If you’re a business owner, you’ve likely heard the term “SEO tools”. You’ll hear them in agency pitches, on marketing blogs and in those junk emails you get promising to quadruple your traffic overnight.
The problem is, they’ve likely never been explained in plain English, and whether or not they’ll be needed to grow your business.
If you run a small or medium-sized business, you don’t have the time to research and learn about all of the different SEO tools. You just need to know: What are SEO tools, what do they do, and which ones are worth paying attention to?
Here we strip away the jargon and explain the essential stuff you need to know in basic terms. By the end, you’ll have a clear picture of whether you can stick with free options, should invest in paid tools, or lean on someone who already has the right toolkit in place.
What do we mean by “SEO tools”?
When people talk about “SEO tools”, they’re simply referring to software that’s usually online and is designed to help improve how your website appears and performs in search engines like Google.
Some tools will help you find the phrases your customers are using to search for on Google. Others will scan your site for broken links and slow pages. Some keep track of where you rank for important keywords over time. Together, they give you a date that would be almost impossible to collect by hand.
These tools help stop you from having to guess what content to write or what to fix on your site. SEO tools give you evidence. They highlight problems, show opportunities, and help you see whether your SEO work is moving the needle.
The main types of SEO tools (and what they actually do)
SEO tools, unfortunately, aren’t a magic button that will get you better rankings; they’re more like a toolbox. Each one helps in different ways. Here’s a breakdown of the main types:
Keyword research tools
Keyword research tools help you find out what people are actually typing into Google. The words, phrases and questions that potential customers are using when they’re looking for something that you sell.
How they help
They’re useful because they stop you from writing based on assumptions. Instead of guessing what people want, you can build content around real demand.
- Blog topics: Find questions people ask and turn them into articles, ones that naturally attract traffic.
- Service pages: Check the wording that people use, for example, loft conversion quote vs loft conversion price. You can shape your pages around the language people use.
- FAQs: Pull out common questions, like how much, how long, is it worth it, and answer them clearly on your website.
Technical SEO and site audit tools
These tools crawl your site like a search engine would and flag any technical issues such as broken links, missing pages, slow load times, duplicate content, messy redirects, and pages Google can’t access or index properly.
Why this matters
If search engines can’t crawl your site cleanly, your content won’t perform as well, even if it’s great. And if your site is slow or full of dead ends, users won’t stick around long enough to inquire or buy.
A technical audit tool helps you spot problems that are easy to miss when you’re just clicking around your own website. It’s basically a ‘health check’ for SEO.
Rank tracking tools
Rank trackers monitor where your website appears in Google for your chosen keywords over time.
The fact is, your rankings will move around, sometimes because of Google updates, location, personalisation, or competitors tweaking their pages. The value of rank tracking is in the trend, not day-to-day updates.
Instead of panicking because you dropped two places on a random day, it’s looking for bigger signals like:
- Have we generally been climbing over the last 4-8 weeks?
- Did rankings improve after we updated a page?
- Are we losing visibility for a group of services (which might indicate a technical issue)?
Content optimisation tools
These tools help you improve existing pages, or plan new ones, by checking whether your content covers a topic thoroughly and uses relevant terms naturally. They often suggest related subtopics, questions to answer, and ways to structure a page to make it easier to read.
Content optimisation isn’t about cramming the same phrase 50 times; it’s about making your page useful for the user.
A good guide to use: if you write a page that genuinely answers the searcher’s question better than the other results, you’re on the right track. Optimisation tools can guide you, but the goal is still clarity, depth, and readability, not writing like a robot.
Backlink and competitor analysis tools
Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. These tools show you:
- Who links to you
- Who links to your competitors
- What kind of content earns links in your industry
This is useful because links can be a strong trust signal. If your competitors have lots of links from local directories, trade bodies, suppliers, or industry blogs, and you don’t, that’s a clear opportunity.
Analytics and reporting tools
Analytics tools track what happens once people land on your site, especially from organic search. Things like:
- How many visitors are you getting
- What pages they visit
- How long do they stay
- Whether they fill out a form, call, or buy
Joining the dots
While it’s great knowing how many people are visiting your site, it’s more important to know if SEO is generating enquiries, leads, and revenue.
Good reporting helps you connect your SEO work to outcomes. Examples of this might be:
- This service page brought in 300 organic visits and generated 12 enquiries
- This blog post attracts traffic, and 8% of readers click through to our quote page
- Organic leads are up 20% since we fixed site speed and refreshed our key pages
That’s when SEO work stops feeling like another to-do for your business and starts looking like a measurable channel you can improve.
How SEO tools help your business
The fact of the matter is, it’s unlikely that you’re reaping the benefits of SEO because you’re not trying hard enough, you’re likely struggling because you’re guessing. Guessing what customers search for, guessing which pages Google cares about, guessing what to fix first.
SEO tools replace all of the guesswork with evidence, allowing you to make decisions that are far more likely to pay off.
Here’s how SEO tools can help your business:
- Choosing what to write about: Instead of brainstorming random blog ideas, you see the exact questions that people are asking (and how often). This means you can write content targeted to a specific audience, not just hoping it lands in front of the right people.
- Knowing which pages to improve first: Tools can show you pages that already rank on page 2 or the bottom of page 1, you’re ‘nearly there’ pages. Tweaking those can sometimes give you quicker wins than starting from scratch.
- Investing your time where it’s going to count: If a tool shows that one of your pages gets the most organic searches, or it has the potential to grow, it makes sense to prioritise it over less important pages.
Do you need paid SEO tools?
Most business owners don’t need a £300-a-month budget of SEO tools to track progress. In a lot of cases, the free tools are enough to spot issues, find opportunities, and track whether things are improving.
Paid tools start to matter when you need speed, depth, or you’re operating in a market where everyone else is already investing.
What you can do with free tools
If you’re working with a small site and you mainly want more relevant traffic and a steady flow of enquiries, free tools can often give you what you need.
Google Search Console
Things is the closest thing you’ll get to Google telling you what’s going on. It shows:
- What searches you appear for (and which pages show up)
- Which pages are getting clicks, and which are being ignored
- Indexing issues (pages Google can’t or won’t show)
- Technical warnings (mobile usability, Core Web Vitals, etc.)
Google Analytics
Search Console tells you what happens in Google. Analytics tells you what happens on your site:
- Which pages bring in organic visitors
- Whether people stick around or bounce
- Which pages contribute to enquiries, calls, purchases or bookings
Basic keyword research
You won’t get everything, but you can still find solid content ideas by using:
- Google’s autocomplete suggestions
- “People also ask” questions
- Related searches at the bottom of the results
- The queries already showing in Search Console
Simple audits
Even without expensive crawlers, you can still uncover a lot:
- Broken pages (404s) and redirect chains
- Slow pages and heavy images
- Missing titles, headings, and thin content
- Obvious duplicate ages and messy structure
Where paid tools start to make sense
Paid tools don’t magically improve rankings, but they can make SEO faster, clearer, and easier to scale.
They’re usually worth considering when:
- You have a larger website (lots of services, locations, products, or blogs). Free tools can feel like trying to fix a car with a torch and a screwdriver. Paid crawlers and suites can help you spot patterns at scale.
- You’re in a competitive market. If you’re up against businesses actively investing in SEO (and content), you’ll benefit from deeper competitor insight, backlink data, and better keyword research.
- SEO is a key channel for leads and revenue. If organic search accounts for a meaningful share of your enquiries, better tracking and prioritisation can pay for itself quickly.
- You need reporting that saves time. If you’re regularly asked “is this working?”, paid tools can make it easier to show trends, wins and next steps without spending half your week pulling screenshots and spreadsheets together.
Buying tools vs hiring an SEO specialist
This is the bit most people don’t consider until they’ve already bought three subscriptions they don’t use.
Buying tools makes sense when:
- You’re going to use them weekly, or you have someone in-house who will
- You actually enjoy the process and have time to learn
- You want to build long-term capability inside the business
Hiring a consultant or agency makes sense when:
- You don’t have the time or headspace to learn multiple tools
- You want decisions, priorities, and implementation, not dashboards
- You’d rather pay for experience than pay to figure it out
A good specialist doesn’t just have the tools; they know what to ignore, what matters for your business, and what actions should be taken to make improvements for your website. In many cases, paying for expertise beats paying for software that you’ll only use twice a month.
How to choose the right SEO tools for you
There’s no one standout best SEO tool. There’s only the best tool for your goal, your budget, and your capacity.
If you choose tools based on flashy features, you’ll end up with a stack that looks impressive and changes absolutely nothing.
Start with your goals, not the features list
Before you look at pricing pages, be clear on what you’re actually trying to achieve. Most SEO tools can do a lot, but you don’t need a lot; you need the right few things.
Ask yourself:
- Do you want more traffic or more engagement enquiries?
- Are you focused on local visibility or wider, national reach?
- Do you need help with content planning, or do you already know what to write and need to fix performance?
- Are you trying to improve a handful of pages or manage a whole site?
A tool is only useful if it helps you make a decision, like:
- We should write about this next.
- We should fix this first.
- This page is nearly there; update it.
- This is generating leads, double down.
If a tool doesn’t help you decide what to do next, it’s basically entertainment.
SEO tools are the toolkit, not the strategy
As you can probably tell, SEO tools are not the magic lever that makes Google love your website. The software is designed to help you understand what’s happening, what’s working and what needs fixing.
To recap, most SEO tools fall into a few main buckets:
- Keyword research tools to find what people are actually searching for
- Technical audit tools to uncover issues that block performance (broken links, slow pages, indexing problems, etc.)
- Rank tracking tools to monitor visibility trends over time
- Content optimisation tools to make pages more useful, complete, and easier to understand
- Backlink and competitor tools to see where trust and authority are coming from in your market
- Analytics and reporting tools to measure what SEO traffic does once it lands on your site (and whether it turns into leads)
The real value of these tools is speed and clarity. They help you stop guessing and start making smarter decisions.
But here’s the key point: tools don’t replace strategy.
A tool can tell you that a page is slow, but it won’t rewrite the page, compress the images, or fix the template.
If you don’t have the time (or desire) to learn a stack of tools, that’s completely normal. In many cases, it’s more cost-effective to lean on someone who already knows what to look for, what to ignore, and what actually moves the needle.
If you’d like a hand, I can help review your current SEO setup. Get in touch with me today, and we can discuss your options and the best steps moving forward.
