The best SEO tools for small businesses in 2026, free and paid

The best SEO tools for small businesses are usually free: Search Console shows which pages leave clicks on the table, PageSpeed Insights how fast they are. You buy a paid tool only when you want to analyze your competitor, or when software should do the work.

There is no shortage of tools. What is missing is a fixed hour a week to do something with them. All prices in this overview come from the vendors’ own pages, in October 2026.

Eight free SEO tools, and what to do with them this week

Google Search Console

Search Console is a free service from Google. Google shows there how often your site appears and how often people click it. The Performance report shows that per keyword and per page, with your CTR and average position. CTR is the share of impressions that leads to a click.

Find the pages with many impressions and few clicks first. For a roofer in Kansas City, that might be the roof leak repair page: 900 impressions, 12 clicks. How to tackle such a page step by step is in improve your SEO.

With URL Inspection you check whether a new page is in Google yet. How to connect Search Console is in connecting Search Console. Search Console says nothing about your competitors, and what to change you work out yourself.

Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics is free and shows what visitors do once they are on your site. In the Traffic acquisition report you see how many visits come from Google, under Organic Search. Set up a quote request as a key event (an action Analytics counts separately) and you see inquiries per channel too.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools gives you free reports on your site in Bing. Since February 10, 2026 it includes an AI Performance report, still in preview. You see how often Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries cite your pages as a source (Bing’s announcement), and which pages those are.

Create an account, add your site and check once a month which pages Copilot cites. ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity do not show up here.

Google PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights measures how fast a page loads, on mobile and desktop. You get two kinds of numbers: a lab test and real user data from Chrome over the past 28 days. Google looks at three measurements, the Core Web Vitals. LCP is how fast the largest block loads: good is up to 2.5 seconds. INP is how fast the page responds when you click or type: up to 200 milliseconds. CLS is how much the page shifts: up to 0.1.

This week, test your homepage and your two most visited pages on mobile. Is LCP above 2.5 seconds? Look first at the largest image at the top of the page. PageSpeed Insights says nothing about your texts or rankings.

Google Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner is a free tool for advertisers. It estimates how often a keyword is searched per month. You do need a Google Ads account with a campaign.

It is handy right before you write a title. The roofer sees whether people search “gutter cleaning” or “clean gutters” more often, and puts the most searched words up front in his title. Keyword Planner does not show rankings, and keywords almost nobody searches for are often missing.

Google Trends

Google Trends shows how interest in a search term changes over the year, and per region. In the free Explore tool you compare up to five terms at once (Google’s explanation), on a scale of 0 to 100. The roofer sees in which months people search most for “roof leak”, and gets that page ready in time.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog is a program that crawls your site the way Google does. The free version checks up to 500 URLs at a time. A license costs £199 a year (October 2026 price) and removes that limit (Screaming Frog pricing).

In one overview you see which pages return an error (404) and which redirect. You also see which titles or descriptions are missing, duplicated or too long. For a forty-page site like the roofer’s, the free version is enough. It does not rewrite anything: it only points.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools

With Ahrefs Webmaster Tools you get free Ahrefs data about your own site, once you verify that the site is yours. Site Audit checks more than 170 technical and content issues. You get 5,000 crawl credits per project per month: that many pages the tool may check. Site Explorer shows which keywords bring you visitors and which sites link to you.

Look at which sites link to you. Is there a supplier, association or local paper you did not know about? You cannot look at competitors’ sites here. That needs a paid plan.

Paid SEO tools: when is a subscription worth it?

A paid SEO tool is worth it when you want to analyze your competitor: what they rank for and who links to them. The free tools do not show that. All three list monthly prices in dollars (October 2026).

Ahrefs costs $29 a month for Starter, $129 for Lite, $249 for Standard and $449 for Advanced. With annual billing you save up to 17 percent, according to Ahrefs. There is also a free account with limited access to Site Explorer and Site Audit.

Semrush costs $139 a month for the SEO toolkit, or $117.33 with annual billing. AI visibility tracking is a separate product: the AI Visibility Toolkit, about $99 a month per domain, or the Semrush One bundles that combine both (Starter $199 with 50 AI prompts a day, Pro+ $299). A free account gives you one demo project and ten reports a day. You can try Semrush free for seven days.

SE Ranking costs $129 a month for Core, or $103.20 with annual billing. With it you track 2,000 keywords daily. Growth costs $279 and tracks 5,000. You can try it free for 14 days. AI Search, for visibility in AI answers, is a separate add-on from $71.20 a month with annual billing.

Put your biggest competitor’s domain into such a tool. Which keywords bring them visitors that you do not get? The roofer might see that a competitor draws many visitors with an explanation of flat roof replacement, while his own site only has service pages. That becomes his next blog post.

We advise against a subscription of more than $100 a month as a permanent tool for a small business without a marketer. You use a small part, and the rest of the month nobody opens the dashboard. Take the trial or one month, write down what your competitor does better and cancel.

Tools that also carry out the work are compared in AI SEO tools.

SEO plugins for WordPress: Yoast and Rank Math

If your site runs on WordPress, you need an SEO plugin for your titles, descriptions and sitemap. The free versions of Yoast and Rank Math are enough for most sites. Which page to tackle you still decide yourself with a plugin. Prices and AI features per plugin are in the best WordPress SEO plugins compared.

GreatCompany: when you want to know what to change

GreatCompany is SEO software for small businesses that want more customers from Google and ChatGPT without an SEO agency. GreatCompany measures your rankings in Google through Search Console. It also measures every day whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name your business for your customers’ questions. It fits when you want to know what to change but have no time to dig it out of Search Console yourself. If you have your own SEO specialist who wants competitors’ backlink data, Ahrefs or Semrush fits better.

Read which SEO tasks you can automate and which you keep.

On Pro ($49 a month) GreatCompany scans your site every month and puts proposals in your dashboard, for titles, descriptions and internal links. If a topic is missing, GreatCompany writes a blog post. You or your web developer put the proposals live. On Automatic ($99 a month, made for WordPress) GreatCompany applies up to five improvements on your WordPress site itself every Monday. What that delivers is in your overview email: from four weeks after an improvement, it shows how many extra clicks that page got from Google.

Take the roofer in Kansas City. His “Gutter cleaning” page had the title “Services | Ross Roofing” (23 characters). After the Monday round it is “Gutter Cleaning in Kansas City | Ross Roofing” (45 characters). The plans are on the pricing page, and the technical scan is available too.

All SEO tools in one table

Tool	For whom	Free or price (October 2026)	What it does not do
Google Search Console	Everyone with a website	Free	Show competitors, say what to change
Google Analytics 4	Those who want to know what visitors do after the click	Free	Say anything about competitors
Bing Webmaster Tools	Those who want to see whether Copilot cites them	Free	Measure ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity
PageSpeed Insights	Everyone, per page	Free	Say anything about texts or rankings
Google Keyword Planner	Those who write titles or advertise	Free, with a Google Ads account	Show rankings
Google Trends	Those who want to know when people search	Free	Show search counts: these are scores from 0 to 100
Screaming Frog SEO Spider	Sites with technical errors	Free up to 500 URLs, £199 a year	Rewrite anything
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools	Those who want to see their own links	Free for your own sites	Look at competitors
Ahrefs	Marketers and agencies	From $29 a month	Daily rank tracking on Lite: Rank Tracker updates weekly there
Semrush	Marketers and agencies	Free account, paid from $139 a month	Measure AI visibility in the SEO Toolkit alone: that needs the AI Visibility Toolkit or Semrush One
SE Ranking	Those who track rankings daily	From $129 a month, 14-day trial	Measure AI visibility without the add-on
Yoast or Rank Math	WordPress sites	Free; Yoast Premium $118.80 a year, Rank Math PRO $7.99 a month	Choose which page to tackle

Which SEO tool should you choose? Advice per situation

1. Just starting, with a ten-page site? Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and a free SEO plugin are enough. That costs nothing. Spend the hour a week on your titles. How to write them is in writing a meta description.
2. An online store with thousands of products? Next to Search Console, get a Screaming Frog license. The free version stops at 500 URLs. Run it over your site every quarter for errors and duplicate titles.
3. A competitor ranks higher and you do not know why? Take one month of Semrush, Ahrefs or SE Ranking, or just the trial. Pull out ten keywords where they get visitors and you do not.
4. You know what needs doing, but nobody does it? Then an AI agent that comes up with and applies the improvements helps you more than another measuring tool.
5. Want to know whether ChatGPT names you? Google’s free tools do not measure that. Semrush does with its AI Visibility Toolkit or Semrush One, SE Ranking with an add-on. Compare the options in the best GEO tools or see the prompt tracker.

ChatGPT itself is not in this list, because it does not measure your site. You can use it to rewrite titles and descriptions once you know which page needs it. How to do that without it going generic is in ChatGPT for SEO.