You know Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz already?

Don’t like them? Or you may have specific use cases they don’t cover?

You may also be unable afford them as a mere blogger. All of those tools require large monthly payments!

Yet they offer free tools and there are many other free options.

Many are virtually unknown!

I prefer tools that cost nothing until I make money with them.

So I can upgrade once I need more than one project etc.

Thus I use Ubersuggest for example for my own blog here and keyword research.

Yet Neil Patel’s popular toolset is hardly unknown.

Here are lesser known or even unknown SEO tools you must know.

They are either free or relatively affordable.

SEO without tools? Is it even possible?

Wow. Time flies! I started practicing search engine optimization back in 2004!

Oh boy! It was pretty hard in the early days.

We did not have many tools yet.

It was before Google acquired Urchin and launched Google Analytics in 2005!

So I can still assess an online presence and do keyword research just looking at the websites and Google results.

Nowadays you might even wonder whether SEO is possible without tools.

Yet there are plenty of free options that are already helpful.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are usually a good start.

Unless you focus on privacy of course. Then you might want to look for Google alternatives.

This time I focus on SEO tools so for pragmatic reasons we won’t hate Google.

Despite all the nonsense we have been hearing from publicity hungry AI vendors and online tabloids SEO is growing.

Therefore a plethora of in many cases virtually unknown Web based tools appear on the market.

You need to know about them though!

These modern tools are both easy to use and visually appealing while still very helpful to implement actual improvements.

People in the SEO industry know by now that I’m on the look out for progressive tools.

That’s why they approach me in the first place.

I have also worked for other SEO tools vendors like Semrush or Ahrefs and many others in the past.

There is barely an SEO software I wasn’t affiliated with at one point.

Yet the tools were so under the radar that they were new to me! See below!

Web analytics tools

Do you use Google Analytics?

Most people seem to hate since version 4. It’s hard to use!

Also many people are not fond of the profiling by Google using GA.

Umami is an easy to use and privacy-focused analytics tool that is free for small sites.

It’s open source like Matomo so you can install it on your server.

Yet even the hosted version allows a certain number of “actions” for free.

What I love about Umami is the simple and clean interface.

It allows you to access most data points quickly.

Yet it also has many advanced features like segments and cohorts.

So it’s not just about superficial metrics like traffic.

You can gain deep insights about

• goals
• funnels
• journeys
• and retention.

This way you can see best performing pages based on conversions quickly.

Other alternatives are of course the above mentioned Matomo for advanced users.

If you’re less geeky and just want quick and clean stats for your blog Koko Analytics is your friend.

All three of them have free versions!

Google Search Console viewers

As noted above Google Search Console is free and offers a wealth of data to sift through for starters and prose alike.

Sadly the interface is a bit dated and sometimes hard to use.

Yet GSC allows you to use its data with third parties.

You can even let third party tools plugin into it.

Thus some pretty advanced SEO tools have been created that act like GSC viewers or dashboards.

SEO Gets is such a visualization tool. It is subscription based with various advanced features.

The best part about SEO Gets is that it truly gets the information for you when you need it.

On click you can view deep insights on a granular level that are hard to come by using Google’s own interface.

I used SEO Gets to discover hidden opportunities I did not even notice before.

Most notably I noticed that I rank quite well with my freelance SEO guide.

Thus I updated and optimized it plus added some paragraphs for differing user intent.

It allowed to notice the potential and now I rank top 5 in the US and top 10 globally for the query [freelance seo].

So SEO Gets is perfect for unearthing unique opportunities and hidden gems within the keyword data Google shares with us.

Other tools that take GSC data, analyze and visualize it are GSC Wizard and SERPView.

Both are cheaper than SEO Gets.

GSC Wizard is quite complex and feature rich. It allows you to monitor your indexing status proactively e.g.

SERPView is a similar albeit more basic GSC viewer and dashboard tool.

It’s very well designed when it comes to looks and simplicity.

It has some issues though when it comes to usability. It’s the most affordable option of the three.

So given that GSC is free you want to start with the latter.