Must-Have FREE SEO Tools for #1 Ranking on Google in 2024

so AI has officially disrupted SEO it has become even harder to compete we will need all the help that we can get from different SEO tools but if you look at the plans of well-known tools like hrefs or Surfer SEO not every beginner can afford those monthly fees so in this video I will review the top three SEO tools that we can add to our Arsenal this year to start an SEO you of course will need some keyword research tools I will start with my favorite free tool this need tool is called keyword Surfer Chrome extension it's a part of surfer SEO and it gives you cool keyword ideas and volumes right there in your Google search results for example if you search for best fireplace tools this extension will show you related keywords and their search volumes so you will quickly find out that my original keyword idea wasn't great because there is another Rel deleted keyword fireplace tool set that has 22,000 search volume versus just about 500 in the first keyword idea that I had it also adds to the search results a lot of information about the competitors pages that rank high here like the estimate traffic volume to each page the word count on each page and how many times the exact keyword was used on them then there is Google Trends totally free and super helpful just make sure that you have the right country settings for example I want to target us-based audience with my content so I've set this to the United States now you can spot new and Rising keywords in your Niche like if you're into fashion type that here in the initial keyword I would suggest one more setting here by default it will show you the growth for the past day but to see a trend you need a bigger time frame I would change this at least to the past 12 months if you scroll down the page Google trans will show you here the related topics and related queries so that gives a lot more keyword ideas and you can see how trendy they are you won't get the exact keyword search volume in Google Trends but it's a good place to start your research on topics that people currently care about exploding topics is another awesome tool it's free and it lets you see what's buzzing in different niches so your research will start with pulling up these categories say you select e-commerce then you can spot trends like AI generators that are picking up steam especially since the last year super useful for finding fresh topics that aren't too competitive yet the next free tool is the blog ideas generator from hopspot start by adding what your blog is about and this free tool will create title ideas and suggested Su keywords for you in seconds if you don't have a hopspot free account you will be prompted to create create one it is totally free and you don't have to add a credit card after my input it gave me a list of titles and SEO keywords ideas based on what my blog is about you can check which one you like the most generate more options based on your preferred one and then you can even create an outline for the blog post on top of that you can generate a draft of your blog post with a template and initial AI generated sections for you to add it and add your unique ideas and perspective this is a great and free tool to make your blog writing process faster and easier and hopspot has a lot more content and resources to help with your blog creation and writing process make sure to explore and take advantage of all the free content and tools thank you to hopspot for sponsoring this part of the video okay so you've got some keywords ready using all the free keyword research tools that I men mention so far and now it's time to write the content how do we do that well I've got a bunch of free tools for this as well you can start with Surfer seo's free article outline generator by the way I will give you a link to this tool just like everything else that I mentioned in this video in the description below imagine you are writing about Pinterest marketing for beginners you pop into Surfer hit generate outline and Bam it gives you a bunch of subheading ideas remember these are just suggestions not a strict template but they're helpful suggestions because they are based on the analysis that Surfer made of your top competitors and on the keyword research that the tool has done on the background for this topic when you start writing remember that while AI tools like chat GPT can help you draft your articles I would still say that you should do your best to stick to writing your articles yourself Google's recent helpful content updates are all about valuing real human experiences over AI generated content so use the a tools for a rough draft if you must but then give it a thorough human touch when you start writing tools like grammarly can help you make your content clear and free of mistakes or you might like the interface of another similar tool called haming way editor check it out too this one will highlight the text when you have a very long sentence which makes it harder for users to read and can negatively affect your Google SEO it will highlight the words that make your text sound too formal and will suggest that you replace them with simpler Alternatives so your process has been so far accommodated with only three tools I mentioned in this video you use them to find your keywords to generate an outline and even to edit your content but this is not it you can still work with other free SEO tools to to track your progress and rankings after you hit publish first you should use Google search console which is free and it shows you which keywords you rank for as well as it alerts you on any indexation and technical issues on your site of course Google analytics is also free and you definitely should have it installed on your site and you probably didn't know but there is also a free keyword rank Checker from HRS it will help you see how articles are performing for example I will search for the keyword Pinterest reverse image search and I have here an article on my blog about it as a result I can see that in the United States my post ranks number 12 it also shows you a bunch of other factors like it shows my domain Authority at 55 the number of back links to this post is eight and Links come from three different domains now let's talk about free link building tools link building is something that can help your blog start ranking for more competitive keywords there are two ways to get those links first is Outreach to make guest posts on other websites and the second is to do link exchange with other blogs in your Niche but here you need to be careful too because if you exchange too many links with the same blogs Google might also consider this as an attempt to manipulate their algorithm in this sense you should look into ABC link exchanges if this is a new term for you what it means is that you will add your link from site a to site B and in exchange the other side will add a link to your website from site C so there is no link exchange betwe