Top 5 Tools for SEO: Analytics, Reporting & More

Google Search Console (GSC), Google Analytics (GA4), Ahrefs, and More! Discover the best free and paid tools for SEO. Is your website ranking for top Keywords? Follow along as I break down the best tools for SEO used by actual professionals in the industry. 

You're either a business owner managing your site or a professional looking for the best resources! Take it from me, SEO tools (as seen on IG ads) are a dime a dozen. Here are the actual tools you'll need to rank your site and monitor performance. Let's start with the basics! 

1. Google Search Console (GSC)

Impressions, clicks, average click-through rate (CTR), average ranking position, and more! The foundations of Organic SEO all rolled into one platform - and it’s free! If you want to know how your site performs in impressions or clicks, GSC helps you determine what pages are performing and provides insight into what queries or keywords bring in site traffic. We’re just scratching the surface here, too - find, page indexing reports, security issues, core web vitals, and so much more.

Bonus: Submit your XML sitemap in GSC to help Google crawl your website.

2. Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

GA4 gives you the “under-the-hood” view of the actions being taken on your site—track performance for key events like new users, sessions, and conversions on button clicks and form submissions. Set up your Google Tag Manager to see specific events across your website! You can even create custom reports and get a peek at where your traffic is coming from in real time! 

Bonus: See audience and tech reports to find user demographics like location, language, and device type.

3. Ahrefs

My favorite SEO tool! Ahrefs provides an accurate estimation of site traffic, impressions, keyword ranking, backlinks, and more. Let’s dive in! 

Backlink Analysis: Understand the value of your backlink quality and identify link-building opportunities across your website. Find broken backlinks and run competitor analysis to build up your backlink profile. 

Keyword Research: Find keywords for your website using Keyword Explorer! Track keyword volume, keyword difficulty (KD), and target the right keywords using their user intention to help determine their conversion value.

SEO Monitoring: Ahrefs also provides insight into where your site may need improvements. Submit a project in Ahrefs to find any issues and track your overall site health.

Competitor Analysis: Dig into your competitor's site performance to see what’s working for them - and what’s not! Analyze their backlinks, keywords, and more. Then use this information to inform your strategy decisions and boost your SEO performance.

4. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog is a desktop app that crawls your entire website, just like a search engine would. Run a site crawl to find 404 errors, duplicate content, or just about anything else! This platform has free and paid options, so choose wisely. 

In the paid version, you can get very specific and technical. Pull any data from a webpage, structured or not. Use Configuration > Custom > Search to locate any phrase you’d like to audit or remove. 

5. Google PageSpeed Insights

Back to the free stuff! PageSpeed Insights is a free tool used to analyze how fast your site loads across mobile and desktop. It even provides recommendations, like lazy-loading images or minifying CSS files to improve your page load performance! Site speed is an important element in user experience (UX) and, therefore, a big part of SEO.

🚀 Wrap-Up

There are a ton of SEO tools out there, but these five? They’re the core crew. Together, they cover all the big stuff—visibility, traffic, site health, speed, and strategy. Get familiar with them, and you’ll be ahead of most of the competition.

Need help getting started with one of these? Just give me a shout!