How to Do SEO for FREE in 2024 (20 Free Tools to Rank #1 on Google)

In this video, I'm covering how to do SEO for free in 2024 because there's a lot of different things that you have to do right. There's keyword research, link building, on-page SEO, content writing—lots of stuff! The truth is, it can get pretty expensive if you go for the higher-end plans like Ahrefs or Surfer SEO.

So, I'm covering how to do all of these things: how to find keywords, how to write articles, and how to rank content. Basically, I'm going to show you how to do SEO in 2024 completely and 100% for free. But before we get started, I want to invite you to watch my free masterclass—80 minutes of free training.

Just click the link in the description and the top comment below to sign up for that. It will cover exactly what it takes to start a blog and an online business in the 2020s. Now, let's get into the topic for today.

So, the first thing to think about when we're talking about SEO here is doing keyword research. I've made a lot of videos showing you Ahrefs and exactly how to do keyword research, but the thing is, we have to rank for things on Google. That's kind of the heart of where SEO starts, and to do that, we have to conduct keyword research.

Now, we want to do it actually for free, but the key here is that when you're using free tools, having a little bit of niche experience is beneficial. We're going to be using a number of different free tools, but you need to have a little bit of knowledge about the niche that you're in, right? You should have an understanding of what some of the new things emerging in the niche are because we're going to be looking for new and emerging products.

You know, 16 to 20% of Google searches every year are brand new, so we’re looking for these sweet spots and keywords that we can rank for. Having a little bit of niche experience can really help. So, I'm going to go over some different tools and examples here.

First, a good tool I like is the free Keyword Surfer Chrome extension. It's a Chrome extension that you can use for free with Surfer SEO, and you can also utilize the free versions of Ahrefs and other Chrome extensions. For example, if I Google "best UTV for under $10,000," I see all the results on Google, but then I also see this Surfer result here that shows me the overlap score for this keyword and others.

It's giving me different keyword ideas and their volumes side by side, which is helpful. I can also turn on the Ahrefs Chrome extension, which gives me some other keyword ideas, such as "best UTV for under $1,000," "used under $8,000," and it compiles all of these suggestions. Additionally, the "People Also Ask" feature can help identify common questions, which is useful for writing informational articles.

So, getting some information and keywords from these free extensions can give you a plethora of ideas for different articles to write. Another tool you can look at is Google Trends. Google Trends is free; you can use it 100% for free.

Then, there's an add-on called Glimpse, which is another Chrome extension that you can toggle on or off. You can use the free version to get a certain number of searches per month. I can look at different categories to see what's new and emerging—keywords that I could actually write about and rank for.

For example, if I go to fashion apparel shoes, I could see something like year-over-year growth for these top shoes. Now, you'll see it blocking out some of this information because I don't have one of the highest-tier plans, but you can observe interesting trends. For instance, pickleball shoes have gone up 75% year-over-year, providing lots of different ideas in that niche.

You might need to upgrade the plan to access all the features of these tools, as you end up piecing together information from various platforms. However, you can definitely get enough information you need. Using Google Trends, you can come up with lots of different keyword ideas and see what is on the upswing in the last 3 months or 6 months—what’s actually rising in search volume that isn’t too competitive yet.

You can also check out Exploding Topics for that. If you use Exploding Topics for free, you can input the niche, like software, and see the trends. The pro plans allow you to look at the last 3, 6 months, or year, but you can look at the last two years with the free version.

You can see different things, like AI generators, which seem to be gaining popularity, especially around the school year. It drops off in the summer, and then it picks up again, providing good ideas for new and emerging keywords we want to write about. Remember, keyword research is all about ranking for new stuff.

It's harder to rank for established topics that are very competitive and saturated, so we need to focus on the new stuff. Exploding Topics is a good tool for that. For free, you might also try Ubersuggest.

For example, I put in "best camping tents," and while you get some information, it’s limited. You can do a free trial for 150 searches. Then, cancel the trial after that.

But for this one, I put in "best camping tents. " It shows me the search volume, the SEO difficulty, and some more metrics on that monthly, so you can see other keyword ideas, other variations, content ideas, and things that you could write. This is all, again, free—just things to kind of gauge what's working with different keywords in your niche.

So, you want to be niche-specific and kind of know what you're going after first to gain all these insights. You can even use ChatGPT; you know, you can put in, "I put in: what are some keywords I can rank for on Google in the ATV/UTV niche to make affiliate commissions and improve my topical authority? " It's giving me some ideas and frameworks, like product reviews, best ATV tires for specific terrains, different product comparisons, accessories, and safety regulations.

So, it's not going to give me the exact search volume and difficulty scores like some of the tools will, but it'll start framing my ideas in my mind. When it comes to keyword research in 2024, for example, after all these Google updates in 2022 and 2023, there's more of a human-first approach to keyword research search. You don't want to have 100% of your articles on your blog all optimized perfectly for SEO; only SEO content.

We'll cover at the end of this video how to have a good content strategy going into 2024, but keyword research should be a component of your SEO, right? You definitely need it, but it's good to have some niche experience and know what specific articles you're going to write, which we'll cover at the end of this video. It's important to develop a framework using a number of these different free tools.

What I would do is try to look at SP Trends with Google Trends, Glimpse, and Exploding Topics, and use ChatGPT to come up with some ideas in different categories of content you could write about. Then, throw them into Ubersuggest and see what it says, see how difficult it is. Speaking of making money with your website, today’s video is brought to you by WPX.

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Now, make sure to click the WPX link in the description for more information on WPX hosting. All right, so let’s say that you have some keywords that you actually want to write. You've used the free tools and found some keywords; now we actually have to write the content.

So, how do we actually do that? Well, we can use Surfer SEO's free article outline generator first. Let’s say I’m writing an article on affiliate marketing.

I go to this URL, I hit "generate outline," and then Surfer SEO will create the actual outline that I can use. What’s really important isn’t just having all the stuffing keywords in; that doesn’t work, right? We have to have a clear format with the right headings and generally the right structure of content to fill in.

So, it’ll start with this outline. You can see here that it gives us some headings that we could use in our article, such as "How to Start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners," "The Types of Affiliate Programs," "How to Start It," and "Mistakes to Avoid. " It gives us some ideas for headings.

Now these aren’t the end-all, be-all; we can’t just plop these into a tool in this order and expect it to work perfectly. This is using AI and GPT-4 to come up with. I don’t think I would just have a random heading on Shopify’s affiliate program in the article necessarily, but you can take it and know which headings are good to have.

What you would do is use a free tool like Grammarly or Hemingway when you start writing this content. You start writing the content and putting it in there, and then you can use a tool like Grammarly, which will give you all of these different things to add. It’ll give you correctness errors that you can just click and fix, right?

Correctness errors, clarity errors, engagement; then it gives you an overall score. So, you don’t have to be a perfect writer here for SEO. What’s really important, though, is if we're doing this for free, it's actually kind of good now because, in a lot of ways, yes, we can use a paid tool like Surfer SEO, which will tell us exactly how long the article should be, all the semantic keywords to add, all the headings, and everything, right?

That is important; we need on-page SEO. However, what's becoming more and more important is the actual content, the human elements—how engaging it is for the reader, how quickly you're answering search intent, the intro to engage people—all those things that are actually being written are actually more helpful. So, as long as you have a good outline and you're filling in the gaps with good, human experience-based content based on things that you've actually done or know, that's going to be key.

Then, you can just fill it in and use a tool like Grammarly to fix all the punctuation errors and spelling mistakes. While you can use ChatGPT or some AI tools to write articles for you, I do not recommend it. I think that human content is what's going to stand out in 2024 and beyond.

Right? You don't want to just publish 100 random AI articles, and Google, in the future, is likely to say, "This is not good. " With all the helpful content updates and product review updates, they are looking for actual experience, not just random AI articles.

I think that's why they've had so many updates recently: to kind of combat that. So, yes, it's easier—and, you know, lazier, I guess—to just have AI write everything for you. Now, you can, if you really want to, have ChatGPT or an AI tool write the initial draft for you, but you have to heavily edit this thing to get it to be a complete, human experience-based article with no AI.

Ultimately, there are no real huge shortcuts to this, especially if you're using free tools. But you can find the keywords you want to rank for, use the outline generator to create the outline, write the content, make sure it's grammatically correct, add your human experience in, and then click publish. All right, so you've hit publish and published some articles.

You went from keyword research to writing it to publishing it. Now, what we typically do is track the rankings, making sure that we're actually getting rankings over time. So, obviously, you should use Google Search Console, number one.

Set that up with your WordPress site, and you can use Google Analytics. Those two obviously can show you traffic, but you can also use something like the free Ahrefs Keyword Rank Checker. So I put in, like, you know, "best online course platforms" as the keyword for my own article on that, and then I can click "Check the rankings," and it will show me where I rank.

So it says, "You rank number nine for best online course platforms. DR 79, 543 domains pointing to this. Here's the traffic," etc.

You can see that you can put these individual things into these tools to find out what you're actually ranking for. With these tools, when you're using free ones, though, it's not quite as in-depth. You can't get every single article of yours in one place, showing you the ranking changes, showing you the fluctuations, and all that.

The best thing for that, in a free sense, is using a free tool like this for individual articles that you see are doing well, just to kind of track progress. But really, this one is all about Google Search Console, showing you your impressions and number of clicks you're getting, and your general average position for each of your articles. All right, so we've covered keyword research, writing, and tracking the rankings.

What about link building? So, how can we do link building for free? Well, it's actually a lot easier than you would think.

The goal here is to do some active link building on your site, especially if you're a brand-new site and your domain rating is zero. No, you don't need a ton of links; you don't need to focus on this like 80% of your efforts or anything like that. But it is a good goal to get your domain rating to 30 or somewhere in the ballpark of sites in your niche to kind of get in the ballpark of the competition.

To do that, we can do outreach. I have videos on how to do guest posting and how to do link building right, with full video tutorials on those on YouTube. Ultimately, we're doing some outreach; we're introducing ourselves to other blogs, to other companies, and brands in the niche to either write guest posts for them to link back to your own blog or build some type of link partnership.

A lot of people are like, "No, we don't accept guest posts," but we actually do guest posts too. Let's say, "I'll link to you in this one; you link to me in this one," to start building relationships with other content marketers out there. Now, for outreach, what we need to do is create a list of sites to reach out to, which is really simple, right?

We can use Google Sheets for free to just create that list where we have a column for their name, their email, and their website. That's kind of your list building. Ultimately, how do we come up with the sites?

Well, we want to come up with a list of about 100 sites in your niche that would be great to get links from. This could be anything from actual brands in your niche. So, if I'm doing UTV stuff—like I was mentioning—or ATVs, it could be like the manufacturers or the sites that have blogs or dealers; actual people that sell the stuff is a really good option.

Other blogs in that niche or even some news-type sites would also work. So, you build a list of sites you want to reach out to. Another thing that you can look at is, "Well, who's linking to my competition?

" You could use Ahrefs' free backlink checker. For example, if I wanted to rank for "how to start a blog," I could look at my own article on how to start a blog. Start a blog, put that in, and then it'll show me what other sites are linking to this article.

It shows me sites like EngageBay, HubSpot, Webflow, and Nutshell—all these different sites that are linking to my article specifically. You can look at these and be like, "Hm, okay, these could be good sites that I can reach out to," because these are all very relevant sites linking to this competitor site. I'm going to try to reach out to them specifically, and you can see the domain rating and all of that.

So when you're just starting out, you know you want to aim up. Try to reach out to sites that have a higher domain rating than you. Maybe you don't start outreaching to sites that have a domain rating of 80 or 90 plus, but you can reach out to some in the 50s, 60s, or 70s to start getting backlinks from those types of sites.

What you actually have to do here is get the list of 100 sites, right in a Google Sheet—really simple. Then, you have to find out, "Well, who do I actually reach out to? " For that, you would use a couple of free tools: hunter.

io and LinkedIn. With LinkedIn, you can find the person that works there. You put the company and the website in, and then you'd find the content manager, the SEO manager, or somebody with that job title at that place.

You connect with them, find their name, and if you have their company and their name, then you can use hunter. io, which will give you the cadence of their email, like the formatting. It could be first.

last name at that company, it could be just the first name, or just the last name, but it'll tell you specifically, based on scanning the web, what the format of that work email is. So you have the name, you have the email, you punch all of that into Google Sheets, and then you just send the email. You send targeted guest post, general outreach emails to these sites for link building with Gmail.

You can use a tool like HubSpot Sales, which is a free Chrome extension, and it gives you about five email templates. You click a button in Gmail, and it just pops up the entire email ready to go. Then you want to personalize it—add the first name, make a personalized first sentence, and send the email asking for guest posts, link partnerships, and all those.

Now, remember, when it comes to link building (I have other videos on this; make sure to check those out), links are a value exchange. You have to come with something of value; you can't just ask for things with nothing in return. There are certain sentences you can add into those emails, like, "I write a lot of other guest posts on other high-domain authority sites, and I can link to your site in those.

" You're starting to open the relationship, keep it a little bit broad, and don't be pushy or ask for things. This is definitely an art form; you know I could talk about that forever—just how to do outreach emails. So again, you don't need link building specifically, but if your domain rating is zero, try to get it up to at least 30 so that you can start competing and ranking across the board for a lot of different keywords.

Before we get into one of my favorite SEO tools and exactly what I would do step by step, I want to cover a couple of other notable tools here that are free and that you can possibly use. Moz has a number of free tools. If you go to their free SEO tools page, you can get to this page, and it'll show you all these different ones.

One that I use that isn't even listed here is just their title tag analysis. So it's at moz. com/learn/seo/title-tag, and you put in your title, and it'll give you what it looks like.

I paste that in, right? You check it, and it gives you the exact title here, so you can see when it gets cut off, what it looks like, and you want to make sure that it doesn't get truncated so that you can see the whole thing. This is really good—just a simple tool to show you and preview what your meta title or your title tag will actually look like on Google.

That's the main one that I use. Another really good, honorable mention here is Screaming Frog. This is a good SEO tool for technical analysis and checking on the technical aspects.

If there's anything broken or messed up with your site, you can analyze broken links, check for duplicate meta descriptions, see if your tags are messed up, or identify duplicate pages. For free, you can check all of those things for up to 500 URLs, so it's a really good free technical analysis tool. Ultimately, my favorite free SEO tool is Detail.

You can find it at detailed. com; it's a Chrome extension that kind of does a little bit of everything, and it's completely free. You can go to detailed.

com to check it out and add it as a Chrome extension. You can also add it to Firefox, but it kind of works on a lot of different levels. For example, if I go to an article of mine, I can click on the Chrome tab here, and it'll show me an overview of this page.

My article on how to start a blog has the title, the description, URL, and lots of information on it. You can also see all the headings, so you can analyze the competition and what headings there are, links, all the internal links and external links on the page, images, schema markup—all of that different stuff that you can see. What you can also do, which is really cool, is right-click and go to the detailed SEO extension menu.

Then you can perform a site domain. com search, allowing you to conduct a Google search based on that domain for competitive research. You can do other types of Google searches, look at things in the Wayback Machine (archive.

org) for a history of it, and use tools like BuzzSumo, Majestic, MZ, SEMrs, and SimilarWeb. It's just a good source of all kinds of information; it's probably the best free tool, in a general sense, for a broad overview. You can see page-level metrics, track things, and use the menu to find other resources.

I really like the detailed Chrome extension. So ultimately, if you're going to do SEO for free in 2024, here is exactly what I would do. First, we start with keyword research; we want to come up with about 20 article ideas.

In 2024, we don’t want to just write all SEO-optimized articles and transactional pieces and try to just be an affiliate site. We have to think broader than that. I would say, in one niche, know what your niche is and have 20 articles that you’re going to write.

Out of those 20 articles, let's do 15 of them focused on keyword research; five are just going to be really good articles based on your experience with no SEO—you're just doing them straight up for your audience and making them as good and as helpful as possible based on your experience and your specific audience. Now, out of the 15 we do keyword research on, I would say 12 can be informational articles that you find to be really helpful, and then three can be transactional articles for affiliate revenue—like those best posts, best UTVs, best ATVs, product comparisons, and things like that. So remember, based on that, we are writing for your human audience first.

Out of the 20, 15 can be keyword research articles, so get those 20 article ideas using all these free SEO tools. Then you’re going to write the articles. You can use Surfer SEO's free outline generator plus Grammarly to write the articles.

This again is more about the intro and engaging content, and human experience stuff—good writing throughout based on actual search intent, not just stuffing a bunch of keywords in there. Then you’re going to publish your articles, and over time, set a cadence of maybe every three to six months to update the article with at least some good updates. Maybe you rewrite the intro to make it better.

We can always update articles to make them better, add 250 words of new content, or remove stuff that isn’t unique or specific. So, there are lots of things you can do to update the articles. Then we want to do link building.

Come up with a list of 100 sites you want to target for guest posts and link partnerships. Use Ahrefs' free backlink checker; put competitive articles in and see who is linking to those articles. Build your list and go to Google.

Find the top brands in your niche; sites that you can reach out to for links are often the sites you would be an affiliate for. For example, if I wanted to rank for online course platforms, I’d probably want to reach out to Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi, and all of those actual platforms—and I did, and they linked to me, which is why I'm on page one for that still. So, create a list of 100 sites.

Use Hunter and LinkedIn to find the names and email addresses of the SEO and content marketing managers to reach out to. Email them with Gmail and HubSpot Sales. Follow up over time; keep track of everything in Google Sheets.

Just focus on those two things: content and links. That process never ends. Focus on publishing content, getting backlinks, and just keep building your authority—your topical authority and your link authority.

Eventually, you’ll get your Google traffic up, and you’ll start making money. Now, SEO is very nuanced; there are a lot of different details here, and we could miss one thing. You can hack your way with all these free tools, but if you really want to take it to the next level—and I'll tell you exactly what I would do—make sure to watch the free masterclass.

It's 80 minutes of free training on exactly what it takes to start a blog in 2024 and make money from it. I hope you found the video helpful. I know I get asked a lot about the free tools, so I hope you found at least one tool in here that you can use.

Please comment with any tools that you are using if I missed any; I'm sure I did, so add them in there—that could be helpful for everybody. Please like the video, subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you in the next video!