20 Best SEO tools in 2024 (17 free + 3 paid)

SEO tools are an excellent helper that will save you time in gathering the important marketing data you need to make the right decisions. 

When selecting an SEO tool, you need to determine the purpose for which you will be using it. Do you need it to help you with keyword research, SEO audit or, conversely, do you need to track your search engine rankings on a regular basis? Today, there are various all-in-one SEO tools that include all these features in one.

Remember that SEO tools are your assistant in detecting errors, but they won't solve them for you. Fixing the errors is up to you.  

In this article, we've rounded up the most popular free SEO tools, as well as their paid alternatives. We have tested all of them for you and we use most of them ourselves at Marketing Miner. 

16 Best free SEO tools

All SEO tools in the list below offer a free plan as of today's date (15.2.2024), so you can use them in a limited mode. 

1. Google Search Console

Google Search Console (previously it was also called Google Webmaster Tools) is a free SEO tool that every website owner should use. As the name suggests, it is an official SEO tool directly from Google and is completely free. 

In this tool, you will get important data about your website's organic traffic as well as technical issues that a crawler encounters while crawling your site. It also includes localizations in almost all popular world languages, so there is no need to know English. 

Price: free

2. Marketing Miner

Marketing Miner is a Czech SEO tool from Filip Podstavec. If you have a limited budget and you don't want to buy multiple SEO tools, but you are looking for an all-in-one solution, then Marketing Miner is the right choice for you. 

Over 40 different features help you get bulk data on:

• Keyword research
• SEO audit
• Competitor analysis
• Rank tracking
• Brand monitoring
• Link building

Try out the individual features:  

For a description of each feature click here: https://www.marketingminer.com/en/features

Price: Minee plan free, paid plans from $13 / month

TIP: If you’re specifically looking to improve your link-building efforts, check out our guide on the best link-building tools to earn more high-quality backlinks and boost your SEO strategy.

3. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that helps you get more detailed information about your website visitors. For example, you'll learn how many visits to your site are coming, from what sources, what the demographics of your visitors are, and how they behave on your site. 

Again, this is a free tool from Google, as is the case with Google Search Console.

Price: free

4. Google Trends

Google Trends is an SEO tool that helps you find out keyword searches over time. For example, a sporting event is taking place and you want to know how much search traffic it had compared to another keyword? That's exactly what Google Trends can help you do. 

You can filter searches by a specific country or region, or view related queries. 

Historical data since 2004 is also available. 

The downside of Google Trends is that for less searched keywords, you won't see any data there. From our tests, we found that a given keyword must have at least 150 searches per month to show any data for it in Google Trends. 

Price: free

5. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a crawler that will help you with your site's technical SEO audit. The tool is geared more towards the technical users who already have some awareness of SEO. 

It doesn't work in the cloud, but it's software that needs to be downloaded to your computer. Because of this, your computing power is used when crawling data from the website and therefore a more powerful computer is required. The bigger the site you need to crawl, the more powerful the computer should be (SSD and at least 8GB of RAM is essential).  

Price: In the free versions, you can crawl 500 URLs. The paid version costs €185 per year and is unlimited.

6. Google PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights helps you find out how fast your pages are loading on desktop or mobile. It also diagnoses issues with rendering, page usability (Core Web Vitals metrics) and provides tips to improve loading speed. 

TIP: In PageSpeed Insights, you can only analyze one URL at a time. If you need to see the page speed of multiple pages at once, we recommend using our bulk page speed checker, which is linked directly to the PageSpeed Insights API. 

Price: free

7. Yoast SEO

In case your website runs on WordPress content management system, we recommend you to install the free Yoast SEO plugin that will help you set up on-page SEO factors.

This SEO tool is most commonly used for:

• Editing the title and meta description
• Yoast SEO analyzes the structure of your content and suggests adjustments to make the article more readable
• Allows you to set different headlines, titles, descriptions and images for each social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter). 

Of course, you can also customize these things in the code, but as we mentioned at the beginning, the goal of SEO tools is to make your work easier and save you time. Thanks to this, you can make these adjustments yourself, without the need for a programmer's intervention. 

Price: free, paid version from 99 € per year.

8. Shortpixel

One of the reasons why your website loads slowly can be non-optimized images (image size, big resolution, no compression). That's exactly what the Shortpixel SEO tool is here for, to take care of optimizing the size of your images. 

There is also a WordPress plugin that optimizes your images directly in WP. 

Price: free version for 100 images per month. Paid versions from $5 per month. 

9. Looker Studio

In case you work as an SEO consultant or simply need to evaluate and report your SEO activities in one place, you can use the free tool Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio). 

This tool allows you to combine data from different tools (such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics) into one and visualize it nicely to make it easier to understand for your clients. 

TIP: Marketing Miner has also a connector to Looker Studio, so you can easily visualize and report all the data from our SEO tool to your clients in Looker Studio. 

Price: free

10. Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a tool that helps you make your business more visible on Google Maps and helps you get better local SEO results. 

Google Business Profile is definitely one of the best SEO tools. If you have a shop or provide your services in a specific area, creating a business profile in GBP is a must for you. 

Price: free

11. Wayback Machine

Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) can be called as a digital archive of websites. This non-profit tool regularly crawls websites and takes screenshots of them. The more authoritative a website is, the more often the crawler will visit them and take a screenshot of them. 

So you can see what a particular site (which may not even exist anymore) looked like historically.

Screenshot of the Marketing Miner homepage from 21 Oct 2016:

Price: free

12. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a tool to help you with new content ideas. Simply type in a keyword and it will show you the articles that have been shared the most on social media in conjunction with that keyword. 

This allows you to write a similar article that has the potential to go viral on social media. 

Sample for keyword Best SEO Tools for United States: 

BuzzSumo also allows you to analyze a domain or a specific URL. This allows you to see which articles are the most popular on social networks when analyzing your competitors.

Preview for the domain marketingminer.com: 

You can see from the screenshot that our most successful article on social networks was: How to set up Google Analytics 4. 

Price: 10 free searches, paid versions from $99 per month. 

13. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner (also called Keyword Planner) is a free keyword research tool available within Google Ads. 

The disadvantage of this SEO tool is: 

• In case you don't have a larger spend, you won't see the exact keyword search volume, but only ranges. For example 100 - 1,000 or 1,000 - 10,000, etc.
• If you have already enough spend, Google Keyword Planner will show you the keyword search volume, but they contain so-called clusters. Cluster means that for similar keywords, it will show you the same search volume (e.g. for washing machine, washing machines, ytube, youtube…) and thus you don’t know search volume for the specific keyword. 
• Keyword Difficulty is given for paid ads - many people think that the Difficulty metric that Google Keyword Planner returns is for organic search. However, this is not true. It is how competitive a given keyword is in PPC (how difficult it is to show up in PPC in the first position) and not in organic SERP. 

TIP: Read this article, where you’ll learn the difference between keyword search volume in Marketing Miner (which doesn’t include clusters) and keyword search volume in Google Keyword Planner: https://www.marketingminer.com/en/blog/search-volume-without-clustering.html

The difference of these two SEO tools can be clearly seen in the table below:

Keyword search volume comparison for the US. 

Price: free

14. Google Tag Manager

In online marketing, it is very important to evaluate different data on which you can then base your decisions. But first, you need to get that data in some way. This is done by deploying various scripts (tracking codes) that collect this data (Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel...). 

This is where Google Tag Manager comes in - SEO tool that simplifies the management and addition of different tracking tags to the website without developer intervention (apart from the initial deployment of the GTM code to the site). 

Price: free

15. Pingdom SEO Tools

Similar to Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Tools allows you to measure page speed from different locations. Simply enter your site at: https://tools.pingdom.com/

Price: free

16. Similarweb

Similarweb is a tool that can help you with competitor analysis. You can get their estimated traffic, what sources that traffic comes from, and a few other analytical metrics. 

Price: free (without historical data)

17. LinkStorm

LinkStorm is a tool that helps SEO agencies and publishers optimize their internal linking strategy. It crawls and analyzes website content to get a whole picture of internal linking.

Here are its main features:

• Find internal ink opportunities
• Audit website internal links
• Fix internal link issues

Price: Freemium. Paid version starts at $30-$120 monthly.

3 Best paid SEO tools

In the list below you will find the best paid SEO tools, but some of them also have a free trial version that allows you to try the tool and then decide whether you want to continue with the paid version. 

18. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most well-known and widely used SEO tool and provides very high quality data on keywords and backlinks. 

We recommend it to more advanced SEOs or agencies, as it is not exactly cheap and you need to already have some knowledge in search engine optimization to use its full potential.

TIP: If you need to get backlink data from Ahrefs in bulk, you can link Ahrefs with Marketing Miner. 

Price: From 59 €. Doesn’t provide a trial version to try out.

19. Semrush

Semrush, like Ahrefs, is also one of the most widely used SEO tool globally, but has recently branched out into other sectors of online marketing. 

Thus, in their all-in-one toolset you will find various features that will help you not only with SEO but also with PPC or social media management.

The downside can again be the price and the large number of features, which can be messy when you first use the tool and you may never even use them. 

Price: $120 per month or a 7-day trial. 

20. Moz 

MOZ, along with Ahrefs and Semrush, is one of the top three most used SEO tools globally. It is one of the oldest SEO tools on the market. 

Also, it is an all-in-one tool, so it includes features for every area of search engine optimization: 

• SEO audit
• Rank tracking
• Backlink checker
• Keyword research

Price: $99 per month or 30 day trial 

Table of the best SEO tools and their features

Conclusion - what is the best SEO tool on the market?

I strongly hope that our list of the best SEO tools has helped you at least a little bit in deciding which tool to reach for. If you'd like to know more detailed information about a particular tool or need help choosing one, feel free to drop us a line on our live chat and we'll be happy to advise you :)