What are the best free/low cost tools you use for SEO?

[Linda-Vassily]

Hello!

I will be giving a talk next month about free/low cost SEO tools and apps and I would like to hear what your favorite/most useful tools are.

I know this question has been discussed here before, but this is a topic that is constantly evolving and I am interested in knowing what people currently find to be the best.

I'd like to hear about things you really use on a regular basis--there are a lot of things out there that sound cool, but end up not being used.

So, what are your go-to free SEO tools?

Thank-you,
Linda

[Linda-Vassily]

It is a very nice rundown of what's out there. Thanks again.

[MikeGracia]

Thanks I didn't intend it to be that long, but at the same time, didn't want to leave anything out!

[Linda-Vassily]

Wow, that's a great answer! I totally agree about Screaming Frog--I'd feel blind without it.

[MikeGracia]

• Screaming frog! All day long

I love SF, it's amazing. I have the paid version (as I use it a lot) but their free too is good too. For smaller sites, the free tool is absolutely fine. It's not som crappy demo that has most features blocked or anything, it's very usable. Their paid version

Their paid version I'd put under 'low cost' for what you get too. Love the fact you can ingore robots.txt, great for testing dev sites.

One thing I REALLY like about SF (vs SaaS based online tools), is the ability to edit my hosts file & add a dev domain, then run SF on the site, even though it's on localhost - A benefit of desktop tools).

Then there's:

• **Google Analytics **- I like to create custom dashboards for various things, such as segmenting mobile vs desktop, PPC dashboards, social dashboards etc. I think as SEOs we forget how many clients either don't realise custom dashboard exist, or don't realise how useful they can be

• Search Console / WMT (can't get out of the habit of calling it WMT!)

• Deep Crawl - Very handy. I use this, Moz's crawl and Screaming Frog for all my crawl testing needs

• Various free page-speed checks (GTmetrix, Google page speed insights, Yslow, testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com, Pingdom page speed tool also)

• OSE & Moz (not free but for what you get, I think it's low cost)

• Moz's keyword explorer (AMAZING tool. Not just saying that as this is on Moz, I genuinely think it's awesome)

• Chrome & Firefox inspectors

• Firebug

• GA plugin for Chrome

• GA debugger for Chrome (handy for testing GA events in Chrome console!)

• Check my links Chrome extension (for when you don't need a full crawl and just want to check for broken links on a page quickly in the browser)

• Google Alerts - Great for finding unlinked mentions as they happen, keeping tabs on competitors mentions & press, or even being alerted to related topics etc.

• Excel or Google Sheets - Great for a multitude of data analsys!

• access_log file - I possibly saved one of the best till last! The access_log file is great for parsing out stuff like Googlebot visits. Pop the data into a (paid) tool like Screaming Frog log file analyser, or (as I like to do) insert the data into a MySQL database and run some queries... You can find a WEALTH of tasty info, like:

• What pages get the most Googlebot activity

• Group pages together (e.g. all posts within a category, or pages under a URL folder) and calculate what % of Googlebot crawls they got

• Identify any important pages that are not getting crawlled much

• Cross-check your sitemap (in MySQL I like to select all pages from the sitemap - which I store in a MySQL table, then do a JOIN with the access_log table in the same MySQL database, then pull off a count how many times the sitemap pages were crawled, according to the access_log table. Of course the access_log needs to be for a decent time period).

These are not strictly for SEO, but useful for SEOs I think:

• **Awesome Screenshot **for Chrome - good for taking quick screenshots & annotating screenies, for devs/staff/clients etc
• Pocket - Brilliant for 'bookmarking' articles to read later... Helps me stay on-track when I'm head-down working but spot an SEO related article I want to read later... Add to pocket & close tab
• Onetab - For the times when the number of open tabs makes my mac sound like a Boeing 747 Closes all open tabs, saves them in a list for later - Can export to a file too. Handy!

Argh! That's a long list, sorry!

[TheZenAgency]

Google analytics , search console, keyword planner, chrome developer tools

[Linda-Vassily]

Thanks so much for the responses so far! Thumbs up for everyone.

[ThomasHarvey]

Screaming Frog is a great tool that has a free version. 500 url limit (suitable for most small sites).

[KevinBudzynski]

Here is a few:

• Pagespeed Insights (Google)
• Keywordtool.io
• Xenu (link checker)
• GTmetrix

As you know, may tools have a free demo, or limited functionality for free. Good luck!