The best SEO tools
What's free and enough, what's worth paying for, and what not to buy.
A rule worth starting from
Free tools from the search engines themselves show the truth about your own site. Paid tools show estimates about other people's. That distinction organises the whole market: if you want to know how your own site is doing, you don't need to pay. You pay when you want to know something about a competitor, or about keywords you don't rank for yet.
Second rule: no tool replaces actually reading your own site. The most common problems — an empty title tag, the same content under three addresses, a missing description — are visible to the naked eye faster than any scanner starts up.
Free and essential
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Google Search Console
The only source of truth for how Google sees your site: what it indexed, what it rejected and why, which queries you show up for, how many clicks come from it. Without it, everything else is guesswork.
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Bing Webmaster Tools
Free, few people use it, and Bing also feeds results into some AI tools. Takes fifteen minutes and shows some things Search Console doesn't.
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PageSpeed Insights
Core Web Vitals with field data. Performance is a ranking factor, but what matters more is that a slow page loses people before Google even scores it.
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Analytics
Any of them, as long as goals are set up correctly. A traffic report with no conversions tells you about visitors, not money — and decisions get made about money.
Paid, when the work is ongoing
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Screaming Frog
A whole-site scanner run from your computer. Free up to 500 URLs, paid annually beyond that. The best tool for a technical audit: duplicate titles, redirect chains, orphaned pages in the link structure.
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Ahrefs or Semrush
For competitor analysis, keyword research and backlink tracking. Expensive, and worth it when you work on SEO every month — not for a one-off fix.
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Local-market tools
Worth checking before buying a global tool, since data on your specific market's search queries is sometimes more complete in a local tool.
What not to buy
- Tools that promise rankings. Nobody but Google decides the results, so nobody can guarantee them.
- Link packages. They work briefly and end in a filter that removes the site from results for months.
- Bulk content generators. Search engines handle detecting mass-produced content better than the vendors of such tools admit.
- "Visibility" as your main metric. Every tool calculates it differently and none is a source of truth — unlike clicks in Search Console.
- "One-click SEO" overlays. If optimisation could be done with one click, it means it wasn't done.
Not sure which tool to start with?
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