10 Free SEO Tools Every New #SEO Company Should Use

When you’re just starting out and cannot afford the expensive tools that large agencies have (I still don’t buy everything on my wish list as some things are 5 and 10K per month), you can still easily compete with them by using some of the best free SEO tools available.  This can help you to provide the same reports and land large accounts, while blowing the larger firms out of the water.  You just need to put some more work into it and find other ways to analyze your data.  Instead of just sitting with spreadsheets and outlook or computer database, here are ten fee seo tools that you can use to help grow your clients SEO.  This does not including Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools which you can and should be using.

The Best Free SEO Tools that Work

1.  SiteLiner.com

What I love about siteliner is that it can go and pull a ton of duplicate content fast and easy.  If it’s a blog, it shows you where you have problems based on categories and tags.  If it’s crawling and finds not properly placed no index, canonical, etc… then it gives you the pages so you can fix them.  It pulls all of the broken links it can find and shows you where they exist as well as a ton of other cool features like outbound links, inbound links by page, etc…  The best part is that siteliner.com for SEO is completely free to use.  Some of the more expensive tools that we use don’t even offer an interface that is this clean and every once in a while I catch myself coming back here.  You should definitely run your own and your clients sites through Siteliner.com to see if there is anything you missed.   Some of it can get confusing, but it actually is kind of a cool basic tool that can help you get started.

2.  Yoast

Yoast is a plugin for WordPress that works with the Genesis Framework from StudioPress that I am running many of my blogs on now.  Yoast is great for your pages content.  It will analyze the copy, help to recommend if you need a higher amount of repetition, where you’re missing keywords and where missed opportunities are within a post.  You get an advanced page analysis, tools for canonical links and Pagination, robots to prevent indexing as well as no dmoz or yahoo directory and an entire slew of freebies to help you with SEO.  You can take static, non blog pages and run them through Yoast by entering them into a fake blog post as well.  This is a must have plug in and I highly recommend you make a donation because you will get at least some value from this.  It is definitely one of the best free SEO tools you can find online.

3.  PRChecker.info

This is a great tool and something that more Bloggers, especially ones who think that because they have a homepage of PR4, they have a PR4 site.  PRChecker.info will let you check by page to see what the actual PR of the page is on the site.  Even if your homepage has a PR of 6, the rest of your site may range from 0 to 3.  Using certain toolbars may only give you the homepage, so when you’re looking through your site, it will stay on 4.  The best way to see if you have one of these toolbars is to go to a new post.  If it says PR4 like your homepage, then the toolbar only gives you the homepage.  No new post will instantly have PR because Google has to rank it first.  That is why I like PRChecker.info.  It gives you the PR of specific pages and not just the homepage.

4.  Alexa or Yahoo Site Explorer

These are great tools that you can use for free to look at links coming into your site.  Yahoo’s site explorer is very complicated to look at, but can give you a ton of information.  Alexa will show you the backlinks that it can find, but it is up to you to go through the site and see where they are.  Alexa doesn’t give as much information, but it is much easier to look at.  I also don’t see all of the backlinks that I find with other tools, but it is a good tool for you to use if you want to see a basic sampling of backlinks to a site.

5.  Whois searches…but not using a who is service.

There are a ton of free whois searches out there.  You can use anything from domainsbyproxy to whois.net or even GoDaddy.com.  However, if you do a simple search for whois and the site name, email address of the person who registered the url or the actual url in Google you can find other sites registered by that person and begin to map out link farms, get contacts for sites that you want a link from and discover other sites that exist on shared servers that your site shares links with.  It might take a while to do, but this can be a great way to map out backlinks to one person and pull a farm down at once.

6.  XML site map generator

I haven’t used a free one for a long time, but if you do a quick search for best free xml site map creators you can find a few easy ones to use.

7.  Site speed and load time checker

iwebtool.com is a pretty good speed test tool.  You can load up to ten sites at once and see the load time for each.  Load times are an important part of your SEO so you should check it regularly, especially if you have changed designs, uploaded new plugins or added anything to your site.

8.  Free heatmapping tools

I prefer CrazyEgg.com, but they aren’t free.  You can use heatmaptool.com for free, but you do get limited clicks, etc… with it.  You can also try attentionwizard.com which is very cheap, however I haven’t tried it.  Heatmapping is important for your site because it lets you know how people are interacting, can help you to get a better conversion rate and help to decrease your bounce rate which can also help your SEO.

9.  Free database CRM systems

I haven’t used one for a while since I have a paid tool that I use.  The one I used to use no longer has a free option, but I did find Zoho.com which seems like it could be a good option.  I haven’t ever used them, but they have all of the features that I would need.  You can tag and track the progress.  Reach out to the people you need to.  Keep track of links and do everything else that you would need to keep track of your backlinks, contacts, etc… for SEO.

10.  Blogs

WordPress.  You really don’t need anything else.  It’s free, you can set up an ecommerce site, add a blog to help drive long tail traffic and build a following as well as anything else you need.  Adding a blog to your site will help you to add content when you have no pages that are a fit, build a stronger internal linking structure and add additional infographics and rank for other terms when you’ve run out of pages with your static site.

These are ten of the best free SEO tools that you can use to compete with the larger agencies.  I haven’t used all of them and some of them I haven’t used for a few years.  Others I still use and probably couldn’t function without them.  If you have a tool or something else you’d like to add to this list, please feel free to leave a comment below.  Do not spam the comments section though by trying to add in links, etc…  Every post and comment is moderated and I will remove the links if you don’t give a reason why people should use the tool and explain how it can help you.