There are constantly new tools being created to help make our lives easier as bloggers, businesses and social media creators. Whether you’ve built your own website from scratch or used a service similar to Linktree, you want to create and share content people are interested in and searching for.
Luckily, in 2022, there are many search e tools you can use for free. Whether you’re a beginner or are more advanced, you’ll likely find these tools very helpful.
What Are the Best Free SEO Tools in 2022?
Below is my list of the best free SEO tools in 2022. These tools will not only help you define new opportunities to rank for certain keywords but will also help you be more creative, follow Google’s guidelines and provide you with more data/insight.
1. Ahrefs Suite of Free Tools
Ahrefs is an extremely powerful tool for SEO. Their massive database of search queries holds 12 billion keywords over 10 search engines in 229 countries. That’s a lot of data!
If you’re going to go with their paid tools, you’ll get access to an incredible amount of information; however, a paid subscription to Ahrefs can get costly fast.
With the minimum monthly package costing $99, it’s likely out of the price range of most beginners.
That being said, Ahrefs does offer a suite of free tools. These include:
- Backlink Checker
- Broken Link Checker
- Website Authority Checker
- Keyword Generator
- YouTube Keyword Tool
- Amazon Keyword Tool
- Bing Keyword Tool
- SERP Checker
- Keyword Rank Checker
- Keyword Difficulty Checker
Although there are limitations with the free tools and you will need to solve a captcha every time, it can certainly help those without a budget.
Out of all 10 free SEO tools Ahrefs offers, my two favourite are their backlink checker and keyword generator.
Ahrefs Backlink Checker
The Ahrefs backlink checker is great for a few reasons. First off, it gives you the domain rating (DR) of the site you search for. This can be great when evaluating if you want to collaborate with a site or not.
A link from a site with a higher DR will pass on more authority to your site as opposed to a site with a low DR.
Second, this tool tells you how many backlinks and referring domains a site has, and their percentage of do-follow links.
Third, this tool gives you an overview of a site’s top 100 backlinks sorted by URL rating and their top five anchor keywords and top five pages.
All of this information can be useful for competitive analysis to see where a particular website is getting links from.
Ahrefs Keyword Generator
My second favorite Ahrefs free SEO tool is their keyword generator. This tool is great for doing keyword research because it gives you the keyword difficulty and search volume and other keyword ideas for related terms.
For example, if I type in “best credit cards” into their tool, I’ll see that this term has a volume of 66,000 searches per month with a keyword difficulty of 80.
This can be extremely valuable for determining which keywords you might have a shot at ranking for.
That being said, Ahref’s keyword difficulty score is not the only number you should consider when determining whether you should try to compete on the first page for a keyword. But more on this another time.
2. Exploding Topics
Exploding Topics is an awesome free tool for figuring out which new keywords are starting to gain popularity.
This tool gives you the ability to select a time range and a topic (e.g., 1 month and software).
Then you can go through and see which keywords are trending up in that particular niche.
This is a great way to get new ideas for topics that haven’t been covered time and time again. Thus, giving you a better chance to rank on the first page.
I like to scroll through a few pages of Exploding Topics and write down any keywords that stand out to me. Then I’ll go over to the Ahrefs keyword generator tool, input the keyword and see what the keyword difficulty and search volume is for each keyword.
If it looks promising, I’ll then do a bit more research into each website on Google’s first page and make a decision whether to write about it or not.
3. Copy.ai
If you’re stuck in a creative rut and don’t know what to write about, you’ll be glad to learn that modern-day artificial intelligence (AI) has a solution.
Copy-ai is a tool I’ve been using to get ideas for blog posts that I otherwise wouldn’t have thought about.
Let’s take the keyword “wordpress” for example.
Simply enter that keyword into Copy.ai and click “Create Copy”.
This will create a whole list of blog post title ideas for the keyword “wordpress”.
Go through the initial list and if you don’t like any of them, just click “Make More” and you’ll get a whole new list of ideas.
So next time you have a keyword in mind but don’t know what to write about, try out this tool and you’ll likely get tons of inspiration for new blog post ideas.
It’s a great way to separate yourself from your competition while still staying on topic for a particular keyword.
4. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner isn’t new, but it’s still very relevant in 2022 as a free SEO tool. With 5.6 billion searches performed each day on Google, they know a thing or two about keywords and search volume.
Google’s Keyword Planner tool will require that you set up a Google ads account which is completely free. Once done, head over to Tools and settings > Keyword Planner.
This will take you to a page that gives you two options:
- Discover new keywords
- Get search volume and forecasts
If you only have one keyword in mind and want Google to give you more keyword ideas relating to that topic, click the first option. Alternatively, if you have a big list of keywords already, click the second option to copy-paste them and get each keyword’s search volume.
Google’s Keyword Planner can only be used as a means to get keyword search volume. You can’t use it as a keyword difficulty checker like Ahref’s tool. That being said, it’s great to get new ideas for keywords that might be worth writing about.
Once you’ve played around with Google’s Keyword Planner and drafted a list of potential keywords, I recommend using Ahrefs keyword checker tool to determine the difficulty for each.
Using Google’s Keyword Planner tool is great to use in conjunction with some of our other free SEO tools in this article. Whether you want to use it for post inspiration or just want to check the search volume of a bunch of keywords quickly, it can do both.
5. Keywords Everywhere
Keyword Everywhere is a tool I like to use in conjunction with the Ahrefs keyword generator tool for determining which keywords I can likely compete for.
Keyword Everywhere uses Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) score. According to Link Building HQ, Moz DA is used to calculate how well a site will rank, while Ahrefs uses Domain Rating (DR) to measure the overall strength of a backlink profile.
Although these two numbers mean different things, I still like to use Keyword Everywhere’s Moz DA tool to identify weak websites that are ranking on the first page for a keyword.
Once I find the website with the lowest Moz DA on the first page for a search term, I do more research. I look into that site’s post to see where I can improve it and their backlink profile by using Ahref’s backlink checker tool.
Keyword Everywhere also provides you with keywords related to your topic so that you can get even more ideas on what to write about.
Unfortunately, unless you buy credits, you won’t easily see the search volume for each word.
But no worries, we can just copy-paste their additional suggestions into Google’s keyword planner and get the average search volume for each keyword there.
6. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a tried and true WordPress plugin that has been around for years. Although they do offer premium features, the core of the plugin still remains free and is all you need as a beginner.
Yoast SEO is great for providing you with tips on how to improve your article for search engines. You can check directly with your WordPress post if your title is too long or too short, if you have enough internal/external links, if you mention your target keyword enough, and much more.
Additionally, they configure your sitemap so that crawlers like Google and Bing and other search engines can clearly see the content you’re publishing and properly index it.
If you’re looking to get started on the right foot with search engines but don’t know much about where to begin. Yoast SEO is a great free SEO plugin.
7. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another one of Google’s invaluable free SEO tools. With this tool, you can gain more insight into which of your pages are generating clicks and for which keywords.
Take the screenshot above for an example of one of my websites.
You can see the total clicks, impressions, click-through rates and average position all over the past 28 days. You can also see which keywords the page is ranking for as well as drill down into the countries, devices and more.
This is a great tool for SEO as it allows you to get more insight into how people are actually finding you, which allows you to optimize your posts for keywords you never even knew existed.
Besides that, Google Search Console also gives you a lot of insight into any coverage issues, page experience issues or security issues. Having these details available can help you improve the overall user experience for your visitors, which helps boost your ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Conclusion
Although not all of these tools are completely free, due to limited functionality in some cases, they offer a great starting point for beginners.
You really shouldn’t need much more than the free versions of all seven of these tools until you start growing your blog and publishing more and more content.
At that point, you should be generating revenue and likely can afford premium features that will unlock even more functionality.
But for now, take advantage of these free SEO tools in 2022 to help you rank for the keywords in your niche.