My 15 Favorite Free SEO Tools…

I never get tired of saying it – I love me a good free tool.

This article is dedicated to the best – those free SEO tools that I use frequently and give me that warm, fuzzy feeling. It’s nice to have a huge arsenal, but it can be more powerful to wield a few powerful weapons expertly, so I’ve included some links and tips on how to make these tools work harder for you.

At the end of this article, you’ll find the 2014 version of this list with notes on changes. There’s also a bonus list of links to more free SEO tools.

Without further ado, here are my current fifteen favorite freebies.

Having a tool to examine page speed and diagnose opportunities for improvement  is now an essential part of the SEO toolkit. Anything that impacts user-experience impacts SEO, and site speed is a big deal for UX, especially for mobile. Many page-speed tools exist; I’ve found GTmetrix reliable and a good balance between thorough and user-friendly. Other page speed tools that are good include  Pingdom, WebPagetest (great visual waterfall), and Google PageSpeed Insights. That last one is especially good. 

The Web Developer Toolbar has become much relied-upon during the technical phase of our SEO audits. To learn how to use it for SEO, read Glenn Gabe’s SEO Audits & the Web Developer Plugin: 12 Helpful Features for the Technical SEO.

SEO Quake shows data on traffic, links, social shares, on-page keyword optimization and more. The SEO Quake website has lots of helpful tips on what to do with all this data.

In 2015, social media is typically vital to SEO success. Hootsuite is one of many platforms for managing social media. I’m not saying Hootsuite is the best social platform, but it is what I’m most familiar with and is plenty helpful for promoting new content and staying on top of opportunities to engage with key influencers.

The Wayback Machine is the Internet’s most complete historical archive and lets you see what a website used to look like back in the day. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used this free tool for detective work  to crack client cases of missing traffic. For that reason, the Wayback Machine holds a special place in my heart. If the numbers for a site have changed and something about that site has changed but you don’t have a site back-up available to figure out what – the Wayback Machine has your back.

“F12” is now the SEO button, because it is the shortcut to major awesomeness built right into Chrome. Some SEO tasks you can do with Chrome DevTools include: examining mobile UX and SEO with the amazing mobile emulator, diagnosing page speed, picking apart source code, examining HTTP status codes, and mocking-up live edits to a webpage (including the title tags and Meta descriptions in the SERPs). Resources below.

Marketers who know where the puck is heading tend to win more. Google Trends shows changes in search query volume for specific queries (and topics and entities).

Bottom line: while often overlooked
, Trends is an extremely powerful tool in the right hands. Below are some helpful articles:

Enter a query in this freemium tool and it will quickly spit out a ton of great keywords based on the autocomplete feature of Google, Bing, YouTube, or App Store Search.

Keywordtool.io is great for generating a ton of keyword ideas containing your seed term, especially long-tail keywords that won’t show up in the AdWords keyword tool due to having  very low volumes. I usually use Keywordtool.io when I am building a list of potential keywords, especially when I need long-tail keywords.

Keywordtool.ie is new to this year’s list (thanks to a reader who shared the tool with me in a comment on last year’s list). Shout out to Ubersuggest, the original tool of this kind.

Bing Webmaster Tools (aka BWT) remains extremely overlooked. It’s great for keeping an eye on how Bing (which powers Yahoo) is treating your site and also enables you to have some control in the matter. It also shows you clicks to your site from Bing by search query, and it has a feature for looking up Bing search query volume. It also offers benefits beyond Bing by providing insights into crawling, indexation, on-page keyword optimization, and other elements that can impact your performance in Google.

A while back, I wrote an article on some ways to use BWT. BWT also has a great help section.

This is one is so obvious that I forgot to include it last year: the Google and Bing search engines themselves are veryuseful SEO tools. Mastery of search engine functionality is part of mastering SEO. With some Google-fu (and Bing-fu), you can examine indexation and duplicate content, find content scrapers, check keyword rankings, analyze SERP listings, and scout for outreach and link prospects.