10 Free SEO Resources for 2024

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In this post I share 10 free SEO resources that will help improve your understanding of search engine optimization, and highlight some tools that can help you improve the visibility of your site.

1. Google’s SEO starter guide

Bing, Yahoo Search and Duck Duck Go are all very well, but we all know that if your site isn’t coming up at the top of Google search results, you are going to be missing out on a huge chunk of traffic, leads and sales.

Google does, after all, completely dominate search engine usage, with 91.6% of all searches currently being carried out using it (source: Statcounter).

So it’s important to listen to what Google say about how to ensure good search rankings — and helpfully, they have a LOT to say in very own free search engine optimization starter guide.

This guide is a ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ resource for improving your site’s performance on Google — and one that’s not to be overlooked! Even if you already know quite a lot about SEO, you may find information in it that is new to you.

As a bare minimum, you should be adhering to all the guidelines contained within this guide.

2. Semrush

Semrush is an industry-leading SEO backlink checker and competitor research tool — you enter a domain name into it and get a lot of data on it, including:

There is a free version of Semrush available, and although it’s more limited in terms of functionality than the paid version, it nonetheless lets you see at a glance how authoritative a particular domain or page is — and this helps you determine whether it’s a site worth approaching for backlinks or pitching guest posts to.

However, you may be better off with Semrush’s free trial, because this gives you a free account AND all the tool’s key data and features for 2 weeks. You can find out more about this here.

3. Yoast SEO

If you’re a WordPress or Shopify user, you really should be using Yoast SEO, a plugin that evaluates your page content from an SEO perspective.

Yoast’s traffic light system tells you immediately if the content you’ve created is search-engine friendly. The tool also gives you list of practical suggestions as to how you can improve its chances of ranking highly in search.

The WordPress version of Yoast can be used for free, but a monthly fee applies to the Shopify one.

If you’re not a WordPress or Shopify user, you can still make use of Yoast (and for free, too) by visiting the Real-time Content Analysis section of the Yoast website.

This allows you to enter the HTML for one of your web pages — along with a focus keyword — and it will check how good your on-page SEO is.

4. Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Moz is one of the leading websites about search engine optimization and it provides a range of free and paid-for SEO tools as well as resources about the topic.

One such resource is their Beginner’s Guide to SEO — a comprehensive, seven-chapter guide on how to optimize your site for search.

It’s well worth a read, particularly for those who are new to the whole area of SEO.

5. Google Search Console

If you’ve got a website, and you want it to perform well in search, it’s advisable to register it with Google Search Console.

Regardless of the website builder you’re using for your website — i.e., Shopify, Squarespace or Wix — Google Search Console gives you a comprehensive, free set of tools to improve its SEO performance, check it for any crawl errors and view backlinks to it.

When you register your website with Google Search Console, you’ll receive an email with a helpful series of steps you should take to maximise its visibility in search.

Follow them!

While you’re at it, you should also register your site with Bing’s Webmaster Tools. Although Google is still the dominant player where search engines are concerned, Bing is handling an increasing number of search queries, particularly in the US and the UK — so it make sense to ensure that it knows as much about your website as possible.

6. Pingdom

Google and other search engines place an increasing amount of emphasis on page speed; sites that load content quickly are given preferential treatment in search results.

Pingdom have a really helpful (and free!) Website Speed Test to help you analyze your website load speed.

The test is designed to help you make your site faster by identifying what about a webpage is fast, slow, too big, and so on.

You simply enter a URL into the tool, and it will produce a report which highlights areas for improvement.

7. Screaming Frog

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls your website’s URLs and analyses your onsite SEO. You can download it for free, or purchase a licence for additional advanced features.

A few things you can do with the free version of Screaming Frog are as follows:

Not a bad feature set for a free tool — the only thing to watch out for is that a crawl limit of 500 pages applies to the free version.

8. Ahrefs’ Webmaster Tools

Like Semrush, Ahrefs is one of the web’s most popular SEO tools, allowing you to perform keyword research, conduct backlink analysis and run site audits on your website.

The full version is quite expensive — it costs a minimum of $99 per month — but the company makes some of the platform’s SEO functionality for free, in the form of its suite of ‘Webmaster Tools.’

Essentially, these let you use cut-down versions of its “Site Explorer” and “Site Audit” features, which let you perform backlink analysis and improve the technical SEO setup of your site respectively.

You can learn more about Ahrefs Webmaster Tools here — or watch our video about how to perform keyword research with Ahrefs below.

In addition to its ‘Webmaster Tools’ product, Ahrefs gives you some other free tools to play with, including a keyword generator, a SERP checker and a website traffic checker.

9. The ‘HeadingsMap’ Chrome extension

One of our favourite free SEO tools is the ‘HeadingsMap’ extension for Chrome. When enabled, this outputs all the H1s, H2s, H3s of the page or post you’re on (see screenshot below to get a quick sense of how this works).

HeadingsMap comes in useful in two ways: first, you can use it to identify what headings the best-performing search results are using. This can give you ideas for crafting the structure of your own content or establishing the topics it should cover.

And second, you can use the tool to audit the structure of your own existing pages or posts — and spot room for improvement or clean-up.

Importantly, HeadingsMap will highlight when headings are ordered incorrectly — so if you have a H4 straight after a H2, for example, you can correct this (improving not just your technical SEO of your content but its accessibility to visually impaired readers too).

10. Google’s Search Central YouTube Channel

The Google Search Central YouTube Channel is full of useful advice about SEO. For a good visual introduction to search engine optimization, it’s definitely worth subscribing to.

It also gives you a great way to find out when Google changes an aspect of its algorithm, or get the latest hints on how to improve your technical SEO.

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