The best free SEO tools for 2022
In SEO, there is no such thing as too much information. Whether you are investigating a specific page, contemplating a new keyword strategy, or planning an outreach campaign, there are always many angles to look at.
As much as paid tools are awesome and helpful, you don’t always have to spend money for gaining good insights or, more likely, to help us minimise some of the more manual tasks of the job.
As such, we wanted to put together a handy list of our top favourite free tools for on-page SEO, technical, outreach, general learning and some handy chrome plugins.
Free on-page SEO Tools
- Find keywords with Google Keyword Planner
Keyword Planner is one of the most popular tools for discovering keywords as well as getting search volumes. With its local feature, you can easily look up volumes in different countries and cities, which is helpful for targeted campaigns.
Top tip: Since this tool is designed primarily for PPC, it only gives a range for search volumes per month, which are fairly broad. To see more accurate search volumes, simply add the keyword to your “Plan” and check out the monthly impression – this number is going to be more accurate than the initial range.
- See ‘People Also Ask’ questions with Answer The Public
Answer The Public is an incredibly useful tool for FAQ and subtopic research. With the ability to see all questions relating to the main query, you can quickly gauge the sub-topics that people are most interested in around a topic.
- Check for duplicate content with Copyscape
Duplicate content is always a source of headache, whether it’s caused by similar pages on the same site or other publications using an exact copy of your content. This tool scans the web for you, highlighting any sites that have the same information as yours.
- Create beautiful designs for your on-page copy with Whimsical
Allowing you to create wireframes for both desktop and mobile, this handy tool helps envision and communicate design ideas with great ease. You can also use it to create various other things like mind maps, flow charts and other projects.
Free technical SEO Tools
- Page speed checks with Google Page Speed Insights
Check the page speed for both desktop and mobile for any webpage of your site. The tool will give you a score and a handful of suggested improvements, highlighting the most important and urgent ones to fix.
The limitation of the tool is that you can only check one page at a time – start with the home page and work through your main pages, the issues will likely be the same across the whole site.
- Crawl your site with Screaming Frog
If you have a smaller site, or you just want to crawl a certain section of your site, crawls under 500 URLs are free on Screaming Frog. Discover broken links, analyse meta titles in bulk, check for larges images that slow down your page and much more.
- Check the CMS of a site with Builtwith
See what a site is built with in order to know what is achievable, or spy on your competitors.
- Compress large images with Tiny PNG
Improve your website speed with a simple trick of compressing hand reuploading heavy images.
A staple for any multilingual site, this tool allows for bulk checking hreflang tags and lets you know about any issues across the site.
Free tools for link building
- Find and validate email addresses with Hunter
One of the most accurate free email address-finder out there, it can be installed as a plugin for chrome making the process of finding email addresses for a particular website quick and easy.
- See journalist enquiries on a range of topics with Help a Reporter Out
Sing up for custom alerts or dig through the daily reporter requests, you can simply find a topic that is relevant for you and write a response in the hope that your answer (and website) gets featured.
Free training tools
- Get certified with Google Certification courses – Grow with Google
Learn the ins and outs of Google Analytics, Search Console, writing content and promoting your site. Best of all, you can earn a free certificate too.
- Learn the tricks of the trade with SEMRush Academy
With courses from industry leaders on a range of SEO, PPC and paid social topics, you can quickly learn everything you need to know to get started in the field.
- Watch the most interesting talks online at Brighton SEO
If there is one good thing that came out of the pandemic, that’s having Brighton SEO move their conferences online – now you can watch presentations and talks on the hottest topics of the SEO industry from industry experts from the comfort of your home (or perhaps your work desk). It’s free, as long as you join the talks as they happen.
