10 Must-Have Free SEO Tools for Beginners

SEO tools are necessary if you want to practice SEO.

But as necessary as they are, a lot of them are incredibly expensive.

However, there are 10 free SEO tools for beginners that I used, myself when starting my SEO journey.

These tools in addition to knowledge gave me a 313% increase in my client’s website’s organic traffic

So if you want awesome results too, read till the end. You’d love number 3

PS: every link opens in a new tab so you can easily find your way back here.

Free SEO Tools for Beginners 

1. Google Search Console 

Google Search Console is a must-have SEO tool for everyone.

It helps you measure your website’s traffic, performance, everything and anything that has to do with how Google sees your website.

And quite frankly, Google will only talk to you about your website using GSC.

On GSC, you can:

• Receive notification alerts on page indexing issues
• Submit your sitemap
• Manually submit links for indexing and crawling
• Submit links for removal
• Check backlinks
• Analyze your website page experience
• Analyze your website’s monthly performance and compare it with previous months
• See keywords that your website is getting noticed for

And so much more!

When I started my SEO journey, this was by far my most used SEO tool simply because of its high effectiveness and friendly user interface. 

See how to use GSC to conduct keyword research.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the second SEO tool every beginner SEO must-have.

Remember how I said GSC is how Google sees your website? Well GA is how you see your audience.

It gives you insights on: 

• Your audience behaviour (whether they leave immediately after checking one page or visit other pages)
• Sessions  (whether they’re viewing multiple pages and how long they spend on each page) 
• Countries your users visit your webpage from
• Lets you know your main source of traffic (organic, paid, direct, or social media)
• You can also check the last page a user visited before clicking out the website so you can understand why they left and restrategize
• Create goals that help you keep track of your milestones
• Link your Google Search Console account to your Google Analytics account for better synergy. 

When I started my SEO journey, I thought I could choose between Google Search Console and Google Analytics but I was wrong. 

And I’ve made that mistake so you don’t have to.

Google Search Console and Google Analytics are both must-haves. It’s not an either-or situation. 

3. Google Trends

Google Trends is great when targeting trendy content. Because you can tell beforehand whether a particular content will trend during a certain time.

You can filter results by different countries and different times.

You can even check as far back as 12 months and even 5 years! 

It’s a must-have when creating a content strategy.

For example, my client wanted to create content for certain countries to drive traffic from those countries to the website. 

I used Google Trends to search for trendy topics in these countries and realized that certain topics would trend in December.

I created content on these topics, published them and submitted the URLs to Google Search Console to be indexed in October (2 months earlier)

A month later (November) these blogs had 98 clicks and 5829 impressions.

By December, it had increased by 34% in clicks and 57% in impressions.

And these countries ranked among the top 5 countries of visitor origin and accounted for 83% of the blog views.

This is the power of Google Trends and I highly recommend it to every SEO newbie. 

4. Ahrefs Keyword Generator

This is a personal favourite of mine.

It’s one of the best free SEO tools every beginner should have!

When I started learning keyword research, I was exposed to a lot of free keywords research tools. 

But soon enough, I realized that these tools all gave me very different metrics. 

Different keyword tools have their measurements as to how they calculate their metrics (keyword volume and difficulty) so it is normal to find metrics from different tools that differ. 

But I wasn’t satisfied, the difference in the metrics was too great to ignore.

One tool would tell me that a keyword search volume was 200 and the difficulty was 1-2 while another would say there was literally no search volume so they couldn’t even give me an estimate for the difficulty. 

And then I discovered Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator. 

After doing my research (so you don’t have to) I found that Ahrefs free keyword generator is very reliable and reasonably accurate.

It was when I started using this free tool that I began to see significant results in my SEO campaigns. 

It’s free but there’s also a paid version.

However, the free version works really well. So if you don’t have the bucks for the paid version, stick to the free version and you’ll get great results. 

PS:  the sign up requires you to pay for one of their plans

5. Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty Checker

While I didn’t use Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty Checker so often, I still recommend it. 

I didn’t use it as much because the Keyword Generator already provides a Keyword Difficulty in addition to the volume when you search for a keyword. 

However, for extra information and details, you can check it out.

For example, on the Free Keyword Generator, Ahrefs only provides some keywords with the volume and KD but after a while, it only provides the volume.

So, if you’ve got time and are really curious, you could check for the KD using their Keyword Difficulty Checker. 

6. Google’s “People Also Ask”

Although Google’s People Also Ask isn’t a typical SEO tool, I strongly recommend it. 

I use this often when I’m searching for content ideas and keywords.

And because actual “people” also ask, it means it’s relevant content and you can get useful traffic from it. 

Being able to answer a PAA query is a good opportunity to get featured on Google Snippets and drive even more traffic to your website.

7. Check My Links Chrome Extension 

I discovered the Check my links chrome extension when I started learning link building and I must say that it’s been very helpful. 

It’s a free chrome extension that literally checks all links! 

All you have to do is open any webpage and scan it.

It’ll highlight all the valid links deep green redirecting links a lighter shade of green, warning links a lime green and then the broken or dead links are highlighted red. 

This helped my link-building strategy.

Stick around so you can learn how exactly I used this to acquire backlinks. 

8. Semrush

Semrush’s free SEO tool for beginners is awesome but of course, it’s limited.

I didn’t use this tool as much as the others simply because of preference and my job description. 

However, here are a few things you can do:

• Perform research on 10 keywords per day
• Analyze 10 competitors per day
• Track 10 keyword rankings 
• Run a free website audit
• Analyze your social media performance
• Track competitor’s social media performance.

9. Ubersuggest 

I have a love-hate relationship with Ubersuggest.

It’s a great SEO tool and just like every other SEO tool it’s limited. 

But its limitations are really limited. 

Unlike Semrush where you get up to 10 free searches daily, Ubersuggest gives only 3. 

So, if you’re going to use Ubersuggest, you better make sure those searches count because that’s all you’re getting that day. 

10. Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension 

This is my handy dandy chrome extension. 

It gives me trending keywords, long tail keywords, keywords people search for and even related keywords. 

But the metrics are hidden because it’s free.

This is however still very useful for generating useful keywords. 

These are the 10 must-have SEO tools for beginners that I recommend! 

They helped me get results and success when I first started off learning SEO and I’d love for you to have the same success and even better results.

Soon, I’ll create detailed step-by-step guides on how to use these tools, so subscribe so you’ll be notified immediately it goes live.

But if don’t want the hassle of keyword research, you can contact me and I’ll do your keyword research for you!