How much money do you spend per month on SEO tools and monthly services? Backlink checkers, hosting, proxies, the list goes on and on. Now there are plenty of posts out there listing the paid tools but not so many listing all the cool free stuff that’s available.
And after doing SEO for a longggggg time, it turns out that there are some pretty handy tools you’ll discover and they won’t cost you a dime. This list is a compilation of everything that we (SEOs) use to get the job done without spending a dollar, all found by hustle. So next time you’re about to throw a buck to that bum on the corner, write the URL for this post down on a piece of paper and give that to him instead.
Contents
Keywords
Google Keyword Planner – The trusty keyword planner, formerly the “keyword tool”. This is where you get the search volume bros.
Google Trends – Hang out with the cool kids and follow the latest trends.
SEMrush – Yes it’s paid but we can still get some insights here. The organic keyword positions graph is incredibly revealing and can give you some serious insights without even looking at the site or analytics. They limit the amount of keyword returned but you can sort from high to low and see the top ones.
Keywordtool.io – This guy will give you some keyword suggestions appending your root keyword with a-z, just like Scrapebox but since we’re on zero budget this will do.
Ubersuggest – Another clutch free suggestion tool, gets the job done as well.
Backlinks
Bulkdachecker – Had this beast in the browser bookmarkelts for a while now, hopefully this post doesn’t crash the damn thing. Free DA folks, 200 URLs at a time, please click this dude’s ads.
Majestic SEO – Now both of the main backlink checkers are going to be asking for your credit card real quick, but you get on run and a partial view of the data. Use a proxy to check multiple URLs.
Ahrefs – Same gig as majestic with free uses, but I really like the anchor cloud the show.
Yup that’s neg SEO, oh no!
Productivity
Dropbox – Oh Dropbox how you make my life easier. Have multiple computers? Work on joint ventures? Have clients? The list goes on, dropbox is my go to, also remember that you can create multiple accounts for different computers and share them with each other. You can also try to game the free space a bit by referring some bogey signups.
Lastpass – Get ready to pull the tin foil hat out you tin foil hat wearers, it’s a password manager that stores all your passwords conveniently in one location. For some people this might be a scary thought, let it go and start using lastpass, you’ll thank me when your nose is no longer in a password spreadsheet every ten minutes.
Evernote – If you’re not using evernote then start, no self respecting internet marketer or SEO can manage all this craziness in our heads, Evernote should be your go-to for planning, to-dos, and other references. This breaks the rules of this post but the premium version of Evernote which is a few bucks per month allows you to edit notes jointly with other users and avoid Google docs which is ideal.
IFTTT – If this, then that. Catchy right? Now the possibilities of this tool are so endless that it overwhelms most people into not using it, myself included. For example, you could seutp a recipe for automatically tweeting a blog post after publishing.
Thunderbird – Similar to using a spreadsheet for managing passwords, manually logging into multiple email accounts is for noobs. Thankfully my boy Robert opened my eyes to this about a year ago and now I’m a email boss.
Skype – Yup Skype, redundant mention for most but come on, it’s free and such a crucial part of our operations. You can also be on the other end of a call in full neck beard and everyone will think you’re a pro.
Google Docs – It’s…get ready for it…keyword…**GOOGLE** docs, try not to scheme about gaming their search engine on here, regardless of the hat color you think the strategy is.
Gmail – See the above and use a different free email provider.
Development
WordPress – Duh.
Yoast SEO – Yoast is the best around, run it here and on countless money sites. Offers practically every options you’ll ever need and more importantly it’s 100% free, you just have to ignore Joost’s expert cartoon animations of him flexing like an SEO superman.
httpstatus.io – So now that we all know this HTTPS ranking factor thing is complete bullshit we’re still gonna have a-holes out there who read the first round of trash pushing SSL wanting it installed. You can check a list of redirects with this tool. Thanks to Anthony Nelson for the suggestion.
Pingdom – Run this fancy test on client sites and make them think you know what you’re doing. Then tell them page speed is an important ranking factor since you’re probably not that good at building links.
Google Rich snippet tool – For testing markup and also looking smart with clients, see your schema markup is fixed Mr. client sir.
Everything Else
Hidemyass – While this tool is a piece of shit more or less it sort of gets the job done. Compared to other free proxies out there, it’s the best of the worst that I know of.
SEObook rank tracker – Some fancy free rank tracker from that Aaron Wall dude, only thing is it’s running on your own connection so you’ll likely need to proxy up for checking lots of ranks.
Copyscape – The premium version of Copyscape is what you really need for checking your spam content for uniqueness but the free version will have to do.
Knowem – If you’re into that whole branding thing then you might want consistent handles throughout the main social channels, ideally matching your domain name. For example:
myfuzzysoundingbrandname.com
twitter.com/myfuzzysoundingbrandname
facebook.com/myfuzzysoundingbrandname
Xenu Link Slueth – Not winning any design awards but it’s free and will crawl and snoop out broken links which provides a range of opportunities.
Wayback Machine – For whatever reason these guys decided to start archiving everything on the Internet and letting people access it for free. As an SEO this is provides a treasure trove of content.
Fake PR checker – Handy tool for checking fake Pagerank if you’re into that sort of thing.
Micorsitemasters – You can try searching around but MSM offers 10 free keywords to get started, better make em count!
Import.io – This is a free web scraping tool and it’s confusing as hell, good luck.
Fake name generator – No idea why you would want to generate fake names but if you did find the need, here you go.
Screaming Frog – There is a free version of Screeming frog which will allow you to audit a site but limits the amount of URLs you can crawl. For a small site this will do the job.
Godaddy bulk domain checker – If you have a big list of potential domain names to register, use Godaddy’s bulk checker for free. It can handle 500 just watch out for odd characters.
Expireddomains.net – Sure everyone knows about expireddomains.net, well they do now at least but you can still find some gems here and for the price you can’t beat it.
Tracking
Clicky – For tracking all those visits you’re getting from search and creepily spying on them.
Piwik – Another free tracking alternative.
Hacks
Joint Accounts – Does your besty do SEO also? Well why the hell are you guys both paying for an Ahrefs subscription? Sorry ahrefs, but one subscription will do. Do the same for other tools also. I have a shared account on practically every service.
Free trial, get data, and cancel – Sort of a dick move but works, signup for a trial, run all the reports you need then cancel before the billing starts.
Blogspot Hosting – If you use a .blogspot subdomain blog you can switch it to a permanent domain and host it on blogspot, yes you have to pay $10 for the domain which technically breaks the guidelines of this post but handy information still.
Cracked Copy of MS Office – Excel is probably the most crucial tool an SEO uses consistently day in and day out. There are cracked copies everywhere, I promise you won’t go to software pirating hell if you use one.
Cheap Laptop + Teamviewer for VPS – Instead of paying for a monthly VPS, set up your own on an old laptop or something equivalent. Then bum off your neighbor’s wireless and run your GSA blasts.
Parasite pages – Not only are they free but if you pick the right ones they can rank very well and withstand mass spam. Great for testing and making some $$ with spam.
Search operators – These should go without saying but a good SEO should also be good at actually searching for things. Shocking I know. Advanced operators are the key to searching in beast mode.
site:moz.com “black hat seo”
Common Sense – Thanks to Adam Steele for reminding us all of one of the most important tools, or brains.
Well there you have it folks, a massive list of all the free shit out there to get the job done. Have any free tools, tips, or tricks to contribute? If it’s something good you could join the group of luck individuals receiving an OBL in this post. Translation, suggest a tool worth adding and you will get a backlink to the location of your choice.
Now don’t be shy!
Charlotte SEO Experts says
Thanks for the list of tools. Keep up the great work Mr King!!
Jacob King says
Cautiously approving this comment, you better not spam it with links in some crazy attempt to tier it.
will says
haha your comments are as good as your posts. Well not always as good information-wise, but definitely even better entertainment-wise.
Jacob King says
Yeah there are some classics for real, many laughs had myself.
Darin Carter says
ROFLMAO !!! That’s GREAT !
Jaytronic says
Ha, sister f&*&er!
So are you ranking for “porn movie” now?
If you ever turn the site into an adult site, please do send out a heads up so I remember not to read it at work ;)
Jacob King says
Will do, and probably not cracking the top 100 on “porn movie” yet.
Monadnock says
Nice list!
I also like sitealerts.com. Shows what keywords a site is ranking for, although not super accurate. Good for doing some quick and dirty keyword research by throwing a competitor’s url into it.
Not really an SEO tool, but Whatwpthemeisthat.com also comes in handy for checking what WP theme, and plugins a specific site is running. Much easier than going through the html to find the theme name.
Jacob King says
Very cool, thanks for the suggestions I’ll take a look.
Ray John says
May I add seo-quake plugin (also from the guys at SEMrush), Spyfu, soovle and Buzzsumo.
I sure hope you approve this comment as you might mistaken our blog for a porn site :D
Cheers Jacob!
Jacob King says
Shit that was in there and got deleted somehow, weird.
Chris G. says
Ah, Jacob. Your posts have become my ray of sunshine. They always make me smile. And this one is no exception. It’s a beauty.
Shay says
Thanks a lot Jacob there are a few things I didn’t know of like the Evernote…
Badass post regardless!
You should build a training course teaching advanced GSA to a closed group, I would really love to learn from you the nitty gritty stuff.
And who’s the sister-f***er that neg seod you?
An addition to this list could be OneHourIndexing free service. If you need a url indexed fast it could help http://onehourindexing.co/TryIt although it’s limited to only one every 3 minutes.
Jacob King says
Yup that’s the point, even one free tool added to your arsenal will pay dividends, Evernote is huge for my business, I have it on all devices and use it for sharing notes etc. Yeah I’ve considered that, thinking about starting a private forum soon, GSA tuts will be part of the draw.
Meh kinda cool but only for one URL lol, still helpful for some stuff. Thanks Shay!
@kpeacy says
Hey Jacob,
your posts are always a breath of fresh air. With that being said Fresdrops is kick-ass. The search function for finding expired domains is flawless.
Jacob King says
Thanks, supplying fresh air to the SEO community seems to be my job. Yeah Freshdrop rocks, beastly tool indeed.
bubu says
how hidemyass is free?? just wondering cause i used to pay like 10 bucks for it
Jacob King says
Just their free proxy, not their VPN, I’ll link to that instead.
YouKnowWho says
I was hoping you would address G’s cock blocking sandbox. I assume you’ve beaten it? FWIW, I haven’t seen any brand new sites ranking in the niches I follow.
Jacob King says
Yup I haven’t seen any either lol, I woulnd’t say I’ve *beaten it but I’ve definitely broken through to page 1 multiple times, domain registered after May, all spam with GSA and PBN. 5k+ monthly volume KWs, so it is possible but I have been testing a shit load and running into this weird dampening effect/page 2 slowdown/sandbox whatver you want to call it.
If I did have a definitive answer for beating it I’d keep it to myself tho, don’t want to get the spam team’s butts back in the chair any sooner than needed.
Jatin Chhabra says
No need to say amazing as your blog is but I really loved “Cracked Copy of MS Office” and most important Common Sense”
Great post again – Mr King
Jay says
You’re joking, right?
Just go with Libre Office already!
Wave Twister says
I just spent $504 in tools this month of September after reading your blog the last couple months. GSA SER, Captcha Breaker, Kontent Machine, Proxies, etc. and another $177 for PBN (Now on pause…till the dust settles)…
When I saw this “free tools” post I was getting worried I just spent all that for nothing…oh and my wife still doesn’t know I spent nearly $700 on a bunch of SEO shit. She’s going to kill me.
Jacob King says
Ha no, still gotta pay to play, but this is everything I could possibly think of that doesn’t require any bucks, totally free no strings attached. Acquired from time grinding.
Carlos Magno LĂ©tes says
Hey Jacob, thanks for the share dude, lots of great stuff in here.
Many SEO’s might be interested in checking out some competitive intel about their pain-in-the-ass competitors. So I decided to suggest to your list these Chrome extensions:
Appspector: Helps you find out what are the technologies are behind their competitors websites
WPSNIFFER: Helps you find out which is the WordPress theme being used on the website.
Hope that helps someone just as much as it helps me!
Jason says
Just a thought i have found http://www.siteliner.com/ quite useful for checking dupe content and broken links etc. Whilst not the most important thing I suppose, its pretty useful tool.
John says
You can add accuranker in it. Offers a free and paid plan too.
Jacob King says
Just spent 10 minutes loling at your blog, I like your style.
John says
haha thanks man. The old posts may show off my noobness as I started that blog when I was totally new to SEO. But I have learned a lot now from you & other people. Big Hats off to you Jacob :D
Josh says
Nice list Jacob. I too have spent a fortune on SEO tools over the years most of which I now deem unnecessary. Anyone want to buy a SENuke lifetime lic?
Anyway to add to your list, for checking social shares http://www.sharedcount.com/ gives you 10,000 free queries a day.
And to toot my own horn, my web service, Pretty Tracker has a free account for rank tracking up to 10 keywords. Paid plans are cheap here if you want to track large volumes of keywords and for good measure I made your readers a 50% off coupon code: “jacob-king-cheapskate”. https://prettytracker.com/?coupon=jacob-king-cheapskate
Jacob King says
Lol, just busted out my copy of senuke the other day to see if it could hit any good webs and profiles, not so much. what a piece of shit that software is. Hrmm, sharedcount looks pretty handy, might be adding that into the mix. Nice got a mobile app for your rank tracker?
Josh says
The site design is responsive and functions great on mobile which I can’t say about most other rank trackers. Actually, I generally check my rankings on my phone.
Jacob King says
How big is your proxy pool, what’s your update frequency?
Josh says
Sorry your reply hit my junk mail filter for some reason. Anyway, we have a diverse proxy pool from a number of sources. We check all keywords 8x a day presently.
@NextLevelFlash says
Search Engine Rankings:
Free version of SerpWoo.com rank tracker allows 3 keywords forever. Coolest rank tracker I have ever laid my eyes upon.
Free version of http://www.accuranker.com has an update on demand 10 keyword tracker plan.
Keyword tracking full SEO dashboard bs 14 day trial at serps.com
Traffic Tracking:
250 Free full traffic visit session recordings with mouseflow.com
100/month Free session recordings with inspectlet.com
StatCounter.com is a pretty good free alternative to G00gleAnalytics
Indexing:
Use googleping.com 1-5 times to index any link.
For free domains you can use:
http://www.tipdots.com for a cat piss domain (.ca.tp)
http://www.registry.cu.cc has the best imo. Plus you love .cu.cc Jacob.
http://www.smartdots.com if you want a .xx.xx domain ;)
http://www.getfreedomain.name for an overview of free domain features
Jacob King says
Wow lot of reccos in there, got my work cut out for me here.
riplash says
If you’re auditing a larger site than a free Screaming Frog license allows for, you can use Microsoft’s IIS SEO Toolkit. Requires installing IIS (obvs) which is usually fairly painless. Windows only, naturally.
Crawler is fast and churns out useful, detailed reports. Remember to untick the option to save crawled pages in their entirety.
Jacob King says
Ah interesting, so this route is totally free and gets past the page limitation?
riplash says
Yeah, totally free if you have a compatible OS. User can limit the number of pages crawled, but there is no software limit.
Identifies typical issues like missing/short/long/duplicate descriptions, titles, h1s, unnecessary redirects, broken links, and so on. Also has sections for site performance, content (large pages, status codes, etc) and links (most linked, most links, link depth, etc).
Basically does pretty much everything you need an SEO crawler to do.
I still have a Screaming Frog license which is testament to their user friendliness, but do use it alongside the IIS tool in case it catches things I missed with SF.
Jacob King says
Very cool, thanks for the info man I’ll email you when I update.
will says
http://www.screenshots.com/ is another site like wayback except that it shows screenshots instead of html. I’ve found a number of times where screenshots had data when wayback didnt.
For concatenating keyword lists (check search volume of variations, etc):
http://permutationer.com/ or
http://mergewords.com/
Good guide to Google search operators: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html
http://soovle.com/ for seeing what comes up on multiple websites when you put in a search term. It’s a little buggy but cool.
Debjit says
Hi Jacob, this is a nice list of tools. But why not use libre-office instead of MS office? Its free! Also, can you tell me what wordpress plugin do you use to make that cool Table of Contents widget at the start of the post?
Jacob King says
Never heard of Libre-office tbh, It’s TOC wordpress plugin – https://wordpress.org/plugins/table-of-contents-plus/
Shobhit says
Frankly, I enjoy reading your posts.
Keywordtool.io and Ubersuggest – not good at all, as they showed 100s of location based suggestion which do not even have 10 searches for a month. (just tried them out)
A hrefs is one of the best for checking backlinks, yes the feature of anchor cloud is awesome. And just like your site one of mine is having pretty high anchor density for viagra and calis. Negative SEO, jerks.
MSM is a great suggestion to track ranking, I will suggest you guys to invest some bucks and buy a basement plan least.
A suggesting to include in Backlink section
Free/trial account of ahrefs and other tools show very limited backlinks, for checking more for free “backlinkwatch” does the job, it shows 1000s of links in no time. Opensiteexplorer should also given a shot..
And on firefox nodofollow addon proves to be pretty helpful.
Cheers
Vikram says
Awesome list Jacob. You should also check out MEGA.co.nz for cloud storage. You get 50 freaking gigs of free storage space, and about the same price as Dropbox you get 4 TB of storage instead of just 1 TB.
prab1996 says
site:moz.com “black hat seo”
Lol , best thing in whole 800 post.
BTW, you forgot best free backlink checker tool backlinkwatch.com it’s better then moz and majestic and it gets results from ahrefs. If site has 1k links shown in ahrefs then it will give you a list of upto 900 links for free.
-=-
Jacob King says
Ah very cool, getting a ton of information from this post. Take care Prab.
prab1996 says
Also add serpfox.com (10 free keyword tacking) proranktracker (50 free keywords) they helped me alot when i was new and still i got tons of more bookmarks. If i will get some time then i think i can post upto 500 free tools.
one more = Keywordshitter.com (if you can buy scrapebox then it’s good to find longtails)
I think it will be better for me to upload my bookmarks in html instead of writing that much, if i got time will email you a download link.
-=-
Jacob King says
Yeah do it up, shoot me an email of the best ones.
Jack says
Great list Jacob.
Do you know of any free tool out there for spying on competitors kw rankings like sem rush?
I’m like the guy in that sign
Sem rush is too rich for my blood or I’m just a cheap ass I guess
Jacob King says
Meh not really, yeah I hate paying that SEmrush fee also, you can see like their top 10 KWs tho, then use a proxy if you have to and check others. Best I got for you right now.
Kaiz says
We now know that Jacob has to be a cheap Mofo to come up with such an epic list !
Thanks a lot ! I also sent you an Email for some more free tools !
Marty Rogers says
Awesome stuff, Jacob!
UberSuggest is a cracker – great for finding some great long-tail keywords.
HideMyAss is free as you say but they do make it quite difficult to navigate to the free version now since their recent re-design – not surprised to be honest, they’re making MILLIONS. It’s only a young kid running it too, what a life!
Jacob King says
Lol that is pretty funny, yeah almost so much of a pain in the ass shouldn’t even be listed.
Shay says
Jacob I see you finally decided to take my advice and build a community. It’s about time! But seriously, I hope it’s not going to look like your forum here (no offense), I want to see some action and I really want to learn some dirty little tricks.
Jacob King says
It’s nothing like the silly forum I had running here, it’s the real deal, big boy shit.
Nauf Sid says
Hey Jacob, you forgot open link profiler. Handy free tool.
Martin says
Jacob are you still using rankwyz to create web2 networks or have you completely moved to gsa?
There’s another tool that does something similar called FCS, did you happen to use it?
Also which content tool would you prefer, KM or content foundry?
Jacob King says
Nah not really using rankwyz anymore, nor GSA for web2s, just not really making many web2s these days, just not worth my time when all the automated tools suck at making them. Serengines is complete joke these days, might get 3 or 4 web2s if you’re lucky, so I don’t mess with em much these days, still good links just not worth the time of manually creating.
Brandon says
Any coupons for BlackHatStacks available man?
Jacob King says
Maybeeeee, let me drop you an email.
TheGreyMan says
Hmmm. Well, I have some big boy friends, does that count?
Brandon says
Ready and waiting! :)
seolover says
I’ve been thinking about joining BlackHatStacks but it’s kinda pricey, any deals brah?
Jacob King says
Nah no deals, keeping it straight up.
Sumit says
Thanks for the list, all are different in specific in their field and area. Keep it up.
Ilijana says
Kimono Lab – scrape for free, or paid. ScreenSlicer, osCommerce,
Brian says
Hey Jacob have you got any coupons available for black hat stacks?
Jacob King says
Yeahh sureee, bhs25off
red_jeep says
Ok, ya got me with that coupon. I’ll remember your largess.
mahesh says
HI jacob,
A perfect sliced article and how to create that in-text navigation links inside the post?
Jacob King says
WP TOC plugin, easy money.
Harry says
Another great post; keep them coming. I honestly love your blog, man!
Also loving the complete lack of shits given about doing things the “right way”!
@Quickfever says
Hello Jacob,
Worth read, thanks for writing this piece. But this post is not updated after 2014. I guess you should update it.
Abhishek Jain says
Hi Jacob
This is really awesome. There are some free tools that I was unaware :)
Knowem is den of great Backlinks :)
Thanks for Sharing!
~Abhishek
Jacob King says
Blog comments too, besides when the admin deletes your link like I just did.