36 Free SEO Tools for DIY SEOs

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Toggle Questions to see “informational” queries you can create content about.

Find keyword ideas from Google’s keyword research tool.

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Most keyword research tools show you ideas based on your seed keyword. For example, if you enter “coffee,” you’ll get ideas like “coffee bean,” “keurig coffee maker,” and “coffee shops.”

GKP can show you relevant keywords based on semantics. For example, GKP suggests keywords like “nespresso pods,” “espresso,” “french press,” and “breville barista express” even though they don’t contain the word “coffee.”

Find questions that appear under Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ SERP feature.

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Use these to find subtopics and questions that may be worth answering in your content. For example, if you’re writing about “how to clean coffee maker,” you may want to answer these questions:

Find topics people are discussing on Reddit.

Keyworddit extracts keywords from Reddit communities, which is a great way to find topics your audience is interested in.

For example, here are some keywords from the r/bigseo subreddit:

Keyworddit also shows you the context where the keyword appeared:

Find trending topics to cover.

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Google Trends also shows you related topics and queries that are rising in popularity:

Cover these topics before other sites do.

See how hard it will be to get into the top 10 search results for any keyword.

Keyword Difficulty Checker shows how difficult it would be to rank for a particular keyword, as measured by Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty (KD) score. This score is on a 100-point scale with zero being the easiest and 100 being the hardest.

For example, the keyword “link building” has a score of 88, which is super hard:

Keyword Difficulty Checker shows you an estimate of how many backlinks from unique websites you need to rank in the top 10 for your target keyword. This is useful for getting a rough idea of how much work it might take to rank for a topic.

Improve your WordPress site’s SEO.

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Check that your page looks as intended in the search results.

This SERP Snippet Optimization tool shows how your webpage will potentially look in Google search results. Just enter your proposed title, meta description, and URL.

Check the pixel counts to make sure your title, URL, and meta description fit the maximum pixel lengths:

Create structured data markup in the JSON-LD format.

Merkle’s Schema Generator generates local business, FAQ, product, and other types of schema markup for you. This helps search engines better understand your content. Just select the type of markup you want, fill in the form, then copy and paste onto your site.

Backlink Checker also shows you the anchor text for the link. This helps you understand how a link was earned and can help you spot opportunities easily.

Find email addresses for link outreach.

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 has found:

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If you’re doing link building at scale, you can use Hunter.io’s bulk email finder to find and verify email addresses in one shot.

Monitor and troubleshoot your website’s search performance.

The URL Inspection tool provides information about Google’s indexed version of a specific page. Enter any URL and see if there are issues with it:

Speed up your website with a free CDN.

Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) that helps speed up your website and protect it from malicious attacks. It works by caching your website across its global servers so visitors can load its content from a location nearer to them, which is faster.

Pagespeed Insights will tell you what the issue is and how to fix it:

Optimize your images.

Shortpixel compresses, optimizes, and resizes images on your site audotmatically. This is useful because large images (in terms of file sizes) can take a longer time to load and therefore impact your page speed.

Use the bulk optimization feature to, well, optimize images in bulk.

Create a properly formatted robots.txt file.

Robot.txt generator creates a robots.txt file for you, which tells search engines where they can and can’t go on your site. It’s best practice for every website to have one of these.

Choose “Customize” to create individual rules for various bots, subdirectories, etc.:

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

Hreflang tags tell search engines like Google about multiple versions of the same page in different languages and helps them to serve the correct version to their users. This tool generates these tags for you. Just add your desired URLs, select your target country and language, then click “Generate.”

Click on More options to customize your sitemap:

See how the browser renders a page.

View Rendered Source shows you 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.

View Rendered Source shows the differences between the raw version of your code and what is rendered.

See the top 10 ranking pages for any keyword.

SERP Checker pulls unpersonalized Google search results for any country. Use it to see accurate real-time results unaffected by factors such as location, language, and search history.

For the first three search results, you’ll also see important SEO metrics like the number of backlinks and referring domains, estimated search traffic, Domain Rating (DR), 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.

BrightLocal’s Local SERP Checker pulls even more granular search results—right down to the city, town, or even ZIP level. This is useful for local SEO.

You can even select Google Maps as your search engine to see where you’re ranking:

Inform your marketing strategy with important marketing data and analytics.

Google Analytics is a free tool that gives you a whole range of data for your website. You can parse and dissect this in many ways to improve your marketing.

Not many people like Google Analytics 4—the current version—but Google Analytics is still likely the most-used analytics tool.

Generate search-optimized titles.

Our free AI title generator writes title tags for you. (Big time saver.)

You can select your preferred tone of voice to generate titles:

Generate SEO-friendly meta descriptions.

Our free AI meta description generator writes meta descriptions for you. (An even bigger time saver!)

Like our title generator, you can select your preferred tone of voice.

Run a content audit of your website.

Our free WordPress plugin runs a content audit to find underperforming pages. It also suggests a course of action to improve rankings, such as rewriting or updating the post.

Click the suggestions to see detailed recommended actions on what to do next.

Manage how your local business appears on Google Search and Maps.

This tool even generates a QR code for easy reviewing:

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).

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Click on Changes to see when major changes have been made to the page. The darker the color, the larger the change:

Monitor mentions of your name or business online.

Google Alerts will send you an email when pages mention terms you’re tracking. This is useful for monitoring brand and competitor mentions.

You can customize your alerts. Choose:

• How often you want Google to send you alerts
• Which sources (e.g., news, blogs, video, books, etc.)
• Language
• Location

And more.

Generate content briefs, outlines, articles, titles, meta descriptions, code, and more

Do I need to explain ChatGPT? You, alongside thousands of students, marketers, programmers, data scientists, are probably using ChatGPT in your work and daily life.

The beauty of ChatGPT is that you can prompt it to do almost anything: answer questions, plan your itinerary, summarize content, create content, pretend to be someone else, generate code, fix your code, and more.

Use ChatGPT to generate titles and meta descriptions:

Check for online plagiarism.

Copyscape makes checking for plagiarism easy: Enter your URL and see if the content has been copied from or used elsewhere. This is super useful if you’ve worked with freelance writers as there’s always a chance they sent you plagiarized content from AI or other people.

You can also compare two articles or webpages and see how they match up:

Create human-sounding drafts with an AI chatbot.

A competitor to ChatGPT, Claude is an AI chatbot from Anthropic, an AI company started by former OpenAI employees. Whatever you do with ChatGPT, you can do with Claude too.

Then, why Claude over ChatGPT? The reason is simple: Each chatbot (ChatGPT, Bard, Claude) is trained on different large language ****** (LLMs). So, their output will differ.

You can use Google search operators to find guest post opportunities, internal linking opportunities, link prospects, and more.

Learn about some powerful ways to use Google for SEO in our extensive guide to Google search operators.

Still looking for more SEO tools? Check out these articles: