What are the best SEO tools for beginners to use?

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Disclosure: “These reviews are my own opinion based on over 20 years in marketing. They are not advertisements. Every tool I review I reviewed because I used the tool first without compensation or encouragement. Affiliate links (marked as Aff) are included on this page.” Shaun Anderson, Hobo

If you are a developer new to SEO (search engine optimisation) and looking for the best SEO tools you can use to optimise your website, this article is for you. This article lists several SEO tools you, as a beginner, can instantly derive value from.

A veteran’s guide to tools that drive results

After 25 years in this industry, I’ve seen hundreds of SEO tools come and go. I’ve seen shiny dashboards that promise the world but deliver vanity metrics.

I’ve seen complex platforms that require a dedicated analyst just to operate. And I’ve seen countless blog posts listing the “Best SEO Tools You MUST Use.”

Let me be direct: most of those lists are failing you.

They treat tools like a shopping list, encouraging you to collect a bloated, expensive, and disconnected subscription portfolio. They focus on features, not philosophy.

They tell you what a tool does, but they don’t teach you how to think.

A professional toolkit is not a random collection of software. It is a curated, integrated system that reflects a coherent strategy. It’s an extension of your own analytical mind, designed to answer critical business questions, not just track fluctuating keyword positions.

Over the last two decades, I’ve built a specific philosophy for how I approach SEO analysis, and by extension, the tools I rely on.

It’s a philosophy rooted in a strict adherence to Google’s guidelines, focused on “white hat” strategies that build long-term, defensible value. It’s about moving beyond chasing clicks and toward building a brand so authoritative that its reputation precedes the click itself.

This guide is the manifestation of that philosophy. I’m not going to give you a laundry list of 20 tools. I’m going to give you a handful of powerful, essential workhorses.

More importantly, I’m going to give you a framework for thinking about how they fit together to form a system that delivers clean, actionable data and drives meaningful results. This is my approach, honed in the trenches, working on thousands of websites.

The DOJ Case and the End of Complacency

Before we dive into my framework, it’s crucial to understand the new landscape we’re operating in. The landmark U.S. Department of Justice antitrust case against Google has fundamentally changed the conversation around search. The court’s ruling was clear: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly”.

For years, Google used its market power and “a series of exclusionary agreements” to lock up the search market, which the DOJ argued was a way of “shutting out potential competitors, reducing innovation, and taking choice away from American consumers”.

While the case focused on anticompetitive behaviour, the implications for site owners are profound. A market without robust competition is a market that can stagnate. It reduces the pressure to innovate and improve the quality of results for users.

This legal earthquake means that we, as creators and site owners, can no longer be complacent.

We must double down on creating content that is so demonstrably high-quality and satisfying for users that it can withstand any market shift. The best way to understand what “quality” means today is to look directly at how Google itself attempts to measure it.

Decoding Google’s Definition of Quality: The Rater Guidelines

Google employs thousands of external “Search Quality Raters” around the world to evaluate the performance of its search results. These raters use a detailed manual to provide feedback that helps Google calibrate its ranking algorithms.

While the raters’ scores don’t directly change the ranking of any single page, their feedback is used to “measure how well our systems are working to deliver helpful content”.

Reading these guidelines is like looking at Google’s homework. It tells us exactly what they consider a high-quality, satisfying user experience. The entire system boils down to two core concepts: Page Quality (PQ) and Needs Met (NM).

• Page Quality (PQ): The Bedrock of Trust. This rating assesses the overall quality of a page. The central pillar of PQ is E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. To determine this, Google encourages creators to ask themselves a series of tough questions, including:
  • “Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?”
  • “Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it…?”
  • “Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?”
• Needs Met (NM): The Measure of User Satisfaction. This rating evaluates how well a result fulfils a user’s search query. This is the ultimate test of helpfulness. The highest possible rating is “Fully Meets,” a standard reserved for results that are so perfect that “All or almost all users would be immediately and fully satisfied by the result and would not need to view other results to satisfy their need”. This is the gold standard we should all be aiming for. The single most important question Google wants us to answer is this:
  • “Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?”

Everything that follows – my philosophy, the tools I choose, and the strategies I employ – is designed to create assets that would unequivocally score high on both Page Quality and Needs Met.

My Philosophy: The Three Pillars of an Effective SEO Toolkit

Let’s establish the framework. Every tool I recommend, use daily, and trust with my clients’ success is measured against these three pillars.

1. Ground Truth Data: The most valuable data is direct, unfiltered, and comes from the source. In our world, the primary source is Google itself. Any effective toolkit must be built on a foundation of first-party data from(https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/how-to-run-hobo-seo-dashboard/). Third-party tools are powerful for competitive analysis and diagnostics, but they are always interpreting, estimating, or modelling data. Your own performance data from Google is the non-negotiable ground truth.
2. Diagnostic Power: I prioritise tools that allow for deep, technical analysis to find root causes, not just symptoms. A tool that tells me my ranking dropped is mildly interesting. A tool that allows me to crawl my entire website, cross-reference the output with server log files, and identify that Googlebot is wasting its crawl budget on faceted navigation URLs is strategically invaluable. We need tools that function like an MRI, not a thermometer.
3. Strategic Integration: Tools should not exist in data silos. The real magic happens when you can combine data from different sources to create a holistic view of performance. How does the technical crawl data from your site audit correlate with the indexation data in Google Search Console? How does the keyword ranking data from your tracker align with the actual clicks and impressions data from GSC? As a developer myself, I built my own tools precisely because I needed to answer these integrated questions. A powerful toolkit is one where the output of one tool becomes the input for a deeper question in another.

With this philosophy in mind, let’s build our toolkit, layer by layer.

The Foundational Layer: Non-Negotiable Intelligence from Google

This is the bedrock. If you use nothing else, you must use these. The data they provide is not optional; it is the definitive record of how Google sees and evaluates your website.

Google Search Console (GSC)

Google Search Console is the single most important tool in your arsenal. Full stop. It is a free diagnostic suite that provides invaluable insights and direct communication from Google about your site’s health. To ignore it is to fly blind.

• Why It’s Essential: GSC is your direct line to Google. It’s where you see how Google is crawling and indexing your site, what security issues it has found, and how your site is performing in search results. The Performance report, showing clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position for your queries and pages, is the ground truth of your organic visibility.
• Expert Application: Don’t just look at the top-level numbers. Use the comparison filters to analyse performance before and after a content update or a Google algorithm update. Dig into the Indexing reports to find pages that Google has discovered but refuses to index—this is often a sign of a significant quality issue.
• The Power of the API: For advanced analysis, the GSC API is a game-changer. It allows you to pull raw performance data at scale, bypassing the limitations of the web interface. This is how you can perform long-term trend analysis, combine GSC data with other datasets, and build custom dashboards that answer specific business questions – it’s the engine that powers many advanced reporting systems, including my own.

PageSpeed Insights & Core Web Vitals

User experience is a critical component of modern SEO, and site speed is a primary factor. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is the definitive tool for measuring your site’s performance against the Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

• Why It’s Essential: These aren’t just arbitrary metrics; they are Google’s attempt to quantify the user’s experience of loading and interacting with your page. Your CWV scores, as reported in GSC and measured by this tool, are a direct signal to Google about the quality of your site’s technical foundation.
• Expert Application: Don’t obsess over getting a perfect score of 100. The goal is to pass the Core Web Vitals assessment (get “Good” URLs in GSC). Use the diagnostic information in the PageSpeed Insights report to identify the specific resources (e.g., oversized images, render-blocking JavaScript) that are slowing down your page. This is not a report for you to admire; it’s a specific, actionable bug report to hand to your web developer.

The Technical SEO’s Workhorse: Mastering the Full-Site Crawl

While GSC tells you what Google sees, a desktop crawler allows you to see your website as a search engine does. It gives you the power to diagnose technical issues at scale before they become indexing problems.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

For more than a decade, the Screaming Frog SEO Spider has been my go‑to technical SEO tool. It will always be my favourite technical seo tool. It’s a powerful and flexible website crawler that runs on your PC or Mac, allowing you to audit sites of all sizes for common SEO issues. While there are many cloud‑based crawlers, I consistently return to the SEO Spider for its raw power, speed, and granular control.

Why It’s Essential: It allows you to find broken links (404s), audit page titles and meta descriptions, analyse redirect chains, discover duplicate content, and visualise your site architecture. For any technical SEO work, this is your primary diagnostic instrument. If you want to take this a step further, check out how we use Screaming Frog in Google Sheets with the Hobo SEO Dashboard to automate and enhance audit workflows.

Expert Application: The real power of Screaming Frog lies in its advanced features.

Custom Extraction: I use this constantly. You can use XPath, CSS Path, or Regex to scrape any piece of information from the HTML of your pages. Need to audit the publication dates on all your blog posts? Extract it. Need to check for the presence of specific schema markup? Extract it. It turns the crawler into a bespoke data collection engine.

API Integration: You can connect the crawler to APIs from Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights. This allows you to pull in performance and crawl data into a single, unified interface. For example, you can identify pages with thin content and low organic traffic in one report. This forms the basis of our SEO Audit Tab in the Hobo SEO Dashboard, which flags and prioritises on-site issues directly from Screaming Frog exports.

Log File Analysis: For the truly advanced, you can use the SEO Spider to analyse your server log files. This allows you to see exactly how search engine bots are crawling your site, identifying wasted crawl budget and discovering which pages are crawled most frequently.

Performance Intelligence: Tracking the Metrics That Truly Matter

While GSC gives you the ground truth on performance, a dedicated rank tracker is essential for monitoring your visibility against a consistent set of target keywords over time, especially in different markets and on different devices.

ProRankTracker

I’ve used Proranktracker (aff) daily for more than a decade, both as a customer and an affiliate. In a market filled with overly complex platforms, its beauty lies in its simplicity, accuracy, and reliability. It is a cloud-based rank checker that does one job and does it exceptionally well.

• Why It’s Essential: It provides a clear, historical view of your search visibility for the keywords that matter most to your business. This allows you to measure the impact of your SEO efforts, spot competitive threats, and identify opportunities where a small push could move a keyword from page two to page one.
• Expert Application & A Critical Warning: Do not fall into the trap of obsessing over daily fluctuations. Rankings are naturally volatile. The value of a rank tracker is in monitoring long-term trends. I use it to answer strategic questions: “Are our efforts to improve topical authority for ‘X’ resulting in a broad lift in rankings for related terms over the last quarter?” or “Did our recent technical improvements correlate with an increase in visibility for our core commercial keywords?” Always correlate ranking data with the ground truth data – clicks and impressions – from GSC. High rankings are meaningless if they don’t drive traffic and conversions.

Market and Competitor Analysis: The All-in-One Powerhouses

While the tools above focus on analysing your own site, you also need to understand the competitive landscape. All-in-one SEO suites are designed for this purpose, providing a wealth of data on competitor rankings, traffic, backlinks, and advertising strategies.

SEMrush

SEMrush (aff) is an almost all-in-one SEO tool, especially for those getting started. It serves as a powerful seo toolkit, and, most importantly, a Competitor Analysis platform. It’s a bit pricey these days, though. And I prefer robotic task-oriented tools in my toolkit that are focused on doing tasks or identifying priorities rather than full suite analysis paralysis machines I can waste time in.

While its site audit and rank tracking features are good, its true strength lies in its massive database of keyword and competitor data.

• Why It’s Essential: It allows you to look “under the hood” of any website, including your competitors’. You can see the keywords they rank for, estimate their organic traffic, analyse their backlink profile, and even see their paid search ads. It’s an indispensable tool for market intelligence.
• Expert Application: For a new client, my first step in SEMrush isn’t keyword research; it’s competitive landscape mapping. I use the “Competitors” report to identify who Google considers the top players in their space. I then analyse the “Keyword Gap” to find high-value keywords that my competitors rank for, but my client does not. This tells me where the biggest opportunities are before I even begin a technical audit. It’s about understanding the market dynamics first, then diving into the tactics.

The Art of Link Intelligence: Deconstructing Backlink Profiles

Links remain a fundamental signal for Google. Analysing your own backlink profiles and those of your competitors is a core SEO task, essential for identifying toxic links, understanding what kind of content attracts authority links, and discovering new link-building opportunities.

Majestic (formerly Majestic SEO)

When it comes to complex backlink analysis, Majestic is my go-to tool. While other all-in-one suites have backlink checkers, Majestic’s specialisation gives it an edge in the depth and quality of its link intelligence. Its proprietary metrics, Trust Flow and Citation Flow, have been industry standards for years.

• Why It’s Essential: Majestic provides a comprehensive map of the links pointing to any website. It helps you understand the authority and topical relevance of the sites linking to you, which is crucial for both link building and penalty recovery.
• Expert Application: Ignore the top-level scores (Trust Flow, Citation Flow). The real value is in the details. I use the “Related Sites” feature constantly. It analyses the backlink profiles of top-ranking sites and identifies other websites that are “ideologically” similar, even if they don’t link to each other directly. This is one of the most powerful and underutilised features for discovering topically relevant link opportunities that your competitors are leveraging. It helps you find the hubs of authority in your niche.

Web Analytics: A Simpler View with Clicky

While Google Analytics is the industry standard, I often find myself turning to Clicky Web Analytics (aff) for quick, intuitive analysis. While GA4 is powerful, its complexity can sometimes be a hindrance when you just need a fast, clear picture of what’s happening on your site right now.

• Why It’s a Great Alternative: Clicky’s strength is its simplicity and real-time data presentation. Its control panel is incredibly intuitive, making it my preferred tool for “quick and dirty” analysis. It offers features like real-time visitor tracking and a more accurate bounce rate calculation that I find very useful.
• Expert Application: I use Clicky when I need immediate feedback on traffic patterns, especially after launching a new piece of content or a marketing campaign. It’s also accessible for beginners, with a free version available for sites that have fewer than 3,000 page impressions per day.

Keyword Ideation: Understanding User Questions with AnswerThePublic

A huge part of creating helpful content is understanding the specific questions your audience is asking. For this, Answer The Public is a brilliantly simple and effective tool.

• Why It’s Essential: It’s a free keyword research tool that visualises search questions and suggested autocomplete searches in a clear, graphical format. It helps you get inside the head of your potential customers by showing you exactly what they are typing into the search box.
• Expert Application: I use this at the very beginning of the content creation process. Before writing a single word, I’ll put a core topic into AnswerThePublic to generate a map of relevant questions. This ensures that the final article directly addresses the real-world problems and curiosities of the user, which is the foundation of a “people-first” content strategy.

A Critical Warning: The Tools and Metrics Designed to Waste Your Time

A core part of my “white hat” philosophy is focusing on activities that create genuine, lasting value. The corollary is to aggressively avoid tools and metrics that encourage low-value, manipulative, or outright useless tactics.

Beginners are especially vulnerable to these traps. Be extremely wary of:

• Keyword Density Checkers: This is an archaic concept. Google is a sophisticated semantic engine; it understands topics and concepts, not crude keyword repetition. Writing naturally for users about a topic is all you need to do. Focusing on a specific density percentage is a complete waste of time and will likely make your content worse.
• Automated Submission Software: Any tool that promises to submit your site to “thousands of directories” or “hundreds of search engines” is selling snake oil. This is a relic of the 1990s and is a fantastic way to build a toxic, spammy link profile that will earn you a Google penalty.
• Page “Graders” That Focus on On-Page Factors Alone: Many tools will give your page a “score” based on whether you have the keyword in your title, H1, and a few other places. While these basic on-page factors are important, they are table stakes. True quality comes from rich, relevant, helpful content and editorial links earned through authority. Obsessing over a superficial on-page score while ignoring deeper content quality is a classic case of missing the forest for the trees.

Your time is your most valuable resource. Do not waste it on tools that encourage you to chase ghosts from SEO’s past.

Your Operational Blueprint: The Free SEO Checklist in Google Sheets

Having powerful tools is one thing, but organising their output into an actionable project plan is another challenge entirely. This is where a structured checklist becomes an invaluable asset. To bridge the gap between analysis and execution, I’ve created a comprehensive Free SEO Checklist template in Google Sheets.

This isn’t just a single list; it’s a collection of online spreadsheets designed to help you manage your entire SEO project from both a high-level and a page-level perspective. It’s the perfect tool for systematically applying the principles we’ve discussed and ensuring that no critical step is missed. The collection includes:

• Technical SEO Checklist: A great starting point for auditing your site against Google’s technical Webmaster Guidelines.
• Website Quality Rater Checklist: Allows you to rate your own website using the same framework as Google’s own Quality Raters.
• Content Quality Checklist: Helps ensure your content meets Google’s high standards for quality and helpfulness.
• Sitewide & On-Page SEO Checklist: Guides you through the process of optimising every page and element on your site.
• Keyword Research Checklist: A framework for reviewing your site’s performance and identifying new opportunities.
• SEO Starter Guide: A complete guide for students and beginners to confidently manage a site’s SEO.

SEO projects often fail because of poor communication between teams. This tool combines your audit checklist with a web developer task list, creating a unified system to track who is doing what and ensure that the identified issues actually get fixed. It’s the ideal way to turn the insights from your tools into a tangible, results-driven workflow.

Free Ebook For Beginners

For those just starting their journey, I’ve distilled my experience into a comprehensive, free ebook: Hobo: Beginner SEO 2025. This guide is designed specifically to provide a clear, evidence-based foundation for modern SEO, moving beyond tricks and focusing on a “people-first” approach.

Drawing on unique insights from the U.S. vs. Google trial, it covers the fundamentals of creating helpful content, demonstrating E-E-A-T, and mastering essential on-page and technical strategies.

The ebook includes chapter-by-chapter action plans and free SEO checklists to help you turn knowledge into tangible results and confidently build a trusted brand online.

The Next Frontier: Turning AI into a Specialist with “Agentica”

The tools we’ve discussed so far are powerful, but they represent a mature paradigm.

The next great leap isn’t another dashboard; it’s a fundamental shift in how we leverage AI itself. For the past year, I’ve been developing a new methodology that moves beyond simple “prompt engineering” into a new paradigm I call “Skill Invocation.”

I’ve named the concept “Agentica: Custom Skills for Large Language Models.” The best analogy is to think of them as “Skills” like Amazon’s Alexa.

An Agentica is not just a prompt; it’s a uniquely named, evidence-based, and self-contained instruction set written by an expert that commands a generalist AI to adopt an expert persona and execute a complex, professional-grade workflow.

When you give an AI a simple question, it acts as an information retriever. When you invoke an Agentica, you’re effectively installing a temporary, expert operating system.

Agentica doesn’t ask the AI a question. It commands it to:

1. Adopt a Persona: Cease operating as a generalist AI and become a specialist in topical authority, grounded in primary-source intelligence.
2. Install Core Principles: Disregard generalised training data and base its analysis exclusively on evidence from the Google DOJ Trial and the Content Warehouse API Leak.
3. Execute a Mission: Perform a specific function—to algorithmically estimate topical visibility by identifying verifiable signals that Google’s systems reward.
4. Follow a Workflow: Execute a precise, multi-phase analytical process that I have defined.

This transforms the AI from a passive tool into an active, specialised analyst. The power comes from its explicit instruction to ground its analysis in an evidence-based model, turning its output from a creative guess into a systematic, forensic audit of a known system.

I have developed and published a suite of these skills, including:

• Check My Topical Authority in AI Answers Using Hobo SEO Researcher: A five-phase strategic intelligence prompt to analyse a topic’s competitive landscape.

• Rate My Page Quality Using the Hobo SEO Method: A prompt that uses a 12-criterion methodology to perform a deep audit of a single URL, algorithmically estimating its content effort and E-E-A-T signals.

• Rewrite My Page Using the Hobo SEO Rewriter: A two-stage prompt that first performs the 12-point forensic audit and then uses that audit as a precise blueprint to re-engineer the content from the ground up.

The “Agentica” Economy and the Disruption of SaaS

I believe this approach signals an existential threat to many Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models. We are entering what I call the “Agentica Economy,” where the barrier to creating sophisticated tools has collapsed.

Many large, monolithic SaaS platforms are destined to die by a thousand cuts. Their business model, which gates complex workflows behind expensive subscriptions, is fundamentally vulnerable.

Each feature within their platforms can be replicated by a highly specialised, free-to-use Agentica skill.

While no single “minnow creator” can kill a giant, thousands of them, each cannibalising a tiny piece of the value proposition, can bleed the behemoths dry. The Agentica model represents a fundamental shift from centralised, paid tools to an open, democratised ecosystem of expertise.

The Spectrum of Automation

This isn’t just a tactic; it’s a significant indicator of the future of human-AI collaboration. I see this future as a spectrum:

1. At one end: Reliable Robots. These are autonomous tools for specific, high-fidelity tasks. My SEO Dashboard in Google Sheets is a reliable robot. It fetches and reports ground-truth data. You don’t want an AI hallucinating your revenue reports; you want low-cost robots for repetitive work.
2. At the other end: The Fully Agentic Web. This is the future where AI seamlessly handles complex tasks. We are not there yet. The fact that even Google’s own models can’t reliably write to their own Sheets API shows the technical hurdles.
3. In the middle: The “Agentica” Economy. This is the critical bridge. For tasks too complex for simple robots but where the risk of AI hallucination is too high for full agency, Agentica emerge. Experts codify their methodologies as skills, creating a massive, decentralised training exercise that paves a realistic path to true AI agency by filling the AI’s “knowledge gap” with structured, human-vetted expertise.

Building Your Command Centre

We’ve discussed the pillars of Ground Truth, Diagnostic Power, and Strategic Integration. We’ve looked at best-in-class tools for each function.

The final challenge is bringing it all together. How do you move from having five different browser tabs open to having a single, unified view of your SEO performance?

This is the problem that led me, as a developer, to build my own solution: the Hobo SEO Dashboard.

I built it because I was tired of disconnected data silos. I needed a way to pull data from the Google Search Console API, the Google Analytics API, PageSpeed Insights, and my Screaming Frog crawls into one place where I could see the full picture. The dashboard is a system in Google Sheets that automates this entire process, creating a comprehensive command centre for monitoring site health, tracking performance, and identifying priorities.

This isn’t just a sales pitch; it’s the logical conclusion of the philosophy I’ve outlined. The goal is to create a system – whether you build it yourself or use a tool like mine – that allows you to spend your time on analysis and strategy, not on manual data pulling and report building.

A proper command centre should automatically tell you:

• Which keywords and URLs are gaining or losing visibility (your “Winners & Losers“)?

• How your site’s performance is affected by recent Google updates, and how to monitor the impact in GA4 and GSC.

• What are your top technical SEO priorities, based on fresh Screaming Frog crawl data?

• How your Core Web Vitals scores are trending over time, pulled directly from PageSpeed Insights or GSC via the API.

This is what strategic integration looks like in practice. It’s about making the data from all your essential tools work together to give you genuinely actionable insights.

The overarching aim of modern, ethical SEO is to improve your website’s conceptual “quality score” in the eyes of Google.

This isn’t a single metric but a holistic assessment of your site’s ability to provide a trustworthy and satisfying user experience. The entire process is guided by the principles found within Google’s official Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, which are the foundational documents used to evaluate search results.

To improve this score, you must focus on demonstrating high levels of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). The ultimate goal is to align with Google’s “people-first” approach, ensuring that after reading your content, a user will “leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience.”

You can use practical resources like the E-E-A-T SEO Checklist and the comprehensive Free SEO Checklist from Hobo Web to systematically audit and improve the signals that contribute to this overall quality assessment.

Conclusion: A Toolkit Is a Reflection of Your Strategy

The tools themselves do not create success. I have seen companies with six-figure software budgets fail because they lacked a coherent strategy, and I have seen solo consultants achieve incredible results with little more than Google Search Console and a crawler.

Your toolkit is a reflection of your strategy.

Don’t chase the “next big thing.” Instead, start with the foundational layer of ground truth data from Google.

Add a powerful diagnostic crawler to understand your technical foundation. Layer on market intelligence to understand the competitive landscape. Master these few, versatile tools. Learn their advanced features. Understand their limitations.

Most importantly, focus on how their data can be integrated to answer the fundamental question that drives all successful SEO campaigns: “How can I create the most helpful, authoritative, and trustworthy experience for my users?”

When you start with that question, you’ll find that the right toolkit almost builds itself.

Here’s my list of the best SEO tools for beginners:

1. Google Search Console
2. Pagespeed Insights
3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
4. Proranktracker (aff)
5. SEMrush (aff)
6. Answer The Public
7. Google Analytics
8. Majestic

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Disclosure: Hobo Web uses generative AI when specifically writing about our own experiences, ideas, stories, concepts, tools, tool documentation or research. Our tool of choice for this process is Google Gemini Pro 2.5 Deep Research. This assistance helps ensure our customers have clarity on everything we are involved with and what we stand for. It also ensures that when customers use Google Search to ask a question about Hobo Web software, the answer is always available to them, and it is as accurate and up-to-date as possible. All content was verified as correct. See our AI policy.

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: “I do not accept paid placement on this page. Affiliate links are included which means I have signed up to the affiliate program. All external links on this page have rel=nofollow to more easily comply with search engine webmaster guidelines, US and UK advertising standards.

Buy at your own risk, I can’t guarantee satisfaction for 3rd party tools I’ve reviewed. Hopefully this affiliate program disclosure illustrates transparency and complies with advertising standards.

The author does not vouch for third party sites or any third party service. Visit third party sites at your own risk. This article is a personal opinion of research based on my experience of almost 20 years. It is not advice. I am not directly affiliated with Google or any other third party other than via affiliate programme. This website uses cookies only for analytics and basic website functions. This article does not constitute legal advice. The author does not accept any liability that might arise from accessing the data presented on this site.“ Shaun Anderson, Hobo