Are you a search engine marketer on a shoestring budget and looking for a free onpage SEO tool?
Don’t worry, I was in the same spot until a few years back, with very little money to invest in marketing of my personal projects.
Still, I was able to make those projects successful, thanks to some awesome SEO tools available in the market.
In this post, I have covered 10 onpage SEO analysis tools that are either free or offer a freemium model. You can use these smart tools to set a rock-solid platform for your next organic search campaign.
10 Best OnPage SEO Tools for Budget Marketers
#1. Screaming Frog (for finding onpage SEO errors)
Purpose: Technical onpage SEO audit
Pricing: Freemium
Screaming Frog is a desktop based on page tool that needs to be installed on your Mac, Windows or Linux system.
As part of its free subscription, it can crawl up to 500 URLs per run to find a wide array of technical SEO glitches.
It crawls the website just like Google crawler does (i.e. by finding internal links). The output inlcudes an excel sheet that covers technical SEO issues ranging from broken links, missing title tags/headings/meta desc/image alt text, canonical errors to word count, and much much more.
Whether you are new to SEO or an old timer, Screaming frog will cater to both your basic as well as advanced technical SEO needs.
Here’s a product demo video of Screaming Frog.
That means it will tell you what’s missing on your web pages. However, it won’t compare your page to that of your competitors, nor would it suggest how to fix the stuff in order to rank on the top. To answer the “how” part, use Screaming Frog along with OnPage Champ (next tool) to execute end to end on-page SEO.
#2. OnPage Champ (for competitor research)
Purpose: Competitor spying and onpage SEO analysis
Pricing: Freemium
We have built OnPage Champ, an onpage seo checker tool, to solve a very common SEO question: What are my competitors doing from onpage SEO perspective to rank on the top?
Previously, you have to manually visit top-ranking URLs and analyse the structure of SEO elements to dig out ranking opportunities.
With OnPage Champ’s SERP Audit feature, you get this analysis, all in a single dashboard at just a click of a button. This can save you atleast 30 hours of manual labor each month.
Another unique feature of OnPage Champ is that it helps you track onpage changes and their impact on Google rankings.
Very often, you will find that you keep on making changes to your page without realizing what’s working for you and what’s not. OnPage Champ will remove all the guesswork and help you track your onpage SEO changes as well as relate them to rank fluctuations.
#3. Yoast for WordPress (for onpage SEO optimization)
Purpose: Content optimization
Pricing: Freemium
Once you have written your content on the WordPress platform, you can use Yoast, an onpage SEO analyser tool, to key in a focus keyword and check how well the content is optimized.
Yoast immediately provides you with a list of recommendations to optimize your content for that focus keyword.
While a green signal by Yoast doesn’t guarantee a first-page rank, it is a good enough indicator that the basic on page SEO is in place.
Here’s an in-depth video of features provided by the Yoast plugin.
Yoast is one of the best free WordPress SEO plugins to use. You can also pay to unlock a few extra features as well as get thier dedicated support.
The biggest disadvantage of using free version of Yoast is that it includes just one keyword analysis and shows no analysis on the usage of LSI keywords, which I think is a big miss.
Do keep in mind that the “lights” you see in Yoast are not sacrosanct . It’s just a guideline that your page is optimized, that too basis just the focus keyword. So a green light doesn’t mean your page will rank on Google, sometimes there can still be things that are missing.
#4. TinyPNG (for image compression)
Purpose: Improving page load time
Pricing: Freemium
Before you are ready to hit the publish button on your latest content piece, have all your PNG and JPEG images processed by TinyPNG.
It does a smart compression of an image without any significant loss, thereby resulting in faster page loads.
You just need to drag and drop the files on the web page. TinyPNG also tells you the percentage of compression done for each image.
In its free plan, TinyPNG allows you to compress up to 20 images in a single drag and drop, with a size limit of 5 MB for each image.
However, there is no limit to the number of images you can compress via multiple drag and drops.
#5. Smush (for faster image loads)
Purpose: Image compression and lazy loading
Pricing: Free
Images contribute significantly to page size, thereby resulting in slow page loads.
To improve page load speed, your images should be in the right format and properly compressed.
You can compress the images using web based tools like TinyPNG (as mentioned above), or if you are on WordPress you can use a plugin named Smush.
In it’s free avatar, it can bulk compress 50 images at a go.
Not just that, it also allows you to enable lazy load for your blog pages, thus boosting the page speed further.
Here’s a detailed blog post on how to lazy load YouTube video.
#6. GTMetrix (to discover page speed improvements)
Purpose: Improving page load time
Pricing: Free
GTMetrix should be your go-to SEO tool after you have made any major changes to your website.
It not just shows you the page load speed but also offers suggestions and improvement areas.
It uses a combination of Google Page Speed Insights and YSlow Insights to churn out scores and speed improvement suggestions which are very practical and easy to follow.
You get a host of features and recommendations under their free plan and I can guarantee you would not need their paid service pretty soon.
#7. Google Search Console (for everything SEO)
Purpose: SEO performance
Pricing: Free
So you have written an awesome content piece and have hit the publish button.
Now use the Google Search Console tool to track how Google bot interacts with this content piece. Using this free SEO tool by Google, you can see the performance of each page in terms of website ranking, keyword impressions and organic clicks generated.
Webmasters tool also allows you to submit sitemaps, keep a track of broken links and 404 errors, view internal and external link profile, etc.
#8. Siteliner (for finding broken links)
Purpose: Broken link checker
Pricing: Free
Siteliner is web based tool that offers a quick glimpse of a handful of on page SEO elements.
I use Siteliner for its 2 functionalities:
– finding broken links within a website
– finding pages that are blocked by robots or have a redirection
You should use Siteliner atleast once a month to run a quick website audit and fix related issues.
#9. Keywords Everywhere (for that Eureka moment)
Purpose: Keyword research
Pricing: Freemium [Update: From 1st Oct 2019, Keywords Everywhere has become a paid tool. 🙁 ]
Most of the time, you are searching the web for multiple keywords without realizing the potential of those keywords.
Keywords Everywhere come as a Chrome and Firefox browser extension and instantly shows you the volume for each keyword that you search for, right on the spot.
This tool can help you uncover many hidden opportunities and ensure you never miss out on the obvious ones.
A low SD score (anywhere below 30-35) indicates a very good SEO ranking opportunity.
#10. Answer The Public (for finding specific content ideas)
Purpose: Content Idea generation tool
Pricing: Freemium
Once you have shortlisted a keyword, consider running it through AnswerThePublic.
This tool fetches related search queries from Google and Bing and categorizes them across how, when, what, where, etc.
This can be a goldmine in terms of content planning since it tells you how users are searching the internet for a particular keyword. Equipped with this insight, you can create content exactly in the way your user is searching the internet.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
#1. Is onpage SEO important in 2020?
Without an iota of doubt. Google of 2020 is focused on content relevancy for the search query. And onpage SEO is a smart way to send relevancy signals to Google.
#2. Should I go for all these onpage SEO tools?
No. You don’t need all these tools right at the start. If you are beginner, just focus on generating quality content and optimizing it using OnPage Champ. As you grow in SEO, keep exploring other tools and adopt whichever helps you solve your problem.
#3. Which onpage SEO tool is the best in this list?
Onpage SEO is a vast field that covers multiple content, HTML and technical parameters. All the tools mentioned above do a specific part within onpage SEO, and do that very well. Ultimately, it boils down to your need that a tool should solve.
Conclusion
I am sure there will be more free and useful on page tools.
I have mentioned only a handful that I have used in my projects and which benefited me a lot.
If you want to suggest a tool as part of this list, do drop a comment below.
We will ensure we test out the SEO tool and write on it if we find it useful.
