Fundamentals
SEO tools: the four a business owner needs, and the rest you can skip
Ilyes Massoudi6 min readThe short answer
A business owner needs four SEO tools, three of them free from Google: Search Console for what Google sees on your site, PageSpeed Insights for mobile speed, and Keyword Planner for search volumes in your country, plus one paid tool such as Semrush or Ahrefs only if you need competitor and link data regularly. SEO checkers that award a score out of 100 are entertainment, and AI writing tools produce drafts, not strategies. No tool can decide which problem to start with, and that is the work you actually pay for.
The idea that saves you money
The SEO tool market is built on one idea: that the problem is a lack of data. On most of the Gulf sites I audit, the problem is not a lack of data but the absence of someone who reads it and decides. A business owner who subscribes to three paid tools and opens them once a month to see a score out of 100 is paying for reassurance, not results.
The list below is ordered by what you actually need, with one criterion: what decision does this tool help me make?
Tool one: Google Search Console, free
The one tool nobody can do without, because it is Google’s own data rather than an estimate. It tells you which queries you appeared for and how many clicks you received, which page is not indexed and why, and who links to you. If you used no other tool, this one would cover most decisions. The full walkthrough is in the Search Console guide.
Tool two: PageSpeed Insights, free
Paste any page URL and receive real-user data on its mobile speed, with the causes listed by impact. The decision it supports: is speed my problem at all, and if so, which item do I hand the developer first. Focus on mobile and on real-user data rather than the lab test.
Tool three: Google Keyword Planner, free
Inside a Google Ads account, with no campaign required. The feature no other tool offers for free: search volumes per individual Gulf country, in Arabic. Set the country, paste your keyword list, and receive volume, competition and cost per click. Volumes are rounded into bands, but that is enough to compare keywords against each other.
Add two free sources to it: Google autocomplete, and the “People also ask” box on the results page. The method is in Arabic keyword research.
Tool four: one paid tool, if you need it
Semrush, Ahrefs and their peers give you what Google’s tools do not: competitors’ keywords, their backlinks, estimates of their traffic, and rank tracking. They earn their subscription in one case: you, or someone working for you, opens them weekly to make a decision.
Before subscribing, know their limits in the Arabic market: coverage of Saudi Arabia and the UAE is good; Qatar, Kuwait and Oman are weak or absent in some functions; and their Arabic keyword data is estimated and misses dialect and spelling forms. Use them for competitors and links, and go back to Search Console and Keyword Planner for Arabic.
If you need the data once for a diagnosis, a single month’s subscription, or an audit by someone who already has the tools, is cheaper than an annual plan.
What you do not need
“SEO checker” tools with a score out of 100. They measure what is on the page and list hundreds of warnings at equal weight. The score rises when you fix image descriptions while your Arabic version sits unindexed. What they see and miss is in free audit versus paid audit.
A pile of browser extensions. One or two for reading titles and headings are enough; the rest is noise.
AI writing tools as a strategy. They write drafts, and do not know your market or decide the target query. The right use is in the AI content article.
Daily rank trackers. Rankings fluctuate daily by nature, and watching them daily produces anxiety, not decisions. The three-month trend in Search Console is enough.
The decision table
| Question | Tool | Free? |
|---|---|---|
| Which queries do I appear for, and from which country? | Search Console | Yes |
| Why does this page not appear? | Search Console, URL Inspection | Yes |
| Is my site slow on mobile? | PageSpeed Insights | Yes |
| What is this keyword’s volume in Saudi Arabia? | Keyword Planner | Yes |
| Which queries does my competitor appear for? | Semrush or Ahrefs | No |
| Who links to my competitor? | Ahrefs or Semrush | No |
| Which problem do I start with? | No tool |
The last row is the point. Tools gather; they do not judge. Judgement is what you buy from a practitioner, and it is what separates a report that gets executed from a list that gets opened once.
The tools in the audit here
In the Digital Presence Audit I use real search data from a professional data provider, alongside Google’s tools and the usual crawlers, and hand you the result readable and ranked by impact. You do not need to buy any subscription to execute the report, because the tool is not the service; reading its output and connecting it to your market is.