Free or Paid SEO Tools — Which Approach is Best for You?

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Wide Range of SEO Software Expense
With so [many SEO software tools, utilities, browser extensions, and advanced platforms on the market today, it can be hard to decide what tool(s) to use to serve your SEO needs.

Naturally, cost comes into play as a major decision factor. As a marketing activity, SEO can become expensive when all factors (including people/time costs) are considered.

And SEO software costs can play a major role as well.

With that in mind, should you use only free SEO tools?

What about so-called ‘freemium’ SEO tools that start free (with user registration) and provide a paid upgrade path to one or more premium pricing tiers and feature bundles?

Or should you, budget permitting, just jump straight into premium SEO software tools, paying monthly or annually to use one or more SEO software platforms?

That’s the question facing companies, marketing agencies, freelancers, and website/blog owners around the world — especially those who are new to doing website SEO or when SEO is not a primary marketing tactic.

I’ll try to help answer these questions with a few example user scenarios below.

When to Use Only Free or Freemium SEO Tools
Budget Constraints and/or Lower SEO Priority
There are certainly situations where using only free or freemium SEO tools makes very good sense.

Here are a few examples:

Free SEO Tools — Case 1: The Broke Blogger or Starter Niche Site
In these situations, very small (or nonexistent) budgets for marketing software tools and services other than reliable website hosting dictate using free do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches for almost everything, including SEO.

Fortunately, it’s possible to do your own basic SEO for free, assuming you’re OK with the limitations of DIY SEO with no help from paid SEO tools.

In particular, there are several ways to do SEO keyword research for free.

Free SEO Tools — Case 2: The SEO Minimalist
The ‘SEO Minimalist’ chooses to use SEO as a secondary marketing tactic, with other marketing and sales efforts taking higher priority in the overall marketing and promotion mix.

For example, some B2B SEO efforts may fall into this category, with SEO playing only a supporting inbound marketing role while more proactive outbound