Your SEO Toolkit
You can do serious SEO with free tools. This guide sets up the core kit you'll use throughout the curriculum, in priority order.
Google Search Console (non-negotiable)#
Search Console (GSC) is Google telling you directly how it sees your site: queries, clicks, impressions, indexing status, crawl errors, Core Web Vitals. It is the ground truth every other tool approximates.
Setup:
- Go to search.google.com/search-console and add a Domain property (covers all subdomains and protocols).
- Verify via DNS TXT record.
- Submit your sitemap under Indexing → Sitemaps.
The reports you'll live in:
| Report | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Performance | Which queries and pages earn impressions and clicks |
| Indexing → Pages | What's indexed, and why excluded pages are excluded |
| URL Inspection | The full crawl/index story for any single URL |
| Core Web Vitals | Real-user performance, the data used for ranking |
A crawler#
A desktop crawler simulates what search engine bots see and finds broken links, redirect chains, missing titles, duplicate content, orphan pages.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider - the industry standard; free up to 500 URLs.
- Sitebulb - friendlier reporting and prioritized hints.
You'll use a crawler heavily in Technical SEO Audits.
Keyword & competitive research#
- Google Keyword Planner - free volume data (ranges) straight from Google Ads.
- Ahrefs / Semrush - paid suites for keyword difficulty, competitor analysis and backlink data. The free tiers (Ahrefs Webmaster Tools) cover your own site.
- Google Trends - relative interest over time; great for seasonality and comparing terms.
- The SERP itself - autocomplete, People Also Ask and related searches are free intent data, straight from the source.
Performance & validation#
# Lighthouse audit (performance, SEO, accessibility)
npx lighthouse https://example.com --view
# What does Googlebot actually receive? (initial HTML, pre-JS)
curl -A "Googlebot" https://example.com | head -100Plus the browser-based testers:
- PageSpeed Insights - Lighthouse + real-user Core Web Vitals data.
- Rich Results Test - validates structured data for Google's rich results.
- Schema.org validator - general-purpose JSON-LD validation.
Analytics#
GSC shows the search side; an analytics tool shows what happens after the click:
- Google Analytics 4 - free and ubiquitous.
- Plausible / Fathom / Umami - lightweight, privacy-first alternatives that don't need cookie banners.
Either way, the metrics that matter for SEO are covered in Analytics & Forecasting.
The minimal stack, summarized#
Foundations complete. Next module: Keyword Research, starting with the concept that makes or breaks everything else - search intent.