Free SEO Tools That Work: A $0 Stack by Job

The free stack, by job

Most small sites don’t need a paid SEO suite yet. They need five free tools used in the right order.

Job	Free tool	What it answers
See what Google already shows you for	Google Search Console	Which queries and pages earn impressions, and at what position
See what visitors do after the click	GA4	Which pages get read and which channels send them
Find broken links, redirects, bad titles	Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs)	What’s technically wrong on your own site
See your backlinks and site health	Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free for sites you verify)	Who links to you and what an audit flags
Check speed and Core Web Vitals	PageSpeed Insights	Which pages fail on mobile and why
Get keyword ideas	Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends	Rough volume and direction
Get indexed in Bing and Copilot	Bing Webmaster Tools	Whether the other search engine can see you

Connect Search Console and Bing first. Both are free, and both only start collecting history once you verify the site, so every week you wait is data you never get back.

Step 1: Start from Search Console, not a keyword tool

A keyword tool tells you what people search for. Search Console tells you what Google already associates with your site, which is a much shorter and more useful list.

1. Open Performance, set the range to the last three months, and sort queries by impressions.
2. Filter to average position between 8 and 20. These are pages Google already likes and hasn’t promoted yet.
3. Write down the ten queries with the most impressions.
4. For each one, open the page that ranks and check whether the title and first paragraph answer that exact query.

Rewriting a title for a query you already rank for beats writing a new post for a query you don’t. I walk through the position 8-20 cases in how to fix pages stuck on page two.

Step 2: Audit your own site with Screaming Frog

The free version crawls 500 URLs, which is the whole site for most small businesses. Run it once and look at four tabs:

1. Response Codes. Anything returning a 404 or a redirect chain.
2. Page Titles. Missing, duplicate, or longer than about 60 characters.
3. H1. Pages with none, or with more than one.
4. Meta Description. Missing, duplicate, or longer than about 160 characters.

Export each tab and fix the largest group first. On this site, an Ahrefs audit in August 2026 flagged 2,909 over-length titles and 4,301 over-length descriptions across roughly 5,000 posts. Nobody finds that by hand, and a crawl finds it in minutes.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives you a scheduled version of the same audit for any site you own, plus your backlink list. Use Screaming Frog when you want to inspect a specific problem, and Ahrefs when you want something that re-checks itself weekly.

Step 3: Check speed where it affects rankings

Paste your three most important URLs into PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile results. Ignore the overall score. Look at the Core Web Vitals assessment: LCP, INP and CLS. If a page fails one of them, the report names the element responsible. Fix that element, then re-test. I cover the two most common failures in fixing LCP and fixing CLS.

Step 4: Use the free keyword sources honestly

Google Keyword Planner needs a Google Ads account, but you don’t have to run a campaign to use it. It gives volume in wide ranges, not exact numbers, so treat it as a way to compare two topics rather than to forecast traffic. Google Trends tells you whether a topic is rising or fading, and it’s the fastest way to avoid writing about something in decline.

Two more free sources are better than either: the “People also ask” box on a results page, and the autocomplete suggestions for your seed term. Both come from real searches. Copy the questions, group them, and answer each one under its own heading. That structure is also what AI assistants quote, which brings up the one area where free tools are thin.

Step 5: Check AI visibility by hand

Dedicated AI-visibility trackers are paid. The free version takes twenty minutes:

1. List ten questions your buyers ask before they hire or buy.
2. Ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode.
3. Record whether your brand is named, whether your site is cited, and who is cited instead.
4. Repeat monthly in the same spreadsheet.

That’s enough to know whether you have a problem. When you need it daily and across hundreds of prompts, that’s when a paid tracker earns its price.

When paying finally makes sense

Pay when a specific limit blocks a specific decision. Three examples:

1. You publish more than a few posts a month and keep guessing at keywords. A keyword tool such as Semrush shows difficulty and competitor gaps that Keyword Planner hides.
2. You write to rank against pages that already win. An on-page tool such as Surfer shows which terms the top results share, so you stop eyeballing it.
3. You manage more than one site. Pulling Search Console, GA4 and ads into one place by hand gets old quickly. I built SiteWide MCP for that, so I can ask Claude for the numbers instead of opening five dashboards.

Buy one tool per job, and don’t buy two suites that answer the same question. My longer comparison of paid options is in the best SEO tools by job, and the keyword workflow is in the keyword research guide.

Disclosure: the Semrush and Surfer links are affiliate links. I earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you.

FAQ

What is the best free SEO tool?

Google Search Console. It’s the only tool that shows what Google itself reports about your site, and everything else is a model of that data.

Can I do SEO with only free tools?

Yes, for a site under a few hundred pages. The gaps are competitor keyword data and automated rank tracking. Neither blocks you until you’re publishing at volume.

Is Screaming Frog really free?

The free version is limited to 500 URLs per crawl. It has no time limit, so it’s enough for a small business site.

Do I need a different tool for AI search?

You can start without one. Run the twenty-minute manual check above and decide from the result.