Home / SEO Tools Cost Calculator / What SEO tools cost
How much SEO work can you do without paying for a tool?
Summary
For your own site, quite a lot. Google Search Console shows clicks, impressions, average position and index status for free, and Ahrefs' free plan adds backlink data and a site audit for sites you've verified. Looking at competitors is where free tools run thin: Semrush's free plan allows about 10 research queries a day and 10 tracked keywords.
Google's tools cover your own site
- Search Console reports clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, showing the past three months by default. Its URL Inspection tool tells you whether Google has indexed a given page, and a live test fetches the current version. Google notes that a clean live test doesn't mean the page will be indexed.
- PageSpeed Insights shows two kinds of speed data side by side: what real Chrome users experienced over the previous 28 days, and a lab run on a single simulated device and connection that's more useful for tracking down causes.
- The Rich Results Test lists which rich result types it found in a page's structured data, plus errors and suggestions.
- Google Trends doesn't show search counts. Each point is a share of all searches in that place and time, scaled from 0 to 100, and low-volume terms show up as 0.
- Keyword Planner sits inside Google Ads, and Google asks you to enter billing information before basic features like keyword ideas work. The search volumes it gives are rounded.
Search Console only covers sites you own, and none of these tools estimate a competitor's rankings, traffic or backlinks. That gap is the main reason people pay for SEO software.
What the vendors give away
Ahrefs calls its free plan "not a trial." There's no credit card and no end date. You get Site Explorer, Site Audit and Web Analytics for any site you verify as yours, with no cap on how many. Site Audit gets 5,000 crawl credits a month per project, and Site Explorer shows up to 1,000 backlinks and keywords at a time.
Semrush's free plan includes one demo project, 10 tracked keywords and a site audit of up to 100 pages a month. The daily research limit is described two ways: the pricing page says 10 reports a day across the main tools, while Semrush's own blog lists 10 queries a day for each tool. Either way, checking a handful of competitors uses it up.
Screaming Frog's SEO Spider is free up to 500 URLs per crawl, with no sign-up. The free version can't save crawls, and most configuration options are locked.
Free plans and free trials aren't the same thing
SE Ranking has no permanent free plan. It offers a 14-day trial with no credit card, and the trial runs with up to 10 projects and 750 keywords tracked a day, which is enough for a two-week burst of competitor research. Semrush offers a seven-day free trial on its SEO, Starter and Pro+ plans. Surfer lists no free plan or trial, and its cheapest plan, Discovery, is $49 a month billed yearly.
Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.
Sources
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7576553?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289?hl=en
- https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v5/about
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7445569?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/trends/answer/4365533?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7337243?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/3022575?hl=en
- https://ahrefs.com/free
- https://www.semrush.com/pricing/seo-ai-search/
- https://www.semrush.com/blog/what-can-i-do-with-a-free-account-from-semrush/
- https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/faq/
- https://seranking.com/subscription.html
- https://surferseo.com/pricing/
Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.