Recently India banned 59 Chinese apps such as TikTok, UC Browser and CamScanner, due to compliance issues and concerns over data privacy. TikTok influencers had built a massive follower base and had many brand deals that added to their source of income. But the ban had left these social media influencers without a medium to reach their audiences. During the COVID-19 lockdown, the number of active users on social media platforms has also significantly increased. This has led to the rise of many alternate apps such as Mitron, Roposo, Chingari, Bolo Indiya and now Instagram Reels.
In a move to capture the market share and move deeper into the short-form content space, Instagram has now introduced a new feature called Instagram Reels. Now you can create 15-second videos on Reels and edit using options like speed, timer, effects and audio. You can also choose the apply AR effects in your video. The audio option allows you to play music from the Instagram Music library or use your original audio. You can create multiple 15-second videos at a time and edit them separately using different options.
Instagram Reels allows the user to select the audience they wish to share their videos with. The videos created using Reels will be displayed in the Explore section and the Reels tab of Instagram. You also have the option to share the video in your feed and in your story.
Open the Instagram Camera and select Reels.
In the audio option, you can select audio from the Instagram music library or choose to use your original audio.
Edit your Reel using the available options such as speed, timer and effects like AR effects.
In today’s digital world, the key for your business to perform well online is to reach the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and for this to happen your website must deserve to be at the top.
With Google’s frequent algorithm updates the need for page speed, unique content and SEO strategies has become a necessity. Fortunately, there are a lot of free SEO tools online for Indian marketers that can help you assess the website content thereby helping you achieve your SEO (and business) goals. You don’t need to use all of the best SEO tools available under the sun to improve your ranking, just the right ones to get you covered.
20 Best SEO Tools List to Improve Search Rankings
SEO tools can give you some insights and updates, thus offering you a better understanding of your website’s general health and success. If you are looking forward to achieving better results for your website, then here are some of the best free SEO tools you should be using.
Some of the tools are completely free while others have certain functionality limitations whilst using the free version. But both make sure you are satisfied with your analysis!
Every individual interested in online marketing should ensure Google Analytics is integrated into their website. Google Analytics is one of the free SEO tools that provide the data of traffic received on the website. The Google Analytics tool helps you identify the source of the traffic whether it’s organic, referral or even paid campaigns. It also has functionalities to break down the metrics further to identify the device, location and behaviour of the users driving traffic to your website. This helps you understand your audience better.
Helpful Add-on: Google Analytics (for google sheets). This GA add-on allows you to generate and schedule reports on google sheets to ease the tracking of data.
No top free SEO tools list is complete without Google Search Console. Google Search Console formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools is a tool that focuses on optimization and search result performance. The tool also helps you with analysis of the technical aspects such as coverage issues, internal, and external links on the website and the speed of the website. It is also one of the only places that provide reliable query data.
Helpful Add-on: Search Analytics for Sheets helps you transfer data without any hassle. This add-on allows you to pull data from Google Search Console on Google Sheets with ease.
Any SEO tools list is incomplete without Google Data Studio is a reporting tool that allows you to merge data from different sources like Google Analytics, Search Console, and Google Sheets. This tool helps you present and customize your data in the form of a dashboard making it convenient for reporting and can be built for free.
One of the best free SEO tools is Google Trends which helps you to understand what people search for and the search volume over a period of time. You can easily filter the results based on the region, time frame, category and type of searches such as web search, image search, shopping search or YouTube search. You can also do a comparative analysis between two terms and then finding getting the insights is all up to you.
MOZ, one of the best SEO optimisation tools, is the first choice of top webmasters. The Domain Authority score by MOZ is an industry-standard to gauge the quality of a website. MOZ bases this score on various on-page and off-page factors. Moz provides SEO extensions for Chrome to get analysis jobs done quickly and with minimum clicks! With MozBar, you can get website link metrics for domains and pages through the Page and Domain Authority. Check out the top free SEO tools from MOZ for link building and analysis, keyword research, page performance, local listing audits, and more! Here are some of the features of the MOZ tool that you can use:
Keyword Optimization
MOZ helps you to keep track of your domain’s ranking and search visibility for the keywords you want to target on your website. You can also perform a competitive analysis to understand your competitor’s position for your targeted keywords. Hence, Moz is one of the free SEO tools that take care of the off-page and on-page health of your website!
Site Crawl
MOZ audits your website and identifies potential errors that could arise when a spider or a search engine bot tries to crawl your website. It can also help you optimize errors in your metadata which can help you rank better in search engine results.
Backlinks
MOZ analyzes your backlinks to understand where you’re getting your backlinks from and the quality of the referring domains. To aid your contextual marketing efforts, MOZ helps you to identify the anchor texts that link to your website. MOZ also helps you to keep a track of recently acquired backlinks and also the backlinks that you have lost.
MozBar is one of the SEO extensions for Chrome which adds a sticky toolbar that knows the right information to determine the credibility of a website. The MozBar is one of the free SEO tools that provides the domain authority and page authority of a website to draw an understanding of how credible the website is. You can also click on the Moz bar and generate reports instantly.
SEMRush is an all-in-one toolkit for all your SEM needs. SEMRush is by far one of the best free SEO tools in the market, which provides tools for most of your digital marketing needs. But, please note that you can use the free version of SEMRush with limited functionalities. Based on the requirement, SEMRush has divided its website into toolkits such as the SEO toolkit, Advertising toolkit, Content Marketing toolkit, Social Media toolkit and Competitive Research toolkit. So, this makes SEMRush a vital one for any SEO tools list.
Keyword Research
You can also perform keyword research and find out your rankings for a keyword. You can either track a set of keywords you have shortlisted and see its performance for organic or PPC campaigns or identify keyword opportunities by just entering your domain. SEMRush is one of the best free SEO tools that help you find keywords and thus assist in ideating new topics!
Backlink Analysis
In the link-building section, you can get an overview of all the backlinks to your website and fulfil your off-page SEO requirements. Identify toxic links that can affect your site health and your domain’s ranking in SERPs. You can also set up a tracker to identify opportunities for backlinking and track their progress over time.
On-page and Technical SEO
You can audit your website and find on-page and technical issues on your website. It provides you with a site health score and gives you suggestions to improve your site’s performance. It can also track local listings for your business and monitor the reviews your business receives.
Competitive Research
You can compare your keyword strategy to that of your competitor and identify any competitive opportunities you can grab. It can identify the strengths of your competitor’s domain and find out what is working best for them. It can also help identify keyword and backlink gaps between your domain and that of your competitors in order to improve your position.
Rank Tracking
This tool keeps track of your ranking position in SERPs on a daily basis. In addition to this, you can also keep an eye on the volatility of the search engine with respect to any changes in the ranking algorithms. You can get a list of the top domains that are currently ranking on search engines.
One of the best free SEO tools is Ahrefs as it can 10x your organic reach strategically. This is another wonderful toolkit for all your SEO needs. You can perform a site audit to identify issues and optimize your website. Ahrefs is a truly remarkable tool that every SEO specialist must have in their toolkit.
Organic Search
You can track how your website has been ranking over a period of time. The keyword research is an important tool to understand the search queries and find opportunities for your keyword strategy. Analyze your competitors in the industry and track how you performed in comparison to them.
Page Analysis
Analyse individual pages on your website either by the traffic they receive or by the type of content or content pages that get the most shares on social media platforms and other domains online.
Backlink Profile
It helps you to identify the backlinks and backlinking domains to your website. You can also understand how your contextual linking strategy is working for you by analyzing the anchor tags. You can keep a track of the backlinks you have recently acquired or lost. Have a look to see an analysis of the internal linking status on your website and identify any orphan pages.
Outgoing Links
This is an important aspect of SEO as important as backlinks are. If you are providing link juice to low quality websites it can give an indication to search engines that you are a low-quality website which can lead to lower rankings or penalization by these search engines.
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps you manage your on-page SEO tasks easily. It also measures the readability of the content on your webpage. It helps you to easily edit the meta-information such as the title and description while editing your page on WordPress. It is one of the free SEO tools that provide you with utmost value but will come with certain limitations in functionality. In that case, you’d have to upgrade to a paying plan!
Moreover, with Yoast SEO, you can also measure the optimization of the content on your page for target keywords and keyphrases. The snippet editor shows you how your webpage appears in the search results. Similarly, you can also control how the meta information of your page appears on social media platforms.
Ranking in SERPs and leading visitors to your website is not enough. Google also gives priority to the user experience which is the culmination of many factors like the bounce rate, time on page, pages per session and other on-page factors. Hotjar is a heatmap tool which helps you understand your visitor’s behaviour after they land on your page. Hotjar helps you track activities like clicks, taps, scrolls or potential parts of the page visitors looked at. And, that’s why it’s one of the best free online SEO tools for bloggers.
Like a weather map, the colour ranges from red which shows high activity to blue which represents low activity. This heatmap tool could also help you to run A/B tests on different versions of your website to track user responses to the changes. All you need to do is add an asynchronous script to your website and follow the analytics to improve your website.
UberSuggest
Ubersuggest is an all-in-one SEO tool that helps you win in the SEO world. The key factor while doing SEO is to be aware of what you’re doing and what your competitors are doing and how you adjust your strategy accordingly. This is also one of the free SEO tools that provide you with data on keyword ideas, keyword volume, backlinks requirements for the keyword, and competitor analysis. Better yet, it also has one of the most thoughtful SEO extensions that eases your marketing efforts by a lot!
UberSuggest Extension
Neil Patel has recently introduced the new uber suggest chrome extension which makes it super handy to do SEO. UberSuggest is one of the SEO extensions for Chrome that allows users to have keyword information directly from Google search results. This is one of the SEO extensions for chrome that shows all the required SEO metrics in the SERPs themselves. Plus, it provides the search volume trends of the keyword and backlinks acquired by the competitor websites which are ranking in the SERP, it also provides related keywords to target. Hence, this is one of the top on page SEO tools that marketers are fond of!
Despite its name, Small SEO Tools provides plenty of on-page SEO tools. SmallSEOtools is an amazing SEO chrome extension that every content creators need. Your content team would appreciate the functions such as the plagiarism checker, paraphrasing tool, image-to-text converter, and other tools.
Similarly, for SEO you have tools to check the keyword density in text, a keyword analyzer, and a keyword finder. You can run a backlink analysis for your domain and find places to improve the website’s crawlability. You can also do a competitor analysis for the keywords and backlinks. There are a host of tools for website tracking and management on this website.
Keyword Planner
SEO is about targeting the right keywords. The keyword planner tool which is Google’s very own provides the average search volume for a specific keyword. It also provides keyword variations and related searches for that focus keyword. Keyword competition is also provided which can get tricky sometimes while you’re performing keyword research for SEO since it’s only used for ads.
SEO Minion
SEO Minion is one of the SEO extensions which provides on-page analysis. This is one of the free SEO tools that provides the metrics necessary for on-page analysis making it handy to have a quick check of your page based on the on-page checklist.
Interlinking pages in a website is a key factor in SEO to allow the link juice to flow from one page to another. It also prevents orphan pages. Interlinking each of the pages can be time-consuming. The Smacient Interlinking Tool is one of the most helpful on page SEO tools for digital marketers. provides suggestions of other similar pages in the website with a suggestion of the anchor text to be linked to ease out the process.
The Schema Generator is indeed one of the most popular on-page SEO tools, that can help users optimize for their target keywords. This Schema Generator tool makes it really easy to create the code to implement schemas onto your website. The tool has a list of schemas to choose from to generate the code for it to be added to your website.
This tool is a status code tool that checks the status code of the URL. The tool can do wonders when you are searching for the status code of bulk URLs to identify certain issues in a specific URL status code. It also checks the response headers, and redirect chains of a given URL.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one of the best SEO tools to make sure your on-page SEO is optimized. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one of the best technical SEO tools out there. It identifies the technical errors of your website to help fix and improve your site’s health. The spider can be crawled by entering the website, uploading a list of URLs or entering a specific sitemap file.
WooRank is an SEO monitoring and auditing checker that offers you an excellent on page SEO tool It helps you identify critical issues that could have caused your domain to rank lower or be penalized by search engines. It has a clean and easy-to-use interface that highlights the issues and explains the need to rectify those issues. Analyzing the code and files on your website, WooRank identifies hidden errors and helps you visualize the improvement of your ranking in SERPs.
GTMetrix is one of the free SEO tools that can help you to test and monitor the performance of your page. With page speed gaining importance for ranking in SERPs, GTMetrix goes beyond Google’s page speed insights tool. GTMetrix offers PageSpeed and YSlow scores along with a detailed analysis for improvement. You can run the tests for different server locations and also simulate the response on different devices. All you need to do is enter your website and run the analysis.
Local citations are extremely important for businesses that operate in a specific geographic area or those who want to increase their keyword ranking for location-based keywords. This is one of the free SEO tools that find where all your citations appear and also identifies where your competitor’s citations appear in order for you to fill those gaps. It also has a tool to analyse the NPS of the reviews that are left for your business online and in Google’s reviews. If expanding your geographic presence is important to you, check out WhiteSpark.
This is one of the free SEO tools that help you with keyword research. Typically, it shows the monthly search volume of a keyword, competition data and CPC on more than 10 websites! Moreover, Keywords Everywhere has multiple other integrated tools that bring you keywords that pages and websites rank for! This, like other tools on our list, allows limited accessibility in the free plan. According to your goals, you can upgrade the plan to a paying one, if needed!
The great Answer the Public is one of the rarest free SEO tools that help you find topics that people are asking! It’s uniqueness allows you to visualize the queries of people into five categories: the 5 Ws and ‘Will’, ‘Are’, ‘Which’, etc. It shows topics that are exploding and can help you be findable in the SERP if done right. These segregation also helps you in strcuturing your blogs or long-form informative content as well!
BuzzSumo is one of the free SEO tools that offer great value to an extent. It helps you identify the best content and social search opportunities. Moreover, it also helps you in your quest fo find new and relevant keywords that fits your website and your business! Therefore, it is one of the most important tool in this SEO tools list that analyses all that your brand needs!
Hope you found this article useful. To know more about digital marketing tools and trends, do stay updated.
Frequently Asked Questions on Free SEO Tools
Which is the best free SEO tool?
Google’s SEO tools like the Google Keyword Planner, Google Analytics, Google Search Console and others help you gain maximum information for free! Many businesses turn to Google’s SEO tools as they are free and provide ample information and assessment!
How can I improve my SEO for free?
You can improve your website’s SEO if you check your website hygiene in the following ways:
Find relevant keywords with low competition for your website pages,
Write short, easy and crisp content that helps people understand quickly,
Optimise your title and meta tags,
Organize your URL structure,
Fix 404 errors,
Update your blog or service/product pages often,
Optimise images on the page, and more!
What 3 Google tools would you use for SEO?
Here are the top 3 Google tools any business can use to better their SEO hygiene:
Google Analytics
Google Search Console
Google Trends
Can I do SEO on my own?
Yes, definitely! You can do SEO on your own for your website! You can look into ways how to go about SEO practices and use the free tools from Google to start with! You can go with Google Trends, Google Search Console and Google Analytics to track growth and results!
Do I have to pay for SEO tools?
It depends on your goals and objectives. If you have an extensive growth plan, then you would need to upgrade these free SEO tools at some point. You can handpick them according to what you require and stick to them for better results and understanding of current website health!
