/FREE SEO TOOLS
FREE SEO TOOLS
THE ONES WE OPEN FIRST
A surprising share of SEO problems are visible in tools that cost nothing. This page lists the free tools our team reaches for on almost every project, what each one is genuinely good at, and the question to ask it — so you can get an honest read on your own site before you talk to anybody.
/THE TOOLS
AND WHAT EACH IS FOR
All free, all first-party or freely available, and all of them tell you something the others do not.
Google Search Console
The only source that tells you what Google actually did with your pages: what it crawled, what it indexed, what it chose not to index and why, and which queries produced impressions and clicks. Start every diagnosis here. If a page is not in the index, nothing else on this list matters yet.
Google Analytics 4
What people did after they arrived. Configured properly it answers whether the traffic you are winning is the traffic worth having. Configured carelessly it produces confident numbers that mean nothing — which is why we wrote a separate page about the setup.
GA4 setup guidePageSpeed Insights
Two things at once: a lab test of a single load, and — where enough traffic exists — real-user field data for the page and the origin. The field data is the part that matters. Read the lab score as a list of suggestions, not as a grade.
What page experience measuresRich Results Test and the Schema validator
Whether your structured data parses, and whether Google considers the page eligible for the result types you are targeting. Faster than arguing about markup, and it catches the silent failures that a schema plugin will not report.
Bing Webmaster Tools
A second, independent crawler’s opinion of your site, free, with generous diagnostics. Useful as a cross-check when Search Console says something you do not believe — and increasingly relevant now that assistants and answer engines draw on more than one index.
Google Trends
Direction and seasonality of demand, which keyword tools with fixed monthly averages hide completely. Worth ten minutes before any campaign or content plan, if only to find out that your market peaks two months before you were going to launch.
Tag Manager Preview and Tag Assistant
Whether the tags you believe are firing are firing, once, on the right event, with the right values. Most “our data is wrong” investigations end here.
A crawler with a free tier
Screaming Frog SEO Spider and comparable tools have free tiers with a crawl limit that is enough for a small site or a representative sample of a large one. This is how you find redirect chains, orphan pages, duplicate titles and broken internal links at scale.
The site itself, with JavaScript off
Not a tool, a habit. Load a key template with scripts disabled and see what survives. On a lot of modern builds, the answer explains the indexing problem immediately.
/THE ORDER
TO USE THEM IN
Running everything at once produces a list of two hundred issues and no decision. Three questions, in sequence, in order of what makes the next one pointless.
Can it be found?
Search Console first: is the page indexed, is it canonical to itself, is it reachable by internal links, does the crawler get the same HTML you do. Nothing further up the funnel matters while the answer to any of these is no.
Does it deserve to be found?
Now content and intent. Does the page answer the query someone actually typed, is that answer better than what currently ranks, and is the answer visible without three clicks. Search Console’s query report is the honest input here — it tells you what Google already thinks the page is about.
Is it pleasant to use once found?
Only now performance, layout stability and mobile behavior. These are real and worth fixing, but a fast page nobody wanted is still a page nobody wanted.
/WHAT NONE OF THEM
WILL TELL YOU
The limits are worth knowing before you conclude that everything is fine.
- What your competitors are doing. Free tools show you your own property. Competitive visibility, share of voice and gap analysis need paid data.
- The link graph at any useful scale. Search Console shows a sample of your own links and nothing about anyone else’s.
- Rank history. Average position in Search Console is an average across impressions, devices and locations — useful as a trend, misleading as a rank.
- Why traffic moved. Tools report the change. Separating an algorithm update from seasonality, from your own release, from a competitor’s, is analysis, and it is the part that takes experience rather than a subscription.
- What to do first. Every tool will hand you a prioritized list. The priorities are generic; yours depend on your margins, your catalog and your team’s capacity.
RAN THE CHECKS
AND STILL STUCK?
If you have been through the three questions above and the answer is still not obvious, that is usually where an audit earns its cost — not by finding more issues, but by telling you which two of them matter.
- SEO Audit — the structured version of the checks above
- Technical SEO — crawling, indexing, structure and performance
- What is SEO? — the fundamentals, if this page assumed too much
- All Insights — the full index of guides, tools and updates
Start your journey
Send us what the tools showed you. We will tell you what we would look at next.