Until this week, this page listed ten SEO tools for beginners, each with a price and a verdict. Among them were paid keyword and content tools, recommended at $12 a month and at $20 to $50 a month, that I had never opened. Not once, not on a trial, not for five minutes.
So this rewrite is split down the middle, and the split is the point. First, the tools I have installed and open. Then, separately and clearly labelled, the ones I only know from their documentation. If you have read four other beginner SEO tool lists this week, you have probably read four lists where that line was never drawn, and the ordering had more to do with who pays a commission than with what a new site needs.
Part one: the three I actually run
Google Search Console
Verified on every site of mine that I want found in search, both blogs included. If you take one thing from this post: verify your domain the day it goes live, not the day you remember.
I use two parts of it and mostly ignore the rest. The Performance report, with the Queries tab and a three-month range, tells me what Google is already showing my pages for, which is the only keyword data on this list that comes from Google itself. URL Inspection tells me whether a specific page is indexed and when it was last crawled, and lets me ask for a recrawl after I change something.
My launch routine, the same on every site I put up: submit the sitemap with the full URL, not the file name, because sitemap.xml on its own gets rejected often enough to waste an afternoon. Delete any old sitemap entries that are broken or left over from a previous version of the site. Resubmit after significant changes. Then inspect the handful of URLs that matter and request indexing on each. I have done this enough times to know it is boring and enough times to know that skipping it costs weeks. The longer version, with realistic timelines, is in the checklist I run on a new site.
Its limits are real. The data lags two or three days. Rare queries are withheld for privacy, so the rows never add up to the totals, and on a small site the withheld part can be most of your traffic. Average position is an average across devices, countries and dates, so it moves for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
Google Site Kit
A WordPress plugin that pulls Search Console and Analytics into wp-admin. I run it because the alternative is three browser tabs to answer one question, and in practice that means I check nothing.
Two things to know before installing. It will happily connect AdSense and place the ad code on your site for you, which is convenient until you forget it is there. And the dashboard summaries are a simplified view; when a number looks strange, open Search Console properly rather than trusting the widget.
All in One SEO, free tier
On both of my WordPress blogs. It does two jobs I need: it generates the XML sitemap, and it gives me a field for a hand-written title and meta description on every post. Any of the well-known SEO plugins would do the same; I am not claiming this one is better, because I have not run the others side by side on the same site.
My actual complaint, from my own site rather than from a review: when I left descriptions on automatic, nineteen posts ended up with headings concatenated with no spaces between them, so the description in search results read like a corrupted string. Write them yourself. It takes forty seconds and it is the one piece of metadata a reader sees before deciding whether to click.
What I do not use is the score. The traffic-light readability and keyword meters encourage you to write for the plugin, and writing for the plugin is how posts end up with the target phrase wedged into every subheading.
The order I would set these up in
- Search Console, verified, on day one, before there is anything to measure.
- An SEO plugin, purely for the sitemap and the description field.
- The sitemap submitted with its full URL, and old broken ones removed.
- URL Inspection on your home page and your first few posts, with indexing requested.
- Analytics or Site Kit, but only if you will genuinely look at it. An unread dashboard is not a tool.
- Google Trends, opened for thirty seconds before committing a week to a topic, to check whether interest is flat, seasonal or sliding. It shows relative interest on a 0 to 100 scale, never volume.
- An
ads.txtfile in the root, only if you are going to run display ads at all.
That is a free stack and it is enough to publish, get indexed and find out what Google already thinks your site is about. What you do with that data is the keyword workflow I run against my own Search Console export.
Why there are almost no prices in this post
Since rebuilding this site I have one rule about numbers: a price gets published only if I opened the vendor’s pricing page myself and can put the URL and the date I read it next to the figure. Everything else gets left out, even when leaving it out makes the post less convenient.
There is one price here, because the hosting under these blogs is part of the setup. When I opened Hostinger’s shared hosting page on 20 September 2026, the cheapest plan was advertised at $2.99 a month, available only if you pay for 48 months in advance, and the same plan was listed as renewing at $10.99. Both numbers belong in the same sentence. Quoting the first one without the second is the most common half-truth in this entire genre, and it is the reason people are surprised by their second invoice.
There is a second reason to be careful with any price you read in a blog post: it may not even be in your currency. On 20 September 2026, checking hosting pages from Spain, SiteGround redirected me to its European site and served euros, and Shopify did the same. A figure copied from an American blog into a European reader’s head is wrong twice over: wrong currency, and usually wrong year.
Part two: the paid tools I have not used
Surfer SEO, Semrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, NeuronWriter, and the rest of the names that fill lists like this one. I have not used any of them on a site of mine. That is the whole of my relationship with them, and it is why you will find no ranking of them here.
What I can tell you is about the category rather than the products, because that part does not require having paid for one. These tools exist to sell you two things the free Google stack will not give you: estimated search volume with a competition score, and a content brief built from whatever is currently ranking. Both are useful. Both are also estimates. Search volume figures in commercial tools are modelled from clickstream panels and other proxies, not handed over by Google, which is why two tools will show you two different numbers for the same phrase and both will look authoritative.
Several of them advertise free tiers or free accounts for verified site owners. Terms in this market change often, so check the vendor’s own page and the date on whatever article sent you there, including this one, before planning around a free tier.
My honest position on buying one as a beginner: when my other blog had five clicks in three months, a subscription costing more than the hosting would have told me nothing my own Search Console data did not. The bottleneck was never missing data about what people search. It was that I was publishing things I could not speak about with any authority. No tool fixes that, and the post about what actually went wrong here is the longer version of that admission.
Three questions worth settling before you install anything
Do I need a paid tool to start? No. Here is the test I would apply instead: if you already know which of your pages get impressions and no clicks, and you have not fixed them, another data source is not your problem.
How often should I look at the numbers? Weekly at most, and monthly is fine. Search Console data lags a few days and normal fluctuation on a small site looks dramatic in percentage terms. Checking daily produces anxiety and no decisions.
What about rank trackers? The average position in Search Console already tells you roughly where you stand across everyone who saw you. A tracker gives you a precise number for one location and one device, which feels more accurate and is not the same thing. For a site with a handful of clicks, it is a number to watch rather than a number to act on.
The short version: run the free Google tools properly, write the metadata by hand, and put the subscription money towards something you can only get by doing the work. If you want the rest of what runs on my sites, tools and plugins and the parts I removed, that is the full stack on my two blogs.