Free SEO tools have their uses, but also have a LOT of limits. You will either be limited to your own data you collect, or only a small sample of the whole data set will be available. You also will be constantly upsold, limited and pitched a paid plan.
Ugh. You DON’T have Ay-AYch-Refs or SEM-Rush? And you call yourself an “SEO”?
Pop Quiz hotshot! How much traffic is your competitor getting from Google this week? Let’s just open up our Google Search Console, and Google Analytics….
Oh, wait. That data isn’t available there!
Paid SEO Tools Cost Money Because Data Costs Money To Gather
Look. The “Ugly Truth” is that money is power. It’s the power to have someone else do things for you. In this case, some very smart people have figured out how to continually scrape Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines and collect data on where you and your competitors exist in their indices.
If you do not pay for the service/product, YOU are the product.
Either you are getting a free taste of the data, and being offered something to buy or your usage is being monitored and used (or sold). You also will constantly run into capability limits with a “friendly” push to get you to cough up some dough.
*To be fair, unless you are paying the HIGHEST Tier of paid tools, you also will likely still run into upsell limits.
Free SEO Tools ARE Actually Great! (Until They’re not)
Free SEO tools have their uses! but also have a lot of limits.
You will either be limited to your own data you collect, or only a small sample of the whole data set will be made available. Here’s some seo things you can and should do for free:
- Get basic visibility metrics from Google Search Console
- Submit Sitemaps and understand your current indexation in GSC
- See how Google is tracking your site performance and load capabilities
- Track your organic traffic and conversions in Google Analytics
- Get a crawl of your site if it’s small enough from Screaming Frog
Let’s say you’re doing seo for an Interior designer, you have these basic sets of data. You’re running blind if you’re only feeling your own pulse. You need market awareness, and quite frankly you have to pay for that data. You can get bits & pieces but to get all the competitive data, you gotta pay for it.
What Paid Tools Do you End Up Using?
I use Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, Botify, SEOarcade, Cloudflare & Content King. What tools do you end up paying for and what do you get out of it?
Articles & Resources With Lists Of Free SEO Tools
- Spyfu’s free tools for your SEO workflow
- Search Engine Journal’s free SEO tools for keyword research
- SEO clarity has explored some free tools & actually created several free SEO tools
- SEMrush actually has a limited Free account
- How about this thread by Dean Cruddace’s Cultured Digital of 4600+ free marketing tools
- Moz has a tasty list of 60+ tools
- Ahrefs has some free SEO Chrome extensions for you too
- Advanced Web Rankings has some free SEO tools of their own
- Nifty niche tool for using SEO data in Excel
