Best Well-Known SEO Tools to Drive More Traffic 100% FREE

Monitor your website’s SEO health, see who’s linking to your website, and learn what your website is ranking for on Google 

Before you hire an interior designer to beautify your house, the foundation of your house needs to be rock-solid. The same goes for your website. Before you go about optimizing your website, you need to make sure its technical health is strong.

Run a comprehensive crawl of your website with Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) to check for over 100 common SEO issues.

You’ll also be able to see who’s linking to your website and learn what keywords you’re currently ranking for.

See the top 100 keyword ideas for any seed keyword, as well as related search data

Our free keyword research tool shows you the top 100 keyword ideas for any keyword or phrase, plus the top 50 related questions. It also shows you important keyword data, such as search volume and keyword difficulty.

Google’s keyword research tool

Designed for keyword research for Google Ads, Google Keyword Planner (GKP) is an invaluable tool in an SEO’s toolbox. This is mainly because the tool is from Google itself, and many SEOs believe its data is the most accurate.

Another limitation is that GKP doesn’t show absolute search volumes—only a range (as you can see in the screenshot above). Nevertheless, it’s still a useful tool if you want to cover all your bases when it comes to keyword research.

Find People Also Ask questions

For almost every query you search for on Google, you’ll see a SERP feature known as People Also Ask (PAA).

AlsoAsked scrapes them and shows you the PAA questions related to the topic you’ve entered. Use these to find subtopics and questions that may be worth answering in your article.

Do keyword research on Reddit

Keyword research is about finding the topics your audience is looking for. So what better way than to find the topics people are discussing on one of the internet’s largest “forums,” aka Reddit?

Enter the name of a subreddit your audience is participating in. Keyworddit will then extract keywords from that community.

For example, here’s a list of keywords it grabbed from the r/bodyweightfitness subreddit:

See search trends from all around the world

Google Trends shows the popularity of a topic over time.

Use it to catch and capitalize on trending topics, as well as avoid creating content about those with waning interest.

WordPress SEO plugin for on-page and technical SEO

See how your page will look like on the SERPs

Enter your proposed title, meta description, and URL. This tool will then show you what your webpage will potentially look like in the search results.

You can already do this if you’re using a WordPress plugin like RankMath. But it’s useful if you’re not using WordPress.

Create structured data markup in the JSON-LD format

Schema markup helps search engines better understand your content. It also powers rich snippets, which often have higher click-through rates than “regular” search results.

Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator helps you create the right schema code. Select the type of schema markup you want to generate, e.g., local business, FAQ, product, etc., fill in the form, then copy and paste the generated markup onto your site.

You can do this if you’re already using a WordPress plugin like RankMath. But if you aren’t, this is a good tool to use.

Multi-feature browser extension that provides SEO data about the pages and websites you visit

With Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar, you can see the valuable SEO data of any webpage you visit. These include the following:

• Page’s title
• Meta description
• Dates when page was published and modified
• Word count
• Headings
• Hreflang tags
• Canonicals
• OG tags

And more.

Besides that, the tool also:

• Checks for broken links.
• Traces redirect chains (full path).
• Highlights nofollow links.

And much more.

See the top 100 backlinks to any website or webpage

One of the most common activities in link building is to pursue your competitors’ links. By that, we mean looking at your competitors’ links and figuring out how they’ve been acquiring theirs. Then you can potentially mirror their tactics.

To do that, you’ll need to see who’s linking to them in the first place. What you can do is enter the URL of the page you’re competing with into our free backlink checker.

Find email addresses

Most link building tactics involve reaching out and persuading someone to link to your page. For that to happen, you’ll need their email address.

Hunter.io allows you to find anyone’s professional email address. Just enter the domain of the email address you’re looking for, and the tool will show you the list of email addresses it’s found:

Free service that connects news sources with journalists looking for expertise

Here’s how this works:

1. Journalists have questions and need experts to answer them.
2. HARO sends emails with those questions to their subscribers.
3. Anyone can respond and potentially become a source for the journalists’ publications.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re starting out or have an established site; this is a great way to build authoritative links.

To do this, you’ll need to create a Gmail filter. Here’s how:

1. Hit the caret on the right side of the search bar
2. Paste haro@helpareporter.com (or another feed) into the “from” field
3. Add your keywords (using the OR separator) to the “Includes the words” field and use quotation marks to consider multiple words as one keyword

Free tool from Google that helps you monitor and troubleshoot your website’s appearance on the SERPs

Use Google Search Console to find and fix technical errors on your website, submit sitemaps, see structured data issues, check your Core Web Vitals, and more.

Free global CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) is a globally distributed server network that makes it quicker for users to access your website. It caches static content across its servers so that it can get content to load faster by serving it from a location near the visitor.

Use Cloudflare to speed up your website and protect it from malicious attacks.

Analyze the loading speed of your webpages

Page speed has been a Google ranking factor since 2010. So if your site is extremely slow, this may be a reason why it’s not ranking as well as it can be.

Use GTmetrix to check your page speed and see how the page is performing:

Optimize your images

Large images (in terms of file sizes) can take a longer time to load and, therefore, impact your page speed. Google even has extensive documentation on how to optimize your images for the web:

For best results, experiment with various quality settings for your images, and don’t be afraid to dial down the quality—the visual results are often very good and the filesize savings can be quite large.

You can use ShortPixel to compress, optimize, and resize your images.

Create a properly formatted robots.txt file

A robots.txt file tells search engines where they can and can’t go on your site. Primarily, it lists all the content you want to lock away from search engines like Google.

If you don’t yet have a robots.txt file on your website, use this tool to quickly create one.

Generate hreflang tags to specify the language and geographical targeting of a webpage

Hreflang is an HTML attribute used to specify the language and geographical targeting of a webpage.

If you have multiple versions of the same page in different languages, you can use the hreflang tag to tell search engines like Google about these variations. This helps them to serve the correct version to their users.

Use this tool to generate the correct hreflang tags for your website. Just add your desired URLs, select your target country and language, then click “Generate.”

See how the browser renders a page

This shows how the browser has rendered a page’s original HTML into the DOM, including modifications made by JavaScript.

It’s a great tool for those who need to audit or troubleshoot JavaScript issues.

See the top 10 ranking pages for any keyword

Google personalizes search results based on factors such as your location, language, and search history. As such, search results may differ widely, depending on the location you search from.

Use our free SERP checker to see real-time search results so that you can get the most accurate SERPs in the location you want to rank for.

For the first three search results, you’ll also see important SEO metrics like the number of referring domains, number of backlinks, estimated search traffic, etc.

This is helpful for assessing the top-ranking pages and understanding why these pages are ranking where they are.

See search results from any location

If you’re doing local SEO, you’ll want to see even more granular search results—right down to the city, town, or even ZIP level. You can use BrightLocal’s Local SERP Checker for that.

Google’s analytics tool

Google Analytics is quite likely the most used analytics tool out there. It’s no wonder—not only is it free, but it’s also powerful. It gives you a whole range of data for your website, which you can parse and dissect to improve almost every aspect of your marketing.

So rather than pinpoint a particular feature I like (which seems almost impossible), read the article recommended below to see how you can use Google Analytics to improve your SEO performance.

Create interactive dashboards and reports

Whether you’re an in-house SEO or an SEO agency, you’re probably creating SEO reports for your clients, managers, and bosses. Google Data Studio helps make such reporting easier.

Since it integrates with Google’s suite of tools, it is relatively easy to merge data from places like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, etc.

Run a content audit of your website

Not every piece of content you publish will be successful. That’s OK. You can always revisit it, figure out what went wrong, and take action to improve its performance.

But to do that, you’ll need to find the under-performing pages. That’s when you do a content audit.

Our SEO WordPress plugin automates the content audit process and kicks back recommendations to you.

Manage how your local business appears on Google Search and Maps

According to BrightLocal’s survey, 36% of SEOs think a Google Business Profile is the most important ranking factor for the map pack. And 6% believe that it’s important for the “regular” organic results.

So if you’re running a local business, make sure you have your Google Business Profile set up.

See how pages looked like in the past

The Wayback Machine takes historical screenshots of pages and stores them in its database. You can then enter any URL to see those webpages’ previous versions (even currently broken ones).

This is useful for a variety of tasks. For example, if you’re doing broken link building, it is helpful to see what was originally on the dead page so that you can replicate it.

Monitor mentions of your name or business online

Use this tool to set up mentions of your name or business. Depending on the frequency you choose, Google Alerts will then send you an email with all the pages that have mentioned the term you’re tracking.

You can also use it to monitor your competitors.

World’s most used search engine

Even with so many free SEO tools available, you can’t forget about Google—arguably the most powerful SEO tool.

You can use Google to do a variety of SEO tasks. For example, you can use Google to figure out what the search intent is so that you can align your page with it.

Let’s say you want to rank for the keyword “best french press.” If we search for the term on Google, we’ll see that searchers want to learn, not buy. Specifically, they want to see comparisons of all the best and most up-to-date French presses:

Ready to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website?

Now that you have these tactics in your toolbox, you should be able to put together a simple strategy for getting more people to your site. Remember, though, that this isn’t a one-off exercise, nor do you have to try everything at once or use only one tactic at a time.

Try something. See if it works. If it fails, stick at it a little longer but bring something else into your roster. Most importantly, make sure the technical aspects of your site are running smoothly — if you need targeted audience, for example, we’ve got plans to suit any budget!