1. The Day I Realised Google Was Ignoring Me
It was raining.
My traffic wasn’t.
Zero clicks, 47 impressions, one sad little flat line in Search Console that looked like the heart-rate monitor of a stuffed animal.
I remember whispering to my laptop: “I hit publish, didn’t I?”
The laptop did not answer.
That silence pushed me into the weird, nerdy arms of SEO analysis tools—software that promises to tell you why Google treats your masterpiece like wallpaper.
Spoiler: the software was right, my ego was wrong, and the ride since then has been half science, half soap-opera.
2. So, Uh, What Is an SEO Analysis Tool?
Short version: a robot that reads your page faster—and harsher—than any human ever will.
Long version: a bundle of crawlers, metrics, and colour-coded panic buttons that audit technical health, keyword relevance, backlinks, page speed, mobile-friendliness, schema, internal links, image alt text, Core Web Vitals, and, occasionally, your will to live.
Some live in the cloud (Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, Sitebulb, Screaming Frog’s SaaS cousin).
Some live on your desktop like digital trolls (looking at you, Screaming Frog local).
Others are WordPress plugins that shout at you while you write (Rank Math, Yoast, SEOPress).
Pick your poison, pay your money, or don’t—there are freebies, and we’ll get to them.
But first, let me explain why I now open one before I open Google Docs, not after.
3. Cause → Example → Face-Palm
Cause: I wrote a 3 000-word guide on “best coffee grinders.”
Example: I lovingly described 14 grinders, added affiliate links, shot custom photos, even made a comparison table that took me two episodes of The Office to finish.
Conclusion: six months later the post sat on page 4.
Page 4 is the wilderness.
Page 4 is where hope goes to practise origami with itself.
I finally ran the URL through Ahrefs Site Audit: missing H1, 17 broken internal links, 4-second Largest Contentful Paint because of an uncompressed hero image the size of Belgium.
Oh, and the keyword was “coffee grinder” but my title said “Bean Masher Extraordinaire.”
Google is smart; it is not a mind-reader.
4. Free Toys That Actually Work (No Affiliate Link, Pinky-Swear)
- Google Search Console – shows queries, click-through rate, coverage errors, Core Web Vitals.
- Google Lighthouse – in Chrome DevTools, audits performance, accessibility, best practises, SEO.
- PageSpeed Insights – Lighthouse’s outgoing cousin who lives in the cloud.
- GTmetrix – grades you, then draws a colourful waterfall you can stare at while you cry.
- Bing Webmaster Tools – yes, Bing still exists, and its tool set is weirdly generous.
- Keywords Everywhere (freemium) – cheap pay-as-you-go credits, instant volume data right in SERPs.
- SEO Minion browser extension – hreflang check, broken-link scanner, SERP preview.
- Screaming Frog – free for 500 URLs, desktop crawler that spits out more CSV columns than Excel can handle.
Combine those eight and you can perform surgery on most small sites without spending a cent.
Will it be slower than a paid stack? Yep.
Will it teach you the fundamentals so you don’t drown in shiny-object syndrome? Also yep.
5. Paid Giants – My Credit Card’s Perspective
Ahrefs: starts at $99, feels like leasing a Lamborghini to deliver pizza.
SEMrush: $119, dashboard looks like mission control at NASA, has a writing assistant that nags you about tone.
Moz Pro: $99, gentle learning curve, great for beginners.
Sitebulb: $13.50 a month, prettier reports than Screaming Frog, loves visualisations.
Screaming Frog unlimited: £149 a year, crawls millions of URLs, turns your fan into a jet engine.
Enterprise tools: Conductor, BrightEdge, Searchmetrics—pricing hidden behind “let’s hop on a call.”
Micro-opinion: buy the cheapest plan that covers your crawl limit, upgrade the minute a client can expense it.
6. Metrics That Sound Scary But Aren’t
LCP: how long until the biggest thing appears.
FID: how soon the page reacts when you click “buy now.”
CLS: how much the layout jumps while loading.
Crawl Depth: how many clicks away from homepage.
Text-to-HTML ratio: meh, don’t overthink it.
Keyword Density: write like a human.
DA/DR: useful for comparisons, useless for bragging.
7. Real-Life Walk-Through – Auditing My “About” Page in 7 Minutes
Copy URL.
Paste into PageSpeed Insights.
See 42 mobile score, roll eyes.
Expand “Reduce unused JavaScript” – culprit: a chat widget one guy asked for once.
Deactivate plugin, retest: 78.
Run through Screaming Frog: missing meta description, two duplicate H2s.
Fix, resubmit to Search Console.
Go make tea.
Next morning: impressions up 18 %.
Causation? Correlation? No idea. But the tea was nice.
8. Keyword Research Module – Where the Wild Clicks Are
Most tools share the same seed data from Google Keyword Planner, then remix it.
Ahrefs shows parent topics.
SEMrush lists variations at warp speed.
Moz colour-codes difficulty.
Beginners chase 10 000-volume trophies; pros chase 50-volume long-tails that convert.
I once ranked #2 for “left-handed coffee grinder for arthritis.” 70 searches a month. 9% conversions.
9. Content Gap Analysis – Legalised Snooping
Enter competitor domain → tick your domain → click “Content Gap.”
Instant list of keywords they rank for and you don’t.
Steal, update, repeat.
I added a cheap manual grinder I originally ignored—moved from #9 to #3.
10. Backlink Audit – The Good, the Bad, the Spammy
Tools show who links to you, anchor text, do-follow vs no-follow, DR, first seen, lost date.
Sudden drop? Link gone.
Sudden spike? Could be negative SEO.
Disavow works. Use carefully.
I disavowed 600 Russian casino links in 2019—traffic recovered in two weeks.
11. Site Architecture – Crawl Budget for Dummies
Google gives you a crawl budget: use it well.
Deep, bloated sites waste it.
Every page should be reachable in three clicks.
Use breadcrumbs—they’re digital breadcrumbs without the witch.
12. Schema Mark-Up – Speaking Robot to Google
FAQ, Product, Review, HowTo—structured data prevents algorithm confusion.
I added FAQ schema to 10 posts; CTR up 2.3 points.
13. Mobile-First Index – The Sky Already Fell
If your desktop site is perfect but your mobile requires thumb yoga… you lose.
Shrunk font from 18 px to 16 px—suddenly buttons fit.
14. Core Update Panic Button
Updates hit, traffic tanks, chaos ensues.
Run audits, compare competitors, wait.
Sometimes Google simply “re-evaluates quality.”
Translation: improve content, reduce fluff, breathe.
15. Reporting to Clients (or Your Future Self)
No one reads 60-page reports.
Send one summary page: health, issues, traffic change, next steps.
Use traffic-light icons. They love traffic lights.
16. My Favourite Stupid Mistakes – Top 10
- No-indexing the whole site by accident.
- Blocking CSS in robots.txt.
- Writing meta descriptions 320 characters long.
- Embedding YouTube video above the fold.
- Using “click here” 400 times.
- Letting WordPress create /page/2/ duplicates.
- Redirect loops http→https→http.
- Installing 17 SEO plugins.
- Optimising for a keyword with zero volume.
- Forgetting to renew the domain (my cousin did).
17. Integrations – Making Tools Talk to Each Other
Slack alerts for DR drops.
Zapier sending PageSpeed to Sheets.
Looker Studio blending GSC + GA into dashboards.
18. When NOT to Trust the Tool
It demands 2.5 % keyword density.
It calls your 2 000-word article “thin.”
It flags legit links as toxic.
It shows FCP as 1.8s when your real phone feels like 4s.
Tools are approximations—use them like GPS, not commandments.
19. The Future – AI, SGE, and Other Acronyms That Scare Me
SGE puts AI answers above your links.
CTR drops for info content.
Tools add “AI overview” modules.
Next: LLM optimisation, entity salience, conversational intent.
My hedge: build brand, build email list, write memorable stuff.
20. Signing Off – One Last Micro-Opinion
I used to think SEO tools were spinach—good for you but boring.
Now I see them as seasoning.
Use too little, bland.
Use too much, overpowering.
Sprinkle, taste, adjust.
Then close the tool and write something a human actually wants.
If your traffic still looks like a stuffed animal’s heartbeat, at least now you know why—and that’s oddly comforting.