15 of the Best Free SEO Tools in 2021

Any marketing plan should include a number of different techniques to help you to reach your target audience. We believe that search engine optimisation (SEO) should play a major part in your digital marketing plan as a small business, for a number of reasons.

Here are some of the benefits of focusing on SEO as a small business.

● Could become a main source of traffic to your website, leading to enquiries, newsletter sign ups and other goal completions
● Gives you a better opportunity to reach potential customers when they are in the right frame of mind to enquire or buy
● Relatively inexpensive, can see some results from free and inexpensive tools
● Invest time in it now, see results into the future (with some ongoing work)

Free SEO tools for small businesses

Have you ever wanted to find out more about how people find and use your website? Google Analytics is a powerful tool that gives you access to data on website users including where they came from (acquisitions), which pages they visit and for how long (behaviour) and how these visitors perform against any goals you’ve set (conversions).

This information can help you to build an SEO strategy for your business, especially the data on which pages people are visiting and where from. You can then monitor any changes and results over time, to see how changes you make to your SEO influence how much traffic your website receives.

Find out more about how to get started with Google Analytics.

Google Search Console, previously known as Google Webmaster Tools, is a free service from the search engine giant that helps you to monitor and measure how your website appears in Google Search results. You can also maintain your results, be notified of and fix errors, and troubleshoot any problems you might encounter with your listings.

To enable this useful free SEO for your website and to find out more, see Moz’s beginner’s guide to Google Search Console.

If you want to research keywords for your website, this is a great place to start. Google Ads Keyword Planner is one of the most popular free SEO tools for keyword research. It allows you to build lists of phrases to use in your website copy based on how often they are searched for and how competitive they are.

The Keyword Planner is part of the Google Ads suite of services, and while you’ll need an account to access it, you don’t need to invest in running ad campaigns ( also known as pay per click or PPC ) unless you want to.

To make the most of this popular tool, follow Google’s advice on how to use Keyword Planner to research keywords.

PageSpeed Insights is a really useful tool to help you identify and fix issues that relate specifically to the speed of your website, which can have an impact on where you rank in search engine results.

This is one of the easiest free SEO tools to use - enter your website address (or URL) on the PageSpeed Insights page and you’ll receive a report instantly with a score, issues to fix and some help to get you started.

The last of our free SEO tools from Google is Google Trends - a useful service that allows you to track trends in search phrases over time. This is a valuable research tool when it comes to researching keywords and topics for your blog, as you’ll be able to get a feel for whether a specific topic is rising in popularity or not. It’s also useful to help you plan for seasonal content, as you can see when certain topics or holidays start to trend on Google Search.

For an introduction on how to use this tool, see Ahrefs’ guide on how to use Google Trends for keyword research.

Moz is a big name in the SEO world, and their Keyword Explorer brings you more detailed analysis and suggestions than Google’s offering. With each keyword search you’ll be presented with data on how many people search for that phrase per month, the difficulty in ranking for it, additional keyword suggestions and links to high-ranking websites for that keyword.

With a free account you’ll be able to run up to 10 searches per month, or you could upgrade to a Pro account for unlimited access to this and Moz’s other SEO tools.

If your business has a physical presence (like a store or restaurant) and serves a local area, local SEO becomes really important. Moz Local is a free tool that will analyse your existing local SEO listings on services like Google and Facebook to identify how complete they are and where you could make improvements.

Moz Local allows you to check your listing and receive a free report on-screen, or you can opt into a monthly plan to directly manage your local SEO presence from their dashboard.

Ubersuggest is a free SEO tool from Neil Patel, a leading online marketer. The tool has recently been revamped and refined to allow you to ‘reverse engineer’ your competitors’ SEO strategy. Ubersuggest allows you to see what’s working well for competitors, research keywords and find backlink data to help with your link building efforts.

Head to Ubersuggest and enter a domain name or keyword to start your research.

For another free keyword research tool, Answer The Public is a must-try. Enter a keyword or phrase at AnswerThePublic.com and you’ll be shown lots of suggestions of phrases and real questions that people have typed into search engines that relate to your keyword. This can help you to build up a list of complementary keywords to feature within your website copy or blog posts.

Answer The Public is not only useful for keyword research, but it can be a valuable customer insight tool too.

Majestic has built the largest Link Intelligence database in the world, surveying and creating a map of the Internet that’s used by SEO and online marketing experts. Their Site Explorer tool offers you access to these insights in a user-friendly way.

While the free access is limited, it’s a useful tool to help you find out how many backlinks your website has, as well as Trust Flow and Citation Flow which are metrics that can be used to help measure the quality of your website and your SEO efforts.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the technical side of the tool, here’s a useful guide to the Majestic Site Explorer.

There are a number of elements that go into search engine optimisation. Many of the tools on this list cover content or backlinks, but the WC3 Markup Validation Service is a tool designed to help you improve the markup validity of your website.

This sounds technical, but it refers to the code that your website is written in. The resulting report can be quite long depending on how your website was built, but over time your web developers should be able to help resolve any errors for you.

Another factor that can have an impact on where you appear in search results is how many broken links exist on your website. These broken links could be internal (to pages that have been deleted) or external (to websites or pages that no longer exist).

It would be difficult and time consuming to run a broken link check manually, but with free tools like Broken Link Checker you can build a report quickly and easily. You can then remove any broken links identified in the report when you next update your website.

Buzzsumo’s Content Analyzer can be handy if you are planning content for your blog. Here you can enter a phrase or topic that you want to write about and see content that’s trending or popular. Looking at this content, in particular the phrases they use in their title and throughout the article, can give you an insight into keyword phrases for your own blogs.

The free version will allow you access to the top 10 results, or you can explore thousands of results with a paid Pro membership.

Screaming Frog is one of the most popular SEO tools around, and it’s designed to help with technical SEO by ‘crawling’ your website and providing you with an audit. The tool was created with agencies and SEO experts in mind so is quite technical in nature, but it’s a useful resource to help you find broken links, duplicate content and more.

While there is a paid version of Screaming Frog available, you should be able to do everything you need with the free version.

Finally, here’s a tool that will help you to discover whether there’s duplicate content on your website – which can have an effect on how it performs in search results. Copyscape offers a free tool which allows you to compare two pages to see what percentage and which words are the same across both. If your content is too similar on two or more pages, you’ll want to rewrite some of it so that it’s unique.

You can use the free comparison tool here, or explore some of Copyscape’s paid options which allow you to check content is unique before you upload it or compare your content with all websites to identify plagiarism.

Whether you are new to working on SEO for your business or you’re looking for new tools to help, we hope this guide has helped you find a solution to help you grow your business.

While you’re exploring these new SEO tools, why not take advantage of our free landing page audit  service? And if you’re looking for a digital marketing and website design agency in Exeter to help with more in-depth SEO support, contact us today.