Guide: What Are the Most Affordable SEO Tools in 2024?

SEO is a vastly complex industry with a thousand factors to consider, big and small. You have to keep everything in mind, from the details of the keywords you use in your site metadata, the optimizations you make to page loading times, and the filesize of the images you use, all the way up to major factors like topic ideation and clustering, overall keyword focus, and user experience. Needless to say, it’s a lot to handle.

That’s why, for as many different factors as there are in SEO, there are just as many tools to help you handle it. A large enterprise can easily spend thousands of dollars per month on agency-grade packages for high-end tools, and there’s always a way to spend even more if you desire. But what about those of us who operate on the smaller end of the scale? I’m not some global enterprise. I may not be a growth hacker working on a shoestring budget, but the cost can be a significant issue, and I know I’m not alone.

Fortunately, there are cheap SEO tools available as well. You don’t have to be spending $400+ per month on the top plans on Semrush; there are many different options to put together a package of tools you find useful for a cheap monthly fee.

About Free Tools

Before we dig in, you’ll notice that there aren’t any free tools on this list. Why is that?

Three reasons.

Number one is that everyone knows about free tools and can easily find lists of the best free options. I’ve even written similar lists myself. My goal is to provide a list of tools you can use to “level up” from the free-tools-only mindset and to the first steps of paid tools. These are all good introductory tools to use to get a feel for what you can get by investing a bit of cash.

Number two is simply that free doesn’t necessarily mean affordable. Often, free tools are either extremely limited, extremely generic, or both. More importantly, they don’t give you many of the convenience features that paid tools do, so you end up spending much, much more time using them, and since time is money in modern business, that can end up more expensive in a way. If you can set up the right free tools, that’s great! Sometimes, though, the cost of the workflow is immense, and it’s worth paying attention to how much time you’re spending.

Finally, number three is that so many of them really just aren’t that useful. A lot of free tools are hindered down into uselessness. Many of them are actually all just the same tool rebranded and whitelabeled in different ways.

To be clear, I’m not saying free tools are bad. Just remember that they still have a cost, and often, that cost comes in terms of time and interoperability.

A Word of Caution

One thing I want to say before we get too deep is that when you’re focused on price-per-tool, it can be easy to overrun a budget and still leave out crucial features.

For example, consider Ahrefs. Ahrefs is an incredibly powerful tool, but most people don’t view it as an option because the cheapest plan they offer is $130 per month.

But consider. For that $130, you’re getting:

• Site analytics.
• Keyword exploration.
• SEO auditing.
• Rank tracking.
• Competitive analysis.
• Page inspection.

Sure, you can find tools to do each of those individually. But if each of those tools costs $20 per month, by the end of the day, you’re only saving $10, and you have to spend time and effort tabbing across apps, importing and exporting data, and wrangling spreadsheets. And that’s all before you consider other apps you might be using outside of just the features from Ahrefs.

Basically, while using individual cheap tools is fine, make sure to keep track of what you’re spending overall so you don’t end up wasting more money and time trying to bootstrap your way up when a larger, more comprehensive platform would actually be cheaper in the long run.

It’s hard to beat Ahrefs, isn’t it?

The Most Affordable SEO Tools

Now let’s dig into the best tools you can get at a cheap price point. I’ve set my arbitrary threshold at around $20 per month, so anything that has a basic plan more expensive than that isn’t going to be on this list.

If you have other cheap recommendations, feel free to let me know in the comments!

Moz Local

Moz is one of the biggest names in SEO. Their Pro tool is incredible, but the cheapest plans it offers start at $100, so they’re well outside of the scope of this post. However, some of their other tools are narrower but more affordable.

One of the best, in my view, is Moz Local. Moz Local is a tool made for local SEO, with features like directory submission, Foursquare integration, data cleansing, duplicate detection, and profile management for directories like Google Business Profile and Yelp. What’s even better is that if your bar is $20, you can even get their mid-tier plan that adds on social posting and reputation management, which is exactly $20 per month.

Mangools

I’m very slightly cheating with this one. Mangools is one of the most solid mid-range SEO tools on the market, primarily used for keyword research and backlink analysis. The cheapest plan isn’t the most robust – you’re limited to just 25 keywords per day – but it’s still enough for a small blog or business to get rolling.

Why do I say I’m cheating? Well, the base price for Mangools Entry is $30 per month. But, if you sign up to pay annually, it works out to be $20 per month on the dot. You’ll find that this is true of a lot of SEO tools, offering a discount for annual payments, so keep that in mind if your budget is such that you can afford to swing it.

Frase

Frase is a tool that I half love and half hate. The half I hate is the generative AI function, which is, just like all generative AI, more about making something that looks acceptable than about making something truly valuable. I have plenty to say about generative AI, and a few use cases where I don’t mind it, but for creating content out of whole cloth, it’s best avoided.

Fortunately, Frase does more than generative AI. The core of their tool is an SEO audit and review of individual pieces of content. You write directly in their editor or paste content into it, and it gives you an ongoing analysis of everything from word count and number of headers to internal links, keyword usage, and more. It’s like Clearscope or MarketMuse, except it only costs you $15 per month instead of nearly $200. It’s a great option for optimizing content on a budget.

Rank Math

Rank Math is a WordPress plugin that gives you a ton of features integrated into your dashboard. You get keyword rank tracking, indexation tracking, Schema generation, integration with Google sub-apps like Trends, News, and Video SEO, and a bunch of narrow features like orphan page detection, importing SEO data, page speed tracking, and 404 logging.

Rank Math has a free plugin, but it’s so limited that it is essentially worthless. Fortunately, the basic Pro plan is only $8 per month. They also have a mid-tier business plan that’s normally $25 per month and routinely goes on sale for $21 per month, so it’s a good path to upgrading the features of something you use a lot if you desire to do so.

SEOptimer

SEOptimer is a pretty decent tool with a cheaper plan that is a little limited but still useful. The main use case for the DIY SEO plan – which costs exactly $20 per month – is for SEO auditing of your site. You can scan your domain, look at pages, and see site issues, as well as some basic rank tracking, mobile tracking, keyword volumes, and keyword recommendations.

Overall, I don’t entirely recommend this tool for ongoing use. The $20 plan is pretty limited compared to even just one step up, and the features it gives you are often the kind of thing you scan and check once every six months or so. Give it a try, make notes, cancel and work on it all, and re-audit in 6-12 months for the best value.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a handy tool for avid internet users and always-on marketers who like to have data even when they’re casually browsing. It’s a plugin for the major browsers, and it gives you the option to harvest keyword information for everything on the page you’re looking at… as long as that page is on one of the supported domains. Which domains? Google, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, the Google Search Console, and ChatGPT. There are a couple of others, too, like Bing and Google Trends, but those kind of duplicate ones already listed.

The only downside is the credit system. The basic plan, for $6 per month, gets you 400,000 credits. But each credit is one keyword, and when you click the button to scan something like a Google search results page, it will give you information for the top ten search results, the knowledge graphs, the related suggestions, and so on; one search can chew up 20, 30, 50 credits if you aren’t careful. So, it sounds like you get a lot, but it’s easy to burn through them.

AnswerThePublic

ATP is a pretty basic keyword and topic ideation tool. It used to be a novel way to present topic ideas as something other than just a list of keywords without context, but over time, a bunch of other tools have built up similar features, so it’s no longer as unique as it once was. Currently, pricing for the most basic, limited plan is $11 per month, though, so the price is certainly right for what it gives you.

One thing to note here is that AnswerThePublic, along with other tools like Ubersuggest, are all owned by Neil Patel, and he’s trying an experiment at the moment selling lifetime plans for one single price (per app.) It’s a steep price to pay all at once! AnswerThePublic’s Pro plan costs you nearly $1,000 up-front, and the expert plan is $2,000. But, if you get a lot of use out of it, a one-time fee forever might be attractive. I’ll leave you to do the math yourself, though, since it heavily depends on how much value you get out of it and how many years into the future you think you’ll keep getting that value.

LowFruits

LowFruits is a keyword research and content clustering tool that is right on the line for my price threshold, so I’m cheating again. If you buy their cheapest annual subscription, it’s $20.80 per month, so close enough.

What does it do? Rank tracking, competitive keyword analysis, SERP score analysis, keyword searching, keyword clustering, and domain analysis. It’s a surprisingly robust tool for what it is, honestly. Take a look!

What About [Insert Tool Here]?

There are a handful of tools that I suspect would make this list, but they didn’t for one significant reason: they hide their pricing information. If a tool isn’t going to tell me publicly what it costs, I’m not going to recommend it. Now, is this a significant impact for a list of cheap tools? Not really. Most tools that hide their pricing do so because they start at something like $500 per month and just don’t want people to tune out before even seeing what they do. Still, though, now and then, there’s one that just wants to look more prestigious than it is and hides that information. Oh well!

As for other tools, if you know of one that costs under $20 per month and offers a good, useful service for that price, let me know! If I left it out, it’s probably not because I’m snubbing it; it’s because I just didn’t think of it when writing this post. I know there are certainly plenty of tools out there that fit those criteria that I’ve just never heard of. That’s where you come in, after all.

Finally, I highly recommend giving Topicfinder a try.

I didn’t put it in the main list because my starter pricing is $40 per month, but I do offer a free trial, and I’m pretty sure you’ll get enough use out of it to make it worth two other tools. Why not check it out?

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