In general, SEO software with high-quality guidelines costs between EUR 100.00 and EUR 500.00 per month, depending on the package booked and additional functions. But don’t worry: SEO doesn’t have to be expensive. In our provider comparison, we have therefore also provided you with a selection of free SEO tools that you can use to become a real search engine optimization specialist. In this blog, you’ll find the list of the best SEO tools to use in 2023.
Top 7 Free SEO Tools
You can all use the placement tools presented here free of charge. Some also offer you a paid version with more functions. We’ve taken a closer look at some of the best providers of these tools to show you how you can put them to good use in your SEO strategy. And here we go:
1. HubSpot Website Grader
Simply enter your website’s URL into HubSpot’s Website Grader, and the tool will provide you with an automated report of your SEO efforts. You can also sign up for a free SEO course from HubSpot Academy. There you will learn, among other things, how to improve the SEO and user experience (UX) of your website and become a real SEO specialist.
These are the highlights at a glance:
| Highlight | Description |
|---|---|
| Website Optimization | Learn more about your website’s load time and performance in seconds. Identify specific performance issues and get clear, actionable feedback on how to fix the issues. |
| On-Demand-Support | Enjoy free access to a HubSpot Academy course. In five website optimization lessons, you will learn, among other things, how to improve the specific problem areas of your website. |
| Optimization for mobile devices | Find out how to qualitatively optimize your website for mobile devices. |
| Increase web security | Learn how to implement best practices for your website security. |
| Improve user experience | Personalize the UX and optimize the headlines and page structure of your website to create a pleasant experience for your users. |
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console has a number of useful tools to help you appear in the SERPs for the exact search terms and phrases your target audience is searching for.
You can use Google Search Console to monitor, debug, and optimize your website — and don’t worry, you don’t need to have in-depth programming knowledge to take advantage of this tool. In the following article, we will show you how you can use the Google Search Console optimally in just a few simple steps: How to: Set up the Google Search Console.
Here are the highlights of the Google Search Console at a glance:
| Highlight | Description |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Learn about the hierarchy of individual keywords that your website is currently ranking for in search engines. |
| crawl error | Identify potential crawl errors that exist on your site. |
| Optimization for mobile devices | Find out how mobile-friendly your site’s page structure is and discover new ways to improve the mobile experience for your users. |
| Analytics and Metrics | Get site-related metrics and crawled results that matter most to you, like clicks, likes, or average click-through rate (CTR). |
| URL Inspection Tool | These tools will show you if specific directives like no index tags on a specific page or link are recognized. |
3. Google Analytics
Although there is also a paid version of Google Analytics, the free version of the product offers you almost everything to help you manage your website’s SEO with its comprehensive capabilities. This is especially true if you should use Google Tag Manager in connection with Google Analytics. In this way, all of your website’s SEO data is crawled and prepared in a way that is easy to read.
In the form of clear reports, Google Analytics can reveal the individual optimization potentials of your website. Curious? Here’s an easy-to-follow step-by-step guide: Setting Up Google Analytics: A Beginner’s Guide.
These are just a few of the highlights that Google Analytics offers you:
| Highlight | Description |
|---|---|
| Compare your website traffic | Know where your visitors are coming from – and optimize those channels to increase traffic. |
| Demographic and geographic results | Find out where your visitors can be located geographically and which demographic insights you can use for search engine optimization. |
| Conversion rate | Determines the conversion rate of visitors from different channels. |
4. Internet Marketing Ninjas
Internet Marketing Ninjas is an SEO-focused company with a variety of free tools to help you compare your website to your competitors, optimize webpages for specific keywords, generate meta tags, and increase organic traffic to your website.
Here we have summarized the individual highlights for you:
| Highlight | Description |
| Broken links tool | Detect broken links, potential error pages, and redirects and use the site crawling feature to create an XML sitemap of your site. |
| Onpage optimizer | Provides you with a check for your website content to evaluate the page structure, your page titles, meta information, and internal links. |
| Side-by-side comparison | Compare your website’s SEO score to that of a competitor. |
| Load time check | Analysis of loading time and how long it takes for each component of your website to be fully displayed. |
5. Bing Webmaster
The Microsoft Bing Webmaster gives you access to many tools that give you important insights for the search engine optimization of your website: These include in particular the criteria of the reporting, diagnosis, and SEO tools. The SEO tools help you analyze your website, manage backlinks and check keywords. This allows you to ensure that your site is optimized for organic search.
Here is an overview of the most important highlights of the Microsoft Bing Webmaster:
| Highlight | Description |
|---|---|
| Backlink Profile Tool | Learn about your backlink profile to understand referring pages, domains, and anchor links. |
| keyword research | Learn what keywords your target audience is searching for. |
| The website scan function | Crawls your website and identifies technical SEO errors. |
6. Seobility
Seobility is a free SEO checker tool. By simply entering the URL, your website will be analyzed and you will receive numerous tips on how to optimize your website.
In addition to a detailed SEO audit of your website, you get access to email reports and notifications as well as handy keyword monitoring.
Do you want to know which highlights Seobility offers you? Here is a selection:
| Highlight | Description |
|---|---|
| Technical error tool | Quick and easy: fix on-page SEO issues. This way you can prevent future traffic drops due to potential error pages. |
| Accurate SEO assessment | Get an SEO score that takes into account various website factors including meta information, page quality, link structures, and more. |
| optimization potential | Identify areas of improvement related to your page speed, page quality, and readability. |
| Fixed server errors | Analyze specific server errors related to redirects, indexing, and source code of HTTP headers or CSS and Javascript files. |
7. Search
Seorch not only impresses with the tempting zero tariffs: Among the free SEO tools, Seorch offers you the most comprehensive software for your search engine optimization and has both an on-page tool and a search engine crawler ready for you. The tool crawls up to 500 sub-pages of a website to check for potential errors. The results and errors are displayed in a clear display.
Do you want to know which highlights Seorch offers you? Here is a selection:
| Highlight | Description |
|---|---|
| Compare-Feature | Determines the hierarchy of several ranking pages for a keyword |
| Ranking-Check-Tool | Examines the hierarchy of individual keywords for the search engines. |
| Overview of elementary SEO and ranking factors | Makes search engine optimization easier for newcomers and offers numerous tips on how to optimize ranking factors. |
What is the Best Free SEO Software?
Which SEO provider is best for you depends entirely on which features are most important to you as a website operator for your business.
Because each of the tools featured here offers you its own unique uses and benefits, you should consider multiple tools in your SEO strategy.
For example, you can run your website through three or four crawlers, examine your pages with on-page and off-page checkers, or optimize the content quality and UX of your website’s page structure. The means of your choice should always be a combination of several SEO providers.
Top 3 paid SEO tools
Next, let’s look at some paid SEO providers. The list of tools presented here also includes some that offer you a free trial period. Some tools also offer you completely free versions of their tools with limited functionality.
1. Searchmetrics
Among the SEO providers presented here, Searchmetrics offers you the most comprehensive service package for your web projects. There are three levels of Searchmetrics: At EUR 69.00, the basic version is relatively cheap, but also quite limited. For smaller website operators, this inexpensive version still offers almost everything you need. At EUR 149.00, Essentials Pro is almost twice as expensive as the cheaper version but differs only slightly from it. With the third variant, the Searchmetrics Suite, you can commission the provider to create a package for your individual needs.
An important part of Searchmetrics is the Research Cloud, which contains the largest database of SEO tools in the world. Particularly practical: In addition to analyzing your own web projects, the Research Cloud also evaluates the content of your competitors.
Advantages
World’s largest database Exclusively own data acquisition Large range of functions Personal customer advisor Fast reaction to changes and trends Free demo test, then from 69 EUR/month
Disadvantages
Training necessary Few explanations in the software Analyzes only on the domain level
2. Sistrix
Sistrix is characterized by a user-friendly dashboard that you can use easily and intuitively. It gives you a quick overview of the organic performance of each page and has its own keyword database.
Is Sistrix worth it for you? Decide for yourself:
Advantages
Extremely user-friendly Large range of functions Good support 14 days free trial membership, then 100.00 EUR/month
Disadvantages
Sistrix requires its users to have a certain basic knowledge of SEO Can overwhelm beginners
3. SEMrush
SEMrush ‘s toolkit allows you to track your website’s visibility over time and see what keywords and page titles it ranks for. Although the provider also offers paid packages, you can already achieve a lot with the free tools.
Advantages
Easy to use Concrete traffic value Quick KPI overview Strong ads expertise Free tutorials 14-day free trial membership, $99.95/month thereafter
Disadvantages
German translation is partly poor No support option in German
The top 3 SEO providers in comparison
For this comparison, our top 3 SEO tools were examined: Searchmetrics, SEMrush, and Sistrix all offer you extensive all-in-one solutions. Nevertheless, each tool comes up with its individual strengths and weaknesses. Here is the comparison table:
| Searchmetrics | SEMrush | Sistrix | |
|---|---|---|---|
| scope of services | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| user rating | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| user-friendliness | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Support / Customer Care | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Price-performance ratio | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| On-page / off-page optimization | And | And | And |
| Keywords | And | And | And |
| Content | And | no | no |
| Preis | from EUR 69.00 per month. | starting at $99.95 monthly. | from EUR 100.00 per month. |
| website | Searchmetrics | SEMrush | Sistrix |
Conclusion
Some of the free SEO providers featured here also offer you paid versions – while some of the paid tools also offer you free options with limited functionality.
We, therefore, recommend that you first test the individual tools and then, if necessary, check the prices of the individual providers that are suitable for you. This is the best way for you to determine which provider is best suited to your search engine optimization criteria.