I have to say that I’m very appreciative of all the SEO tools I’ve used in my time in digital marketing, and there have been some very useful ones.
When I first joined my last digital marketing agency 8 years ago, I used my predecessor’s recommendation of SEOMoz as it was called back then. But then the guy before me, whilst being the company’s Digital Marketing Manager, was almost purely a PPC specialist. So SEOMoz was quite limited for my needs as an SEO and content manager.
Then I needed a Digital Marketing Executive to assist in my workload as the business grew. He suggested we try SEMrush. 7 years later and running 50 projects, I found the website audit, position tracking, and keyword gap analysis tools were right up my street.
“But why didn’t you use all the other tools in SEMrush, there are so many?” some may ask. Well, as with all tools, people tend to use what they need and, if other features aren’t necessary or there are better alternatives, then it’s good to focus. After all, how much do you understand Microsoft Word? Probably as much as you need to do your job well, and to be honest, that’s quite alright. Why know 99% of a tool when you only need 10% of the features?
The Cost and Benefit of Additional SEO Tools
Working at any digital marketing business, SEO tools are a necessary part of doing your job, so they are business essentials and should a worthy investment. That’s not to say that you should buy all of them because one SEO tool has all the features you need, apart from one cool tool, so you purchase another digital platform. Or so-and-so prefers Ahrefs because he’s used it for years and isn’t comfortable with Screaming Frog SEO Spider, so you get additional tools that are strictly necessary. It’s nice to have all the tools but not always appropriate.
Also, having worked at digital marketing firms with a small budget or even a tight boss, even these paid tools are questioned, and so they should be. Do you really need SEMrush, Ahrefs or Screaming Frog when you could do all those extra jobs using off-the-shelf tools for free?
Now don’t get me wrong here, I love SEMrush, Screaming Frog is extremely useful to supplement it, and Ahrefs I’ve not had sufficient use of to comment. They’ve all been great tools but for a newbie or non-marketer, should we be pushing tools ahead of knowledge? Part of me says yes, absolutely, and for anyone with funds in their budget, I’ll help assess their needs and which tools to purchase.
You Can’t Have a Conversation if You Don’t Know the Language
Remembering the time when I was a web designer, over 20 years ago, I recall being frustrated when friends casually told me that they were going to be web designers too and were going on courses to learn Macromedia’s Dreamweaver. I balked at these comments at the time. It seemed like web design was a glamorous profession in the early 2000s and so many people “wanted in”. To me that wasn’t a good enough reason to do it.
Also, I’d cut my teeth on tediously building websites one line of code at a time after buying, reading, and absolutely immersing myself in the book SAMS Teach Yourself HTML 4 in 24 Hours with a copy of Microsoft Notepad. This was about 3 years before getting my hands on Dreamweaver 4 and UltraDev at the dotcom start-up I worked for.
My point here is that I learned HTML 4 then I learned Dreamweaver. There’s no point in learning the tool when you don’t know the fundamentals of exactly what’s underneath the bonnet. And it’s the same with SEO tools. They’re all wonderful but there’s a massive professional and technical advantage to knowing the basics. Yes, I am biased.
The Basic Tools Then
Again, I recommend SEMrush, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Ahrefs, and some might say Moz, as it is now called, too. There are plenty of other tools that I won’t go into now, but they are all useful additions to any SEO toolbox.
However, we’re here to discuss SEO on a shoestring, so let’s look at the basic tools you can “get away with” to successfully “do SEO”.
Google Tag Manager
“Oh! That’s a funny one to start on, I thought you’d say Google Analytics!”
Bear with me. You’ve got your brand new website, it looks great, but nobody’s put any measurement tools on it. Yes, you need Google Analytics, but first, I recommend Google Tag Manager (GTM).
By setting up a Google Tag Manager, you simply add the GTM code to your website and, once the tags are firing correctly, you add future tags to GTM and not the website. Years ago, before GTM, this was a real issue because, when multiple vendors wanted their tags added to your website, you had to add them to the source code then upload that to your webserver, every single time. If it was an intelligent build, using server side includes or something like that, the job was relatively easy. Flatter website needed every page uploaded. I remember doing this and it was tedious. Also, it was fraught with danger.
Now, with Google Tag Manager, because there is only ONE tag being deployed on your website, it then in turn deploys all the other tags you’ve added via your GTM dashboard. So, you can add Google Analytics, Hotjar, and LinkedIn pixels easily and you have granular control from one control panel. It is SO much easier and configurable than it used to be so please add GTM to your website.
Google Analytics
Now we get to Google Analytics. By creating a GA4 account and configuring it correctly, you have a dashboard where you can see all the measurements of traffic to your website. Google Analytics is the industry standard analytics service and, yes, other tools are available.
But Google Analytics is quite incredible in having a wealth of options to help you understand your website visitors. You can measure which pages have been viewed, session duration, and user demographics.
Delving deeper into GA4 you can see where traffic has come from, such as which search engines, ads or email campaigns have driven visitors. You can see which devices, browsers, screen sizes, operating systems, and the geolocation of your visitors.
GA4 is, as I like to call it, like an IKEA product. You have all the potential reports at your disposal but you really have to build them yourself to get what you want. There are basic reports, but the real power of GA4 is customising the reports to see which campaigns or AI is earning you visits.
Google Search Console
Whilst I love GTM and GA4 has grown on me (I used GA when it was Urchin Stats, long time ago!) Google Search Console (GSC) is one of my favourite tools.
The reason why I love GSC so much is because, being a step before Google Analytics in the search process, it shows you user behaviour in Google Search before anyone has even visited your website.
The default performance report, as soon as you open your GSC dashboard, is perfectly placed as a key indicator of how your website performs in Google Search. The key metrics it reports are:
- Clicks: Yes, these people clicked on your link and visited your website.
- Impressions: This logically belongs before the click, but shows how may times your website appeared in the Search engine Results Pages (SERPs)
- Click through Rate (CTR): Is the percentage of users who clicked on your link after seeing it in the SERPs (Impressions divided by clicks).
- Average Position: The average ranking of your website in the results.
With these data, you can view as far back as 16 months, run different date ranges, filter by queries, pages, countries and devices.
There are plenty of other tools within GSC too, such as:
- URL inspection
- XML sitemaps
- Core web vitals
- HTTPS
- Breadcrumbs
It really is a Swiss Army Knife, and absolutely vital in your SEO toolbox.
Bing Webmaster Tools
I’m giving Bing Webmaster Tools a shout here because it’s the same as Google Search Console except for all the information you need about how your website performed in Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.
In fact, GSC was originally called Google Webmaster Tools, so they were both almost identical in name. But Google decided that the term “webmaster” could be seen as too technical and so it got renamed.
But Bing Webmaster Tools is great. Once you’ve set up GSC you can go to BWT and import your websites from GSC.
There are other benefits in Bing Webmaster Tools too, such as:
- IndexNow: The open source protocol that allows webmasters to notify the search engines if updated to URLs.
- Backlinks: Useful for not just your website’s backlinks profile, but for looking at competitors’ profiles too.
- SEO Reports and Site Scans: Yes, BWT gives you actionable SEO recommendations and scans for broken links!
- Microsoft Clarity integration: Like Hotjar, MS Clarity is a heatmapping tool and it integrates into BWT seamlessly.
Bing Webmaster Tools offers some excellent complementary tools to GSC, so always set it up as soon as you get your site on GSC.
Google Sheets
So this is not so much of a strict SEO tool in itself, but Google Sheets is absolutely invaluable for SEO on a shoestring.
With your tools all under your Google account, being in Search Console for instance, you can export reports to Google Sheets. Once here, you get raw data, but I love to make the tables presentable, usually because I’m likely to add them to a board report or something.
Also, it’s best practice to make Sheets data visually appealing, because it’s user-friendly and easy once you have the habit in place.
Once you’ve got your Sheets looking pretty, and named correctly, you can “slice and dice” the data, cloning sheets and filtering out target key phrases. Google Sheets really is an excellent playground for key word analysis.
Conclusion
Doing SEO on a shoestring is where every digital marketing professional should really start. By understanding all the underlying tools, you then get to appreciate how much is going on behind the scenes, and you really benefit from all the SEMrush and Ahrefs tools.
If you’d like help setting up the SEO tools on a shoestring, let me know and I’ll be happy to help out and show you the basics. Call me on 07730 499 539