In this post I will detail the SEO tools that I use and list some others that may be interesting for an SEO project.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool from Google russia number you can register the websites you manage to track SERP data.
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page, which is the search results page, a common term in SEO to refer to the pages displayed for each query on Google, for example.
If you're not already using GSC on your site, do so now:
GSC will show you which terms people typed, how many impressions, clicks, CTR and average position for each term and each of your pages that appeared in the SERP. In addition, you can submit your sitemaps, be notified of crawl errors, malware and check pages that have not yet been indexed on your site and request indexing.
In my opinion, it is the main SEO tool. This is because it is Google data (it couldn't be more reliable than that). With GSC, you can report, in your project, data such as improvement in average position (for example: in January the average position of the site was 9.8 and now it is 2.3), increase in clicks or impressions for a site, all of this very quickly.
I also use GSC in diagnostics to check which KWs generated impressions, which have low CTR or poor positioning.
TIP : One way to get “quick” results for a site that has been running for some time is to go to GSC and list the queries that have the most impressions and check those that have an average position below 10 or 20 or that have a CTR below 5%.
Normally, with just a few actions (editing titles and descriptions, placing the KW in focus, CTA, etc.) on these pages, you can already improve the results in the SERP.
Google Analytics
In any project you need to report data and results, so Google Analytics (GA) is essential.
I use it not only to report monthly to clients on organic traffic on the website and its main entry and exit pages, but also to evaluate which months have the most traffic, the quality of this traffic and its LPs at the time of diagnosis.
Adwords Keyword Planner
Another Google tool. The Keyword Planner or Keyword Planner (keywords or KWs) is within Google Adwords (now Google Ads ).
In KW Planner you can enter your website and find keyword ideas or even upload a list of KWs to check the monthly search volume, CPC (cost per click) on Adwords and the level of competition on the platform.
Even though it doesn’t represent the level of competition in the SERP organically, it’s a good indication of the difficulty you’ll face.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a tool that scans all website URLs for on-page issues like duplicate meta titles and descriptions, missing h1 tags, etc.
The cool thing about it is that it's free for up to 500 URLs and generates an XLS for you to work with your data. I usually use it to extract the list of URLs from the site and then see which term typed by the user generated impressions of this URL in the SERP, for this I use GSC. With this, I see the search volume, CPC and difficulty of these KWs in KW Planner.
This way, I have a good view of how that page is performing for its queries and I can also estimate the effort and priority of working on that page.