27 Simple, Free SEO Tools to Boost Your Search Rankings in 2026

Whenever I dream up a home improvement project for my place, I work the smartest and fastest when I have the right tools. The difference between having helpful resources and trying to figure everything out manually? It's huge – and it shows in your results.

The same principle applies to digital marketing. How can you work smarter and faster with SEO?

It starts with having the right tools.

Whether you’re just getting started with SEO or you’ve been at it for a while, these free tools can make a real impact on your visibility in search. They’re user-friendly and give you a peek into the factors that determine how well your content performs. Let’s dive in and see which tools might be right for your goals.

At a glance: The best free SEO tools

1. Google PageSpeed Insights

Best for: checking the speed and usability of your site on multiple devices

GooglePageSpeed Insights helps you assess your core web vitals (aka metrics Google uses to assess the user experience of your webpage) of any site you enter for both desktop and mobile. It gives a rating between zero and 100 along with actionable, valuable insights so you can improve your site’s experience for website visitors.

Limitations: None

Alternatives: Pingdom, WebPageTest, and GTMetrix

2. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools

Best for: running a technical audit of your site

Ahrefs is one of the top SEO tools in the market. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is a set of three tools: 

• Web analytics: Get an insight into web traffic data — traffic volume, sources, visitors, and more.
• Site audit: Scan your site for common technical and on-page SEO issues that might be hurting the visibility of your site.
• Site explorer: See which keywords you rank for and who's linking to your site, so you can spot quick wins. 

After running an SEO audit, it also suggests areas where you can improve your internal linking, which helps boost your rankings in search engines. It’s also an excellent tool to find keywords that bring you the largest wins and double down on them.

Limitations: 10,000 crawl credits per project per month

Alternatives: Screaming Frog (audit), Beam Us Up (audit)

3. Answer the Public

Best for: getting hundreds of keyword ideas based on a single keyword

AnswerThePublic is one of the best free keyword research tools that helps you find hundreds of related keywords for your primary keyword. You get a large list of long-tail keywords, plus common questions asked.

Limitations: Three free keyword researches per day; you have to sign up to use them.

Alternatives: KeywordTool.io, UberSuggest, Keyword Sheeter, Keyword Generator

4. Google Analytics

Best for: getting complete web stats and search insights

Google Analytics is possibly one of the most powerful analytics tools out there to analyze the traffic on your site. tracks pretty much every bit of traffic you can imagine on your website — where it comes from, which page is receiving it and so on.

While it’s not purely for SEO, it’s still a helpful tool to track if you’re getting traffic from organic search.

However, Google Analytics has since stopped showing which keywords send you that traffic. You’ll have to pair it with a tool like Keyword Hero to uncover what’s behind “(not provided).”

Limitations: No limitations for its usage, but queries that are sending you organic traffic are hidden

Alternatives: Matomo, Open Web Analytics, and Clicky

5. Google Search Console

Best for: constant website analysis, alerts, and error reports

Google Search Console gives you a taste of what the most used search engine thinks of your website. You can use it to check and fix technical issues on your website, see important SEO data like clicks, impressions, and average ranking position, submit sitemaps, and more.

If ranking in search engines like Bing and Yandex are important to you, note that they have their own “search console” too.

Limitations: Only shows a handful of technical SEO issues, the top 1,000 backlinks, and the top 1,000 organic keywords

Alternatives: Bing Webmaster Tools, Yandex Webmaster Tools

6. Ahrefs Backlink Checker

Best for: comprehensive link analysis

The free version of Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker shows the top 100 backlinks to any website or URL, along with the total number of backlinks and referring domains (links from unique sites), Domain Rating (DR), and URL Rating (UR) where applicable.

A great way to use this tool is to paste your competitor’s website and find potential link-building opportunities.

Limitations: Free for the top 100 backlinks

Alternatives: Moz Link Explorer

7. Google Ads Keyword Planner

Best for: finding what people search for

Enter a keyword or group of keywords into the tool, and Google Keyword Planner will return all sorts of helpful stats to guide your keyword strategy: monthly search volume, competition, and even keyword suggestions you might not have considered.

Limitations: You’ll need to run a Google ad campaign to see exact search volumes

Alternatives: Bing Keyword Planner

8. SERP Snippet Optimization Tool

Best for: previewing how your web pages will look in Google’s search results

SERP Snippet Optimization Tool allows you to see how your meta title and description will appear in the search results before you even publish your web page. It works for desktop and mobile. You can check for truncation issues and fix them instantly.

Limitations: None

Alternatives: Portent's SERP Preview Tool

9. Google Trends

Best for: viewing the relative search popularity of topics

Google Trends shows the popular search terms over time, which is useful for uncovering seasonal variations in search popularity. Compare multiple terms to see their relative popularity over time, and watch for handy keyword suggestions. 

It’s excellent for discovering keyword ideas that are evergreen (look for terms that have a stable interest over time graph).

Limitations: None

10. Ahrefs SEO toolbar

Best for: checking for broken links, redirect chains, nofollow links, and on-page elements for any webpage

The Ahrefs SEO toolbar is a free Chrome extension (also available as a Firefox plugin) that allows you to check for broken links, trace redirect chains, and highlight no-follow links for any webpage. It also generates an on-page SEO report that includes the web page's:

• Title
• Meta description
• Word count
• Headers
• Hreflang tags
• Canonicals
• OG tags

This makes analyzing any page much easier and faster.

If you have access to a paid Ahrefs account, you’ll also be able to see important keyword metrics like search volume, CPC, and keyword difficulty within the SERPs.

Limitations: Technical and on-page SEO features are free, but you’ll need an Ahrefs account to see SEO metrics within the SERPs

Alternatives: Detailed SEO Extension, SEO Minion, LinkMiner (broken links), Ayima Redirect Path (redirect tracing)

11. Moz Local Listing Score

Best for: seeing how your local business looks online

Moz Local Listing Score helps you ensure your business appears accurately across the web. It crunches data from more than 10 different sources — including Google, Yelp, and Facebook — to score your brick-and-mortar business on how it looks online. Results come complete with actionable fixes for inconsistent or incomplete listings.

Limitations: Data is only available for three countries: US, Canada, and UK

12. Yoast SEO

Best for: optimizing your blog posts for search engines

Yoast SEO is an essential for SEO professionals. It provides AI-powered suggestions to tweak your blog posts so it’s better optimized for search engines. You can also get suggestions for general SEO improvement for content like meta tags and URL slug. It's primarily available to Wordpress users.

Limitations: Some data limitations, which you can unlock via a premium account

Alternatives: Rank Math, All in One SEO Pack, The SEO Framework

13. Dentsu Schema Markup Generator

Best for: customizing how your web pages appear in the search results with schema markup (which is code that helps search engines understand your content better)

Dentsu Schema Markup Generator is great for creating custom code so that your reviews, events, organizations, and people are displayed the way you want them to be in Google’s search results. Once you’ve created your schema code, copy and paste it into your website.

Don’t worry if this sounds technical — the tool does the heavy lifting for you, so you don’t need to know any code to use it.

Then, use the next tool to check if the implementation has been done correctly.

Limitations: None

14. Classy Schema Structured Data Viewer

Best for: checking if your structured data was implemented correctly

It's worth double-checking your technical SEO implementation — Classy Schema Structured Data Viewer makes it simple to verify everything's working as expected.

Limitations: None

Alternatives: Google Structured Data Testing Tool, Google’s Rich Results Test (currently does not test for all possible schema markups)

15. SimilarWeb

Best for: viewing site stats for any domain

Use SimilarWeb to estimate how much search traffic a website gets. See a breakdown of traffic sources, locations, and more. A helpful tool for competitor research.

Limitations: You’ll need a paid account to see every data point, but the free version is good enough to get a real-time snapshot of your competitor’s activity

16. SERP Robot

Best for: seeing your ranking position for up to five keywords

Enter any website or web page and up to five keywords on SERP Robot to see where you rank for each of them. Check your competitors’ rankings too.

Limitations: None

17. XML Sitemaps

Best for: creating a sitemap

Simply enter your site’s URL and some optional parameters, and XML Sitemaps will create a sitemap that you can upload to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Limitations: Free up to 500 pages

18. Robots.txt Generator

Best for: generating a robots.txt for your site

Robots.txt generator lets web robots know what to do with a website’s pages. When a page is disallowed in robots.txt, that represents instructions telling the robots to skip over those web pages completely.

Limitations: None

19. Copyscape

Best for: checking for duplicate content

Best for: checking for duplicate content

Enter a URL for a blog post or website, and Copyscape can tell you where else that content exists online. You might find results you’ll need to follow up with to help get your SEO in order.

Limitations: Only the top 10 results are shown

20. Google Alerts

Best for: getting alerted of any online mentions of your brand, product or company

Enter your brand, company or product name and Google Alerts will send you an email if it finds any webpage mentioning those terms. You can also use this tool to for keyword tracking and monitor the search volume data of popular/trending terms in your industry.

Limitations: None

21. Screaming Frog SEO Log File Analyser

Best for: uploading and analyzing your log files

If you’re interested to find out what Googlebot is doing on your site, you can look into your website’s log files. Screaming Frog’s Log File Analyser allows you to do that for free.

Limitations: Up to 1,000 lines

Alternatives: SEOlyzer

22. Hreflang Tag Generator

Best for: generating hreflang tags for your multi-language/multi-country site

If your site targets different countries or different languages, you’ll need to set up your hreflang tags properly. Unfortunately, it’s quite easy to mess up, which can cause issues for your site.

Enter your site’s URL, the language and country of the URL, and Aleyda Solis' Hreflang Tag Generator will generate the necessary hreflang annotations for you.

Limitations: None

23. Keyword Surfer

Best for: seeing monthly search volumes and CPC data within the SERPs

Install this free Chrome extension by SEO Surfer, and you’ll be able to a mini keyword analysis of the keywords you search — including search volumes and CPC data. It can help you assess keyword difficulty and you'll also see suggested keyword ideas related to your query — pop a couple into your headings to see what happens to your SEO.

Limitations: None

Alternatives: WMS Everywhere

24. SE Ranking Mobile Friendly Site Test

Best for: checking your site’s mobile-friendliness

Enter any URL and SE Ranking's Mobile Friendly Site Test will tell you if the webpage is mobile-friendly. It also tells you what went wrong and what you need to fix.

Limitations: None

25. Website Authority Checker

Best for: checking your website’s Domain Rating

Enter your URL and see the Domain Rating (DR) of your website using Ahrefs’ Website Authority Checker. Generally speaking, the higher the number, the more authoritative your website.

A high DR has been shown to correlate positively with higher Google rankings.

Limitations: None

Alternatives: Moz’s Domain SEO Analysis Tool

26. DemandHub Google Review Link Generator

Best for: creating a link for customers to review your business on Google

Customer reviews are important for small business’ local SEO. DemandHub Google Review Link Generator allows you to create a shareable link for customers to review your business on Google. You can send pop these links in your social media link in bio or make them part of your content marketing.

Limitations: Non

27. Semrush

Best for: performing a site audit or check your ranking in search

With a free trial of Semrush, you can:

• Track your search rankings with the rank checker
• Perform competitor analysis
• Perform a content and technical SEO audit of your site
• Generate a content brief for your target keyword
• Use the SEO writing assistant for content writing guidance to find relevant and related keywords
• Get recommendations to optimize existing content
• Run 10 free keyword research reports each day

If you just want to get straight to it, check out Semrush's pricing here.

Limitations: Although users benefit most from a paid account, you can still get a lot of functionality out of a free account.

FAQ about free SEO tools

What's the difference between free and paid SEO tools? 

A free tool can help you handle the basics like keyword research or performance checks, which is ideal if you’re new to SEO. Paid tools often include advanced data and more in-depth features, so they can be worth it once you’re ready to scale. It’s all about choosing the right fit for your current needs.

Does Google have free SEO tools?

Yes, Google offers several free tools that are super helpful for SEO. Google Search Console lets you see how your site is performing in search results, track keywords, and fix issues. Google Analytics helps you understand who’s visiting your site and what content they love. And don’t forget Google Keyword Planner, which is great for spotting keyword ideas if you’re planning content.

What are the best free SEO tools?

You’ve come to the right place; that’s exactly what this blog is for. Go through the free SEO tools we've mentioned above and see which ones will give you the results you need — without spending a dime.

More free SEO tools and resources

If you’re interested in even more tools, here are a few places to start:

• The Ultimate List of the 60 Best SEO Tools (Free & Paid)— a comprehensive tools list curated by SEMRush
• 36 Free SEO Tools for DIY SEOs — a curated list of tried and tested free SEO tools by Ahrefs

There are so many free SEO tools to explore — pick a few that fit your needs and see how they help your content rank. You’ll often uncover new opportunities or quick fixes that can boost traffic. If you’re ready for more, check out our in-depth guide on building an SEO strategy. Plus, tools like Buffer can help you keep your social channels active so folks can discover your content more easily.