Is SEO free?

The answer

You do not pay a search engine to list your pages in organic results; Google states that it does not accept payment to crawl a site more frequently or rank it higher. However, SEO takes time and effort, and some people choose to pay for tools, writers, developers or consultants. Search Console is free and does the basic monitoring. Paid search advertising is a separate activity from SEO, and ad spending does not buy a better organic ranking.