Recently, we published a blog looking at some of the best free SEO tools that we use at Harvest. While some of the tools we mention will be well-known across the industry, we wanted to put together this list so that anyone, fresh-faced to SEO or veteran Google algorithm ninja, might discover something new and so help them in their quest to become a better SEO. To spice things up a bit, we decided to take the top 10 tools and rank them from bottom to top. We are sure the SEO community will 100% agree unequivocally with our list and its order (and if you don't, please comment below!)
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And so without further ado, here’s our list for you to peruse.


10. Copyscape

See a breakdown of duplicate content across your website. The interface could be a little better, if we had to be pernickety.


9. SEMrush Academy

Learn from industry experts on a range of subjects. This includes all-round crash courses on SEO or ones that are more specialist.


8. HARO

Short for ‘help a reporter out’, HARO curates requests from journalists in certain industries, allowing you to respond to them if they relate to your business’s field. The overall aim is to get a tasty link back to your website.

Sounds easy enough? Well, you better move quick if you want to be the expert cited. HARO is used by thousands of people daily, so you need to be very clear and concise in your answer or you won’t be featured!


7. Grow with Google

Learn the ins and outs of Google Analytics, Search Console, writing content and promoting your site. Best of all, you can earn a free certificate too.


6. Answer The Public

Answer The Public is an incredibly useful tool for FAQ and subtopic research.

With the ability to see all questions relating to the main query, you can quickly gauge the sub-topics that people are most interested in around a topic.

We miss having the passive aggressive gentleman video on the homepage, but hey, what can you do about rebranding.


5. Tiny PNG

Image compression is important for increasing the speed that your page loads. This tool helps you do this quickly and easily, but it does have a limit to the number of images you can compress. Plus, we think the panda is kind of cool.


4. Whimsical

With SEO and UX becoming more closely intertwined, we often need to create wireframes for new designs on the website’s we work on.

Whimsical allows you to easily create wireframe designs, but also has other features like idea boards and more.


3. Screaming Frog

‘Aha! That’s not free’ we hear you say. Well, most large brands that use SF will have the paid subscription, but if you want to crawl under 500 URLs of a website, then you can use the tool for free.

You can get all sorts of crucial information and your website and its pages, whether this be the number of broken pages, a breakdown of meta data, the word count on each page or their canonicals.

This is the tip of the iceberg – there’s so much more, so try it for yourself if you’re not familiar with it.


2. Google Page Speed Insights

An absolute staple of many an SEO’s repertoire, you can use this tool to find out the page speed on mobile and desktop of your website pages (duh).

There are other tools out there that SEOs use to analyse page speed, but this one is likely the most widely used.


1. Google Ads Keyword Planner

What's a paid search tool doing topping out our list of free SEO tools? Well Keyword Planner gives you keywords, search volumes, CPCs. It’s all extremely important stuff, not just for SEO but for most digital marketing strategies.

For those who can’t fork out for tools such as SEMrush or Ahrefs to get keyword information, then Keyword Planner is the one for you.


So that’s our list. So what's your favourite? Have we missed anything out? Is there anything here that you hate? Please tell us in the comments below and we may even revise this list at a later date.

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About The Author

Harvest Digital is an award-winning, independent digital performance agency formed in 2001. We know that success comes from getting an awful lot of tiny details right – from content marketing to data analytics, paid advertising to user experience. That’s why Harvest delivers truly integrated strategies that are proven to maximise revenue and build brand value online.

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