One of the most common mistakes people make when starting out with SEO is purchasing software before they understand the goals they or trying to achieve, or the problems they want to solve.
Think of it like buying a full set of mechanics’ tools before you’ve even diagnosed what’s wrong with the car. You might end up with a hefty subscription to Semrush or Ahrefs (both great options in the right case) and still have no idea why your website isn’t getting traffic because the tools were never the issue.
The truth is, Google and Microsoft give away an extraordinary amount of diagnostic and research capability for free. This isn’t third parties charging you tens or hundreds a month, but actual first-party data. Most businesses, especially those just getting started with SEO, can get months of meaningful work done without paying for anything. This is especially useful if you are bootstrapping your SEO.
Here’s a breakdown of the best free SEO tools available, what each one actually does, and when you should be using them.
1. Google Search Console
If you only use one tool from this entire list, make it this one.
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free platform from Google that shows you how your website is performing in Google Search. It tells you which queries are driving impressions and clicks, which pages are indexed, and whether Google is encountering any technical issues crawling your site.
Key things you can do with it:
- See what keywords you’re ranking for: including queries you might not have intentionally targeted
- Monitor index coverage: find out if any pages are being excluded from Google’s index and why
- Submit sitemaps: tell Google about your site structure so it crawls you more efficiently
- Request indexing: push newly published or updated pages to Google’s attention faster
- Check Core Web Vitals: Google’s page experience signals (loading speed, interactivity, layout stability) are reported here
- Identify manual actions: if Google has penalised your site for a policy violation, you’ll see it here
GSC is not a keyword research tool, it shows you performance data for your existing rankings. But once your site has traffic, it becomes indispensable for identifying opportunities, diagnosing drops, and understanding what’s actually driving visits.
Best for: Monitoring Google Search performance, diagnosing indexing issues, understanding which content is working
2. Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing holds a small but meaningful share of search traffic (around 3–5% globally) and higher in certain markets and demographics. It’s worth not ignoring it entirely.
Bing Webmaster Tools (BWS) functions similarly to Google Search Console: it lets you verify your site, submit sitemaps, monitor crawl activity, and see keyword performance data within Bing Search.
But BWS has an extremely underrated feature Backlinks Monitoring. Unlike GSC, you can put your website in to see backlinks that Bing recognises are worth value. Even better you can compare it with up to 2 different competitors at one time.
This is similar to third-party tools, but again they are basing their info on made-up metrics while this is from the source. You can quickly see where you have gaps with referring domains, formulate plans to close this gap and monitor your efforts.
Another feature is their SEO analyser, which audits your pages for on-page SEO issues and gives actionable recommendations. It’s free, it’s built-in, and it covers things like missing meta descriptions, duplicate title tags, and thin content.
Finally, they also show have AI Performance. A lot of brands want to know how well they are performing across different LLMs, both from mentions and citations. BWS shows a picture of this from “Microsoft Copilots and Partners” showing total citations and average cited pages. We are in the wild west at the moment with a lot of tools claiming they can track GEO, AEO but they don’t have actual info direct from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other other LLMs to determine this. Not to mention how expensive they are well
After setting up Google Search Console, adding Bing Webmaster Tools takes about 10 minutes and costs nothing. There’s no good reason not to.
Best for: Backlink monitoring, Bing search visibility and AI performance
3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog is a desktop-based website crawler and is one of the most trusted tools in the SEO world. The free version lets you crawl up to 500 URLs, which is more than enough for most small to medium-sized websites.
What it crawls and reports on:
- Broken links (404 errors): find internal and external links pointing to dead pages
- Redirect chains: identify unnecessary multi-hop redirects that slow things down
- Missing or duplicate meta titles and descriptions
- Missing or duplicate H1 headings
- Images without alt text
- Pages blocked by robots.txt or noindex tags
- Thin or duplicate content: based on word count and content similarity
For anyone working on a WordPress site (or any CMS) running a Screaming Frog crawl is one of the most efficient ways to get a technical SEO snapshot. It surfaces issues that would otherwise take hours to find manually.
The paid version (£259/year) removes the 500 URL cap and adds features like Google Analytics integration and site structure visualisation. But for most sites just starting out, the free tier is plenty.
Best for: Technical SEO audits, finding broken links and redirect issues, on-page element checks.
4. Google Analytics (GA4)
Google Analytics 4 is Google’s free web analytics platform. Where Search Console tells you about performance within Google Search, GA4 tells you what happens after someone arrives on your site.
With GA4 you can:
- Track traffic volume and sources (organic, direct, paid, referral, social)
- See which pages get the most engagement
- Monitor bounce rates and average session duration
- Set up conversion events (form submissions, phone clicks, purchases)
- Build audience segments for remarketing
GA4 has a steeper learning curve than its predecessor (Universal Analytics), but it’s the standard now and worth getting familiar with early. The data it collects from day one will become valuable as your site grows you can’t go back and recover historical data you never tracked.
Connect it with Google Search Console to bring search performance data into the same reporting interface. While GSC shows how people land on your site, GA4 shows how people migrate through your website, where you are converting and where you’re losing out on customers. You can argue it’s not really SEO but it is closely connected.
Best for: Understanding what visitors do on your site, measuring conversions, tracking traffic sources.
5. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is part of Google Ads and is designed for paid search campaigns but it’s widely used by SEOs for keyword research, and it’s completely free to access (you’ll need a Google Ads account, but you don’t need to run any ads).
What it offers:
- Search volume data: monthly average search volumes for any keyword
- Keyword ideas: related terms and variations based on a seed keyword or URL
- Competition and bid estimates: these reflect the paid search landscape, but high competition often correlates with commercial intent
- Seasonal trends: see how search volume fluctuates month by month
The main limitation is that free accounts often see volume data in broad ranges (e.g. “1K–10K” rather than an exact number). Despite that, it’s still one of the most reliable sources of keyword data available, given that it comes directly from Google.
Best for: Keyword research, validating search demand, identifying seasonal patterns.
6. Google Trends
Google Keyword Planner tells you how often something is searched. Google Trends tells you whether interest is growing or declining and that distinction matters.
Trends doesn’t show absolute search volumes, but it shows relative interest over time and across regions. This makes it useful for:
- Validating a content idea: before investing time in it determine if it is the topic trending up or flatlining?
- Identifying seasonal peaks: useful for planning content calendars around predictable demand spikes
- Comparing topics: you can overlay multiple terms to see which has more momentum
- Spotting emerging topics:”related queries” and “related topics” sections often surface rising terms before they appear in keyword tools
For example, if you’re in the healthcare space and considering a content push around a specific procedure or condition, Trends can tell you whether patient interest is growing, stable, or waning.
Best for: Topic research, seasonal planning, validating content strategy direction.
7. Google Search
It sounds obvious, but a lot of people overlook the most direct research tool available: just searching Google.
Opening an incognito window and searching your target keywords tells you immediately who you’re competing against, what kind of content is ranking, and where you currently sit relative to them once your site has some traction. Incognito strips out your browsing history and personalisation, so you get a cleaner picture of what the average searcher sees.
Beyond rankings, pay attention to the People Also Ask (PAA) boxes that appear in most search results. These are questions Google has identified as closely related to the search and are pulled directly from real search behaviour. Each one represents a specific query someone typed, which means each one is a potential content opportunity.
If you’re planning a blog post or a service page, scanning the PAA boxes for your main keyword is one of the fastest ways to understand what angle to take, what sub-topics to cover, and what questions to answer within the content. Addressing these directly with a clear, concise answer near the top of a relevant page also increases your chances of appearing in those boxes yourself.
The same logic applies to the autocomplete suggestions that appear as you type in the search bar, and the related searches at the bottom of the results page. These are all signals Google is giving you for free about how people actually search for your topic.
No account required. No subscription. Just search.
Best for: Understanding the competitive landscape, identifying content angles, spotting People Also Ask opportunities.
Other Useful Free Tools Worth Knowing
Ahrefs Free Tools: Ahrefs offers a limited free tier and several standalone free tools, including a backlink checker, a broken link checker, and a SERP position checker. Useful for spot-checking without committing to a subscription.
Semrush Free Plan: Semrush’s free plan gives you 10 queries per day across their keyword and domain analysis tools. It’s restrictive, but useful for occasional competitive research if you’re not ready to pay.
Chrome DevTools: Built into Google Chrome. Used by developers, but useful for SEOs to inspect page structure, check schema markup, and diagnose rendering issues.
A Note for WordPress Users: What SEO Plugins Actually Do
If your website runs on WordPress, you’ve probably heard of Rank Math, Yoast SEO, SEOPress, and AIOSEO. These are all popular WordPress plugins, and they all do essentially the same thing: help you manage on-page SEO elements and technical SEO settings from within your WordPress dashboard.
They’re genuinely useful for:
- Setting meta titles and descriptions for each page and post
- Generating XML sitemaps automatically
- Controlling robots.txt settings
- Adding schema markup
- Managing canonical tags
- Checking on-page readability and keyword usage
But there’s a critical misconception worth clearing up: no WordPress SEO plugin will rank your website.
Rank Math’s green score, Yoast’s traffic lights, AIOSEO’s page score are indicators of on-page optimisation, not ranking predictors. A page can score 100/100 on any of these tools and still rank nowhere if the site lacks authority.
Don’t get fooled by scores as well from paid tools like Ahrefs and Semrush as well. Again, these are third party vanity metrics search engines and AI does not pay attention to. Same goes for Google PageSpeed Insights. (PSI) Yes, it’s important for your website to low quick as this provides a better user experience. You don’t want people to jump off your website if it takes 4 seconds to load. You should test your page load performance and Core Web Vitals against Google’s benchmarks. Flags specific issues like render-blocking scripts, unoptimised images, and poor server response times. Don’t mistake this for ranking thought. Having a 100/100 score on PSI will not rank you higher than a competitor with higher authority.
Ranking comes from something no plugin can give you: backlinks from other high-quality websites that signal to Google or Bing your site is worth trusting. That’s the work that actually makes you rank higher.
Use an SEO plugin to manage the technical housekeeping. But don’t confuse that with SEO strategy.
When Should You Pay for SEO Tools?
Paid tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz are genuinely powerful. They give you deeper keyword data, full backlink analysis, rank tracking, and competitive intelligence at a scale the free alternatives can’t match. Here are PrimaryRush, we use these tools.
But they make sense once you have a clear strategy, know what you’re trying to measure, and have enough site activity to make the data meaningful. Paying hundreds of dollars or euro a month for tools you don’t yet know how to act on is a fast way to burn budget without seeing results.
Start with the free tools. Get familiar with how your site performs in Google Search Console. Learn what your target keywords are. Run a Screaming Frog crawl and fix the obvious issues. Track your traffic in GA4.
Once the free tools start feeling limiting, for example you ou find yourself wanting deeper competitor data, bulk rank tracking, or full backlink analysis that’s the signal to start evaluating paid options. This also include when you want to track SERPs daily. You can export data from these tools in a spreadsheet and track that way but it can be time consuming.
The tools don’t do the SEO. They show you where to focus. And for a long time, free tools are more than enough to guide that focus effectively.