The best free SEO resources, tools, and blogs to learn, research, and improve your rankings.
Improve your online exposure, create brand awareness, research keywords, analyze trends, increase traffic, improve domain authority, generate more leads, outperform your competition, and get more customers with our comprehensive list of free and premium SEO resources.
We have also collected a comprehensive list of the best web design resources such as graphics, fonts, blogs, frameworks, tools, utilities, and software to help you design, develop, maintain, update, and craft the perfect website.
Without more introduction, here it is, a quick reference list of the most popular SEO tools.
Free SEO Tools
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Ubbersuggest
- XML Sitemaps
- Google Trends
- Pingdom
- GTmetrix
- Google Ads
- Yoast SEO Plugin
- Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a popular SEO and marketing tool to help you track, analyze, and report your site’s traffic data, e.g., user behavior, bounce rates, traffic sources, user device, and browser type.
What can you do in Google Analytics?
- Visualize in real-time traffic sources, location, events, and conversions
- Analyze the audience’s information e.g., demographics, interest, age, gender, language
- See the device type and browser your visitors use while browsing your site
- Analyze organic, direct, social and referral traffic acquisition data
- Check webpages bounce rates, conversions, and user behavior on your site
- Check site speed, page timings, speed suggestions
- Check eCommerce product performance and conversions if you own an online store
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a great tool to help you monitor and identify issues about how your webpages are being displayed in Google search results. You can monitor, troubleshoot, repair, and fix any crawling problems with the structure of your website.
What can you do in Google Search Console:
- Confirm Google has crawled your webpages
- Request that Google recrawls URL’s
- Analyze performance and search traffic
- Inspect URL’s for possible problems
- Upload sitemaps and check security issues
- Verify structured data problems
- Receive notifications about indexing or crawling issues
- Troubleshoot issues related to mobile usability
Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) analyzes, reports, and provides suggestions related to performance on specific webpage URL’s on your website on both mobile and desktop. It’s a great tool to help you improve your site speed and overall performance.
What can you do with Google PageSpeed Insights:
- Analyze server response time
- Diagnose image performance
- Receive overall performance score (0-100)
- Inspect fonts, CSS, and JavaScript loading times
- Analyze page redirects
- Examine browser caching settings
- Explore recommendations to improve performance
Go to Google PageSpeed Insights
Ubbersuggest
Initially known as a keyword research SEO tool, Ubbersuggest has evolved to become a robust SEO platform that provides website, domain, and content analysis. This tool is fast and straightforward to use. By simply entering a domain name, keyword or term, you get a variety of data, e.g., keyword suggestions, cost per click, domain overview, and top SEO pages.
What can you do with Ubbersuggest:
- Research keywords and terms
- Receive keyword and content ideas
- Get domain score and organic keywords
- Get the number of total backlinks
- Get top SEO pages for your site
XML Sitemaps
XML-Sitemaps is an online sitemap generator tool that allows you to generate and view, download, or email sitemaps. The free version allows you to create a XML sitemap for up to 500 pages. The premium versions allow you to create XML, HTML, image, video, news, and RSS sitemaps.
A sitemap is a file on your website that provides information about the pages, images, and other file types on your website. Search engines can better understand your site when they find a sitemap file – it’s like providing a glossary of pages and assets on your website.
What can you do with XML-Sitmepap:
- Create a XML sitemap file for your website
- Create HTML, image, video, news and RSS sitemaps – Premium version
Pingdom
Pingdom is a very popular website monitoring service that provides a handy and robust tool that is commonly used among webmasters and SEO specialists to test performance and speed on websites. Just enter your domain name in the search bar, and Pingdom will analyze your website load speed by resources, eg. HTML, Javascript, CSS, Images, and redirects.
Their website monitoring service, which is a premium (paid) offering, provides real-time reporting and notifications for website status issues.
What can you do in Pingdom?
- Analyze website speed and performance
- Analyze asset load speed, eg. HTML, JavaScript, and CSS
- Retrieve website performance grade
- Analyze page size
- Check the number of server request
- Receive page performance recommendations
Perform a website speed test with Pingdom
GTmetrix
GTmetrix is a popular speed and performance tool. Just type your domain name and you will get a performance report that includes recommendations, page speed, server request, total page size, and asset loading times. You can also compare your results report with another URL and download a PDF report with recommendations.
Perform a website speed test with GTmetrix
Google Trends
Google Trends is a web service by Google that provides access to search data made by users. The data is grouped together to form an interest rank from 0 to 100, which is displayed by geographical area in any specific timeframe.
The great thing about Google Trends is that you can use it to get website content ideas and find the most trending searches related to your industry and website. You can also enter keywords and terms to get search data volume and how it has changed over time.
Overall, Google Trends is a great SEO tool that will help you decide what type of content is trending so that you can focus on writing high-quality content.
What can you do in Google Trends?
- Search term and topic trends on any given period and region
- View recently user trending searches
- Explore rising Google search queries
- Explore trends by category
- Subscribe to receive updates about trends by region
Google Ads
Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords, is a web platform made by Google that allows users to display Ads in their Network, e.g., other people’s websites, search results (SERPs.), Gmail, Google Finance, Google Maps, Google Play.
While Google Ads is mainly an advertising platform, it offers free SEO tools to help you improve your site performance organically. You can use Google Ads to discover new keywords and get search volume and forecasts.
When you are researching keywords in Google Ads, you can apply specific filters and customize your results. If you are a small business owner, filtering your search by location allows you to retrieve keyword and term ideas based on local searches in the areas you specify.
For example, if you own a steak restaurant in Chicago and want to find out how local users are searching for similar businesses. You would use the Google Ads Keyword Research tool and enter a search term that makes sense like “steak restaurants in Chicago”.
As shown in the image below, you get a list of keyword ideas along with the average monthly searches, competition, and a range of the cost per click.
Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast is a software company that specializes in SEO related products and services. They offer a wide variety of SEO software products that assist in the optimization part of your website.
The free WordPress Yoast SEO plugin is a great tool you can benefit from since it provides an easy way to optimize and configure your site and webpages individually. You can do things like add meta descriptions, add sitemaps, add social media profiles for easy sharing, and more.
If you don’t use WordPress as your website platform, you still can benefit from other services they offer and their popular blog where they write about SEO.
Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool
Use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool to quickly check if your web pages are mobile responsive, which, by now, is a significant ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.
Content Optimization Resources
Power Thesaurus
Free, fast, and comprehensive, Power Thesaurus is an online thesaurus that will help you optimize and customize content. You will find this SEO tool very helpful when writing content for your site because it provides a list of related terms, synonyms, verbs, adjectives, antonyms, expressions, definitions, and examples.
Grammarly
Powerful and easy to use, Grammarly is a writing assistant that goes beyond grammar and spelling. Grammarly is perfect for optimizing text content for your site. It offers a great way to eliminate errors and find better words to showcase your knowledge. It also provides an easy way to check for plagiarism and duplicate content on the web.
What can you do in Grammarly?
- Check grammar and spelling
- Optimize text content with better words
- Get content recommendations
- Check content for plagiarism
- Check the percentage of unique words
- Get the number of words and characters
- Get estimated reading and speaking time
Convertcase.net
A convenient online text tool that allows you to capitalize, uncapitalized, convert text from lowercase to uppercase, and it will also display character count, word count, and line count. This text tool is very handy when writing text content.
Popular SEO Blogs
Google Webmaster Blog
Google Webmaster Blog provides news, insights, and tips about the latest changes and updates to the Google search engine.
Moz Blog
One of the most popular SEO blogs out there, Moz covers tutorials, articles, and guides for all levels of expertise. Their Beginners Guide to SEO is a well-known tutorial for learning the basics of SEO.
Yoast Blog
Focused on WordPress SEO, Yoast’s Blog covers all aspects of search engine optimization such as eCommerce SEO, onsite optimization, and technical SEO.
Neil Patel SEO Blog
Neil Patel is a blogger, marketer, and SEO expert that features SEO content with a focus in small to mid-size businesses.
Backlinko Blog
Similar to the Neil Patel Blog, Backlinko offers comprehensive and detailed articles about SEO and marketing.
SemRush Blog
From PPC, SEO, eCommerce, Amazon SEO, on-site and off-site SEO, SemRush is another popular blog site that covers a wide range of topics about SEO and digital marketing.
Ahrefs Blog
Ahrefs offers a comprehensive list of well explained articles, tutorials, research, case studies, and tips about marketing and SEO.
Shopify Blog
Mainly a business type of blog, Shopify offers well-structured and informative eCommerce SEO articles where they write about online stores and product optimization.
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Land covers news, industry trends, articles, and publications about marketing and SEO.
Search Engine Journal
Search Engine Journal covers SEO and marketing related news, updates, articles, tutorials, and guides to help you improve your online presence.
Cognitive SEO
From content optimization, and site audits, to case studies and SEO related articles, Cognitive SEO is a great resource that offers high-quality blog posts.
The HOTH Blog
THEHOTH blog covers eCommerce SEO, PPC, Youtube SEO, local SEO, and technical SEO blog posts and live video series.
BigCommerce Blog
If you sell products online, you should subscribe to the Bigcommerce blog to receive regular blog posts, articles, tips, strategies, and news relates to eCommerce.
WooCommerce Blog
Another eCommerce related blog that you should add to your arsenal. They offer great information focused on online store owners using the popular WordPress and WooCommerce platform.