10 Cheap SEO Tools for Small Businesses on a Budget [2024]

Looking for the best cheap SEO tools to optimize your website and drive more organic traffic?

SEO is essential for all businesses, and even beginners know the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in their strategy. Still, unfortunately, it’s becoming expensive in the same way.

When you don’t have money to spend on expensive options, then affordable SEO tools are here to solve your problem.

In this article, we’ll look at some of the cheap SEO tools available. These tools can help you find the best keywords, create optimized content, and improve your search engine rankings.

The best part is that most of them are under $50 and deliver value.

So let’s get started!

Top 10 Affordable SEO Tools in 2024

Below are some of the low-cost SEO tools with their key features.

1. SE Ranking

SE Ranking - All in One SEO Software

If you’re looking for the cheapest SEO tools to manage all your SEO tasks in one place, then SE Ranking is the best option. It is the most complete SEO platform designed specifically for affiliate marketers, individuals, and enterprise agencies.

It’s a user-friendly platform with tools like SEO analysis, competitor research, rank tracking, and website optimization. You may use this tool to analyze how your website ranks in the SERPs compared to your competitors and what you need to fix to future-proof your SEO strategy using actionable data. On top of that, you get solid integration with Google Search Console & Google Analytics to see the most crucial data.

The best thing about SE Ranking is that its features and plans are highly customized to your needs and budget.

Key Features:

Keyword Rank Tracker: Know how your pages are ranking for your target queries across different search engines, geographic locations, and devices.
Keyword Research: Find similar, related, and long-tail keywords and see which keywords your competitors target.
Website Audit: Through analysis of your entire website, identify SEO issues that could hinder your site’s performance.
Backlink Checker and Monitoring: Analyze your backlink profile, monitor new and lost backlinks, and evaluate the quality of each backlink.
Competitive Research: Spy on your competitor’s SEO strategies by analyzing their keywords, rankings, and backlinks.
On-page SEO Checker: Get a detailed report on how well the particular page is optimized for SEO.
Report Builder: Get detailed SEO progress reports sent right to your inbox.
Content Marketing Tool: It provides guidelines and recommendations to ensure your content is optimized for search engines and engaging with your target audience.

Pricing:

SE Ranking offers a flexible pricing model where you can select a plan based on your SEO tool needs. The number of keywords and user logins needed varies for each of the price options.

SE Ranking offers three pricing plans:

Essential: It costs $52/mo (billed annually).
Pro: It costs $95.20/mo (billed annually).
Business: It costs $207.20/mo (billed annually).

All plans come with a 14-day free trial. That allows you to experience the tool before committing financially.

Start SE Ranking 14-Day Free Trial

2. Mangools

Mangools is a cheap SEO tool for beginners who might not have the budget for premium tools. It started as KWFinder in 2014 before rebranding as Mangools and expanding its offerings beyond keyword research. Today, it positions itself as a low-cost alternative to Semrush or Ahrefs.

Mangools works by giving five SEO tools from your profile dashboard, allowing you to manage everything from one page.

The five SEO tools help you with keyword research, tracking rankings, analyzing backlinks, studying competitors, and understanding different SEO metrics.

Key Features:

KWFinder: This allows you to long-tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, offering metrics such as keyword rankings, search volume, CPC, PPC, and keyword difficulty.
SERPChecker: This helps you find your competitors’ weak spots and analyze your SEO competitors.
SERPWatcher: A rank-tracking tool that monitors website rankings for targeted keywords over time.
LinkMiner: It is a backlink checker tool that you can use to analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles in an advanced way.
SiteProfiler: Offers an SEO profile of a website, focusing on metrics like domain authority, backlinks, top content, and competitor analysis.
Browser Extension: Available for Chrome and Firefox, these extensions provide easy access to key metrics directly from your browser.

Pricing:

Mangools offers a 35% discount on annual plans and has four pricing plans:

Entry: It costs $19.90/mo (billed annually).
Basic: It costs $29.90/mo (billed annually).
Premium: It costs $44.90/mo (billed annually).
Agency: It costs $89.90/mo (billed annually).

You can start Mangools with a 10-day free trial. No credit card is required!

Start Mangools 10-Day Free Trial

3. Serpstat

Serpstat is a cheap SEO software that helps you with site, keyword, and link analysis. It is a powerful growth hacking tool for SEO, PPC, and content marketers alike.

If you plan to invest in both organic and paid search marketing, Serpstat is the best tool available. It helps you find keywords and analyze your competition effectively. Serpstat is a great choice for those looking to enhance their search marketing strategies.

Furthermore, if you’ve ever used a major SEO tool like Moz or Semrush, you’ll be right at home with Serptat. It’s got many of the same features. And a similar UI.

Key Features:

Keyword Research: A tool for picking the right keywords for SEO and PPC campaigns to attract your audience.
Competitors Analysis: Analyzes competitors’ sites in SEO and PPC strategy, allowing you to understand your competition better.
Keyword Clustering: Organizes keywords by thematic similarity, which is essential for improving site structure and relevance.
Site Audit: Helps find and fix on-site issues, boosting your Google rankings by identifying and rectifying technical issues.
AI Content Generation: Generates articles and meta tags, providing support for content creation with the help of artificial intelligence.
Backlink Analysis: Comprehensive backlink checking tool to track and analyze backlinks for better link-building strategies.
Rank Tracking: Tracks daily changes in website rankings. It offers insights into the effectiveness of SEO strategies.
Local SEO: Improve your brand’s visibility in local search results, attracting new customers and increasing organic traffic.
PPC Research: It helps you discover your competitors’ paid keywords and ads.

Pricing:

Serpstat is an affordable SEO toolkit that offers three pricing plans.

Individual: It costs $50/mo (billed annually).
Team: It costs $100/mo (billed annually).
Agency: It costs $410/mo (billed annually).

You can also use Serpstat for 7 days for free before upgrading to the premium plans.

Start Serpstat 7-Day Free Trial

4. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a robust SEO tool with a large number of features. However, it is primarily known as a cheap SEO auditing tool.

Screaming Frog’s main strength is its ability to crawl websites. Analyzing your website by crawling it can provide valuable information about its structure. This process can help you identify issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and other on-page SEO elements.

Furthermore, Screaming Frog provides detailed information on internal and external linking. Additionally, it creates XML sitemaps. As a result, you can ensure that search engines can easily crawl and index your website’s pages, resulting in greater visibility in search results pages.

Overall, it’s a great choice for individuals or small businesses since there is a free version with a limit of 500 URLs. That makes it an excellent, low-cost SEO tool, particularly for auditing your site on a tight budget.

Key Features:

Website Crawling: Quickly identify broken links, errors, and redirects.
SEO Analysis: Analyze page titles, metadata, and review meta robots & directives.
Duplicate Content: Discover exact duplicate pages to avoid content redundancy issues.
Integration: Offers seamless integration with Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights for enriched data analysis.
Content Analysis: Examine the use of headers, meta tags, and word counts across your site to optimize for search engines.
Custom Extraction: Use XPath, CSS Path selectors, or regex for custom data extraction from your website’s HTML.

Pricing:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a freemium tool that offers both a free and paid version.

Free Version: You can crawl up to 500 URLs.
Paid Version: It costs $259/year.

Start With Screaming Frog

5. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a helpful SEO tool that can boost your online marketing efforts. It does this by increasing your website’s visibility and traffic. This tool offers various features to achieve these goals.

Neil Patel, a digital marketing expert, created this tool. It provides detailed information on keyword research, competitor analysis, SEO audits, and content ideas. It is a valuable resource for beginners and small businesses alike.

Key Features:

Domain Overview: Gain insights into your own or competitors’ SEO strategies, helping you adapt and improve your tactics.
Top SEO Pages Report: Identify which of your competitor’s pages rank for popular organic keywords and which are getting the most social media attention.
Keyword Suggestions: Offers hundreds of keyword suggestions along with data on search volume, competition, and seasonal trends.
Content Ideas: Discover content that has received a high number of social shares and backlinks in your niche, aiding in developing your content strategy.
Backlink Data: Understand your competitors’ backlink profiles to enhance your link-building efforts.
SEO Audit: Analyze your website to identify technical SEO issues and provide actionable recommendations for improvement.
Rank Tracking: Allows you to monitor your website’s rankings for specific keywords across different search engines.
SEO Extension: Available as a browser extension, it offers quick access to SEO metrics for any webpage you visit, including meta tags, page load times, and backlink counts.

Pricing:

Ubersuggest offers a competitive price structure as compared to many premium SEO tools. This pricing makes it an attractive option for those on a tight budget.

Ubersuggest offers a free version with limited features and three premium plans.

Individual: It costs $12/mo or $120 for a lifetime.
Business: It costs $20/mo or $200 for a lifetime.
Enterprise: It costs $40/mo or $400 for a lifetime.

You can also get Add-ons for additional searches, keyword tracking, competitor tracking, etc, at just $5/mo. Plus, all plans come with a 7-day free trial.

Start Ubersuggest 7-Day Free Trial

6. Ranktracker

RankTracker is an all-in-one SEO software that tracks and optimizes your SEO campaign in order to drive more traffic to your site. It is relatively new, but it’s the most feature-rich cheap rank tracker for you.

You can use RankTracker to see how your SEO performs in the search results, find the long-tail keywords, audit your site for technical SEO, and monitor your backlinks easily.

In addition to that, RankTracker also comes with white-label SEO reporting tools to build effective ranking reports for your client.

If you’re looking for the best cheap SEO tool for your startups, RankTracker should be your best option.

Key Features:

Rank Tracker: Monitor your rankings for specific keywords across different search engines, GMB, and different devices.
Keyword Finder: Easily find high-traffic, low-competition keywords that will bring traffic to your site.
SERP Checker: Get detailed search engine results that provide you with the best opportunities to rank your site.
Web Audit: Get an in-depth health check of your SEO and get recommendations for improvement.
Backlink Checker: Allows you to analyze and track your and your competitors’ backlink profiles.
SEO Checklist: Provides a step-by-step optimization guide covering various aspects of SEO, from keyword research to off-page SEO.
AI Article Writer: Help you create high-quality and unique content quickly and easily.
SERP Simulator: See detailed info like the title tag, meta description, and URL of search results as they’re typed.

Pricing:

Ranktracker is a cheap SEO software that offers four pricing plans.

Starter: It costs $16.80/mo (billed annually).
Double Data: It costs $41.30/mo (billed annually).
Quad Data: It costs $76.30/mo (billed annually).
Hex Data: It costs $146.30/mo (billed annually).

You can start Ranktracker with a 7-day free trial. No credit card is required!

Start Ranktracker 7-Day Free Trial

7. SpyFu

SpyFu is a competitor analysis tool that excels at spying on your competitors’ organic keywords and search ads keywords.

The tool also has a regular keyword explorer for researching keywords and a rank tracker for tracking your keyword ranks over time.

However, its detailed PPC analysis of your competitors is what sets it apart from all the other best cheap SEO tools in this list.

Furthermore, it is usually used by both SEOs and PPC expert to research their competitors and find easy keywords to go after.

Key Features:

SEO Research: Get in-depth data on organic search performance. These include organic keywords, monthly traffic, top organic competitors, keyword gains and losses, top pages, inbound links, etc.
PPC Research: The tool offers over 13 years of data on paid search activities, allowing you to analyze the PPC keywords used by any website, ad timelines, cost-per-click, monthly costs, and ad positions.
Keyword Research: Identify top-performing organic and paid search keywords for any website, categorizing them by value, recent rankings, gains, losses, and more.
Backlink Research: Offers valuable insights into backlink profiles, showing the strength of referring domains and the types of websites linking back.
Competitor Analysis: It gives you a plethora of information about your competitors’ top-ranking keywords, backlink sources, and ads.
List Builder: Help you create comprehensive lists of domains and keywords for various purposes, such as SEO and PPC campaigns, competitive analysis, and outreach efforts.

Pricing:

SpyFu offers a free version to check out how the site works and what kind of results you get. It also offers two premium plans.

Basic: It costs $33/mo (billed annually).
Professional: It costs $58/mo (billed annually).

Start With SpyFu

8. LowFruits

LowFruits is a cheap keyword research tool that helps you find easy keywords for any niche.

Primarily used by niche site owners and affiliate marketers, it allows SEOs to find low-hanging keyword ideas by analyzing the SERPs of the keywords.

LowFruits will then show you which keywords have weak domain ranking on the first page of Google for that term, indicating that you can outrank them.

Key Features:

Keyword Research: This helps you analyze keywords and their SERPs in bulk and has options to filter by search intent, parent topics, and questions.
Competitor Analysis: Identify what keywords your competitors are ranking for, extract competitor sitemaps, and the content that your competitors are writing about.
Domain Explorer: Explore the winners in your niche (low DA, high traffic) and study them and what keywords they are going after.

Pricing:

One thing that makes LowFruits a great keyword tool for anyone is the flexible pricing options. Even small businesses or bloggers can benefit from the tool at a low cost.

They offer the following pricing options:

Pay as you go: For a flat fee, you can buy credits you can use when you need them. Packages currently available are $25 for 2,000 credits, $50 for 5,000 credits, $100 for 10,000 credits, and $250 for 50,000 credits.
Monthly Subscription: It costs $29.90/mo for 3,000 credits or $79.90/mo for 10,000 credits.
Annual Subscription: It costs $249/mo for 3,000 credits or $749/mo for 10,000 credits.

You can get started for free with 10 free credits. No credit card is required!

Start With LowFruits

9. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free SEO tool that shows you how your website ranks in Google’s search results.

It provides a lot of metrics, such as the number of impressions and clicks your website got, the average position of your website in SERPs, and the number of organic clicks it has received.

The program also provides information on 404 errors and pages that Google has blocked. This information might help you debug and improve the SEO of your website.

Google Search Console also creates data for on-site links, which display in search results below your website’s title.

Key Features:

Index Coverage Report: Highlights issues that Google encounters while crawling and indexing your site, such as errors, warnings, and valid pages.
URL Inspection Tool: This lets you inspect a specific URL on your site to see how Google views it, including indexing status, crawling errors, and any enhancements applied through structured data.
Sitemap Submission: This enables you to submit XML sitemaps to Google, helping the search engine understand the structure and hierarchy of your website for more efficient crawling and indexing.
Mobile Usability Report: Identifies mobile usability issues on your site, such as text readability, viewport configuration, and touch elements, to ensure a seamless experience for mobile users.
Security Issues Monitoring: Alerts you to any security issues found on your website, such as malware or hacked content.
Rich Results & Enhancement Reports: This provides insights into how Google utilizes your site’s structured data markup to generate rich search results.
Core Web Vitals Report: Provides insights into the performance of your site based on Core Web Vitals metrics, including loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

Pricing:

Google Search Console is totally free to use.

Start With Google Search Console

10. SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is an all-in-one SEO software that can be used to examine both your own and your competitor’s websites. It offers tools such as Rank Tracker, WebSite Auditor, SEO SpyGlass, and Link Assistant.

Using the tools provided by SEO PowerSuite, you can thoroughly search any domain to see how your competitors’ websites get traffic. It can help you with proper SERP analysis, among other things.

Key Features:

Rank Tracking: Allows you to monitor the search engine rankings of your website across multiple search engines and locations.
Keyword Research: Do in-depth keyword research to identify valuable keywords for your SEO campaigns. These include search volume, competition level, and keyword difficulty.
On-Page SEO Analysis: Analyzes individual web pages for on-page SEO elements. These include meta tags, headings, content quality, and internal linking structure.
Backlink Analysis: Analyze your backlink profile and keep track of the quality and amount of backlinks pointing to your and your competitor’s websites.
Link Building: Find new link-building opportunities, manage outreach campaigns, and monitor the status of link-building efforts.
Site Audit: Perform comprehensive audits of your websites to identify technical issues, crawl errors, and other factors that may affect search engine rankings.
Competitor Analysis: This allows you to analyze the SEO strategies of your competitors, including their keyword rankings, backlink profiles, and on-page optimization tactics.
SEO Reports: Create unlimited custom reports for your or your clients with any SEO data you need.

Pricing:

SEO PowerSuite offers a fully free plan with limited features. The free plan allows you to audit up to 500 pages, track unlimited keywords, and track up to 1,100 backlinks on your website. If you need all of the features and options provided by the software, you can upgrade to a premium plan.

The premium plans offer the following pricing options:

Professional: It costs $299/year.
Enterprise: It costs $499/ year.

You can save 34% on three-year plans.

Start SEO PowerSuite For Free

Final Thought on Cheap SEO Tools

In exploring the realm of affordable SEO tools, it’s crucial to remember that cost-effectiveness doesn’t always equate to efficiency. While budget-friendly options can offer a solid starting point for SEO optimization, they may lack the depth and breadth of data, features, and support needed for a comprehensive strategy. This is where investing in a more robust platform like Semrush becomes invaluable.

Semrush stands out by providing a comprehensive suite of tools that cater to all facets of SEO, from keyword research and site audits to competitor analysis and content optimization. Its extensive database and advanced analytics offer insights that far surpass the capabilities of most cheap SEO tools, enabling businesses to craft strategies with precision. Furthermore, Semrush’s continuous updates ensure that you’re always ahead of the latest search engine algorithms and market trends.

Opting for Semrush over cheaper alternatives means investing in the growth and resilience of your online presence. It’s about prioritizing long-term success over short-term savings. For those serious about dominating their online niche, Semrush offers an unmatched toolkit to navigate the complexities of SEO with confidence and clarity.

You can test out Semrush by simply creating a free account or using its 7-day free trial before committing financially.

Start Semrush 7-Day Free Trial

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Murtaza Malek

Web Engineer, Evid Learner and Reader, Techentreprenuer, Tech Evangelist.

15 March 2024