Search for free SEO tools and most of what comes back is a software company's own list of its free tools, every one of them a taste of a paid plan. That is fine if you are shopping for a subscription. If you run a local business you need about ten tools, most of them made by Google, none of them on a trial, and you need to know which question each one answers.
The free SEO tools a small business actually needs: Google Search Console, your Google Business Profile, PageSpeed Insights, the Rich Results Test, Keyword Planner and Bing Webmaster Tools, plus Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and Screaming Frog's free crawler for the checks Google does not do. Add two free Chrome extensions, SEO Readout for any page and Rank Readout for the search itself. Together they cost nothing and cover most of what a paid suite would tell a local business.
What do free SEO tools need to tell you?
Four things, and a tool is only worth installing if it answers one of them:
- Can Google find and read your site? Which pages are indexed, which are not, and why.
- Is each page right? Its title, description, headings, speed and structured data.
- Where do you rank, and against whom? On the searches that bring in work, including the map pack.
- Is your Google profile doing its job? How many people find it, and how many call.
Everything below is sorted by those four. Only one of them, Keyword Planner, asks for billing details, and the only sign-up most of them need is the Google account you already have.
Which free SEO tools does Google make?
1. Google Search Console
The one to set up first. It shows the searches your site appeared for, how often it was shown, how often it was clicked and its average position, and its page indexing report lists which pages Google has indexed and why the rest are not. It is free and needs a Google account and a verified site. If you only open one tool a month, open this one. Our guide to getting your website onto Google covers verifying your site and submitting its sitemap.
2. Google Business Profile
Free, and for a local business the most valuable listing you have. Once the profile is verified, its performance view shows the searches people used to find you, how many times it was viewed on Search and Maps, and how many people called, asked for directions or clicked through to your website. The search terms update monthly, a few days into the month. Setting one up takes an afternoon.
3. PageSpeed Insights
Paste in any address and it reports the page's Core Web Vitals two ways: real visitors' experience over the previous 28 days, from Chrome's own data, and a lab test run on the spot. No account. The real-visitor numbers are the ones that matter; the lab score is a diagnosis.
4. The Rich Results Test
Structured data is what lets Google show stars, opening hours and FAQs beside a result. The Rich Results Test tells you whether a page's markup qualifies for those features, and Google points to the Schema Markup Validator for checking the markup in general. Both are free and need no account.
5. Keyword Planner
Google's own estimate of how often something is searched. It is free, but it sits inside Google Ads: you have to finish setting up an Ads account, including billing details, before it will suggest keywords. On an account that is not spending, it showed us ranges such as "100 to 1,000 a month" rather than exact numbers, which is still enough to choose between two phrasings. It is how we chose the words this post is written around.
Is Bing Webmaster Tools worth setting up?
Yes, and it takes five minutes. It is free, and it can import your sites straight from Search Console, already verified. Bing's index reaches further than Bing's own search page: OpenAI says ChatGPT search uses third-party search providers, and its help pages say searches may go to Bing. Bing's tools also support IndexNow, which tells Bing and several other search engines the moment a page changes, and since February 2026 it has been previewing a report on when your pages are cited in Copilot's answers.
Which free tools check what Google does not?
6. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
The free side of a paid suite, and a generous one: once you verify your own site, it audits it (5,000 crawl credits a month), and shows up to 1,000 of the sites that link to you and 1,000 of the keywords you rank for. Links are the one thing Google's free tools barely show, so this fills a real gap. It only works on sites you own.
7. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
A desktop program that crawls a site the way a search engine does and lists every broken link, missing title and redirect chain. The free version crawls 500 addresses, which is more than most small business sites have. No account; download it and point it at your home page.
Which free Chrome extensions help with SEO?
Two, and we should say up front that we made them. We built them for our own work and give them away: no account, no trial, no paid tier, and nothing sent to us.
8. SEO Readout
Open any page, yours or a competitor's, and click the icon. It gives a score out of 100 with the quick wins first, then every check in plain words: the title and description measured in pixels the way Google cuts them, the heading outline, images, every link, structured data checked against what Google needs, share cards, and what AI crawlers get before JavaScript runs. On a Newcastle wedding page we built it scores 99 and finds one quick win, a description Google may cut off. It only reads the tab you click it on, and the only requests it makes go from that page to its own site.
9. Rank Readout
It works on the Google results page you are already looking at. Search as you normally would and it shows where your site landed, organic and in the map pack, beside up to ten competitors; what kind of page every result is; each result's headings, word count and schema when you press Outline; a side-by-side comparison of the top ten; and which sites the AI Overview quotes. It never searches Google in the background, because Google treats automated rank checking as spam, and it sends nothing to us. Our worked competitor analysis is one search read with it, start to finish.
Both are on our free tools page.
Are the free plans of paid SEO tools any use?
Some are. Semrush's free account gives you about ten reports a day without a card, enough to look up a competitor or a keyword now and then. Moz's free MozBar extension shows its authority scores on any page. Ahrefs, Moz and SE Ranking each keep a page of single-purpose free checkers, and most of the top results for "free SEO tools" are exactly those pages.
What the free tiers hold back is the part a local business rarely needs: keyword databases for every competitor's whole domain, months of rank history, and reports to hand to a client. If you are tracking hundreds of keywords across a national market, pay for one. If your work comes from five searches in one region, the free kit above covers them, and the money is better spent on the pages themselves.
A 30-minute monthly routine with the free tools
- Search Console, 10 minutes. Check the page indexing report for anything new that is not indexed, then sort the search queries by impressions and look for searches you appear for but rarely get clicked on.
- Business Profile, 5 minutes. Compare calls and website clicks with last month, and read the search terms people found you with.
- Rank Readout, 10 minutes. Run your three or four money searches again. Saved searches show who moved up, who is new and who dropped out since last time.
- SEO Readout, 5 minutes. Open any page you changed this month and fix what it flags before Google reads it again.
Once a quarter, add a PageSpeed Insights check on your home page and a Screaming Frog crawl for broken links. That is the whole maintenance job for most local sites. If the routine keeps turning up the same problems, our guide to SEO for small business sets out the fixes in order, and they are also the work our SEO service in Newcastle does.
Method. Every limit and requirement for another company's tool was checked on that company's own website or help pages on 17 October 2026: Google's Search Console, Business Profile, PageSpeed Insights, Search Central and Google Ads help; Bing's webmaster blog and help; OpenAI's help pages; Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz and Screaming Frog's product pages. Free plans change often, so treat the numbers as true on that date. What ranks for "free SEO tools" in Australia is from a search made the same day, signed in, from the Newcastle area, read with Rank Readout. We make SEO Readout and Rank Readout; no other company here paid for or knows about its mention.
Written by Newcastle Web Co, web design & seo in Cameron Park NSW 2285. Last updated 17 October 2026.
