The SEO Tools We Pay For, What They Cost, and Which Ones You Could Run Yourself

If you are weighing up doing your own SEO, the first thing you want to know is what software you would have to buy.

Here is the full list of what we run for our clients, what each one costs, and what job it does.

What SEO tools does a trades business need?

A trades business needs three things:

• something to find the terms people search locally

• see what the site already shows up for

• a way to track positions over time.

Some of those jobs are covered by free Google tools. Paid keyword tools cover the rest.

The tools we pay for every month

• Semrush for keyword research, rank tracking, competitor and backlink analysis

• Semrush Local for directory listings and map pack rank tracking

• Wix Studio where every client site gets built

• Google Search Console to track current traffic

• Google Business Profile to show up for local searches

• AI tools for writing content (with human input & editing)

Semrush: keyword data, rank tracking and competitor checks

Semrush is the one paid tool we would struggle without. It does three separate jobs for us, and it is worth splitting them out because you may only need one.

Keyword research

We use the Keyword Magic Tool to find local terms with low difficulty, ideally under 15 KD, and a sensible ratio of difficulty to volume.

The number Semrush gives you is not a forecast. In our experience it understates real volume by 2-3x, so we read it directionally. Higher number means more demand, and that is as far as we take it.

The more useful part is breaking a big term into smaller ones. A landscaper's homepage targets landscaping plus their town. The service pages take the components underneath it: decking, patios, fencing, turfing. One page trying to cover all four ranks for none of them.

Position tracking

Every client has a Semrush project tracking the target keyword for each page, plus the target keyword for every blog post.

This matters more than it sounds for local work. Search Console reports an average position that gets badly distorted when pages show up for semi-related terms, so a search you are winning can look like it is sitting at position 14. Semrush position tracking gives us a clearer picture of the site's rankings.

Backlink and competitor checks

The Backlink Gap report shows which sites a competitor has links from that a client does not. Semrush can also be used to identify (and avoid) link farms via the Network Graph.

What Semrush costs

Semrush publishes three classic plans: Pro at $139.95 a month, Guru at $249.95, and Business at $499.95, with roughly 17% off for annual billing. You can see the current figures on Semrush's pricing page. Prices are billed in US dollars, and extra user seats cost more on top of the headline number.

Semrush Local is priced separately and per location, starting at $30 a month, with the directory listing distribution sitting on the higher tier. That is the part we use to push a client's name, address and phone number out to dozens of directories consistently, which builds a base layer of authority and stops the map pack seeing three different phone numbers for the same firm.

Morningscore: what we would look at on a smaller budget

Morningscore is a Danish tool that has been going since 2018. It starts at $69 a month for 100 tracked keywords across three websites, with a 14-day trial that does not ask for a card. The step up is $99 a month for 500 keywords and ten sites.

It covers the core jobs a local business needs:

• Keyword research and search volume

• Daily rank tracking, including a local rank tracker

• A 0 to 100 site health score with the issues listed in priority order

• Backlink profile, plus new and lost links

• Competitor comparison on keywords and links

• Tracking for whether you turn up in ChatGPT answers and Google's AI Overviews

Asking AI for business recommendations is quickly becoming very popular, and those assistants search the web the same way a person does. Knowing whether your name comes up is becoming part of the job.

Morningscore say as much themselves: they do not offer the same number of tools as Semrush or Ahrefs, they cover the core functions with a simpler interface.

The free Google tools that do most of the work

Google Search Console

If you only set up one thing, set up this. It tells you which searches your site already appears for, which pages Google has indexed, and which it has quietly refused to index.

You can see terms that are climbing the search results. Impressions always arrive before clicks, so a page with increasing impressions is working even when the enquiries have not started.

Also, you can see terms you never targeted. A landscaper we work with had a patios page getting nothing for the term we built it around, but a pile of impressions for a "paving contractor" phrase we hadn't touched. We changed the meta title, description and H1, pointed a couple of internal links at it, and impressions for the new term went up around 20x within a few weeks.

Google Business Profile

Free, and for most trades the fastest win available if it's not done properly already.

Primary category, secondary categories, every service listed including custom ones, hours set to open 24h, links, photos, and a phone number that matches the website exactly.

We set this up once at the start of a campaign and then largely leave it. The detail of how we do it is in our guide to what moves a trades business up the map pack.

Wix Studio: where the sites get built

Every client site we build runs on Wix Studio. We use it because it's quick to build in, the sitemap stays current on its own and feeds straight into Search Console, and the whole thing can be handed over cleanly when the client owns it.

Where AI fits in

We use AI for research and writing content. It is good at gathering what people are asking about a trade and pulling the questions into a sensible order.

It is not good at knowing your trade. We are not going to pretend we understand resin bound aggregate better than the person laying it, and a page that reads like software wrote it gets bounced by readers, which does the ranking no favours at all. Every page and post gets rewritten and checked by one of us before it goes live.

The part no tool covers

Software tells you what to do. It does not write the service page, optimise your conversion rate, build the links, tell you if a backlink is worth the money, sort out the duplicate Google profile holding your rankings down, or notice that your homepage is targeting a term nobody searches. It also doesn't give you more time in the day.

We pay our accountant because he knows what he's doing and, although we could stumble through it ourselves, I'd rather pay for peace of mind that it's being done properly, and spend my work time doing other things. For the same reason, the websites showing up on Google and in AI responses are ones developed and optimised by agencies, not business owners' DIY.