Every founder knows the drill: Your competitor has a strong SEO profile, and you need to figure out how they’re winning.
You ask around, and the answer is always Ahrefs or Semrush. They are the industry standard, the gold currency of keyword research. Then you look at the price tag - $100 to $400 per month - and suddenly, that gold currency feels more like a heavy burden.
For a founder who is aggressively bootstrapping or running on a tight budget, committing that much cash monthly is simply not feasible. You need tools that deliver 80% of the value for 0% of the cost.
The good news is that you don't need a single, all in one platform. You can stitch together several free, specialized tools to cover keyword research, backlink monitoring, and site auditing perfectly well.
Here are the five essential free and low cost SEO tools that will give you all the data you need to execute your Growth Hacking strategy without draining your runway.
1. Google Search Console (GSC)
Every other SEO tool in the world is giving you an estimate. GSC, however, is giving you the actual data straight from Google’s servers.
If you aren't using this tool, you are flying blind. GSC is the only place where you can find out what keywords your site is currently ranking for, how often it appears in search results, and whether Google is having trouble crawling your pages.
- Ahrefs Feature Replaced: Keyword Rankings, Site Health Check.
- Why It Works: It gives you 100% accurate, non estimated data on clicks, impressions, and click through rates (CTR). This is invaluable for finding "low hanging fruit"—keywords you rank #10 for but could easily push to #1 with a quick content refresh.
- Bootstrapper Tip: Use the "Performance" report to filter queries by position 10–20. These are the keywords you are almost ranking for. Optimizing those pages is the fastest path to traffic.
2. Ubersuggest (Neil Patel's Tool)
Ubersuggest is the budget friendly choice.
While its free tier has limits (you get only a few searches a day), it offers the best value when you are ready to pay a small amount. Its paid plans are priced for individual entrepreneurs, not huge agencies.
The tool excels at two things: competitive analysis and finding content ideas. It shows you your competitor’s best performing pages and gives you suggestions for keywords that are easy to rank for.
- Ahrefs Feature Replaced: Keyword Research, Content Ideas.
- Why It Works: It provides a clear SEO Difficulty score, making it easy to spot keywords that you actually have a chance of ranking for on day one. It helps you focus your limited content creation time on realistic targets instead of wasting effort chasing Wikipedia.
- Bootstrapper Tip: Use the "Content Ideas" report to find topics that are popular but haven't been covered well by huge sites. These are excellent opportunities for quick traffic.
3. AnswerThePublic (Now Covered by Ubersuggest)
AnswerThePublic used to be a standalone, slightly odd looking visualization tool. It now sits under the umbrella of Ubersuggest, but the concept is still pure gold for content creation.
It answers the question "What are people actually asking about this topic?" You plug in a keyword, and it gives you hundreds of long tail questions grouped by prepositions (like "can," "why," and "for").
- Ahrefs Feature Replaced: Long Tail Keyword Discovery, Topic Clusters.
- Why It Works: When you build content around explicit questions, you are perfectly positioned to rank for Featured Snippets (Position 0). Getting featured snippets is one of the fastest ways to steal massive traffic from competitors without having a huge Domain Rating.
- Bootstrapper Tip: Use the suggestions to build out FAQ sections on your service pages or blog posts. This instantly improves the quality and comprehensiveness of your existing content.
4. MozBar (Browser Extension)
This is the sneaky, must have tool. The MozBar is a free browser extension that gives you an instant snapshot of a website's SEO authority directly in your browser or search results page.
Every time you search for a keyword, the bar shows you the Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) of the sites ranking on the first page.
- Ahrefs Feature Replaced: Site Audit and Competitive Analysis (at a glance).
- Why It Works: It's your quick reality check. If the first page of results is dominated by sites with a DA over 80 (like Forbes or Wikipedia), don't bother writing for that keyword yet. If you see a site with a DA under 30 ranking well, you have a solid chance of competing.
- Bootstrapper Tip: Use the PA score on your own pages to monitor how link building and content updates are actually affecting your page authority. It's a simple, tangible KPI.
5. Google Analytics (GA4)
It sounds obvious, but many founders only use Google Analytics to track immediate sales or signups.
When used for SEO, GA4 tells you which posts are actually contributing to your business goals and whether your customer acquisition cost (CAC) via organic search is sustainable.
- Ahrefs Feature Replaced: Traffic Analysis, Goal Tracking.
- Why It Works: You need to confirm the quality of the traffic Ubersuggest sends you. GA4 allows you to track user behavior like bounce rate and time on page per blog post, helping you quickly identify which topics are engaging your audience and which ones are just generating empty clicks.
- Bootstrapper Tip: Set up specific goal funnels to track how many organic visitors eventually subscribe to your newsletter or start a trial. This helps you ruthlessly prioritize content that drives genuine ROI.
You do not need to spend thousands of pounds on Ahrefs to win at SEO. By combining the hyper accurate data from Google Search Console with the user research goldmine of AnswerThePublic and the competitive intelligence from Ubersuggest and MozBar, you have a full, functional SEO stack.
The key is to be disciplined, focus on low competition keywords identified by your free tools, and link your high authority evergreen content back to your glossary pages to build long term domain trust.
