15 years doing this, over 150 staff trained and using this, and over a thousand clients, these are the seven tools that I use. First, Google Search Console, GSC. Super useful data to see if you're getting indexed, crawled, and everything else that Google wants you to see.
Second is, screaming for up.
Really good for site audits, especially if you pair it with Claude. Third is GA4. Super annoying to use, but very useful data.
Fourth is data for SEO.
That's what we use to compile all the data into our AI systems and then create insights. Five is Microsoft Clarity. Great for heat maps, tracking, dead clicks, everything, and it's totally free.
Six is Claude with a custom skill.
We've built a whole ecosystem, but we use a lot of these skills, and we release a lot of them for free. Last is Ahrefs and SEMrush. Ahrefs, we use a lot for backlink data.
SEMrush, we use for keyword research, but they're both largely the same, but super useful tool.