Looking for the best free SEO tools online?

Free SEO tools can help guide you in optimizing your website content for search engines. In turn your content will be more likely found in searches. Unfortunately the very best SEO tools are not free, and they can seem expensive depending on your perspective. Fortunately most of these premium tools offer free trials and also free basic reports for beginners. In today’s article we’ll cover some of our favorites and what you should know about each one.

You have a website and now you want to optimize your content for search engines. We can certainly help you out there at an affordable price point, but you can also do your own SEO without paying a snobby web firm thousands of dollars a month. Here at West Press we believe in empowering our customers with the knowledge and tools they need to be successful all around. If any of the terminology seems unfamiliar to you, we encourage you to check out our previous article on Search Engine Optimization Strategies.

So here’s some of the top free SEO tools online we’d like to share with you…

Yoast SEO | yoast.com

Even if you don’t have a WordPress site you can learn quite a lot about SEO knowing how this plugin works. Do you have a WordPress site? Yoast’s SEO WordPress plugin is considered one of the best out there. Sure he sells a premium version with added features, but the free version is very powerful. The plugin displays in the back-end when you are editing your posts, pages and even products. This free SEO tool grades your content and provides feedback on some of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. For example here are the areas your content is graded on based on your chosen focus keyword:

• The copy is graded in the Flesch Reading Ease test – generally the easier to read, the better.
• The plugin counts your words – 300 words is a recommended minimum.
• The keyword density – between 1% to 3% is considered optimum by most SEO experts.
• Subheadings – The focus keyword should appear in some of your subheadings in the copy.
  
• The images on the page should contain alt tags with the focus keyword.
• Focus keyword should appear in the URL for the page.
• The meta description should contain the focus keyword.
• Page title should contain the focus keyword, especially at the beginning which is considered to improve rankings.
• Page title should be between the 35 character minimum and the recommended 65 character maximum.
• Focus keyword needs to appear in the first paragraph of the copy.
• Your focus keyword should be unique for each page and not used before, diversity is key.

In the premium paid version you can grade multiple “focus keywords” at a time. After all this tool is simply a guide and you can optimize a page for multiple different keywords by just changing the focus keyword and updating your content accordingly.

SpyFu | spyfu.com

How does your website compare to the competition? Could it be made more appealing? We think this is the ultimate competitive analysis tool for SEO. SpyFu has a wonderful set of competitive research features.  Even though the extensive reporting and statistical analysis functions are paid subscriptions, the amount of free data available to the public on their website is staggering. We highly encourage you to check it out. Put in your competitor’s websites and even your own to see how you match up.

Keyword Tool | keywordtool.io

Keyword Tool helps you find the keywords that people are entering into Google, and more importantly which related keywords or phrases are more popular. The site offers incredible premium features for keyword research, but also generates up to 750 keyword suggestions for every search term in their free version. For example, the original title for this blog post was going to be Top Free SEO Tools in 2016 with the keywords being “free SEO tools”. However it turns out that 2015 is the most popular, which makes sense because there’s more data on last years search entries. Nonetheless you can see in the screenshot below that “free SEO tools online” comes second and is more practical given it’s no longer 2015…

The Pro version will give you actual numbers for search volume, cost per click (CPC) and the Google AdWords competition. For general SEO purposes the simple ranking feature is sufficient for keyword research.

Ahrefs | ahrefs.com

Ahrefs offers premium SEO tools to track your backlinks, keywords, brand mentions and know what your competitors are doing. Ahrefs offers a free 14-day trials of their Lite and Standard plans. Pay close attention if you don’t want to pay for the service after 14 days. Closer to the trial expiry date you will get a notification on the upcoming charge. From there you may either stop the trial and switch to the basic (unlisted) “Newbie plan” or continue using the service on a paid basis. So if you don’t want to be a paid subscriber make sure you downgrade to the Newbie Plan 😉

SMALL SEO TOOLS | smallseotools.com

Granted there are lots of ads on this site (everyone has to make money somehow) but there are some very powerful free SEO tools here. Among the most useful free SEO tools on this site is the Keyword Position Tool. You can enter your domain and the keywords you’d like to check your current position in the search results. we’ve found is the article spinner. The tool Everyone gets lazy now and then, and trying to come up with unique content on a daily or weekly basis can be very time consuming. considering Google is penalizing sites for duplicating/scraping content from other sites that are the originators. In addition to providing a whole host of free SEO tools, SMALL SEO TOOLS also provides detailed descriptions of how each tool works.

Thank you for reading and cheers to your online success!

If you would like to work with West Press in refining your website or SEO goals, please feel free to contact us. We are more than happy to work with you in improving your web presence.