You just started running a blog and need all the help you can get? Already has a blog and wants to get more visitors by employing SEO? In my opinion blogging and SEO go hand in hand.

Every website could benefit from SEO. Blogs more so. Be it an easier to navigate interface or fixing up broken links across your website. With better SEO comes more visitors and better SERP rank.

There are tons of tools out there. So much so that you are confused as to which to use. Worry no more. You don’t have to waste your time researching for them one by one. We have already done it for you.

Here are some essential free blogging and SEO tools to help you get started.

In-depth SEO Solution

1. BiQ

click here to BiQ

Short for Business Intelligent Quotient (BIQ), this SEO suite aims to approach the market in a different manner than the existing conventional suites out there. How so?

By providing granular cost control. This SEO tool allows marketers and SEOs to gain total control over their SEO costs. In short, you pay only for what you use. No more paying excessively for an entire package that you won’t be needing everything in it.

Here’s a brief breakdown of what you’ll be getting: Keyword Intelligence, Link Intelligence, Markup Intelligence, Content Intelligence, Rank Intelligence, Site Intelligence, Settings and management (and more!). It’s designed perfectly for marketers and SEOs like us.

Read this blog for an in-depth explanation of BiQ: World’s First SEO Suite With Granular Cost Control.

2. RankingGap

click here to RankingGap

Every content creator, marketer and business owner needs to know about their competitors in order to stay up the market. And if we are talking about SEO, one thing that is always highly competitive is ranking on the SERP for search queries related to your niche.

RankingGap allows you to do exacly that! Discovering you and your competitors keywords that are ACTUALLY ranking on the search engine. All you need to master are the 4 keyword views that RankingGap offers, Common, Missing, Gap, and Unique keyword views to understand you and yur competitors better.

Learn more about RankingGap and how it actually works right here keyword gap analysis tool.

Chrome Extension

1. LiveKeyword

click here to LiveKeyword

The BiQ team is back once again and has developed a new Chrome extension known as Livekeyword.

FOR FREE!

Blogging Tool

1. Blog Title Generator

click here to Blog Title Generator

Keeping up with the schedule and pumping out those blog posts weekly really drains your creative juice. Need inspiration for your blog titles?

Get endless blog title suggestions with this Blog Title Generator by yours truly SEOPressor. All you need is a keyword of the topic you want to write on. Type it in and BAM endless blog titles for you to choose from.

2.  Prepostseo | All in one SEO Tools

click here to Prepostseo

Prepostseo is another platform that you can use to check the SEO quality of your blog and website.

Having many SEO tools, this website provides different ways to modify your blog content for proper SEO.

Talking about its Domain analysis tool, Prepostseo has an advanced domain authority checker which provides domain authority, spam score, and page authority score.

Prepostseo also provides a domain age checker that helps you check the domain age of a website. Apart from that, this platform provides many content optimization tools for its users.

It provides the following online Content optimization tools:

• Plagiarism checker to check plagiarized content.
• Paraphrasing and article rewriting tools to rotate your text to make it unique.
• Keyword density checker that maintains the correct number of keywords and avoids stuffing.
• The word counter gives you the word, character, and sentence count of your content.
• It also provides a text summary to get a summary of your text.

The best thing about their tools is that they are in line with best SEO practices. Thus you can optimize your content with this tool.

Also, the Prepostseo tool is free to use, given the limitations of the package. You can get 30 search queries as a visitor, and if you register as a free user, you will get up to 500 queries for free.

3. Canva

click here to Canva

A blog post with a whole page of text? BORING. Get some color and pictures into your blog posts. Use Canva to create a header, featured image, flowchart, etc. Any graphic design work needed to be done can be done on Canva.

It’s ok if you’re a graphic design peasant (I am too), Canva is easy to use. Just drag and drop and you’ll get a colorful image for your blog post in no time.

4. Flaticon

click here to Flaticon

Here’s another blogging tool that can go hand in hand with Canva. I can get dozens of free icons on Flaticon. Let’s say someone is looking for a pet icon for the “ List of best pet bed” blog post.

The word “pet” gives you more than three thousand search results on Flaticon. Download them, upload it to Canva, drag it to the canvas. There, another colorful image for your blog post.

5. Compressor.io

click here to Compressor.io

Now that you have awesome images to feature in your blog post, time to upload them. The problem is each images’ size is 3MB. That’s gonna slow down your loading speed by a ton. What you need to do is compress your images.

Compressor.io does a good job downsizing your images while maintaining your image quality. Blogging and SEO both taken care of.

6. MailChimp

click here to MailChimp

MailChimp is an all-in-one marketing automation software. They can take care of all your basic marketing needs. The service is provided free of charge with more features being offered with a paid plan. If you’re just starting out, their free plan would work just fine.

7. LSIGraph

Keyword research has always been an important task in SEO. There are many tools out there that you can use for keyword research but here’s one.

LSIGraph is a freemium keyword research tool that focuses strictly on LSI keywords. Simply type in your keyword and you’ll be served with a list of related keywords.

Rank high today by including semantically related keywords in your content. Try it yourself: LSIGraph.

Blogging Productivity

1. Focuswriter

click here to Focuswriter

Find yourself struggling to keep up with your posting schedule? Wandering off on pages after pages of Wikipedia. Watching one after another cat videos on YouTube? (Who doesn’t, its CAT VIDEOS)

Focuswriter is a software with a minimalist interface for writers. That way, you are forced to focus on doing nothing except writing. Another brilliant blogging tool.

2. Tomato Timer

click here to Tomato Timer

Want to keep track of how much time you have spent on writing? (Or watching cat videos, really.) Tomato Timer is a free tool to time yourself on work time and break time.

The default mode is set to a 25 minutes work time and 5 minutes rest time interval. That way you can keep your mind sharp and easily focused but not overworked.

You can even select the alarm sound you want for when the 5 minutes rest time is up. I personally choose the elevator ding since it’s not violently intrusive. But the choice is yours.

Enjoying the list so far?
You might also like our free ebook where we share with you 73 actionable tips for blogging. Check it out!

73 Blogging Tips That Make Sense

• 73 Actionable Steps That Many Gurus Do Not Teach
• Blog Tips That Bring Actual Results
• It Is Free Tips To Advance Blogging Skills

Data Collecting

1. Google Trends

click here to Google Trends

As the name suggests, the tool lets you see what’s trending based on country and category. You can use it to gain insights on many things.

This can highly benefit you from selecting a topic, a keyword, gauge how popular a certain product is to how well your competitor is doing.

This could be a both blogging and SEO tools. Since writing about hot topics would attract more visitors. While targeting certain keywords can help step up your SEO game.

2. Google Adwords

click here to Google AdWords

The keyword planner function in Google AdWords is a vital tool for anyone who is serious about optimizing their blog posts. Keywords play a key role in SEO.

Choosing a relevant keyword makes your blog post relevant. And when it’s relevant, you gain more readers, that simple. Keywords are different from topic and are further broken down into short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords.

You can read more about keyword research here.

3. Google Analytics

click here to Google Analytics

Google Analytics’ logo.

Google Analytics is the all in one data gatherer for your website. For me, this is one of the most important free SEO tools that everyone should be using.

On Google Analytics you can see how many visitors each webpage has, how long they stay on the page, the demographics of your reader etc. There are so many things on Google Analytic that the easier way would be for you to see it for yourself.

Take note of the data, and make adjustments. SEO means nothing when you don’t have access to real data. Read up on our SEO course about setting up analytic for your website here.

4. Google Speed Insights

click here to Google Speed Insights

While the average load time for a webpage is 8.66 seconds, the recommended load time is 3 seconds. Why? Cause users like their internet fast, and webpage load faster.

Ever click on a web page that takes forever to load? Did you give them a chance to finish loading before you just abandon the site altogether? You probably just clicked on the x button right? That’s why speed is so important.

This Google tool tells you how your site speed fare and gives you a list of suggestions. The connection between site speed and SEO should never be ignored.

5. Google Mobile-friendly Test

click here to Google Mobile-friendly Test

Another important aspect of SEO is responsiveness. You can read more about why a mobile-friendly website is important for SEO here. Your website should be mobile-friendly not only because of SEO but also for the ease of use for your readers.

Like the tool above, this tool lets you check how mobile-friendly your website is and give you a list of suggestions to improve. Considering how Google has been stressing on the importance of mobile-friendliness to ranking, this is a must-use tool.

Add-Ons & Plugin

1. Fireshot

click here to Fireshot

Everyone will find themselves needing to screenshot a webpage once in a while. Need to take a screenshot but is tired of the good old prt sc + ctrl v it into paint?

Fireshot is a simple browser add-on for taking screenshots. Click it once to take a screenshot. Click again to download the image. Voila, you got your screenshot hassle free and in seconds.

In fact, all the screenshots I have featured in this post are taken using Fireshot, no lie.

2. Grammarly

click here to Grammarly

When you’re writing a lot and writing quick. There tend to be overlooked in grammar and spelling mistakes. Grammarly is a simple add-on that keeps an eye on your grammar.

It highlights mistakes and suggests corrections. Making editing much less painful. If you don’t want the blog post which you poured hours on be frowned on because of a misplaced comma, Grammarly is a must-have.

3. Alexa Traffic Rank

click here to Alexa Traffic Rank

Alexa the flagship virtual assistant of Amazon has an add-on too. The traffic rank toolbar is very useful for analyzing your website as well as your competitors’ website.

Two of the most valuable information you can get from it is Search Analytics and average load time. Search Analytic is especially useful to analyze keywords of similar blog posts. That way you can analyze and learn from the enemy and outrank them.

4. WP Super Cache Plugin

click here to WP Super Cache Plugin

This WordPress plugin generates and serves static HTML files to a majority of your readers. A cached site loads faster. Faster load speeds lead to happy readers.

Happy readers lead to more loyal readers. Loyal readers lead to more leads. More leads lead to more business.

Now you know why you need to cache your website. Considering the benefit of caching, you should give it a try to boost your website.

5. GDoc SEO Assistant

Most of us content writer write on Google Docs. Well, here’s a Google Docs add-on we all can use for free.

All you need to do is enter your target keyword in the empty field and begin to write like you usually do.

It will analyze your content in real-time and gives you your SEO Score. It will also tell you your content readability, Semantic Quality density, SEO suggestions, and related keywords that you can use.

One of the best blog writing tool! Install it in Google Docs here: GDoc SEO Assistant

Webmaster Tool

1. Google Search Console

click here to Google Search Console

Previously Google Webmaster Tool, as the name suggested it is an essential tool for every webmaster. If you want to gain full control of your website, Google Search Console lets you do just that.

From checking sitemap, setting crawl rate to setting up robots.txt file. You will find this tool extremely useful for managing your website.

Together with Google Analytics, these two free SEO tools are extremely helpful for everyone wanting to start optimizing their website.

2. Bing Webmaster Tool

click here to Bing Webmaster Tool

Like its Google counterpart, Bing Webmaster Tool lets you into a big amount of data and let you take control of your website. Submit your sitemap, test your website’s mobile friendly-ness, setting up crawl rates and more.

Fully utilized, this can help boost your site’s SEO. It’s also completely free, so you should definitely make use of it.

Now that you know which blogging and SEO tools to use…

It’s time to start working on building your blog and SEO. There are many more articles on our blog that can help you. Be it SEO, blogging, inbound marketing or more.

73 Blogging Tips That Make Sense

• 73 Actionable Steps That Many Gurus Do Not Teach
• Blog Tips That Bring Actual Results
• It Is Free Tips To Advance Blogging Skills

Updated: 7 November 2024

About Vivian

Vivian is an anthropologist lost in the world of digital marketing. She has an interest in learning about the science of marketing and the creativity that businesses use to transform themselves into purple cows.