115 Best FREE SEO Tools and Plugins to Boost Your SEO in 2023

As an SEO professional or a website owner, the time you can spend creating a great site experience is limited.

How many times have you wished there was a tool that would speed up your tasks and make your life easier?

I bet there were so many times when someone would come up with a new shiny tool that will improve efficiency and you didn’t even know this tool existed.

And once you decided to do your own research, you would find out that the tool was too expensive and you or your company could not afford it.

Fortunately, I got you covered.

In the last few months, I’ve reviewed more than 300 free SEO tools, plugins, and extensions. I’ve decided then to share here the best 115 tools I think are worth your attention.

If you are on a tight deadline or you have a small budget, this list is for you. And trust me, it will save you the time to go through the same long process I went when I was looking for them.

1. Free Crawling & Indexing SEO Tools

GreenFlare

• Works on small and large sites
• No crawl limits! Crawl as many URLs as you like
• Desktop-based software that runs on low-end machines with as little as 1 GB of memory
• Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux

SEO Crawler by Rob Hammonds

• Online SEO crawler with all the most common SEO data points including page title, HTTP status code, details of redirect chains, meta robots details, rel=canonical URLs, etc.
• Flags basic potential SEO issues for you (e.g. multiple h1 tags)
• Crawl up to 350 URLs, completely free of charge
• Test how your site behaves with different user agents such as Desktop, Mobile, Tablet, and search bots

•  –Best-in-class SEO spider, able to efficiently crawl both small and very large websites
• Tons of onsite SEO data are available to allow webmasters to make informed decisions
• Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights API integration
• Desktop-based software
• Free plan available with a max of 500 URLs per crawl

• Real-time SEO crawler & log file analyzer
• Free plan available with a limit of up to 1 site per account and 10,000 URLs crawled/logs per month

• Technical SEO audit tool
• Helps you find indexing problems, duplicate content, wrong redirects,
  pages with error statuses, images with missing ALT texts and more
• Free version with a limit of 500 pages per month

• Allows you to upload your log files, verify search engine bots, identify crawled URLs and analyse search bot data and behaviour for SEO insights
• Able to process, store and analyse millions of lines of log file event data
• Free plan available but with a log event limit of 1,000 lines and 1 project at a time

• Duplicate content and broken links finder

• Desktop-based website crawler
• Free community version with 500 URLs limit
• Good for small website maintainers and bloggers
• Not my favourite tool to be completely honest (very old school UI, probably great for nostalgic people?). But, hey, it’s still free! 😁

• Online tool to view HTTP request and response headers
• It includes info like response code (200 success, 301/302 redirect etc.), content type, server identifier, last modification time, and other details

• Quick, easy way to test whether a page or specific strings of code on your site are mobile-friendly
• Test results include a screenshot of how Google sees the page on mobile devices and a list of all the mobile usability problems that it might encounter

• Fast and easy hreflang tag generator for multi-language or multi-country sites
• Helps you follow the correct values and syntax following Google’s specifications, with ISO 639–1 for languages and ISO 3166–1 Alpha 2 for countries

• Lets you generate XML sitemaps from a URL list
• Ability to add priority and change frequency
• You can export your file as XML

XML Sitemap Generator by Counting Characters

• Online XML sitemap generator by pasting your website URLs
• Offers options to add last modification date, change frequency and priority

• Sitemap Generator
• Amazing prototyping tool & visual sitemaps builder

Gloomaps

• Highly customisable visual sitemaps builder
• Lets you build a visual representation of your site’s URL taxonomy

Robots.txt Tester in Google Search Console

• Lets you test in real-time your robots.txt file
• Flags errors and warnings in your robots.txt file

• Google announced this tool will soon replace the Structured Data Testing Tool which (unfortunately) will be soon deprecated
• The tool, among many other applications, can be used for testing URLs or specific strings of code to see if they are eligible for rich results in Google SERP

• HTTP and HTTPS checker

• Easy-to-use XML sitemap generator
• Pulls URLs from a crawl of your site
• You can customise settings such as links order and frequency
• Ability to ignore/follow robots.txt rules and include or not nofollow links

• Fast SSL Checker to help you quickly diagnose problems with your SSL certificate installation

• Provides you with a lot of useful information about your SSL certificate to make sure it’s installed correctly on your server

2. Free Keyword Discovery & Expansion SEO Tools

Google Ads Keyword Planner

• Best-in-class keyword research tool with data coming directly from Google
• It’s 100% free to use as long as you have a Google account. However, the tool will show you the exact search volume for a search query ONLY if you’re running an active Adwords campaign. If that’s not your case, you will still see search volume data but they will come in a range like in the picture below:

• Uses organic (=unpaid) keyword volume data from Bing to help site owners get keyword ideas and suggestions for their content
• 100% free if you create a Bing account

• Leverages Google’s Suggest feature to give you all the questions people are searching for in relation to a certain keyword/topic
• It also shows you with nice visuals comparison and preposition-related keywords
• It doesn’t give you the monthly search volume for those questions, so you might need to combine it to another free tool like the Google Ads Keyword Planner to get search volume trends
• Great for content writers to get new content and FAQ ideas
• The tool provides searches (over 500k a month) where you can get a few content ideas on them, but you’re limited based on their traffic. After that cap, you will need to update to the pro version

SearchVolume.io

• Lets you search 800 keywords per search and 800 keywords per day completely for free
• Option to upgrade with additional keywords and searches per day

• Free Chrome browser extension which helps you analyse keywords while you’re browsing
• Pulls the ‘People Also Search For’ and ‘Related’ keywords from Google and shows them to you along with their search volume metrics. All directly inside the search engine result pages (SERPs)
• Shows local search volume estimates for 19 countries with the option to turn global search volumes on or off
• It works similarly to another popular extension called KeywordsEverywhere. However, Keyword Surfer is completely free compared to KeywordsEverywhere which recently switched to a freemium model

Keyword Sheeter

• This simple-to-use tool is great when it comes to generating keyword and content ideas as it provides a list of any possible search term related to your seed keyword. Once done, you can easily export your list
• It also has both a ‘positive filter’ and a ‘negative filter’ which allow you to narrow down your research to include/exclude search terms that might be related/unrelated to your seed keyword

QuestionDB

• Finds for you all the questions people are asking about a specific topic (1 to 3 words), pulling them from a database of 31M questions sourced from Reddit
• You can sort questions by popularity or by topic

• Lets you pull keyword ideas from the popular discussion website Reddit. When you enter a subreddit (you can find the full list here), it’ll mine the titles and comments of threads to find up to 500 keywords
• Gives you search volume data for those keywords using the Grepwords API. Search volume is usually similar to the Google Ads Keyword Planner

• It’s not actually a keyword research tool per se but it’s essential to expand your list of keywords
• You can add up to 3 seed keywords and the tool will concatenate one with another to form longer tail keywords

3. Free SEO Content Management & Optimisation Tools

Grammarly

• AI-powered spellchecker and writing assistant for clear and mistake-free SEO writing
• Free plan with option to upgrade with additional features

Hemingway App

• Writing assistant to help you identify superfluous words, hard-to-read sentences, and passive voice

Twinword Writer

• Editing tool that analyses natural text and provides content writers with real-time feedback on what they’re writing
• You can search for a word and the tool will highlight all the related words in your writing with just one click!
• It also has a technology suggesting similar words, association words, and related words derived from each English word
• It gives the word count and character count with and without spacing. In addition, the tool picks up the count of repetitive words (and keywords!) used in your writing
• Great for journalists, bloggers, and content marketers

Google Doc Research Tool

• Sees and uses suggested content in a document
• Allows you to conduct Google searches (text and images) without leaving your Google Doc window. All you have to do is click on ‘Tools’ from the menu bar and choose ‘Research’ from the dropdown menu

Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule

• Headline tester which scores your overall headline quality and rates its ability to resonate online
• Some metrics it takes into consideration are: readability, sentiment, word balance, character count and skimmability
• It’s completely free but you must submit your name, email address, and some other personal information before using it
• It also has a free Google Chrome extension

• Instant plagiarism and citation assistant
• Duplicate content finder

Canva

• Graphic design platform that will help you create visuals for your site content, including engaging infographics
• Loads of templates to choose from
• Free to use with the option to upgrade for additional features

• Project management tool that helps you keep track of everything in your SEO workflow, from the big picture to the minute details
• Great for content management and to help to keep you and your team up to date with the content creation process
• Free to use with the option to upgrade with additional features

Asana

• Project management tool which you could be used as an alternative to Trello for content management
• Great for content calendars to better plan and organise your editorial site content (check out this Asana’s guide to learn how to create your content calendar if you want to know more about it)
• Free to use with the option to upgrade with additional features

Mindmup

• Map maker designed to help you focus on your content ideas and remove all the distractions while brainstorming
• You can create unlimited mind maps for free using text bubbles, links, and images, and store up to 100 KB in the cloud to MindMup storage for up to six months
• Great for note-taking, collaborative planning, teamwork and presentations
• Free plan with option to upgrade with additional features

Word To Clean HTML

• Free Word (or similar) to HTML converter which strips out invalid or proprietary tags, leaving only clean HTML

4. Free Digital PR & Link Building SEO Tools

Link Explorer by Moz

• By entering a domain in the tool, it’ll show you top competitive SEO metrics like the Moz’s Domain Authority (not a big fan of this metric but still insightful), gained vs lost backlinks, anchor text, top followed links, and more
• You will need an account for a free plan that includes up to 10 queries per month. If you want to know the DA authority for any domains, you can download their free MozBar extension

Content Research by BuzzSumo

• Although Buzzsumo is a paid tool, their content research is free to use
• As they are constantly crawling the web and social media feeds it’s a great tool for getting backlinks and content ideas that can be easily shared

Apollo.io

• Find email addresses, phone numbers, and research from anywhere on the web
• See when people open and click on your emails
• Great for digital PR professionals who are prospecting journalists, influencers, and bloggers
• Free plan with option to upgrade to a paid plan. The free plan includes the Gmail and Linkedin Extension

Google Alerts

• Free content monitoring tool service that allows users to track keywords and receive automatic notifications when new content is published
• You can set up alerts to track your brand or the title of your article to discover when new mentions and backlinks

Detailed

• Free link research engine which focuses on what’s driving links to the most popular niches
• Great also identifies top websites in a particular niche and analyse their backlinks
• At the time of writing, they had a database of 1.1 million total links

SEO Spyglass

• Desktop-based software
• The free license offers unlimited link auditing projects but you are unfortunately limited to 1,100 links to analyse per project. You can upgrade for additional capabilities

Free Link Building Toolkit by BuzzStream

• You will find a bunch of free tools including an email finder, a domain extractor from URL, a link extractor from HTML, and more

PR.com

• Great place for distributing your press releases and boosting your reach
• Their free plan includes up to five targeted industries, publishing on PR.com, keyword optimization, and file attachments (video, image, or other types of media)
• You can also set up a full company profile

5. Free Site Speed Tools

Google PageSpeed Insights

• Analyses the content of a web page on mobile and desktop and generates suggestions to make your site load faster
• Provides both lab and field data about a page: lab data are useful to check your debugging your site in a controlled environment whereas field data will show you real user monitoring (RUM) data

Google’s TestMySite

• Google’s speed scorecard and revenue impact calculator
• You can quickly compare your speed performance to those of your competitors

• Open-source automated tool for improving the quality of web pages
• Performance auditing, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more

WebPageTest

• Reliable and open-source website performance and optimization test used by Googlers
• Runs a free website speed test from different locations around the world using real browsers at consumer connection speeds with detailed site speed recommendations

• Analyses your page’s speed performance, gives you a score for it, and provide site speed recommendations
• Since Nov 2020 is powered by Lighthouse
• The tool is free if you run 50 weekly on-demand tests but they also have a Pro version with additional features
• You need to open an account for it

Pingdom

• Similar to previous tools, it provides a speed score along with insights and recommendations around page load speed

Google Lighthouse in Chrome Webtools

• Open-source automated tool for improving the quality of web pages
• Performance auditing, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more

• Website resource loading and debugging
• Network monitoring and testing

Speed Performance Test by KeyCDN

• Breakdown of the loading times and HTTP response headers performed with a single test from 10 different locations around the world

6. Free SERP & Rank Checking SEO Tools

FatRank

• Allows you to instantly check where the website ranks in any Google country for the keyword you enter
• You can download CSV reports at any time
• Built by SEO professionals for SEO professionals
• They offer an IOS and Android app as well as a Chrome Extension

• Completely free keyword position rank tracker
• Allows you to paste in a list of keywords, enter your domain, and pull back all the Google keyword rankings in real-time
• You can either make a copy of this Google Sheet or download their newly launched Google Sheet Add-on
• In their Google Sheet, you can also integrate the Semrush API if you happen to have a paid Semrush plan already

• Google SERP checker with up to 100 searches if you don’t want to create an account, and unlimited searches if you do create one
• The free version offers daily rank tracking for 10 keywords, unlimited on-demand checks and up to 3-month rank history

• Instant SERP results checker for any keywords from any location

• Analyses the top 10 rankings for any keyword in 229 countries and shows you real-time search results without using proxies and location-specific IP addresses
• You can also see some free SEO metrics for the top 3 results

7. Free SEO Data & Analytics Tool

Google Analytics

• The most popular free web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, site speed, conversions, revenue data and so much more
• Google recently launched Google Analytics 4, its new generation of Google Analytics which offers more granular data controls, AI-powered insights, user tracking across devices

• Formerly known as ‘Google Webmasters’, this free tool provides tons of technical SEO data to website owners, including indexing status and crawling issues

• Tool offered by Google which analyses the popularity of top trending search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages
• Uses graphs to compare the search volume of different search queries over time
• Great to spot seasonality for a certain topic/keyword

8. Free SEO Chrome Extensions

Redirect Path

• HTTP status code and link redirect checker

• All-in-one SEO toolbar for meta data and other SEO checks

• All-in-one SEO toolbox
• Lets you quickly spot SEO issues by providing info on headings, HTTP status, alt text images, schema, internal links, and more

• Opens multiple URLs or searches for several words using a configured search engine, each one in a new tab

• Link analyser and broken link checker

• Email finder
• Email open and click tracking

• All-in-one SEO toolbar for SEO research on the go

• Free audit & analysis tool

• Easy data extraction and web scraping tool

• HTTP status code checker and link redirect tracing

• Web scraping made easy
• Lets you extract data out of HTML web pages and import it into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets
• Free starter subscription plan with up to 500 free page-scrape credits per month

• Pull easily information on alt text tags

• Checks webpages for broken links, and pulls metrics on those links

• All-in-one SEO toolbox to help you quickly spot SEO issues including meta data issues, internal and external links
• Lets you analyse some SEO metrics directly on SERPs and export the results in CSV format

• Extract all links on a webpage and export them to a CSV file

• Screenshot and Screen Video Recorder

• Lets you quickly and easily switch between user-agent strings
• You can also set up specific URLs that you want to spoof every time

• Structured data / rich snippets tester regardless of whether it is online, on an intranet, or behind a logged-in page
• Supports Microdata, Schema, RDFa, and JSON-LD

• All sorts of web developer tools in one place

• Youtube keyword research and Youtube SEO
• Channel audit, video velocity, avg. watch time, competitors analysis, and more!
• A free basic plan is included although with limited features. Great for people new to Youtube

• An essential tool for sites using JavaScript frameworks like Angular, ReactJS, and Vue.js
• Lets you see how the browser renders a page, not just what the server sends
• Shows how search engines see your pages, considering Google’s dynamic serving workaround

• Lets you open, copy, or bookmark multiple links at the same time
• Lets you open links as new tabs, into a new window, copy to a clipboard or saved to your bookmarks
• Auto-scroll and smartly select only the links you need on the page

• Robots.txt file inspector directly in your browser

• Real-time checks on elements including robots.txt, meta robots tag, X-robots-tag, Rel=Canonical, and UGC, Sponsored and Nofollow attribute values

9. Free WordPress SEO Plugins

Yoast SEO

Most popular SEO WordPress plugin. Some of the useful features in their free version include:

• On-page SEO analysis features (meta data length, etc.)
• Automatic creation of XML sitemap.
• Robots.txt file editor
• Noindex and canonical tags control
• Structure data
• Permalink URL controls

Rank Math

• All-in-one SEO toolbox with features that include 404 monitor, redirection manager, internal link suggestions, structure data and schema markup (up to 15 types), and much more

• Automatically add Related Posts to your entry page showing users-related content on your site

Similar tool to Yoast SEO. Some nice features include:

• .htaccess file without FTP
• Meta description autogeneration
• Robots.txt file editor
• Readability and content analysis tool
• AMP support

• Finds broken links on your website — both internal and external
• Shows you the HTTP status code (e.g., 404, 302, etc.), anchor text, and source of the link so you can quickly spot and fix the broken link

• Best tool to manage redirections in WordPress

• Cashing is key to improving performance and making your website load faster. This plugin helps you have full control of your website caching
• For most users, it will be enough to turn on their basic caching functionality to get great results

• Official Accelerate Mobile Pages (AMP) plugin for WordPress
• Helps you optimise pages for mobile web browsing and help webpages load faster

• Lets you optimize all your existing images, from any plugin, and then takes care of new image uploads automatically
• No Speed Limits and unlimited file size

• Automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https so that the entire site will move to SSL

10. Free Shopify SEO Plugins

SEO Plus

• Dynamically displays new content, for each product, each day ensuring content freshness
• Multi-language support and the content is optimized for all screen sizes
• Easy one-click install — No programming required

• All-in one SEO solution
• Unlimited image sync quota
• AutoPilot feature to fix SEO issues based on customizable rules
• Compression engine which dramatically reduces the file size of images
• Automatically add JSON-LD to your store
• Automatically optimizes the alt tag on all the images on your site
• Automatically build, maintain, and submit your store’s sitemap to Google to make sure every page is indexed and crawled by Google
• Broken link automation

• Image optimization
• Alt tags (Alt texts) and filenames Editing
• Find and fix technical SEO & speed issues
• Optimize metadata
• JSON LD with one click

• Keyword suggestions
• Google Search Console and Google Analytics integration
• Helps you to generate draft text to add to product descriptions, blog posts, and collections using AI
• Lets you see which changes to titles and descriptions had a positive effect on your traffic eliminating the guesswork
• Completely free for now as it’s in beta. In the future, they plan to offer paid pro plans with additional functionality

• Fully automated image compression and optimisation

• AI automation to generate alt-text for product images

• Generate SEO alt-tags for images automatically

• Free plan available
• Rich AMP editor with Shopify editor look and feel
• Analytics

• Keyword suggestions tool
• Your site needs to have at least 500 impressions for this plugin to work
• Google Search Console linking required

• Local business structure data for a chance to be eligible for Google’s Rich Results in SERP (including knowledge panel/graph card)
• Info to be filled in includes social media profiles, store addresses, company logo, contact information, business hours, etc.)

• Relevant posts suggestion on your Shopify blog to improve site engagement and internal linking

• Free keywords rank tracking, reporting, and analytics

11. Other Useful Free SEO Tools

Wayback Machine — Internet Archive

• One of the most essentials tool for SEOs to check how a page from your site or your competitor’s has changed over time
• Browse more than 514 billion web pages stored in their database

Trim URL Tool

• URL to root domain trimmer (in bulk!)

Conclusion

Hopefully, this extensive list of free tools is enough to prove that tools don’t necessarily have to cost you a fortune.

There might be some limited features or perhaps you won’t have the same depth and level of detail. However, if you are a freelancer or a small/medium website owner, this list might be an excellent starting point to supercharge your online visibility and boost your organic presence.