing campaigns and is built with in-depth website analysis in mind. Its reports will help you mend the online value of your services.

SEO CHecker one of the best SEO tools, with clean and easy to understand interface. It definitely has the potential to fix a good number of ongoing website problems that you might not be aware they exist.

There are 70 personalized tips aimed to tackle SEO-related issues with content. You can also use Woorank SEO Checker tool to determine what keywords you competitors are using and see they may relate to your business.

3. Link Prospector

Link Prospector screenshot

Link Prospector is designed to help online marketers optimize content in order to earn links and shares. This tool can help you find several potential link partners and take your business to the next level.

You can also use it to discover content writers potentially interested in promoting your content. This is great for when you need quality content but don’t have time or resoures for it. Link Prospector has created a list of options for getting quality links: blogs, review pages, promoters, forums, directoris and more.

4. Raven SEO Tools

Raven SEO Tools screenshot

These are powerful SEO and that focuses on wide range of SEO components. It can help you boost your site ranking but also analyse your cometition. All the tools have clean interface allowing for easy access to all features. The free version of Raven SEO Tools suffices to intelligently support your online marketing efforts.

Raven SEO is not just one tool, but a whole set of helpful instruments inclusing website audit, crawl, link spy, keyword rank and research, and more. Especally key are the comprehensive reports - you get to see bulks of relevant data presented to you in ways that are easy to undeerstand and suggestive of concrete plan of action.

5. BuzzSumo Content Research Tool

BuzzSumo screenshot

Need more relevant content for your web or product pages? This is an effective content research tool used to generate marketing ideas for your site. This tool can help you produce high-quality content and monitor its performance. It’s one of the robust SEO tools many marketers are using to discover how content matters in their respective industry.

BuzzSumo allows you to enter keyword phrases and quickly identify and present content that holds value in a specific niche. We find BuzzSumo to be great for developing smart content strategies that complement existing SEO campaigns.

6. Keyword Position Checker

Keyword Position Checker screenshot

Keyword Position Checker will show if your website ranks in organic search results for the keywords that are already in place. Impatient marketers that are convinced content needs change to make it better are the ones who miss on this great opportunity. Changing content may be due, but why not first see how to make the best of of the current state.

Monitoring the rank of keywords already on-site will basically get the best of the current situation and plan correclty for future keyword improvements. This tool basically verifies if your ongoing SEO effort is going in the right direction.

You can also use KPC to check your text for grammar errors and plagiarism.

7. SEMrush

SEMRush screenshot

SEMrush is a robust marketing toolkit designed to improve your online visibility. It has a unique function for high-quality content. You can use it to uncover the topics and page titles that are proven to attract customers to certain products.

SEMrush can help you analyze your competitor’s website and discover the keywords they may be using to outrank you on the search engine results. It is created specifically for E-commerce and the SEO value.

It sights top-performing content and peeks into the strategies the successful players in the respecive industry are using. At SEMrsh, SEO is just part of a more comprehensive toolset, icnluding sales prospecting and evaluation, visitor engagement level, social media benchmarks, paid traffic strategies, and more.

8. Keyword Tool Dominator

Keyword Tool Dominator screenshot

KTD is a simple tool that is good for useful keyword ideas. Keyword Tool Dominator can help you discover the long-tail keywords that your potential customers are using to search for products on the web.

Long-tail keywords are too specific, and their management can be difficult during even the most mediocre marketing campaigns. The Dominator will allow you to extract long keywords directly from Google, Amazon, YouTube, Ebay and Etsy. It’s one of the top SEO tools that makes it easy to get to hundreds of keyword suggestions and evaluate them by reelvancy and location.

9. Open Web Analytics (OWA)

Open Web Analytics (OWA) screenshot

This is an open-source software best used for monitoring and analyzing how online shoppers use your website. It’s a tool that tells you who visited your website, what they did there, and what you can do to make them return.

It provides a detailed report on the keywords that initially led them to your pages and products. For more specific visitor behavior analysis, it also makes a recording of visitors’ mouse movement while they browse your pages and track the time they spend on each page. Very useful if you have, for example, lots of traffic on certain pages, but not a lot of action by the visitors.

10. Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights screenshot

This is an important SEO tool developed directly by Google to give webmasters a detailed report on the loading speed of their websites. It provides useful information on web pages speed and performance. Page loading speed has become a top factor for Google and other search engines when page rank is determined.

  The good news is that this tool can analyze your website performance and provide solutions to reduce the time it takes to properly display in a browser.

PageSpeed is made by the most advanced yet search engine and it guarantees to provide insights on possible faults and areas for improvement. The main report has two main parts dedicated to desktop and mobile devices, respectively.

With competition in onine selling becomeng more fierce by the day, it comes as no surprise that with equal other factors, site loading speed can be detrimental for successful SEO. Loading speed is largely dependent on how the website is designed, coded and optimized for smooth display of all graphics, videos, scripts.

11. Grammarly

Grammarly screenshot

Grammarly is probably one of the best writing tools out there that guarantee error-free content. This tool can automatically correct your grammar and spelling on multiple platforms, apps, and software.We use it when editing documents that are both online, offline, text boxes, or text documents. Grammarly has an outstanding interface and can be used individually and as part of a team. It covers over 150 types of grammar and spelling issues.

When you type or copy-paste your content from your working file onto the web page editor, it will automatically detect grammar, punctuation, spelling, writing style, and sentence structure mistakes. It offers insights on how you can improve your writing and reduce the inevitable text errors to an absolute minimum.

It also analyzes and detects specific moods that your text may be conveying. Trying to make a dry text sound more convincing and engaging? Try Grammarly, and you may never want to write any text without consulting with it first .

12. Google Search Console

Google Search Console screenshot

The other tool in our list coming directly from the source, Google Search Console is top SEO tools and a must-have for tracking website’s visibility in Google search results, and potential problems with URLs that usually need immediate attention.

GSC’s importance and relevancy are mostly due to the fact Google made it– the company with presently the biggest influence on search engine trends and standards. Coming from the source, this is a very revealing factor in how effective this tool can be. If you want to understand your website when seen through the ‘eyes’ of Google, this free service will go a long way with you.

Since content updates and how often they deploy is SEO-relevant, knowing when Google robots have finished indexing your new blog or product update page becomes very relevant.

Google Search Console (previously dubbed Webmasters Tools) will also alert you when there are any technical problems with specific URLs and they display a comprehensive site traffic report. This web service has an added effect when paired with Google Analytics. Link both instruments for maximum combined effect.

13. Spider Simulator

Spider Simulator screenshot

Usually, what crawling robots can see, people can see too. But not always - even robots might fail to register certain pieces of content or fall victims of misinterpretation. This robust SEO tool will equip you with the eyes of a crawling spider and help you reveal issues with tags that otherwise may be very difficult or impossible to spot. Tools like this are developed to scan and detect types of problems that humans are likely to overlook.

What people see or don’t see can be best verified by other people. For everything else, you need a reliable AI like this one. It brings a new perspective into the mix - the one search engines use to perceive and evaluate your content. The tool also facilitates the crawl process, especially when dealing with the internal and external links .

14. Bing Webmaster Tool

Bing Webmaster Tool screenshot

As the name suggests, Bing Webmaster focuses on search trends from Bing engine. The tool will display the path shoppers used when reaching your site, including the keywords they used to get to your listed page. You can use it to better understand how Bing crawlers work and consequently improve the way you feed them information.

Bing Webmaster Tool is ideal for tracking and resolving potential spam problems and refers to supplementary tools that could extend your online front with Bing audience.

Although Bing is presently much less popular than Google, it is still relevant, and detrimental if your servces and products are somehow related to popular search trends overall.

15. Keyword Density Analyzer

Keyword Density Analyzer screenshot

Keyword density is particularly important because Google can penalize or demote your website if your content has, for example, an oversaturation of keywords. During a product promotion, especially a more agressive campaigns, it becomes easy to overuse keywords. This tool provides a neat overview of the number of keywords you used on a specific web page and relates them to the overall content volume.

Just enter your URL or copy-paste your text content and it will quickly display some useful insights about the correct keyword density.

16. Soovle

Soovle screenshot

One of the great examples of AI trying to predict human behavior is the autocomplete function integrated into the main search bar. Soolve is a unique tool that allows you to find out what various search engines think it’s popular by making them finish the phrase you started.

Using autocomplete is a great way to get insights into trending phrases, topics, or products. What people search for the most or what they expect to find when they search for a particular thing is sometimes detrimental to business success.

You would be surprised how useful information might hides in the most innocent of searches, for example: “what is the best…”. The opportunities and strategies that can derive from the autocomplete function highlighted by Soolve are endless.

As soon as you type even one word in the bar, Soolve gives you all the most used autocomplete suggestions on Google, Bing, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, and more, simultaneously. Such phrase suggestions are great for learning how popular trends develop over time, by doing a simple cross-comparison.

17. Ahrefs Backlink Checker

Ahrefs Backlink Checker screenshot

Ahrefs offer an extensive toolset dealing with all major aspects of SEO. Although the real in-depth improvement come are part of a payment plan, there are some very features tools that they generously offer for no charge.

One of these useful freebies is the Backlink Checker. It allows you to see the top 100 best backlinks for any website. With this many links you can not only manage valuable links pointing to your domain but also follow-up on how your competitors are doing in that front.

We admire the diligence Ahrefs use when breaking down important points related to content marketing.

Their knowledge and reputation in SEO are recognized by many. Although their tools may use interface that looks a bit scary for the beginner, they have put a lot of effort to break down strategies into steps that are easy to follow.

18. Hunter.io

Hunter.io screenshot

Hunter.io finds email addresses associated with certain domain name.This tool is best used to proactively reach out to people who operate in a relevant online market. It’s great for puttign faces in front of brand names or product lines.

This means that with this tool you can quickly get a point of contact related to any chosen online business site. You can also verify the discovered emails and give you an estimate of the probability of this estimate. Requires simple registration.

19. Responsive Design Checker

Responsive Design Checker screenshot

The name of this tools is pretty revealing about its main function. It lets you check how the website looks on different mobile devices. This is extremely important tool and for several reasons.

First, it saves you the trouble of live checking your website pages through the “eyes” of the various popular devices and their respective operating systems.

Seconds, as we mentioned above, mobile friendliness is king. You better have yoru content ready and optimized for all the commonly used devices and screen sizes. If not - this is the tool to use and find out the reasons.

20. Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere screenshot

Keywords Everywhere tackles one very crucial aspect of SEO, embedded in the name of the tool: it checks search volume, among other factors like CPC and competition data. This information is invaluable to have during AdWords campaigns, and even in preliminary key phrase research. Knowing who else is looking to emphasize certain keywords can be the difference between a sound investment in a rewarding marketing campaign and a complete waste of effort, time, and money. Better be ready to tell the difference.

Competition between online marketers has always been rough. Having a tool like this only confirms how tough it is to drag attention, even towards high-quality products. Keywords Everywhere is the small key that opens big doors, if used right. It comes as an add-on to your Chrome or Firefox browsers and is incredibly easy to use.

21. SEO Site Checkup

SEO Site Checkup

SEOSiteCheckup is one of the most trusted website and SEO analysis tools. It is used to analyze inter, external links as well as anchors. From meta tags to the speed of website users, you can scan any errors with SEO Site Checkup. Apart from these, this software also helps to analyze competitors’ strategies to stay ahead of the game. It is very easy to use; any new user can operate it without any hassle. In addition to highlighting errors, the SEO Site Checkup also gives you recommendations on fixing them. This really helps you to improve your website performance and earn good revenue. Also, SEO Site Checkup offers a 14-day free trial, which you can cancel anytime.

Here at CodeCoda we know how important SEO can be, especially for product or services promotion. This list of helpful SEO tools comes as a result of our practices and extensive research of the best practices and instruments in SEM.

Another interesting topic we will be looking at in an upcoming blog post will be the top search engines you need to optimize for.

The list can aid SEO experts as well as beginners. If you are new to search engine optimization, getting familiar with these SEO tools will—at the very minimum—aid your decision-making and possibly bring some important insights for your content marketing.

Part 1 on SEO can be found here: What Is SEO: A Comprehensive Introduction

Author

Yulian Zhekov

Yuliyan is a marketing specialist with a multi-faceted background. He uses technologies to create content and manage information flow.
His content strategies are backed by years of knowledge and experience coming from applied tech solutions. Goal-oriented and dedicated to producing high-quality output.
Solving problems from the perspective of all stakeholders involved is an essential part of his work ethics. He believes that great solutions come as the result of an ingenious fusion between technologies and present demands.