A lot of SEO tools & internet marketing software can be quite expensive if you’re just starting out.
But if you’re ultra-resourceful then you can take advantage of the best free SEO tools and trials that are available.
You can get everything from free email marketing services all the way through to free SEO software.
So I’ve decided to compile a list of all of the best free SEO tools and software in one place for your convenience!
Getting The Most Out Of Free SEO Tools & Software
If you are considering taking out any of the free SEO software below then you’ll want to make sure you squeeze the most out of the trial as possible.
So before you start any trial, take time to familiarise yourself with the service/software via tutorials on YouTube or from forum discussions etc.
If it is a link building software trial for example you should watch tutorials so you know how to use it before you start the trial.
You should also plan out your campaign and prepare all of the content you will need so you can make sure 100% of the trial period is spent building links and not figuring things out.
The Best Free SEO Tools & Software
I have highlighted all of the best SEO tools and trials at the top of this list.
I have also split them all into different categories to help you find what you need quickly.
My Personal Favourites
Using the free SEO tools & software below you can setup, track and monitor a tiered link building campaign.
SEOMoz (Full 30 Day Trial) – SEOMoz is one of the best SEO tools to monitor your site and link building campaigns. It does it all from rank tracking to on page recommendations and you can even use it to download all of your competitors backlinks!
SENuke XCR (Full 14 Day Trial) – SENuke XCR is a very diverse link building tool and is great for creating tier 1 links. It is quite expensive on a monthly basis though but the full 14 day free trial is great.
GSA Search Engine Ranker (Full 5 Day Trial) – This has quickly become the swiss army knife of link building targeting over 120 platforms at the time of writing. Perfect for automating your tier 2 and 3 links! See it in action here.
Kontent Machine (Full 7 Day Trial) – The best content generator I have ever used. Generate and export content for your tier 2 and 3 campaigns in just a couple of clicks. Read my full review here.
SEO Powersuite (Free Version) – Get free versions of RankTracker, Website Auditor, SEO Spyglass and Link Assistant. Each tool is an industry leader in its own right and I have relied on this suite of tools for years. Check out my full review.
Content Creation
TheBestSpinner (Full 7 Day Trial / $7) – It really is the best spinner and I have used it personally for the past few years on a nearly daily basis. The API is used in a lot of other link building tools. Check out my advanced spinning tutorial to see it in action.
Spinner Chief (Free Version) – A close rival to TheBestSpinner but it feels clunky in comparison. Either way they have a completely free version of the software for you to enjoy!
WordAI (3 Day Trial) – These guys are the new kids on the block but claim to be able to automatically spin content without making it sound like garbage. Big claims but the trial is worth it!
Kontent Machine (Full 7 Day Trial) – The best content generator I have ever used. Generate and export content for your tier 2 and 3 campaigns in just a couple of clicks. Read my full review here.
Email Marketing
Aweber (Full 30 Day Trial / $1) – I use Aweber right here on this blog and have done so for the past few years across all of my sites. It takes the pain out of email marketing and makes staying in touch with you guys easy!
GetResponse (Full 30 Day Trial) – The rival of Aweber, GetResponse offers a similar feature set. It really is just a matter of personal preference between the two of them!
Hosting
Dreamhost (Full 14 Day Trial) – If you need hosting quickly then you can take out the 14 day trial at Dreamhost. They offer unlimited plans from $8.95 a month if you stick with them and they were my first webhost when I became a full time internet marketer.
Keyword Research
Market Samurai (Full 14 Day Trial) – The keyword research and SEO competition modules of Market Samurai are some of the best in the business and this is solely what I use the software for.
Keyword Researcher (Free Trial) – This is great for generating keyword ideas and is fantastic for coming up with Google Alerts to monitor. It doesn’t pull in any search volume numbers though.
Link Building
Article Kevo (Full 7 Day Trial) – A relatively new kid on the block Article Kevo can now submit to a wide range of platforms including article directories, web 2.0 platforms, social bookmarks, wikis, social networks and forums!
GSA Search Engine Ranker (Full 5 Day Trial) – This has quickly become the Swiss army knife of link building targeting over 120 platforms at the time of writing. Perfect for automating your tier 2 and 3 links! See it in action here.
Inspyder Backlink Monitor (Free Version) – The ultimate tool for monitoring your backlinks. Very easy to use and will automatically sort out all of your tiers for you. Check out my full review.
Link Wheel Bandit (Full 7 Day Trial) – Great tool for powering up your tier 2 links even further. Not sure why it’s called Link Wheel Bandit though as it doesn’t actually build Link Wheels, it builds Link Pyramids/Tiers. This is covered in this tutorial.
Link Assistant (Free Version) – This is part of the SEO Powersuite set of tools and is great for prospecting link partners. However I have hacked it a bit and use it to manage and automate guest posting.
Magic Submitter (Full 30 Day Trial / $4.95) – This is really the main rival to SENuke XCR and offers very similar features. It can post everything from videos to press releases and is very diverse. However the user interface is a bit tricky to get to grips with at first.
NoHandsSEO (Full 7 Day Trial) – This provides a completely automated and hands off solution to build an endless supply of links. Very easy to use and setup and supports a few different platforms.
SENuke XCR (Full 14 Day Trial) – SENuke XCR is a very diverse link building tool and is great for creating tier 1 links. It is quite expensive on a monthly basis though but the full 14 day free trial is great.
SEO SpyGlass (Free Version) – Use this to discover your competitors backlinks and breakdown key metrics such as anchor text usage. You can also use it to monitor your own sites backlink profile.
Sick Submitter (Full 3 Day Trial) – Like SENuke XCR & Magic Submitter this is a really diverse tool that can post to a huge range of platforms which is backed up by the user forums offering scripts to post to even more sites and platforms!
SliQ Submitter (100 Submission Limit) – One of my favourite directory submitters before I replaced it with Ultimate Demon. Really easy to use and can grab you some links from high quality directories.
On Site SEO
SEOMoz (Full 30 Day Trial) – With weekly scans of your site the SEOMoz dashboard quickly identifies any on site SEO issues and advises you on how to correct them.
Website Auditor (Free Version) – Part of SEO Powersuite, you can use Website Auditor to spider your site and report any issues it finds.
Microsoft SEO Toolkit (Free) – Finally Microsoft have made a useful product! The SEO Toolkit will spider your site and report back on any issues.
Rank Tracking
Rank Tracker (Free Version) – Part of SEO Powersuite this is the best rank tracking solution period. Unlike web based services this desktop application means you own the data and you can track an unlimited amount of keywords as well as your competitors.
SEOMoz (Full 30 Day Trial) – The SEOMoz service provides weekly ranking updates and tracks your progress over time. You can also use it to monitor your competitors and benchmark your site against them.
SEO Multi Tools
These tools have a wide range of functions and don’t really fit in one category.
Market Samurai (Full 14 Day Trial) – My tool of choice for keyword and competition research but it also includes a rank tracker, domain finder, content finder, content publishing and link finder.
SEO Powersuite (Free Version) – Get free versions of RankTracker, Website Auditor, SEO Spyglass and Link Assistant. Each tool is an industry leader in its own right and I have relied on this suite of tools for years. Check out my full review.
SEOMoz (Full 30 Day Trial) – The SEOMoz team provide a range of fantastic tools to monitor your site and link building campaigns. It does it all from rank tracking to on page recommendations and you can even use it to download all of your competitors backlinks!
Internet Business Promoter (Free Version) – A fantastic piece of software that offers a range of functions such as keyword suggestions, link building and rank tracking. The best feature though is the top 10 optimiser that will look at the on page of the current top 10 results and tell you what you need to change on your site to reflect that.
Social Media
BuzzBundle (Free Version) – Made by the same team behind SEO Powersuite, BuzzBundle makes it easier to identify & engage with your target audience online. I have grown traffic to this blog by manually doing a lot of what BuzzBundle can help to automate – read my full review here.
HootSuite (Free Version) – This is my preferred tool for managing Twitter, Facebook and Google+. You can monitor a number of search terms as well as schedule updates to go out.
SynnD (Free Version) – If you need a steady drip feed of tweets, likes, +1, social bookmarks and up votes on sites like Reddit then SynnD is for you!
TweetDeck (Free Version) – Now owned by Twitter this is a great desktop client to manage your Twitter account.
WordPress
WPRobot (Free Version) – This is widely regarded as the best auto blogging solution for WordPress. It can pull content from a ridiculous number of sources and when setup correctly can produce some high quality auto blogs. Perfect for tier 1 links 
Did I Miss Any?
If there are any free SEO tools or trials that I’ve missed then please let me know in the comments and I’ll add them to the post!
No not Matt Cutts, but I am better at SEO than him :P I make a great living online with SEO and I will teach you 
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High quality tutorials like you've never seen before!
61 Responses
Hey Matthew!
Love your blog, it gives great information!
But how does WPRobot is perfect for tier 1 links? I saw in your multi-tier guide that tier 1 should only have quality content, and with WPRobot I never managed to make the articles with good quality. not to mention it automatically spins the scraped content.
Please give me a heads-up, Thanks!
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
December 13th, 2012 at 4:55 pm
Hi,
Thanks very much.
Well perhaps perfect is the wrong word but you can use it to create reasonable quality sites that are constantly getting new content. A lot of people go overboard with WP Robot but keep it simple and it can be used on an aged domain as a tiered link safely – worst case scenario you just login and remove links ^^
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Killer list! Hate to leave a "great post" comment, but had to here. This is such a great resource page.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
December 13th, 2012 at 4:55 pm
Haha thanks man =D
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Nice how you are getting referrers… lol
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
December 13th, 2012 at 4:55 pm
The hidden tutorial, how to spam a list of affiliate links while adding value to the user ^^
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Great list Matt! Maybe you could add Traffic Travis and http://rankcheckerace.com , which is a rank checker that automatically delivers ranking info to your e-mail.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
December 13th, 2012 at 4:56 pm
RankCheckerAce is pretty bland/uninformative so that won't make the list and I couldn't work out what the Traffic Travis trial actually offered so didn't include it
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I'd also include MicrositeMasters. They offer a free plan for 10 keywords. Also if you want a free trial for a paid plan, you can use this link to get your first month free: http://www.micrositemasters.com/We-Met-In-Person.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
December 13th, 2012 at 4:57 pm
Thanks – on the list to add
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Hey Matt you really think Spinnerchief is clunky in comparison to TBS? I've read on BHW that allot tend to give more credit to Spinnerchief for its updates and features.. I've been wanting to ask you about this since I found out about Spinnerchief. I haven't made up my mind on which one to get yet because of this. A post on this would be awesome.. I'm sure other BHer's would enjoy that also.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
December 13th, 2012 at 4:57 pm
Hi,
Yes I just didn't like the general look/feel/usability of it – for the most part its personal preference but I've been a TBS user since it launched
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Dustin Gomez Reply:
December 13th, 2012 at 6:41 pm
I'm getting TBS then.. It's cheaper anyway. haha Thanks Matt!
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
December 31st, 2012 at 1:38 pm
Haha no worrys man
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awesome artcle! actually, people sometime only use only some functions of the expensive tools, trail is really good choice.
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Chuang Liu Reply:
December 11th, 2012 at 6:47 am
i saw facebook all inks are noflollow~
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
December 31st, 2012 at 1:39 pm
Then you’ll be glad to know I moved it over to wordpress comments ^^
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Hello Matt! Your list includes lots of valuable tools. There's hardly a SEO tool you missed!
I'd like to show you one more app, that can be very useful for competition research, link prospecting and complex SERP analysis. The tool is called KeySR, you probably haven't heard of it yet, since it's been launched very recently. In order to see how it works, here's a report I generated using it: http://www.keywordsearchrankings.com/keywordreport/car-rentals-dollar.com-SERP-Position-Report-3308c9ca1b.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
December 13th, 2012 at 4:58 pm
On the list to add, thank you!
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So GSA is only for Tier 2 links and Ultimate Demon & SE Nuke are Tier1? What is it about GSA that relegates it to only Tier2?
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
December 13th, 2012 at 4:59 pm
This question has been answered a number of times in comments across the tutorials
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Hello, Matt! You have done very nice job here. You've generally selected the best tools. Also I liked the way you divided these tools in their appropriate categories. I would like to suggest you one seo tool that can be placed in SEO Multi Tools category that I have been recently found about and that is http://tutor.rs. This tool has it's free version that is great, because besides generating seo reports you can also download.pdf reports and you can view site statistics (improvements) over the time.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
December 13th, 2012 at 5:02 pm
Hi,
Thanks for your kind words
I checked it out but I can't seem to find what you actually get with the Free Version? Any ideas?
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Nice article and thanks for the tipoff about Synnd, I didn't realise it had a free version.
I'd also add SpinReWriter 3 since it has a free 5-day trial. I prefer it to TBS now.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
December 19th, 2012 at 3:06 pm
Thanks very much added to the list for the update
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Great list of software thanks for putting it together!
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
December 31st, 2012 at 1:39 pm
No worrys glad you enjoyed it
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Finally, great and actual list of seo tools. Personally, i’m using ColibriTool and it’s worth to be mentioned as seo / internet marketing tool. They have competitor finder, keyword-research, Google Analytics integration and more.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
January 2nd, 2013 at 5:23 pm
Looks like a great tool to me, thanks for the share will add it when I update the post
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Doey Andi Reply:
January 3rd, 2013 at 10:46 am
Oh, thanks for reply
I’ll visit your blog more often 
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
January 3rd, 2013 at 11:30 am
Cheers man
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Matthew you are very good and give anyone learning seo a lot of very helpfull info. You are my No1 for seo. I am going to email you now, but jst wanted to leave a comment saying this is a list i have wanted for a while now.
Thnx
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
January 12th, 2013 at 4:50 pm
Cheers Jay glad you have enjoyed it.
Please try and keep questions to the forum if possible so the answers are for everyone’s benefit! Obviously if it’s more personal then drop it in a mail but forum takes priority
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Your blog is really full of information I think this will really help me in getting started with SEO
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
February 7th, 2013 at 5:51 pm
Glad your enjoying it =D
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You said that it is important to be able to remove tier 1 link. But can’t we just use the google disavow tool to remove those that we don’t want?
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
February 18th, 2013 at 10:49 am
Hi,
It is always better to remove the actual link, better to remove the gun from your head entirely than still have it pointing at you with the safety on.
Have a read of http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tips/why-google-disavow-is-bad-news-for-seo/
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Where did Ultimate Demon go? I don’t see it on this page anymore. Did you stop using it?
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
February 19th, 2013 at 8:21 am
Hi Steve,
This post is the best free tools. The tools I actually use are here http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tools-of-the-trade/
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Thanks Matthew for this list, i’ll be sure to bookmark this.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
March 6th, 2013 at 12:33 pm
No worrys
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Many Of this are new to me
Thanks for sharing
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
March 8th, 2013 at 12:05 pm
Glad you enjoyed them!
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Very usefull list , i have bookmarked it ..i would like to know if you would build any TIER system for youtube video to rank it higher on BIG G ?
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
March 10th, 2013 at 3:24 pm
Hi Tim,
Yes you can use it for YouTube videos but just bear this in mind http://searchengineland.com/youtube-search-adds-time-watched-as-ranking-factor-136412
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Which WordPress theme do you use or recommend? I hear Genesis and DIYThemes are good but I want to get your recommendations.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
April 10th, 2013 at 3:15 pm
Hi,
I use http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/get/convergence/ with a few tweaks here n there!
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Great list Matt,
Just wondering what your thoughts are on SEOpressor plug-in for the onsite stuff??
Mark
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
April 10th, 2013 at 2:05 pm
Hi,
I wouldnt bothher with it, as long as you have your keyword or variation of in the title, meta desc, a header tag and in the copy somewhere you are good to go.
Google are much better at understanding what a page is about and can even make pages relevant to words that aren’t even on the page such as the terms deals/offers
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Which tool do you use to get your links indexed?
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
April 11th, 2013 at 8:21 am
GSA Search Engine Ranker – please see http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/the-ultimate-guide-to-tiered-link-building-part-5/
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Chris Reply:
April 11th, 2013 at 10:25 am
Thanks!
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
April 12th, 2013 at 9:39 am
No worrys!
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BOUNCINGNRG Reply:
April 11th, 2013 at 8:34 am
I’ve also just brought the GSA indexer, runs in the background nicely, at $20 – worth a shot.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
April 12th, 2013 at 9:40 am
I still haven’t got round to using that ^^
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Hi Matt,
A good selection of internet marketing tools!
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
April 26th, 2013 at 7:23 am
Hi Mark,
Hopefully you’ve found some useful stuff
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Nice post, thank you for sharing this. and i know another free online backlinks checker: http://siteexplorer.info, this tool is similar with ahrefs, they are so good at checking backlinks, but the difference is that the one i said is free and no limit, it is just like a perfect ahrefs.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
April 27th, 2013 at 2:46 pm
Thanks for the share!
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Jimmy and Matt,
With SiteExplorer.info in the recent comment, do you have any comparison of its “rank” algorithm with the Citation Flow/Trust Flow of Majestic SEO or the URL Rank/Domain Rank found in AHREFS.com?
Also, is there discuss of how these ranking algorithms compare to the SEOMoz authority score?
Many thanks for your ideas on which are better to use or any combination of them!
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
May 18th, 2013 at 8:42 am
Hi Matt,
Great questions and unfortunately not ones I can answer because I have always ignored these metrics. In my opinion they bear no relevance to Google and as such are worthless.
Could be wrong but its not something I personally use =\
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