4 Most Powerful (& Underrated) SEO Tools That Are Absolutely Free

Having the right SEO tools is vital to starting an SEO campaign. Let's face it, a lot of these tools are very expensive. If you just started a company and have a limited budget, it can really be a pain in the a**.

In this post, I got it all covered for you. If right now you think you can’t afford a subscription to Ahrefs or Moz, that’s alright, I got an alternative tool for you that's free.

If you need to crawl a 10,000 page-website but all you have is a free version of ScreamingFrog that can only do 500, you don’t need to worry anymore.

Below, I’ve listed the FREE alternatives to the most powerful SEO tools out there.

Audit My PC

I already created an article about Audit My PC before discussing its features. In this post, I’ll go deeper. We’re looking at the alternative of ScreamingFrog here.

Instead of paying $175 per year and downloading ScreamingFrog’s Windows/Mac OS app, you can easily go to this link and do your crawling.

The tool is basically a sitemap generator that runs on Java. Recently though, Chrome and Firefox stopped supporting NPAPI, a technology required for Java applets. That means we won’t be able to run Audit My PC in these browsers anymore. Good thing there’s still Internet Explorer (Windows) & Safari (Mac OS X).

You can crawl any website using this tool, even those that are still in development, not indexed & followed, images, WP files, blocked by Robots.txt and more.

It’s very easy to use: go to Audit My PC Sitemap Generator and you’ll be redirected to the Settings, see below.

Do the following before you click the Play button at the lower left corner of the page:

• Name your project. It could be the domain name or anything you want.

• Add the exact URL (with http/https).

• You can include or not include pages by adding filters. In the example above, I usually exclude /wp-includes/ and /wp-content/ which were generated in WordPress and I don’t really need them in my list.

• You can also edit the rules. I usually leave it by default but if you want you can exclude the images as well.

After modifying the settings, click the Play button. Then in the Menu section, go to Sitemap. You’ll see all the URLs that are being crawled. See below.

In this section, you can get the following data:

• URLTitle Tag

• HTTP Status Code

• Inbound & Outbound Links

• Page Type

• Error Pages

Download the file by clicking Export in the upper left corner and you’re done.

Console Rocket

This new tool is quite something. I have always been curious to learn how I can maximize the use of Search Console, and I think this tool is the answer.

If you want to visualize and enrich your data without manually pulling it from Search Console, parsing & creating graphs using Excel, then this is your tool.

Console Rocket is 100% free. I dare you to go to Pricing to confirm that it’s actually free. All you need to do is sign up, connect your Search Console account and you’re good to go. It’ll then start processing your data.

So what features does this tool have?

Click Opportunity – shows you what keywords provide the most visits and which pages have the most keyword opportunities in a single UI.

CTR Curves – shows you the CTR impact if you rank in certain positions. For example, if you rank #1 instead of #5, it tells you what happens to your SEO CTR.

Brand vs Non-Brand Auto Tagging – brand and non-brand keyword metrics are automatically separated.

Keyword to Page Mapping – shows what page/s a keyword is ranking for in a single UI. Search Console separates this data, which makes it harder for SEO specialists to map the keywords & landing pages.

Way Back Machine

WayBackMachine is a free tool you can use to browse hundreds of billions of archived web pages saved over time. This is a tool anyone can use to view what a website looked like in the past. For SEO Specialists, it’s a very helpful tool to improve SEO.

Greenlane Marketing listed the top 10 ways to use this tool:

• View changes in the website

• Become familiarized a with a website

• Find old redirect opportunities

• Discover old URL structures

• Examine Robots.txt

• Validate Analytics code placement and use

• Dig deeper into pathing analysis

• Identify site structure

• Find old content

• Perform a marketing mix analysis

The WayBackMachine tool has had new features updated in 2016 which include search to find a website and a summary of types of media on a website.

Keyword Shitter

Keyword Shitter is a powerful tool used for generating keyword ideas. It’s very easy to use. Just input your own keyword ideas and it’ll give you as many as it can.

You can use the positive and negative filters to include or not include variations of your keywords. Note that it’ll literally give you shitty keywords sometimes so make sure you use the filters.

Bonus - Other Free Powerful SEO Tools

Open Link Profiler – a free tool that gives you backlink data including anchor texts, link contexts, link age, LIS distribution and more. It’s basically an alternative to Ahrefs and Moz. You can also export up to 1000 links.

WonderWeb Ware - offers a list of Windows & Mac OS apps that are mainly used for website development. The tools include a sitemap generator, page preview tool, page speed tester, screen ruler, text to html converter and more.

GTmetrix – a free page speed tool that provides insights on the speed and performance of your website. It’s basically an alternative to Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Difference is, it goes deeper on each technical issue that might be causing your website to slow down and gives you recommendations on how to fix them.

Do you have any free SEO tools that you currently use? Share your picks with us in the comment section below!

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.