10 free search engine and site optimisation tools you can use in 2024

Managing your own website, whether it’s E-Commerce or not, is a tough job. If you’re doing it on a tight budget, and that probably describes most of the website-owning population in 2024, it’s even tougher. Successful websites thrive on continuous improvement, and that’s only possible if you have the data you need to make decisions.

Luckily there are still some free options to help you start building that data picture, and in this article we’ll look at ten of the best, plus a bonus one that’s very nearly free. We don't have ties to any of these products, but if they want to send over free t-shirts as a result of this article, it's a size medium please.

*Almost free - Keywords Everywhere ($27 a year)*

Google Analytics

The equivalent of a National Insurance number - everybody with a website needs this. Like most free tools there’s a steep learning curve which became a bit more like an unclimbable wall with the release of Google Analytics 4, but there are lots of guides out there which can help you get to grips on what it’s telling you, including free courses from Google itself. We can also help you to set it up and understand the data it's reporting, if you prefer the human touch.

There are customisable goals (now called Key Events) which you can implement to report on the parts of your site that really matter, like whether people are taking actions like submitting contact forms. You can then use this to assess whether your marketing activity is working.

Search Console

It’s easy to mistake Search Console, which is another Google tool, for an older-looking version of Google Analytics with less features, but it’s there to do an entirely different job. Actually, it’s there to do three entirely different jobs.

Search Console’s able to tell you the queries people used to find your website, which is actually telling you the keywords that your site performs best on. It can tell you whereabouts in the search results you are, which you can use to guide your site optimisation and other advertising. If you’re not performing well for a keyword you need to rank for, some of the other tools in this article can help you find out how to improve.

It can also tell you about the health of your site - are all the right pages in Google’s Search Index? (if you run an E-commerce site, you might not want every variation of a product to be in there, for example - just the main product page). It will also warn you if pages become unavailable, which can be helpful if you’ve got a site outage you don’t know about.

Lastly, it will offers basic reporting on the quality of your website experience. Google’s assessment of your site looks at not just the content, but the overall performance. You can get a more detailed picture from Pagespeed Insights, another tool we’ll discuss later, but for a quick assessment, Search Console is an option.

There are also a few smaller services that are easy to overlook. Most websites will hopefully never have to suffer the effects of a Google Manual Action (a penalty from Google for doing something they see as trying to cheat their systems), but if you do, it can be appealed from within Search Console.

There’s also a link section that looks at the backlinks coming into your site - want to know which are your top linked pages, and which sites link to you the most? You can find out here.

Pagespeed Insights

If you need to know technical information about the performance of your pages, this is where to find out. There are quite a few different metrics you’ll be judged by, including the speed of your site, how much the page layout shifts around when it’s loading, and how quickly it becomes interactive.

The downside is that while it gives recommendations, most of them can only be solved with the help of an agency that has experienced developers. The upside is that we are one of those agencies, so if your site isn’t at its best, we can help you fix it.

Answer the Public

Knowing which questions your website has to answer to rank well on Google can be huge in terms of performance. Answer the Public is a tool which has been through a few different iterations (and owners), but the basic functionality remains pretty much the same. You can put in your search term and it will find you related searches on the same subject, including the questions users are asking. Creating content around the suggestions it gives will increase your authority on the subject, and your chances of the users you want landing on your site.

SEMRush

The paid version of SEMRush offers a wide selection of tools to help with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), but there are still some you can use on the free plan to build up your site. There’s even limited keyword tracking, which means you find out how well your site is ranking for important search terms and see if it moves up or down the ranks with daily update emails.

AHRefs

Similar to SEMRush but taking a different approach to the free account is AHRefs, which will let you do limited analysis on sites which it validates through your Search Console account. Both SEMRush and AHRefs use their own proprietary metrics to calculate your site’s strength, so if you try both, prepare to see some variation in the reporting. AHRefs will send you some very useful tutorial videos, even if you are on the free plan, so may actually be the best one to try first.

Google Trends

Google Trends is similar to Answer the Public in that it will show you search trends and related searches, but the information it produces is a lot more limited. On the plus side, it’s fully free to use, so you can always use it as a fallback when you run out of free Answer the Public searches for the month.

Looker Studio

This one is filling more of a niche role. If you’ve got people you need to report to about your site’s progress, you can connect Google products like Analytics and Ads to Looker Studio and built stylish reports which can be filtered to show performance over custom periods. If you’ve got the patience, you can also add statistics from any other platform that will output them as a spreadsheet but setting up a Google Sheet to hold the data and adding it as a data source for your Looker Studio report.

Hubspot

If you’re just starting out then you might not have a solution set up to capture the data about the work that arrives via your website. The free version of Hubspot offers forms that can be embedded into your site, which can be set to email to the inbox of your choice. More importantly, you can keep the data inside Hubspot and use the free features to track the progress all the way from a lead to a customer. If the time comes when you realise you need more features, there’s also a competitively-priced Starter tier that will add a ton of functionality.

Hotjar

If you’re seeing lots of visitors but no enquiries, or just really want to know what your visitors do when they’re on the site, Hotjar is the answer to your problem. It can show you how far down your pages people scroll, where they like to click the most, and lots more. It’s also just been merged with two other firms that offer similar services, so now you get even more of an allowance with the free tier.

Keywords Everywhere

This tool used to have a free version, so I know how useful it can be. Unfortunately you now have to pay for even the lowest tier, but the price is $27 for an entire year. It’s a plugin for Google’s Chrome browser that offers some really helpful features. It works a bit like Answer the Public, but instead of a dedicated site, if you search for a topic on Google, you’ll also see related searches shown to the right of your search results. It can also assess website pages for keyword density, which is less useful now that AI is making a lot of the calls when ranking a web page, but there was a time when seeing that your biggest rival had mentioned “sandwich toasters” 35 times on their sandwich toaster page which was outranking yours was really helpful, because you could then mention it 37 times (once extra for insurance) and hope to outrank them.

What to do if the tools tell you to do complex work

Whether they’re free or paid, there’s only so far that website tools can get you. If you’re seeing results you can’t explain, or your site is failing to grow no matter what you do, we’re here to help. Give us a call or drop us a line and let’s chat about the options.

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