The free SEO tools we actually use (and where SPOTlight fits)

Search "best SEO tools" and you'll drown in lists of forty products, half of them costing more per month than a small business spends on its whole website. Ignore most of it. The tools that move the needle for a normal business are mostly free, and you can count the ones worth bothering with on two hands.

Here's what we genuinely reach for, in the order you'd set them up. We made one of them ourselves, and we'll be honest about exactly what it is and isn't.

Google Search Console

If you set up nothing else, set up this. Search Console is Google telling you, in its own words, how it sees your site. Which searches brought people to you. Which pages get clicked and which get ignored. Whether a page has dropped out of the index, or tripped a mobile or Core Web Vitals problem.

It's free, it's the source of truth, and it's the one tool we'd never run a project without. Verify your site, then check it once a week. You'll learn more about your real audience in a month than from any amount of guesswork.

Google Analytics

Search Console tells you how people found you. Analytics tells you what they did next. Did they read the page and leave, or click through to your contact form? Which blog post quietly sends you the most enquiries?

The current version, GA4, has a steeper learning curve than the old one, and plenty of people find it fiddly. You don't need to master it. Even just knowing your most-visited pages and where visitors come from is enough to make better decisions.

PageSpeed Insights

Paste in any page and you get a speed score for mobile and desktop, plus a list of what's slowing it down. Big unoptimised images are the usual culprit for small business sites, and they're easy to fix once you know they're the problem.

Speed matters more than people expect. A site that takes five seconds to load on a phone loses a chunk of visitors before they ever see it, and Google factors loading experience into rankings. Lighthouse, built into Chrome's developer tools, gives you the same data with a bit more technical depth if you want it.

Google Business Profile

If you have customers who could walk through a door or phone you up, this is non-negotiable, and it's free. Google Business Profile is what powers the little box on the right of search results and the pins on Google Maps. A complete profile, with photos, hours, and a steady trickle of reviews, will often bring in more local enquiries than the website itself.

When you're ready to dig deeper

Two more free tools earn a spot once you've got the basics running:

• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives verified site owners a free site audit that flags well over a hundred technical and on-page issues. A solid free slice of an otherwise pricey tool.
• Screaming Frog crawls up to 500 pages free and is brilliant for finding broken links, duplicate titles and messy redirects across a whole site at once.

Notice what's not on this list: expensive all-in-one suites like Ahrefs or Semrush at full price. They're genuinely good, but they're built for agencies and serious content teams. If you're a plumber or a café, you'll get further spending that money elsewhere until you've squeezed everything out of the free tools.

Where SPOTlight fits

Now the honest bit about our own tool, since we promised. SPOTlight isn't trying to replace anything above. Search Console and Analytics are ongoing dashboards you live in. SPOTlight is the quick first look you start with.

You type in your domain, and a few seconds later you get a plain-English scorecard across four areas: SEO basics, social link previews, accessibility, and mobile readiness. No account, no setup, no jargon. It's the fastest way to find out which of these other tools you actually need to open first, and where the obvious wins are hiding.

The short version

Start at the top of that table, work down only as far as you need to, and don't pay for anything until the free tools have run out of things to tell you. For most small businesses, that takes a good long while.