# Cheap SEO tools: what a small site can do for free, and when paying makes sense

Most of the SEO a small site needs costs nothing: Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for your own searches, PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse for speed, the results page itself for demand and rivals, and a crawler's free tier for technical checks. Paying only adds data about other people's sites: search volumes at scale, who ranks for what, and rivals' links. When you need that, rent it for a month, pay per use, or buy it once, rather than subscribing.

Updated 2026-09-23 · Source: https://porteur.ai/guides/cheap-seo-tools

## Each job and its cheapest option

Start from the job, not the brand. Each SEO job has a cheapest option that is good enough for a small site, and something paying adds on top. If you do not need what paying adds this month, you do not need to pay.

| Job | Free option | What paying adds |
| --- | --- | --- |
| See which searches bring you visitors | Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools | Little for your own site; mostly the same data in other charts |
| Check a page is indexed | Search Console URL inspection and indexing reports | Nothing a small site needs |
| Measure speed and Core Web Vitals | PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse | Scheduled tests and alerts across many pages |
| Find what people search around your product | The results page, autocomplete, the questions shown on it, your own Search Console queries | Volumes and difficulty for thousands of searches at once |
| See who you compete with | Search your main searches and note who holds the top results | Every search a rival ranks for, and how that changes |
| Technical audit | A desktop crawler's free tier, Lighthouse, Search Console reports | Larger crawls, scheduled crawls, comparisons between crawls |
| Links | Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools list links to your own site | Links to your rivals' sites, and where they come from |
| Track positions | Average position per query in Search Console | Daily positions for a fixed list of searches, by location |

The pattern is plain: anything about your own site is free, because the search engines give it to you. What costs money is data about everyone else, because someone has to collect it.

## The free set that covers a small site

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free and report your site's own queries, clicks, impressions, positions, indexing and links. Verify both on day one. They are the only tools with real figures about your site in search; everything else estimates.

PageSpeed Insights is free and shows Lighthouse lab data, plus field data from the Chrome UX Report when the page has enough traffic. Lighthouse is free and built into Chrome DevTools, so you can test a page before it is live. For a small site, checking the templates (home, a product page, a guide, pricing) covers most of the site.

For demand and rivals, the results page is the tool. Type the search, read the autocomplete suggestions, read the questions shown, open the top five results and note their type: guide, comparison, product page, forum thread. That tells you what page to write and who you are up against, for a handful of searches, at no cost.

For technical checks, a desktop crawler's free tier is enough to find broken links, missing titles, duplicate descriptions and redirect chains on a small site. The guide on the best free SEO tools goes through each of these tools and how to work within their free tiers; this page is about the point where free stops.

## What free cannot tell you

Free tools are built around your own site. Three questions sit outside it.

- How many people search something you do not rank for yet. Search Console only shows searches where you already appear. For a new site or a new topic, that is nothing.
- How hard a search is to win, and who else ranks for it across thousands of searches. Checking the results page by hand works for ten searches, not for a market.
- Where your rivals' links come from. Search Console lists links to your site only. A rival's links are the most direct list of places that might link to you too.

If none of these questions blocks a decision this month, keep working with the free set. If one does, for example you are choosing which of five topics to write about first and you have no figures on any of them, that is when paying makes sense.

> Before paying for volumes, check what you already have. The Queries table in Search Console often holds searches you never planned for, with real impressions. The guide on Search Console for keyword research shows how to read it.

## Three ways to pay less for the data you do need

Subscriptions suit agencies that use the data every day. A small site needs it in bursts: when choosing topics, when planning a comparison page, when looking for links. Pay for the burst.

1. **One month of a suite's lowest plan, then cancel** Prepare before you pay: the list of searches to check, the rivals to look up, the exports you want. Spend the month pulling them, save everything as files, and cancel before renewal. Read the plan's limits on exports and projects before choosing it.
2. **A pay-per-use data API** Some data providers sell search volumes, results pages and link data per request, with no monthly plan. It suits founders who can run a script, or an agent that can call an API: you pay for the searches you check and nothing more. Set a spending cap in the provider's dashboard before the first call.
3. **A one-off report** Someone else pulls the data and writes the findings once, for your site and your market. You pay once and work from the document. Porteur sells one of these, with no subscription, for 99 euros, or 199 euros with product analytics.

Whichever route you take, keep the data. A saved export of rivals' searches and links stays useful for months; a subscription you cancelled shows you nothing.

## What to pull in a single paid month

If you rent a suite for a month, go in with a list. Without one, the month goes on exploring dashboards.

1. Your three to five closest rivals: every search each one ranks for, exported.
2. The searches they rank for and you do not, exported and sorted by volume.
3. Their links: the referring sites, exported, so you can see which ones link to more than one rival.
4. Volumes and difficulty for the twenty to fifty searches on your own topic list.
5. One crawl of your site, if the suite includes a crawler, saved as a file you can compare against next time.

That gives you a year of topics and a list of link prospects. Then work through them with the free set, and measure results in Search Console.

## Traps that cost more than they save

- Group-buy accounts. Group-buy SEO tool services resell shared logins to paid suites. Sharing a login is generally against those suites' terms of service, so the account can be cut off at any time, and you are handing your site data and searches to an unknown reseller.
- Lifetime deals on young tools. A single payment for lifetime access is only worth it if the tool lasts and keeps its data up to date. Search data is expensive to collect; a tool that stops paying for it becomes a dashboard of old figures.
- Rank tracking before you rank. Tracking daily positions for searches where you sit on page five tells you nothing you can act on. Search Console's average position is enough until pages reach the first two pages.
- Several overlapping subscriptions. Two suites plus a separate keyword tool usually means paying three times for the same volumes. Pick one source for each job in the table above.
- Paying to fix scores. A tool's own site health score is not a ranking factor. Fix what affects readers and indexing, not what moves the tool's number.

## When paying makes sense

Pay when a decision you have to make this month needs data about other sites, and the free set cannot give it. Examples: choosing which topics to write first for a new product, planning a page that compares you with named rivals, or finding the sites that link to rivals and not to you.

Do not pay because a tool shows more charts, because a competitor uses it, or to watch positions move. On a small site, the constraint is rarely data. It is the number of good pages you ship and improve. Money spent on a tool you open once a month is better spent on a month of writing.

## Questions

### What is the cheapest SEO tool that is still useful?

Google Search Console, which is free and holds the only real figures about your site in Google. Pair it with Bing Webmaster Tools and PageSpeed Insights and you have what most small sites need. Pay only when you need data about rivals or searches you do not appear for yet.

### Are free trials of SEO suites worth using?

Yes, if you go in with a list of exports to pull and a date to cancel. A trial without a plan is spent learning the interface. Check what the trial restricts before relying on it for exports.

### Is Search Console enough for keyword research?

For searches where you already appear, yes: it shows real impressions and positions, which no paid tool can. For searches where you do not appear yet, no. That is the gap paid volume data fills.

### Are group-buy SEO tools legal?

They resell shared logins to paid suites, which is generally against those suites' terms of service. Accounts can be closed without notice, and you share your searches and site data with a reseller you do not know. The saving is not worth the risk for a business site.

### Should I pay for a rank tracker on a new site?

Not yet. Until your pages reach the first two pages of results, daily positions change nothing you would do. Search Console's average position per query covers the early months; the guide on rank trackers covers when to add one.

## Read next

- [The best free SEO tools in 2026, by the job they do](https://porteur.ai/guides/best-free-seo-tools): The free SEO stack that works in 2026: what “free” really means, the right tool for each job, and what you still miss without a paid suite.
- [Bing Webmaster Tools for a small site: what it gives that Google does not](https://porteur.ai/guides/bing-webmaster-tools): Set up Bing Webmaster Tools in minutes. Import from Search Console, reach Copilot and Yahoo, use Backlinks, Keyword Research, Site Scan and IndexNow.
- [How to read PageSpeed Insights: field data first, then the score](https://porteur.ai/guides/how-to-read-pagespeed-insights): Start with field data, not the score. Learn what Google uses, why scores vary, and how to turn a PageSpeed Insights run into a clear order of fixes.
- [Keyword research from Search Console alone](https://porteur.ai/guides/search-console-for-keyword-research): Use Search Console alone to find queries you already earn, gaps with impressions and no page, long questions, and pages that compete. Build a plan.
- [Competitor backlink analysis: turn a rival’s links into your list](https://porteur.ai/guides/competitor-backlink-analysis): How to read a rival's referring domains, the four kinds you find, which you can realistically earn, and how to turn the export into ten emails.
- [The best rank trackers, and when Search Console is enough](https://porteur.ai/guides/best-rank-trackers): See when Search Console covers you, what rank trackers add, how to choose one, and how to read daily movements without chasing noise.
- [SEO for indie hackers: one person, one hour a week, real pages](https://porteur.ai/guides/seo-for-indie-hackers): A simple SEO plan for indie hackers: one hour a week, ship one page per pain, early comparison pages, first links from launch sites, and what to skip.

Before you pay for any tool, get a free check of your site: paste a URL and in about thirty seconds it reads your site, the searches around it and the rivals on them, and shows three findings whole. Free check: https://porteur.ai/