Plus: The *ULTIMATE* Free SEO Tool Revealed!
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I’m a big nerd about SEO tools and have written about my favorite paid ones. Tools make doing SEO far more easier and efficient, whether it’s small, specific tasks or more large-scale ones. There are a ton of free SEO tools out there and I’m sharing the favorites that I regularly use. Some of these I’ve been using for years.
Here are 16 I find super-useful (and fun to use). I’m leaving out ones from the big SEO tool suites because there’s already been so much written about them.
Some of these free SEO tools have cute names, while others have much more utilitarian ones. Either way, they’re all great to play with and use, so try them out.
As a special bonus at the end, I’ll reveal the ultimate, most important free SEO tool in the world!
1. Pixel Width Checker
Measure Title Tags and Meta Descriptions so they fit within Google’s size limits.
Writing and updating meta info is a regular task, whether for new posts and pages, updating existing ones, or finding candidates for running tests.
The Pixel Width Checker from Paul Shapiro, (@fighto) is an elegantly simple and ultra-useful way to see if your title tags and meta descriptions fit within Google’s recommended limits of 55 characters (600 pixels) for title tags and 155 characters (928 pixels) for meta descriptions. I’ve had it bookmarked for years and it’s invaluable.
Just put your proposed tags into the fields, hit “Get Pixel Length”, and it spits out proposed tags and their lengths in characters and pixels.
I especially like being able to check multiple tags at once and also to upload CSV lists of ones to check.
2. SERP Snippet Optimizer
Simulate how proposed title tags and meta descriptions will look in the search results.
After you’ve written and checked the length of your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions with the Pixel Width Checker, view how they’d look in the SERPs, with this tool from Higher Visibility. Paste your results and fill in the rest of the fields to yield cool simulated search results, complete with character and pixel lengths.
Add your proposed tags:
See how they’ll look to users:
3. Mangool’s SERP Simulator
Simulates richer SERP results
For richer SERP simulations, Mangools’ tool lets you bold words, and add dates, maps, and ads. You can also export and share your results.
These simulated search results are especially useful for showing others how your proposed pages or meta info changes will look in the wild.
4. HREFLANG Tag Generator
Generate HREFLANG tags for international SEO
International SEO can’t be done without Hreflang tags, and writing them is super easy with this generator from Aleyda Solis.
This lets you generate them for individual pages or by uploading a CSV of up to 50.
All you need to do is:
- Add the URL you want to be internationalized
- Choose the desired country and language
- Choose whether you want them in the page HTML or an XML sitemap
- Hit “Generate”
You can also upload a CSV with up to 50 URLs and you can add multiple country-language
I’ve used this to generate hreflang tags for a large international SEO project and it saved me a lot of time.
5. PageSpeed Compare
Measure and benchmark pagespeed metrics against competitors
Regular benchmarking is crucial when optimizing for speed and helps gauge how much more you need to do. Pagespeed Compare is made by Sander Heilbron and makes it easy to do so for single URLs, lists of ones or uploaded via CSV.
Results are based on Google PageSpeed Insights and Chrome UX data.
This is the most robust pagespeed comparison tool I’ve found, and it has the cleanest and easiest interface by far. I like the color scheme too.
After adding your URLs, there are a lot of results that are downloadable as CSV or JSON files:
- Lighthouse Performance lab data
- Chrome UX field data
- Page Resources – very useful
- DOM Size
- CPU Timings
- Potential Savings
The results look great and I used them when were presenting my case for speed optimization.
6. Layout Shift Generator
Illustrate Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) as GIFs
During my big speed optimization project, Cumulative Layout Shift was one of the more frustrating things to diagnose and propose fixes for. (again, I’m not a developer). Part of this was showing others what was actually going on to give poor CLS scores. Fortunately, I discovered the Layout Shift Generator from Chris Johnson, and it was a huge help.
You can use the web interface to paste in the URLs to measure, and there’s also a command line tool for the more technically inclined.
The results are a Gif illustrating a page’s CLS, as well as the actual score. The gifs are my favorite way of visually showing what can be an abstract concept.
7. GTMetrix
Comprehensive speed testing
For a comprehensive, third-party look at a site’s speed, GTMetrix is my go-to tool. While it has paid tiers and monitoring, the free version still shows everything to get snapshots of pages’ speed:
- Google’s Web Vitals and performance metrics:
- Opportunities for each metric (similar to how the PageSpeed Insights tool does)
- A Waterfall View:
- Historical Data
- Speed Visualization
8. Cloudinary Website Image Analysis Tool
Image Analysis of Live Images
Poorly optimized images are one of the biggest causes of slow page speed and low Core Web Vitals scores.
The Web Image Analysis tool from Cloudinary gives a full report of how a page’s images perform and contribute to CWV.
You don’t just get an overview of combined image performance, but reports for each image on the page! (the exclamation point reflects my excitement about this).
This is an essential tool for diagnosing how well – or not well – all of a page’s image
9. Yellow Lab Tools
Comprehensive Speed Testing
This is built by Gaël Métais and is unique because it’s not based on Google data (PageSpeed, Lighthouse, and ChromeUX). Instead, it uses headless Chrome, which is essentially the Chrome browser while bypassing its GUI.
What I like about this tool is it groups issues together by type, and in plain language: “Bad JS, Bad CSS, Web Fonts”, rather than a metric like Google-based speed tools do.
This can be very helpful for those of us with a non-dev background, and useful when showing non-technical stakeholders or executives what makes their site slow.
10. Convertio
Converts image formats to WEBP
Google now prefers images in its own faster-loading WEBP format replacing jpeg and png. Convertio is one of my two favorites for turning old-school image formats into the fancy new WEBP.
It can also handle all kinds of formats, and multiple types of media in addition to images.
For converting non-bulk amounts of images, try either, or both, of these tools which support multiple image formats:
11. CloudConvert
Converts image formats
CloudConvert from Lunaweb is my other go-to for changing image formats. Like Convertio, it supports multiple formats across different media types.
Convertio and CloudConvert let you convert a certain number of files daily for free. I used this option at first before moving to a paid subscription since I had over a million pages to work on.
12. Imagify
Image Optimization – Compression & Resizing
Once I had my newly WEBP formatted images, they needed to be compressed to smaller file sizes. I chose Imagify because I could use it in both the WordPress portion of the site I was working on (it has a plugin) as well as images hosted on our CDN using its API.
Some cool features include:
- You can choose between lossless compression, or for better results, Imagify’s Smart version, which balances image quality and compression.
- There are three levels of compression to choose from Normal, Aggressive, and Ultra.
- And if you decide to close your account and remove Imagify, any images compressed and optimized will remain that way.
12. Gzip/Brotli Compression Tester
Checks whether file compression is used
Enabling compression for HTML, CSS, and Javascript is a first step towards optimizing for speed. The GZIP test tool determines whether either the GZIP or Brotli compression technologies are employed. It’s very useful during technical audits.
13. JSON-LD Generator
Generates Schema markup in JSON-LD
Structured data markup is a must-have for standing out in the increasingly cluttered SERPs. But it can be difficult to build if you’re not really familiar with JSON, the schema language preferred by Google.
Joe Hall has a schema markup generator that spits out JSON code ready to paste into your pages. It supports these schema markup types:
- Local business
- Person
- Product
- Event
- Organization
- Website
14. View Rendered Source Plugin
Shows differences between source vs rendered code
The View Rendered Source is a Chrome plugin from Jon Hogg and is my favorite tool for render testing. It highlights any differences between a page’s source and rendered code after the DOM has been constructed, right from your browser.
The two versions are shown side-by-side and any differences are highlighted.
15. Pre-rendering Testing Tool
Shows Content as Served to User Agents
Since different search engine bots can “see” content differently, it’s important to know if the same, desired HTML content is being served to each and ultimately shown to users. Merkel’s Pre-Rendering Testing Tool lets you test in any combination of 43! different bots.
Look how many bots you can test in:
- Google: 9
- Bing: 6
- Other search engines: 8
- Social media: 3
- SEO Tools: 14
- Browsers: 3
16. Web Accessibility Testing Tool (WAVE)
Evaluates pages for accessibility compliance
It’s imperative for sites to be accessible to people with disabilities, and testing is part of this.
Utah State University’s Institute for Disability Research, Policy & Practice has the best tool out there for testing sites’ accessibility.
It has versions on its webpage, browser extensions, and an API.
17. Page-oscope
Test mobile rendering by device
Whenever I make page changes or publish new ones, I want to see if they’ll show up on mobile devices. Mobile Moxie’s Page-oscope has a free version that lets you choose from dozens of devices. In addition to the web page version, there’s also a Chrome extension and WordPress plugin.
18. The Ultimate Free SEO Tool
You may be surprised
I promised to reveal the ultimate free SEO tool. It’s by far the most valuable and useful one in existence. Ready?
Here’s how to find it:
- Find a mirror
- Look into it
That’s it. It’s YOU! You’re the ultimate free SEO tool!
A bit corny, I know, but accurate nonetheless. We don’t always recognize what we’re capable of. Note: I said the ultimate, not the biggest tool. That’s a topic for an SEO therapist 🙂
Do you have any favorite free SEO tools?
