9 DIY SEO Software Tools & How to Use Them Like A Pro

What’s the #1 channel that can help you with high-quality traffic, leads, and sales? If you said “SEO”, you’re absolutely right.

SEO is a billion-dollar industry. If used right, it can send tons of visitors to your website for free.

In fact, the blog you’re currently reading generates over 2.5 million views every year, most of which come from Google.

Have a look;

Have we hired an SEO agency or expert? No! We did it all by ourselves with the help of DIY SEO tools.

What is DIY SEO?

DIY (Do It Yourself) SEO is done without paying someone else to do it. Several DIY SEO tools help you efficiently do SEO tasks by yourself, such as;

• Keyword research
• Content creation
• Optimization
• Rank tracking
• Website speed testing, identifying crawling errors and optimizing your site’s visibility, and more

A DIY SEO tool should offer the following;

• A free trial (or free plan, so you can experience the tool before paying anything)
• An easy-to-use interface 
• Useful product features

So what are the DIY SEO tools available for 2024 that tick all the boxes mentioned above? Let’s find them out, along with the details on how to use those tools. 

DIY SEO – Do It Yourself SEO Software [Our Top 9 Picks]

1. Semrush (Useful for ALL Your SEO Needs)

If you’re looking for ONLY one DIY SEO software, go with Semrush.

Why? Semrush offers over 55 marketing tools under one roof. You’ll get access to all the necessary tools, from SEO and PPC to social media. 

Over 10 million people use Semrush. It has a massive database of 23 billion keywords from 142 geo locations and 39.1 trillion backlinks data from 819 million domains.

What can you do with Semrush?

• Perform in-depth competitor analysis
• Do keyword research and track your keyword rankings
• Website audits
• Backlink analysis 
• Paid advertising and social media tools

How to use Semrush?

First things first: Semrush can be used for a wide range of SEO tasks such as keyword research, website analysis, backlink audit, etc.

Let’s see what the domain overview looks like;

As you can see, you’ll get a report of the total number of backlinks, organic search traffic, etc.

If you want to find all the top-performing keywords pointing to a domain, scroll down a bit, and you’ll see the “Top Organic Keywords” section, which looks like this;

See that? You’ll get a list of all the keywords, their current rankings, search volume, traffic %, etc. Similarly, you can analyze ANY website or URL to improve your SEO.

Pricing: Semrush offers the following three pricing packages.

1. The Pro plan costs $129.95 monthly, suitable for small teams and newbies. It can be used to manage up to 5 projects, 500 keywords to track, and 10,000 results per report
2. The Guru plan costs $249.95 monthly, suitable for agencies and mid-size businesses. It can be used to manage up to 15 projects, 1500 keywords to track, and 30,000 results per report
3. The Business plan costs $499.95 monthly, which is excellent for large agencies and enterprises. It can be used to manage up to 40 projects, 5000 keywords to track, and 50,000 results per report

You’ll get a 17% INSTANT discount on all the above plans (if you pay annually).

Does it offer a free trial? 

Yes, Semrush offers a 14-day FREE trial exclusively to our audience.

Try Semrush 14 Days Free Trial

2. Jasper AI (for Content Creation)

The popularity of AI tools has been increasing daily since the launch of ChatGPT. But Jasper AI was introduced before ChatGPT and is still one of the best content creation tools.

It offers over 50 copywriting tools that help you create almost any type of content, from blog posts to reviews to YouTube video scripts.

What can you do with Jasper?

• Automatically generate content such as emails, landing page copy, blog posts, reviews, and more
• Get access to 55 copywriting templates
• Built-in Grammarly checker
• Offers “Jasper Chat,” where you can have a human-like conversation

How to use Jasper AI?

Once you’re on Jasper’s website, pick any template you want. 

Here’s an example of a “Paragraph Generator” template, which automatically generates compelling paragraphs based on your input.

As you can see, we gave some basic input, and Jasper instantly generated outputs on the right side. If you’re unhappy with the content it generated, you can keep generating new content until you’re satisfied.

You can check out our detailed Jasper review to discover how you can get the most out of this tool.

Pricing: Jasper offers the following pricing options.

1. Creator plan’s pricing starts at $39 per month and you can create unlimited content where you get access 1 user seat.
2. Team plan’s pricing starts at $99 per month, and it is the most recommended plan as it offers 3 user seats along with Documents & Workflows
3. Business plan has custom pricing plans depending on your content needs

You can also pay up-front for the year to save 20% instantly.

Does Jasper offer a free trial?

Yes, Jasper offers a 7-day free trial.

Try Jasper’s 7-Day Free Trial!

3. Frase.io

Are you struggling to create content that ranks well in Google? Looking for “do it yourself SEO software” for content optimization? Then, you should try Frase.

Frase.io is a popular AI software that helps you create successful content, used by over 30,000 content marketers.

What can you do with Frase?

• Create content briefs
• It can be used for content creation
• It’s a fantastic tool for optimizing your content properly 
• It offers “Content Analytics” that lets you find new content opportunities

How to use Frase.io for DIY SEO?

Once you’re on the tool, click on “Documents” to pick a topic to create content around.

It offers a wide range of tools, from content briefs to whole blog post creation.

Here’s what the content brief for a topic looks like;

Here’s a quick video tutorial on how Frase.io works.

Pricing: Frase.io offers the following pricing options.

1. Solo plan costs $14.99/mo where you can generate up to 4K words per month (up to 4 articles with optimization)
2. Basic plan costs $44.99/mo where you can generate up to 4K words per month (up to 30 articles with optimization)
3. Team plan costs $114.99/mo where you can generate up to 4K words per month (unlimited articles with optimization)

Does Frase.io offer a free trial?

No. But it offers a 5-day trial for only $1.

4. Surfer SEO

If you’re looking for an affordable SEO toolkit for finding better keywords, content creation, and optimization – you should check out Surfer SEO tools.

The best part? It also offers free tools such as the Keyword Surfer browser extension, which reveals Google search data for your keywords on the go.

What can you do with Surfer SEO?

• The content editor helps you write with proper SEO suggestions
• Keyword research tools
• Audit tool that helps you optimize existing pages 
• It also offers free tools AI outline generator, a Keyword surfer extension, etc

How to use Keyword Surfer?

Keyword Surfer is one of the most-used tools from Surfer.

It’s free, and once you install the extension on your browser, here’s what its data looks like;

As you can see, once you enter any topic or keyword, it will instantly show you a list of relevant keywords along with the overlap and search volume. 

Want more details? You can read our in-depth Surfer SEO review to know more about it.

Pricing: Surfer SEO offers the following pricing options.

• Basic plan is perfect for small business owners. It costs $59 per month and you can create 10 articles and audit up to 20 pages per month.
• Pro plan is perfect for medium organizations. It costs $119 per month and you can create 30 articles and audit up to 60 pages per month.
• Business plan is perfect for large business owners. It costs $239 per month and you can create 70 articles and audit up to 140 pages per month.

Does it offer a free trial?

Surfer SEO does not offer free trials. However, it offers a fantastic FREE Chrome extension called “Keyword Surfer,” which gives you essential SEO metrics like search volume, Cost per Click, estimated traffic, and more.

5. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is a powerful DIY SEO software that provides you with 100% accurate keyword rank tracking. Over 800,000 people are using SE Ranking for the following two reasons;

• Offers a 360% analysis of your website
• Affordable pricing plans starting only at $39/mo

What can you do with SE Ranking?

• Keyword rank tracker, which helps you track keyword rankings
• On-page SEO checker for better optimization 
• Website audit for finding your site’s SEO issues
• Competitor analysis tool
• Backlink checker tool and much more

How to use SE Ranking SEO tools?

SE Ranking can be used for multiple tasks.

If you want to perform an in-depth analysis of a competitor, you need to first identify your niche competitors. Here’s where you can use SE Ranking’s competitor website analysis tool.

Here’s what it looks like;

As you can see, you can quickly identify all the websites that target similar keywords in Google search as your own website.

Pricing: SE Ranking offers the following pricing packages.

• Essential plan costs $39 per month and is suitable for freelancers. You can add up to 10 projects, track up to 250 keyword rankings, and perform website audit for up to 40K pages with this plan
• Pro plan costs $89 per month and is suitable for small agencies. You can add unlimited projects, track up to 1000 keyword rankings, and perform website audit for up to 250K pages with this plan
• Business plan costs $189 per month and is suitable for large agencies. You can add unlimited projects, track up to 2500 keyword rankings, and perform website audit for up to 700K pages with this plan

Does SE Ranking offer a free trial?

Yes, it offers a 14-day free trial with all the plans.

Read: Semrush vs SE Ranking: Which is Worth Your Money?

6. Google Pagespeed Insights (for Testing Website Performance)

PageSpeed Insights is an excellent FREE DIY SEO tool every website owner must use.

It tests your website’s performance and how quickly users interact with your website content. It is 100% FREE to use!

What can you do with Google Pagespeed Insights?

• Get a detailed report on your website’s performance (on both devices: mobile and desktop)
• Identify all the things that are slowing down your website, such as images, CSS code, server response time, etc
• Get the “Core Web Vitals” assessment
• It gives you the best practices to improve your page speed
• Find out how fast your website loads and how quickly users can interact with it.
• Identify the largest contentful paint, which tells you how quickly the main content of a web page is loaded.

How to use Google Pagespeed Insights?

Once you’re on the website, simply enter any website’s URL you want to analyze.

It will instantly start analyzing the web page or URL and offers you insights.

Here’s what it looks like;

As you can see, it gives you what your website users are experiencing on both mobile and desktop. You’ll discover things like;

• Performance issues
• First Contentful Paint
• Largest Contentful Paint, a metric for measuring perceived load speed 
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which is a metric for measuring visual stability
• Speed Index and much more

When you scroll down a bit further, you’ll also be shown all the suggestions to improve the user experience of your website.

Have a look;

As you can see, you’ll find various suggestions like;

• Initial server response time
• Critical request 
• Image sizes and more

Pricing: It’s free to use. You don’t even need to use your email. You can use it directly by entering any website’s URL.

7. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (to Monitor your SEO Health)

Want to know how your website is performing in Google search? If you’re looking for a better alternative to Google’s search console, you should definitely try Ahrefs Webmaster tools.

Ahrefs webmaster tools scan your website for over 140 common SEO issues. The best part? It’s completely free for website owners and helps you easily monitor your website’s SEO performance.

What can you do with Ahrefs Webmaster Tools?

• Monitor your SEO health (it performs a detailed scan of your website)
• Get SEO suggestions on fixing all the website issues 
• Know your website’s backlink data
• Easily discover all the keywords your website ranks for 
• Broken links data for internal and external links

How to use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools?

Once you’ve verified website ownership on the AWT, it will automatically start crawling your site.

Here’s what it looks like once your site is crawled;

As you can see, you’ll get an overview of your website’s SEO performance where you can discover everything including;

• The reports of internal pages, indexing, links, on-page, social tags, etc
• Top issues such as broken links, canonical, missing heading, HTML tags, etc
• Gives you domain & page-level SEO metrics
• Gives you SERP snapshot with competitive data

Pricing:  It is free for website owners. However, you’ll need to verify ownership of your website in the following methods.

• Connect Google Search Console (recommended)
• You can verify ownership of your website by uploading an HTML file (OR), adding a TXT record to your DNS configuration (OR) adding an HTML meta tag to your homepage.

Here’s the link to sign up for FREE

That being said, you can also upgrade AWT (Ahrefs Webmaster Tools) account to a premium Ahrefs subscription, where you’ll find the following pricing options.

• Lite plan is useful for small businesses and it costs $99 per month where you can add up to 5 projects, track up to 750 keywords, and get 100K site audit crawl credits.
• Standard is suitable for freelance SEOs and it costs $199 per month where you can add up to 20 projects, track up to 2K keywords, and get 500K site audit crawl credits.
• Advanced is useful for in-house marketing teams and it costs $399 per month where you can add up to 50 projects, track up to 5K keywords, and get 1.5 million site audit crawl credits.
• Enterprise is useful for agencies and enterprises and it costs $999 per month where you can add up to 100 projects, track up to 10K keywords, and get 5 million site audit crawl credits.

8. Pingdom Speed Test (to Test the Speed of Your Website)

Website speed matters a lot. Not only does it impact your rankings but it can also help with better user experience.

So how can you find your website’s performance? You can use a free tool called the Pingdom speed test.

What can you do with Pingdom Speed Test?

• It has access to over 70 global polling locations to test your website performance
• Helps you easily find the speed and performance of your site
• Identify your site’s page load time, analyze it, and find issues
• It offers suggestions based on your site’s issues

How to use Pingdom Speed Test?

Once you’re on the website, enter your site’s URL and pick a country to start the test.

It instantly starts analyzing your site and gives you a website’s speed test report, which looks like this;

As you can see, you will get site’s performance grade along with other metrics like;

• Page size
• Load time
• Total number of requests
• Suggestions to improve your site’s performance 

Pricing: It’s free to use.

9. Google Search Console (Identify How Your Website is Performing on Google)

If you’re looking for free DIY SEO software, Google Search Console is just for you. It helps you check your website’s indexing status, total number of search queries, crawling issues, and much more.

What can you do with Google Search Console?

• You can submit sitemaps of your website for crawling
• Identify your website’s mobile usability
• Find crawling errors
• Check the search queries that are used by people on Google to find your site
• Discover all the issues with your website’s structured data markup
• Find the total number of clicks and top-performing pages on your site

How to use Google Search Console?

Once you’ve accessed the Google search console, see the overview of your site to identify issues with crawling, indexing, or page experience. 

You can click on the “Performance” report to see a detailed analysis of your website.

Here’s what it looks like;

As you can see, you’ll see the total number of clicks, impressions, average CTR and average position of your website in Google search results.

When you scroll down a bit, you’ll also find a list of all the top search queries that send the most visitors from Google.

Have a look;

See that? You can also filter the results by choosing specific dates (or months) so you’ll have a better idea about the search queries of your website. 

Pricing: It is totally free to use. You need to get a Google account if you don’t have one. Then, you need to add and verify ownership of your website to start using it.

FAQs

Related Posts:

• 19 Best SEO Blogs 2024 You Shouldn’t Miss Out
• The ONLY 3 Surfer SEO Alternatives You Need
• People Also Search For (PASF) Keywords: The Beginner’s Guide

Final Thoughts 

Whether you’re running a website or online business and looking for an affordable way – DIY SEO is the only solution. Most SEO professionals charge thousands of dollars and the results are NOT guaranteed. 

It’s better to do it by yourself with the help of the above tools, especially when you’re on a tight budget.

What do you think about DIY SEO? Are you going to try it? Have any questions? Let us know in the comments.