The 4 SEO tools you need to know (and what each can’t tell you)

In February 2013, this page invited you to a free Nashville SEO meetup at Belmont University to learn four SEO tools: Raven Tools, SEOmoz, SEMrush and Screaming Frog. The guest presenter was a guy from Raven named Jeremy Rivera.

A year later Jeremy joined us, and he ran our digital marketing until 2022. Thirteen years on, the list needed redoing. SEOmoz is now Moz. Raven, the Nashville company, has since been acquired. Screaming Frog is still on the list, which tells you something.

Here are the four SEO tools you need to know now, what each one is good for, and the thing each one can’t tell you. That last part matters more than the logos.

The four SEO tools, in the order we open them

Two of these are free and come from the search engines and analytics side. Two are paid databases or crawlers. Between them they answer the questions every site owner actually asks: why don’t I show up, what’s broken, who’s beating me, and what do visitors do when they arrive?

1. Google Search Console: free, and the only data that comes from Google

Search Console shows the searches your pages appeared for, how often they were seen, where they ranked and how many people clicked. It also tells you which pages Google has indexed and why it skipped the rest. If you only set up one tool, set up this one.

What it can’t tell you is the full list of searches. Google hides queries that too few people search for. We checked our own property. Between June 2025 and October 2026, Search Console recorded 501 clicks to 2thetopdesign.com, but the queries report explained only 189 of them. That’s 38%. The other 62% are what Jeremy calls dark clicks. Across about four million clicks in all the Search Console accounts he can see, his figure is 64% anonymized.

The practical fix is to read clicks by page, not by query. Our page-level report accounted for nearly all of the clicks. Query data is a sample, so treat it as direction, not a census.

2. A crawler: Screaming Frog SEO Spider

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls your site the way a search engine does and hands you a spreadsheet: every URL, status code, title tag, meta description, H1, canonical, redirect and broken link. The free version still crawls up to 500 URLs, which covers most small business sites.

This is where you find the problems nobody sees from the homepage. Redirect chains left by an old redesign. Fifty pages with the same title. Images with no alt text. Orphan pages nothing links to.

What it can’t tell you is what Google thinks of any of it. A crawler reports what’s on the page. Search Console reports what Google did with it. You need both.

3. A keyword and link database: Semrush, Ahrefs or Moz

Paid databases like Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz estimate what you and your competitors rank for, how many searches a keyword gets, and who links to whom. They’re the only practical way to look over a competitor’s shoulder, and Moz’s free Beginner’s Guide to SEO is still worth reading if you’re new.

Just remember the word “estimate.” Jeremy once pulled search volume for a phrase his own site ranks for. The keyword tool, using Google Ads data, said ten searches a month. Search Console showed over 1,100 impressions for the same phrase. Both numbers came from Google.

So don’t sort your keyword list by volume and chase the top line. Sort it by where the money is. A phrase with 30 searches a month from people ready to hire you beats 3,000 from students writing a paper.

4. Behavior analytics: GA4 and Microsoft Clarity

Rankings and clicks stop at your front door. Google Analytics 4 tells you what happens after: which pages people land on, where they came from, and whether they filled out a form or called. Microsoft Clarity is free and adds heatmaps and session recordings, so you can watch someone rage-click a button that doesn’t work.

GA4 is also where our own story got uncomfortable. It showed our organic sessions falling from 8,344 in 2023 to 216 in 2026, and showed one 2011 Facebook how-to post carrying most of the earlier total. We wrote about what that taught us about future-proof SEO. For the setup, see how to use Google Analytics like a pro.

What it can’t tell you is whether a lead was any good. Our forms collected 1,094 entries from 2022 to 2026, and 109 were real sales leads. No analytics tool knows the difference. You do.

Buy fewer tools, and use the ones you have

Most small businesses don’t have a tool shortage. They have a pile of subscriptions nobody opens. Jeremy wrote a small script to list every software subscription on his own statements and was a little embarrassed by the result.

James Ernst of Core Order put the right question on Unscripted Small Business. The first thing to ask, he said, is “not which tool should we buy, but what are we trying to make structurally better?” Otherwise, as he put it, you end up paying for a tool that sits unused for six months until somebody forgets the subscription exists.

Two habits get more out of the four above:

• Check for an API before you do it by hand. Search Console, GA4 and most paid tools have one. An afternoon spent connecting them can replace hours of exporting spreadsheets every month.
• Know the analysis before you hand it to AI. AI assistants can now pull and compare data from all four tools, and that’s a big time saver. Chris Green of Torque Partnership gave the warning that goes with it on Unscripted SEO: “If you kind of know how you would do it without Claude, you can get Claude to do it much more effectively for you because you know what to ask and what to look out for.” Without that, he warned, it’s easy for the model to start inventing trends that aren’t in the data.

How the four fit into an SEO audit

When we run an SEO audit, the tools come out in a fixed order, because each one answers the question the last one raised:

1. Search Console first. Which pages and searches bring in clicks, and which pages Google won’t index.
2. The crawler next. What’s technically wrong on the pages that matter.
3. The keyword and link database third. Who outranks you, and what they have that you don’t.
4. GA4 and Clarity last. Whether the visitors you do get turn into leads.

Most of what we find lands in two buckets. On-page fixes, which we walk through in building a perfectly optimized page, and design problems, covered in web design mistakes that hurt SEO.

Just like you wouldn’t build a house with only a hammer, no single tool runs an SEO campaign. But you don’t need twenty. Set up Search Console today if you haven’t, and look at the Pages report. How many of your pages has Google decided not to index? If the answer surprises you, let’s talk.