This page lists the software I work in when I run SEO, Google Ads and Facebook and Instagram ads for UK businesses, and what each piece is for. Most of it is free, because the most reliable data about your website comes from Google, Microsoft and Meta themselves. Paid tools sit on top of that for specific jobs, and below I explain when they earn their cost and when they do not.
This page contains no affiliate links. If I ever add one, it will be labelled as an advertisement, as the CAP Code requires.
How a tool earns a place
I start from the source of the data. A platform’s own report shows what that platform actually recorded about your pages or your ads. A third-party tool shows its own estimate, built from a separate crawl of the web and a sample of searches. Both have their uses, but when they disagree, I trust the platform.
The second test is ownership. Anything that holds your data over the long term, such as analytics, ad accounts and your Business Profile, should sit in your company’s name, with me added as a user. The last test is whether the tool changes a decision. A dashboard that nobody acts on is a monthly cost, not a tool.
Search data from the platforms themselves
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is the first thing I ask for access to on any SEO project. It shows the searches your pages appeared for, how often people clicked, which URLs Google has indexed and why it left others out. It keeps 16 months of performance data, so if it was set up a while ago you already hold a useful history. If it has never been verified for your domain, setting it up comes before anything else, because that history only starts once it exists.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing’s equivalent of Search Console. Bing has a smaller share of UK searches than Google, but its index also supplies results to other search products, so it is worth confirming Bing can crawl the site properly. A site already verified in Search Console can be imported in a few minutes.
Google Business Profile
For any business that serves customers in a particular place, the profile dashboard shows calls, direction requests and the searches that brought people to you on Maps. I make changes in the profile itself, under your ownership, rather than through a paid listings service, so nothing depends on a subscription you might later cancel.
Keyword Planner and Google Trends
Keyword Planner, inside Google Ads, gives search volume ranges for the UK and its regions. On an account with little or no ad spend it shows broad bands rather than precise figures, so I read it as a sense of scale, not a forecast. Google Trends shows seasonality and the relative interest in two phrases over time, which is often more useful for planning content than a single monthly average.
Crawling and technical checks
A desktop crawler
A crawler follows the links on your site the way a search engine does and records every URL, status code, title, canonical tag and redirect it meets. Screaming Frog is the crawler most SEOs know, and its free version stops at 500 URLs, which is enough for many small business sites. For larger sites I consider a paid crawler licence one of the few paid tools that is hard to do without, because nothing free lets you see a site of several thousand pages as a whole.
PageSpeed Insights and the Rich Results Test
PageSpeed Insights reports Core Web Vitals from real Chrome users where Google holds enough data, and runs a lab test where it does not. I read the field data first, since a lab score can move several points between two runs of the same page. The Rich Results Test tells me whether the structured data on a page is valid and which search features it could qualify for. Both are Google’s own and both are free, which settles any argument about whose numbers are right.
Between them, the crawler and these two checks cover most of the diagnosis in my technical SEO work on crawling, indexing and speed.
Paid media
For advertising, the platform’s own interface is the main tool. I build and run Google Ads campaigns in Google Ads itself and in Google Ads Editor, the free desktop application that handles bulk changes and lets me review a whole account before anything goes live. For Facebook and Instagram advertising I work in Meta Ads Manager, and in Events Manager to check that the Meta pixel and the Conversions API are both sending events, without duplicates, and carrying enough customer information for Meta to match them to its users.
Third-party bid management software is rarely worth it for a small or mid-sized UK account. The platforms’ own automated bidding sees signals that no outside tool can, such as the device, location and time of each auction, so a separate subscription tends to pay for itself only when spend is large and spread across many accounts. What makes far more difference is feeding each platform accurate conversion data, which is where the next section comes in.
Measurement and reporting
GA4 and Google Tag Manager
Google Analytics 4 records what people do once they reach your site. I install it through Google Tag Manager, which keeps every tracking tag in a single container. I can test changes in preview mode before publishing them, and you, or anyone you hire after me, can see exactly what is installed without opening the website’s code.
Consent, and why it shapes the setup
Under PECR and UK GDPR, advertising cookies need the visitor’s consent before they are set. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 created a narrow exemption for some first-party statistics cookies, but a standard GA4 setup linked to Google Ads shares data with an advertising platform, so it should not lean on that exemption. On UK sites I configure a consent banner together with Google’s consent mode, so Google’s tags respect each visitor’s choice and the ad platforms can still estimate conversions from people who decline. A setup that fires every tag the moment a page loads may produce fuller reports, but it is not compliant, and fixing it later usually means rebuilding the tracking.
Looker Studio and Microsoft Clarity
For reporting I use Looker Studio, Google’s free dashboard tool. It reads directly from GA4, Search Console and Google Ads, so the figures you see are the platforms’ own rather than numbers copied into a spreadsheet by hand. Microsoft Clarity offers free heatmaps and session recordings, which are good for spotting where people give up on a form. Because it records behaviour, I load it only after a visitor has accepted analytics cookies.
Websites and content
Much of the work happens inside your own content management system. On WordPress I work with the SEO plugin you already have rather than adding a second one, since two plugins writing titles and canonical tags tend to contradict each other. Shopify, Wix and Squarespace all have built-in fields for titles, descriptions and redirects that cover more than most owners realise.
Drafts go to you in a shared document, so you can comment on every line before anything is published. If you use AI writing assistants yourself, keep them to narrow jobs such as summarising a long interview transcript or suggesting alternative headlines. A page generated whole tends to repeat what already ranks, and Google’s guidance on helpful content asks what a page adds that others do not.
Paid SEO suites, and when they are worth it
Ahrefs and Semrush are the best-known paid suites. Each crawls the web to build its own index of backlinks, and each estimates how often a keyword is searched and how hard it would be to rank for. They answer questions Search Console cannot: which sites link to your competitors, which terms a competitor appears for that you do not, and when a link to your site appeared or disappeared.
Their figures are estimates. Search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic value all come from each company’s own models, and the two suites regularly disagree. I use them to compare options and find gaps, never as numbers to promise a client.
Whether you should buy one yourself depends on how often you would open it. For most small UK businesses the answer is no: a monthly licence is hard to justify for occasional use, and the free platform tools above cover most day-to-day questions. It starts to make sense when someone in-house publishes content every week and checks competitors regularly. When a project of mine needs data from a paid suite, I tell you what I am looking for and why before anything is bought.
Which accounts should be in your name
Whoever you work with, these should belong to your business, with outside help added as users:
- Your Search Console property, ideally verified for the whole domain.
- Your GA4 property and the Tag Manager container.
- Your Google Ads account, linked to a consultant’s manager account rather than created inside it.
- Your Meta business portfolio, ad account and pixel.
- Your Google Business Profile, with you as primary owner.
- Your domain registrar and hosting accounts.
If a former agency or an ex-employee still owns one of these, getting ownership transferred is usually the first job. It is far easier while that person is still contactable.
What I avoid, and why
- Bought links and link networks. A private blog network or a package of guaranteed links breaks Google’s spam policies, and the clean-up after a manual action costs more than the links ever returned.
- Software that mass-produces pages. Tools that turn one template into hundreds of near-identical town or service pages create the thin, repetitive content that Google’s spam policies describe.
- Rank reports as the headline measure. Rankings shift with location and device, and results in one London postcode can differ from the next. I report on enquiries, sales and the search queries that produced them.
- Tracking before consent. Nothing that sets a non-essential cookie runs until the visitor has agreed.
- Shared passwords. I ask for user access in each platform instead, so there is a record of who changed what and access can be removed in one click.
Free tools on this site
This site has a set of free marketing calculators and checkers for jobs that come up again and again: building tagged campaign links, checking whether a title tag will be cut off in Google, working out break-even return on ad spend, clustering a keyword list so each page gets one intent, and formatting keywords into match types. They are there for you to use whether or not we ever work together.
A toolkit does not make the decisions
Software tells you what is happening. It does not decide which pages to write, which campaigns to switch off or what your customers need to read before they pick up the phone. Two people with identical subscriptions can run the same account very differently, and the difference is judgement, not software.
If you would like me to look at your website with these tools and tell you what I would fix first, request a free SEO audit.
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