Are you a search engine marketer on a shoestring budget and looking for free onpage SEO tools?
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 9 such on page SEO analysis tools that are either free or offer a freemium model. You can use these smart SEO tools to set a rock-solid platform for your next SEO campaign.
9 Best OnPage SEO Tools for Budget Marketers
#1. Screaming Frog (for finding onpage SEO errors)
Purpose: Technical on-page SEO audit
Pricing: Freemium
Screaming Frog is a desktop based 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 on-page 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 on-page 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 SEO 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 on page SEO optimization)
Purpose: Content optimization
Pricing: Free
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 SEO plugins to use but you can pay to unlock a few extra features as well as get dedicated support. The biggest disadvantage of using Yoast is that it still focuses on one keyword and shows no analysis on the usage of LSI keywords, which I think is a big miss.
#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 tool after you have made any major changes on 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 webiste 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. 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.
#9. 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.
Conclusion
I am sure there will be more free and useful onpage SEO 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 at our labs and write on it if we find it useful.
