SEO tools: free and paid, with prices and limits (2026)

What you need, by the size of your site

Don't start with the tool. Start with the question: what do you want to find out?

The prices in this article are the ones shown on the official pages on 19 October 2026, excluding VAT where the page says so. They change often, so check the vendor's page before you pay. None of the links in this article are affiliate links.

The free tools from Google and Bing

These come first, whatever your budget. They show data from the search engine itself, which no outside tool has.

Two practical notes:

• Keyword Planner requires a Google Ads account. According to Google Ads Help, the account must have billing details set up. Volumes are rounded, and very rare searches don't show up at all.
• Bing Webmaster Tools can import your sites from Search Console, according to the Bing blog. Setup takes a few minutes. Bing has 2.18% of searches in Romania (StatCounter, Sept. 2026), so it is only worth it if you already have Search Console in good order.

How to use the first three in a complete 20-minute audit, step by step, is in the SEO check guide.

WordPress plugins: Yoast SEO and Rank Math

If your site runs on WordPress, you need one of them. They let you write the title and description of each page, generate the sitemap and add structured data.

The translation percentages come from translate.wordpress.org, for the stable version of each plugin.

For a small site, the free version of either is enough. Don't install both. Two SEO plugins produce duplicate titles and sitemaps and contradict each other.

Rank Math has one quirk: the PRO version runs on top of the free one, so both must stay active, according to its pricing page.

The full platforms: SE Ranking, Semrush, Ahrefs

These do almost everything in one place: daily rank tracking, technical audits, keyword research, link and competitor analysis. The differences are in price, data volume and interface.

A few things the table doesn't show:

Ahrefs Free is underrated. The former Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives you, for free and for the sites you verify, a technical audit with 5,000 crawl credits per project per month and up to 1,000 links and keywords in Site Explorer. The details are on the Ahrefs Free page. For a small site, it can replace a good part of what you would pay for elsewhere.

The $29 Ahrefs plan is limited. The full plans start at $129 a month, almost the same as the other two.

Data for Romania is thinner than for the US. All three estimate volumes and rankings from their own databases. In a small market, the estimates can differ a lot from what you see in Search Console. When the numbers disagree, Search Console is right about your site.

Crawlers: Screaming Frog and SEO PowerSuite

A crawler goes through your site like a search bot and gives you a list of every problem: broken links, missing or duplicate titles, redirect chains, pages buried too deep. It installs on your computer; it doesn't run in the browser.

If your site has fewer than 500 pages, the free version of either is enough for a complete technical audit.

For those without a specialist: rankingCoach

rankingCoach is an app that gives you a list of SEO tasks explained step by step, aimed at small business owners without technical knowledge.

Of the tools checked for this article, it is the only one with a site in Romanian and prices in lei: 100 lei a month or 1,200 lei a year, plus taxes, on its Romania page. It also has a free plan.

Its limit is the limit of any guided app: it tells you what to do, but you still do the work yourself.

How to choose, in three questions

1. Do you already have Search Console set up, and do you look at it monthly? If not, no paid tool will help you yet. Start there.
2. What concrete question do you want to answer? "Why aren't my pages being indexed" is solved with a free crawler. "Which keywords bring traffic to my competitors" needs a paid platform.
3. Who will look at the data? A platform costing over $100 a month that nobody opens is the most expensive tool on the list.

Most paid platforms have a trial or a free plan. Use it on a real question about your site, not on a general tour of the features.

What no tool does

Tools show you the problems. They don't fix them, and they don't decide what matters.

An audit report with 300 "errors" may contain three real problems and 297 warnings with no effect. The hard part of SEO is knowing which ones to fix first and what to write on your pages. That is what the guide to what SEO means is about.

Sources

All prices were checked on the vendors' official pages on 19 October 2026. Where the page showed only the "$" symbol, we have used it as is.

• SE Ranking, pricing: the Core plan and the trial period.
• Semrush, pricing: the SEO plan, the free plan.
• Ahrefs, pricing and Ahrefs Free: the Starter plan and the free limits.
• Screaming Frog, pricing: the free version's limit and the annual licence.
• SEO PowerSuite, pricing: the free version and the Professional edition.
• Yoast SEO and Rank Math, pricing: the paid options; the Romanian translations on translate.wordpress.org.
• rankingCoach Romania: prices in lei.
• Google Ads Help, Keyword Planner: access conditions.
• Bing Webmaster blog: importing from Search Console.
• StatCounter: Bing's share in Romania, September 2026.