Chapter 30: Using SEO Tools Efficiently

Last updated: November 1, 2026.

It’s almost impossible to do SEO without using tools. Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Semrush, Screaming Frog, Lighthouse, Tag Manager… Each one tells us something different.

But I think the most important point here is this:

Using tools isn’t doing SEO.

Tools give us data. Understanding the problem, interpreting the data and deciding what to do is still our job.

In the previous chapter, we talked about Google Search Console in detail. In this chapter, let’s widen the view a bit and talk about what the tools we use most often in SEO are for, and which one to use in which situation.

1. Not every tool answers the same question

One of the biggest mistakes people make with SEO tools is comparing the numbers from different tools directly with each other. For example, for one site you might see:

• Search Console: 100,000 clicks
• Google Analytics: 87,000 organic sessions
• Semrush: 140,000 estimated organic traffic

At first glance we might think, “Which one is wrong?” In fact, all three measure different things.

Search Console measures clicks in Google search results. Google Analytics measures sessions and behavior after the user arrives on the site. Semrush doesn’t see the real traffic data Google gives you; it builds a model from rankings and estimated search volumes.

So expecting the three numbers to match is wrong to begin with.

2. Google Search Console: how does Google see us?

Since I covered it in detail in Chapter 29, I’ll keep this short. Search Console’s main question is:

What’s happening in Google Search?

From it we get this very valuable information:

• Clicks
• Impressions
• CTR
• Average position
• Queries
• Pages
• Countries
• Devices
• Branded / non-branded queries
• Indexing
• Canonical
• URL Inspection
• Core Web Vitals

Search Console is especially strong for questions like these:

• Which keywords have we started appearing for?
• Which page is losing traffic?
• Which query moved from position 11 to position 8?
• Which canonical URL is Google selecting?
• Is the page indexed?
• In which country is performance dropping?

But Search Console doesn’t fully tell us what the user did after arriving on the site. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.

3. What does Google Analytics tell us?

On the Google Analytics side, the basic question is:

What did the user do after arriving on the site?

For example:

• How many users came?
• How many sessions were there?
• Which pages did they browse?
• How much engagement was there?
• Did they fill out a form?
• Did they make a purchase?
• Which channel brought conversions?
• How much revenue was generated?

This is very important for SEO. Search Console might tell us, “10,000 people came from Google.” But Google Analytics might tell us, “Only 3 of those 10,000 people bought something.”

At this point, looking only at traffic growth isn’t enough.

4. Why is measuring SEO success by traffic incomplete?

Let’s consider an example:

If we evaluate only by traffic, we might see page A as more successful. But in terms of business results, page B is far more valuable.

We see this a lot, especially in B2B projects. Search volume may be low. Traffic may be low. But the users who arrive may be exactly the right users.

That’s why it’s important to read Google Analytics together with Search Console. Search Console comes closer to answering “How did the user find us?“, while Analytics answers “What did they do after finding us?“

5. What do I look at in Google Analytics for SEO?

It depends on the project, but in general we can look at these areas:

• Organic users
• Organic sessions
• Landing pages
• Key events
• Revenue
• Engagement rate
• Views (pages and screens)
• New and returning users
• Device
• Country
• Channel comparisons

But again, seeing the whole-site total isn’t very meaningful on its own. For example, organic traffic may have grown 20%. But if the growth came only from informational content and commercial pages declined, the business picture may be different.

6. How do you use Search Console and Analytics together?

I think you need to see these two not as separate tools but as two data sources that complement each other. For example, a page shows this in Search Console:

• Impressions are rising
• Clicks are rising
• Average position is improving

Good. Then we move to Analytics:

• Are there conversions?
• Is the user moving on to product pages?
• Are they filling out forms?
• Is it generating revenue?

This is where the real picture emerges. An SEO effort may have improved rankings without improving commercial results. That doesn’t mean it was bad. But we can’t judge success without knowing the goal.

7. What is Google Tag Manager for?

Google Tag Manager (GTM) may not look like an SEO tool. But it’s very important for measurement.

With GTM, we can manage many measurement tags without needing a developer to touch the site code every time. For example, it can be used to track events like these:

• Form submissions
• Phone clicks
• WhatsApp clicks
• File downloads
• Video views
• Scroll
• Add to cart
• Purchase
• Specific button clicks

In SEO work, the right event structure is very important so that instead of just saying “traffic went up,” we can answer the question what did users from SEO actually do?

8. The mistake people make with GTM: trying to measure everything

We don’t have to measure everything we can measure. For example, if we create events for all of these, the Analytics side can become unreadable after a while:

• Every scroll
• Every hover
• Every button
• Every small interaction

I think you need to define business goals first. For example, on a services site these might be important:

• Phone calls
• Form submissions
• WhatsApp
• Quote requests

In e-commerce, these are far more meaningful:

• Product views
• Add to cart
• Checkout start
• Purchase

The purpose of a measurement plan isn’t to collect as much data as possible.

It’s to collect the data you need to make decisions.

9. What is Semrush used for?

Semrush is one of the tools we use a lot on the agency side too. It’s especially useful for:

• Keyword research
• Competitor analysis
• Rank tracking
• Backlink analysis
• Link Gap
• Keyword Gap
• Site Audit
• Visibility tracking
• SERP analysis

But there’s a very important distinction here:

Semrush isn’t Google.

The search volume, traffic estimates, Keyword Difficulty and Authority Score that Semrush shows are based on its own data and models. You shouldn’t read them as if they were official Google data.

10. Semrush shows 100,000 traffic, Search Console shows 60,000. Which is right?

I get this question very often.

If you want to know your real Google Search clicks, Search Console is the more direct first-party data. Semrush doesn’t have access to the site’s full Search Console data. It usually calculates traffic potential from rankings, search volume and estimated CTR.

So Semrush may show 100,000 and Search Console 60,000. That doesn’t mean Semrush is broken. The tool is calculating something different.

Semrush’s real strength is usually on the competitor side. We can’t access a competitor’s Search Console. But with Semrush we can do estimated analysis on things like:

• Which keywords do they rank for?
• Which of their pages are strong?
• In which country are they visible?
• What’s their traffic trend?
• What backlinks do they have?

11. Why is estimated data still valuable in competitor analysis?

We don’t know a competitor’s real traffic. But if we can compare two competitors with the same methodology, we can still get a valuable idea.

For example, Semrush says:

• Competitor A: 1 million estimated traffic
• Competitor B: 200 thousand estimated traffic

We can’t say these numbers are real Analytics data. But they can be a strong signal that A’s organic visibility is clearly higher than B’s.

So what matters here is the ratio and the trend more than the number.

12. How should we read scores like Keyword Difficulty?

We talked about this in Chapter 11. Keyword Difficulty isn’t a metric Google provides. It’s Semrush’s own calculation. It gives us an idea.

But evaluating it like this is wrong:

• KD 82: we can’t do it
• KD 25: we’ll definitely do it

You shouldn’t make a decision without looking at the SERP. The same approach applies to metrics like Authority Score, Toxic Score and Traffic Estimate.

A tool score is useful for diagnosis.

It isn’t the decision itself.

13. What is Screaming Frog for?

Screaming Frog is one of the most widely used SEO spiders. Put simply, it helps us examine the technical structure by moving through the site the way Googlebot does.

When we crawl a site, we can see things like:

• URLs
• HTTP status codes
• Title
• Meta description
• H1
• H2
• Canonical
• Noindex
• Internal links
• External links
• Redirects
• Images
• Alt text
• Page size
• Server response times

and much more.

The free version can crawl up to 500 URLs.

That limit can be quite enough for an initial analysis on many small and mid-sized projects. Especially if the whole site is under 500 URLs, or if a representative crawl is enough to see the problem, you can get a serious amount of work done with the free version.

But things change as the site grows. On a project with tens or hundreds of thousands of URLs, the paid version becomes almost mandatory. The crawl limit goes away and we can use more advanced features.

I think another advantage of Screaming Frog is its price. Compared with the big SEO platforms, it’s quite affordable, and it’s one of those tools that pays for itself very quickly, especially if you do technical SEO.

14. A Screaming Frog report isn’t an SEO audit

I think this distinction is very important.

You ran Screaming Frog. It found 5,000 errors. That doesn’t automatically mean you’ve done an SEO audit.

For example, it found 500 404s. The first question is:

Are these 404s actually a problem?

Maybe they’re old product URLs that shouldn’t exist anymore.

Or 1,000 pages have no meta description. That doesn’t mean every one of those pages has an urgent SEO problem.

The tool says, “This is the situation here.” The SEO specialist decides, “Is this a problem or not, and how important is it?”

This will also be one of the core points of the SEO audit in Chapter 32.

15. Some of the most useful analyses with Screaming Frog

It depends on the project, but I find these especially useful:

• 3xx redirects
• 4xx errors
• 5xx errors
• Canonical issues
• Noindex pages
• Orphan pages
• Very deep URLs
• Broken internal links
• Duplicate titles
• H1 issues
• Internal link counts
• Sitemap comparison
• Server response time
• Large images
• Redirect chains

On large sites, you can do much more advanced analysis by segmenting.

16. A crawler and Googlebot aren’t the same thing

This is important too. Just because Screaming Frog can crawl your site, we can’t conclude that Google crawls it the same way.

A crawler works with its own user agent, its own crawl settings and its own rendering system. Googlebot has its own crawl frequency, rendering behavior and systems.

So you shouldn’t say, “Screaming Frog sees it, so Google definitely sees it,” or “Screaming Frog didn’t see it, so Google can’t either.” When needed, you have to verify with Search Console and server logs.

17. I think one of the most important SEO tools is Excel or Google Sheets

When people talk about SEO tools, they usually mean Semrush, Ahrefs or Screaming Frog. But for me, one of the most important SEO tools is still:

Excel or Google Sheets.

Because most of the time the real work starts after you get the data. We download data from Search Console. We pull keywords from Semrush. We export the URL list from Screaming Frog. We pull traffic and conversion data from Analytics. Then we need to compare them with each other.

For example, let’s say you have 50,000 URLs. One table has:

• URL
• HTTP status code
• Title
• Canonical
• Internal link count

Another table has:

• Organic clicks
• Impressions
• Average position

And another has:

• Sessions
• Conversions
• Revenue

Sometimes the real power of SEO analysis appears when we bring these three tables together.

18. Real SEO analysis with Excel and Sheets

For example, we can pull out this segment:

• Indexed in Google
• 0 clicks in the last 12 months
• 0 conversions
• No backlinks at all
• Receives only 1 internal link

This can give us a much more meaningful list for content pruning or improvement.

Or we can filter for pages with these characteristics and pull out quick-win opportunities:

• Average position 6 to 15
• High impressions
• Low CTR
• High conversion value

Most of the time, no SEO tool gives you this kind of analysis fully ready-made. It can’t know your business model, your goals or which data you want to evaluate together.

19. Which Excel or Google Sheets features are useful in SEO?

These are especially handy:

• Filtering
• Sorting
• Pivot tables
• VLOOKUP
• XLOOKUP
• INDEX / MATCH
• IF
• COUNTIF
• SUMIF
• Regex
• Finding duplicates
• Conditional formatting
• URL comparison
• Splitting text
• Concatenation
• Data cleaning

With these, we can create things like:

• Redirect mapping
• Keyword grouping
• Competitor comparison
• Internal linking plan
• URL matching
• Content inventory
• SEO checklist

20. A site migration example

We’re redesigning a site. The old structure has /old-product-a, the new structure has /new-product-a.

If there are 10 URLs, you can manage it by hand. But if there are 20,000 URLs, you need a spreadsheet.

By matching old URLs, new URLs, status codes and redirect targets in Excel or Sheets, we can give the developer a clean 301 map. Because even a small mistake here can affect thousands of URLs, spreadsheet tools become very valuable.

21. Excel / Sheets in keyword research

Let’s say we have 20,000 queries. Next to each query, we might have:

• Search volume
• Search intent
• Category
• Current URL
• Target URL
• Average position
• Competitor
• Content status

From this table:

• We can group keywords with the same intent.
• We can see which queries need a new page.
• We can find possible cannibalization.
• We can pull out a content gap.
• We can prioritize.

I think a good SEO specialist being good with spreadsheets is sometimes more valuable than knowing how to use expensive tools. SEO tools give us data.

Excel and Google Sheets let us bring different data together and do the real analysis.

In fact, here’s a nice summary for me:

In SEO, the most expensive tool isn’t always the most powerful one. Sometimes your most powerful tool is an empty Excel file.

22. What is Lighthouse for?

Lighthouse is a tool that analyzes a web page under certain categories. It can run checks in these areas in particular:

• Performance
• Accessibility
• Best Practices
• SEO

In SEO, it’s most often used for performance analysis. For example, it gives us an idea about:

• LCP
• CLS
• Unused JavaScript
• Large images
• Render-blocking resources

But as we discussed in Chapter 24, Lighthouse is a lab test. It isn’t the same as real user experience.

23. If the Lighthouse SEO score is 100, is SEO done?

Absolutely not. I think it may be one of the most misleading screens in the SEO world.

Lighthouse can show “SEO 100.” But the site:

• May be targeting the wrong search intent.
• May have no backlinks.
• May have weak content.
• May have very strong competitors.
• May have chosen the wrong keywords.
• May have most of its pages not getting indexed.

The Lighthouse SEO score is the result of certain technical checks.

It isn’t a Google ranking score.

In the same way, Performance 100 doesn’t mean you’ll be first on Google.

24. How do PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse differ?

For performance analysis, PageSpeed Insights can show both lab data and, when available, real user data together. Lighthouse runs the page under specific test conditions and produces lab data. So it’s normal to see different results in the two.

Again, the same principle:

Don’t make decisions based on a single measurement.

25. All tools share the same problem: score addiction

Most SEO tools show us a score:

• Site Health: 82
• Authority Score: 45
• Keyword Difficulty: 73
• Performance: 91
• Spam Score: 8
• SEO Score: 95

The human brain loves scores, because they’re simple. 95 is good. 25 is bad. But real SEO isn’t that simple.

For example, your Site Audit score can go from 92 to 98. But organic traffic can drop. The reverse can happen too.

That’s why, for me, the question What problem is behind the score? matters more than the score itself.

26. There’s no single thing called an “SEO score”

You can see an “SEO Score” in many SEO tools. But Google has no official metric along the lines of “This site’s SEO score is 83.”

Each tool uses its own checklist and weighting. One tool may assign 5 points to a missing title. Another may assign 2. So different tools can give different SEO scores.

You need to know that this is completely natural.

27. What do we do if three tools show three different search volumes?

This happens often too. For example:

• Semrush: 8,100
• Keyword Planner: 12,000
• Another tool: 6,500

Which one is right? Probably none of them is the exact real number.

Search volume models can differ because of:

• Data sources
• Rounding
• Grouping of similar queries
• Date range
• Country
• Device

I think what matters here isn’t 8,100 or 8,400? It’s understanding whether the keyword is on the scale of 100, 1,000, 10,000 or 100,000.

When making decisions, we don’t use search volume as the only metric anyway.

28. Tools can be used to verify each other

I think this is a good approach.

For example, in Semrush a page’s traffic looks like it dropped significantly. We look at Search Console. Did it really drop? According to Search Console, certain queries dropped. Then Google Trends: did demand for this query decline? Analytics: did this drop affect conversions?

This way we build a data chain instead of relying on a single tool.

29. Why is Google Trends important?

Google Trends is quite useful for SEO. It can be used especially for:

• Seasonality
• Rising topics
• Brand comparisons
• Regional interest
• Trend changes

For example, in Search Console a keyword’s impressions dropped 40%. Your ranking is the same. When you look at Google Trends, overall demand may have also dropped 40%.

In that case, there’s no SEO problem. Market demand has changed.

30. Can Google Keyword Planner be used for SEO?

Its main purpose is Google Ads. But it can give ideas for SEO too. It can help especially with:

• Keyword ideas
• Related terms
• Country
• Language
• Seasonality
• Commercial competition

However, you shouldn’t confuse the “competition” metric here with SEO Keyword Difficulty. Competition in Keyword Planner is more about advertiser competition. It doesn’t directly show organic ranking difficulty.

31. Can we use AI tools in SEO?

Of course. AI can help in many areas, such as keyword grouping, content outlines, generating regex, classifying data, log analysis, redirect mapping and summarizing reports. But the same rule applies here: The tool shouldn’t make the decision. It should help the specialist make the decision.

I cover AI and search in a separate book, AI SEO.

32. Why can SEO tool data sometimes be wrong?

Because none of the tools sees the entire internet or all of Google’s data. For example, a third-party tool:

• May have a limited keyword database.
• May have delayed country data.
• May be checking rankings from a different location.
• May have modeled the search volume.
• May not have discovered a backlink yet.
• May still show a backlink that’s gone.

So you shouldn’t read tool data as absolute truth.

33. What do I look at when choosing a tool?

I think there’s no single answer to “What’s the best SEO tool?” You need to define the need first.

A tool may try to do everything. But it doesn’t have to be the best at everything.

34. Does a small business need every tool?

No. I think this is important too.

For a 50-page local business site, these can often get quite a lot done:

• Search Console
• Analytics
• PageSpeed Insights
• The free version of Screaming Frog
• Keyword Planner
• Trends
• Excel or Google Sheets

Paying thousands of dollars a month for tools doesn’t mean SEO will be done well. For a large agency or a large e-commerce site, the need is different. The tool budget should also be set according to the scale of the project.

35. Does SEO get better as the number of tools goes up?

No. Sometimes it’s quite the opposite.

Ten different tools are in use. Each one produces a different error list. Then the team spends the whole month fixing scores, closing warnings and preparing dashboards. But the work that would actually affect users and rankings doesn’t get done.

I think the right question is:

Which tool will help us make which decision?

If the data a tool produces doesn’t change any decision, why are we producing that report?

36. Should every warning from a tool be acted on?

Absolutely not.

For example, the tool says, “100 pages have no meta description.” That doesn’t automatically mean “Let’s write 100 meta descriptions.” Maybe the pages:

• should be noindex
• have a canonical pointing to another page
• have no organic goal
• should be removed

First you need to understand the role of the pages.

In the same way, you may get an “Orphan Page” warning. But the URL may be an old page that shouldn’t be used in the system anymore.

The tool finds the error.

You set the priority.

37. Which tool do I open first for an SEO problem?

It depends on the problem.

So there’s no favorite tool.

There’s the right tool for the right problem.

38. The most dangerous sentence: “The tool says so”

In SEO meetings, you can sometimes hear this sentence: “We need to change this because the tool is showing an error.” My first question is:

Why is it showing an error, and what’s the real impact?

A tool’s recommendation isn’t a justification.

For example, “The title is 62 characters and the tool shows it in red.” But in the SERP the title displays fine and gets a very good CTR. Do we have to change it just so it turns green? No.

Tools should work for us. We shouldn’t work for the tools’ scores.

39. Checklists still matter

I’ve said this a few times before. I like checklists, because people forget.

For example, when a new project comes in, checks like these can be standardized:

• Is Search Console connected?
• Is Analytics set up correctly?
• Is GTM in place?
• Are conversions being measured?
• Is the sitemap correct?
• robots.txt?
• Canonical?
• Core Web Vitals?
• Crawl?
• Backlink profile?
• Keyword visibility?

But a checklist shouldn’t replace thinking.

A checklist reminds us what to look at. We have to decide what it means.

40. What is an SEO specialist’s most important tool?

I think it’s none of the ones on the list. Not Search Console. Not Semrush. Not Screaming Frog. Not Analytics. Not even Excel.

The most important tool is:

Being able to ask the right question.

Because we may have millions of rows of data. But if we don’t know what we’re looking for, we’re just staring at a spreadsheet.

• “Traffic dropped.” Why?
• “CTR dropped.” For which queries?
• “The competitor grew.” With which pages?
• “The site is slow.” On which template?
• “We don’t have many backlinks.” Compared to which competitor, and on which topic?

SEO analysis is, in part, the work of constantly narrowing down the right question.

Wrapping up

Each SEO tool opens a different window.

Search Console shows performance in Google Search. Analytics shows what users did after arriving on the site. Tag Manager helps us manage what we measure. Semrush and similar tools help us understand competitors and the market. Screaming Frog crawls the site technically. Lighthouse gives information about performance and technical quality. And Excel and Google Sheets let us bring together the data from all these sources and do the real analysis.

But none of them alone can say “Your SEO is good” or “Your SEO is bad.”

I think the most important principle in using tools is this:

Know what question you’re asking before you look at the tool’s answer.

And perhaps more importantly:

Work to solve the real problem, not to fix the tool’s score.

Previous: Chapter 29: Reading Google Search Console Correctly · Contents · Next: Chapter 31: How Do We Measure SEO Success?

This chapter was first published in Turkish on X (October 6, 2026).