Free Google Tools for SEO: What Each One Is For

There are a lot of free Google tools for SEO, and most lists just throw a dozen names at you. That leaves you wondering which ones you actually need, and what each one is for. The short answer: Search Console shows how Google sees your site, GA4 shows what visitors do, and PageSpeed Insights and the Rich Results Test check specific pages. Everything else depends on your business.

Below I go through each tool by the job it does, what it cannot tell you, and the order I set them up in. I also cover tools that no longer exist.

The Short List: Which Free Google Tools for SEO You Actually Need

If you only have an hour, set up these three first:

• Google Search Console. It is the only place Google tells you directly how your site shows up in search.
• Google Analytics 4 (GA4). It shows what people do once they land on your site.
• PageSpeed Insights. It checks how fast and stable your pages feel for real users.

After that, add tools based on your situation, such as Business Profile for a local business or Merchant Center for a shop.

In my experience, most small sites get most of their SEO value from Search Console alone. I would rather a business owner checks Search Console properly once a month than installs ten tools and never opens them.

Google Search Console: How Google Sees Your Site

Search Console is Google’s free service for checking your site’s presence in Google Search. You don’t need it to appear in results, but without it you are guessing. Google’s own Search Console help page describes it as a tool to monitor, maintain and troubleshoot how your site appears.

What It Is For

• Performance report. Clicks, impressions (how often your pages appeared in results), click-through rate and average position. You can break this down by search query, page, country, device and date. It keeps 16 months of data.
• Page indexing report. Which pages Google has indexed, which it hasn’t, and why.
• URL Inspection. The full story for one URL: is it indexed, when Google last crawled it, and what blocks it. I wrote a full guide on the Search Console URL Inspection tool if you want the details.
• Sitemaps. Submit your XML sitemap (a file that lists the pages you want Google to find) and see if Google can read it.
• Core Web Vitals report. Groups of pages that are slow or unstable for real visitors.
• Manual actions and Security issues. Whether Google has penalised your site by hand or found hacked content.
• Links report. A sample of the sites that link to you and your most-linked pages.

What It Cannot Tell You

Search Console only covers Google Search. It says nothing about what visitors do after the click. It also hides very rare queries for privacy, so the query list never adds up to your total clicks.

The web interface shows up to 1,000 rows in a table. If you have a bigger site, use filters (for example by folder) or connect Search Console to Looker Studio to see more.

When I audit a new site, the first thing I open is the Performance report, set to the last 16 months. A long view shows seasonal patterns and sudden drops that a 28-day view hides.

Google Analytics 4: What Visitors Do on Your Site

GA4 is Google’s free analytics tool. Where Search Console stops at the click, GA4 picks up. It shows how people arrive, which pages they view, and whether they complete the actions you care about, such as a form submission or a purchase.

For SEO, the most useful views are:

• Traffic acquisition, filtered to the “Organic Search” channel, to see visits from search engines over time.
• Landing pages, to see which pages bring in organic visitors and how engaged those visitors are.
• Key events (what GA4 calls the actions you mark as important), to tie organic visits to leads or sales.

One setting I change on every new property is data retention. By default GA4 keeps detailed user-level data for explorations for only 2 months. You can raise it to 14 months under Admin, then Data collection and modification, then Data retention. Standard reports are not affected, but custom explorations are.

If you are starting from zero, my GA4 setup guide walks through the full process.

Google Tag Manager: Add Tracking Without Editing Code

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tool that lets you add and manage tracking code, called tags, from one dashboard. Instead of asking a developer to paste a new script into your site every time, you install GTM once and add tags through its interface.

It doesn’t improve rankings by itself. It makes measurement easier, for example tracking phone clicks and form submissions and sending them to GA4.

I recommend GTM to anyone who runs more than one tracking tool. If you only need GA4 on a simple site, the basic GA4 tag is fine. You can read more about useful setups in my guide to Google Tag Manager for SEO.

Looker Studio: Reports You Can Share

Looker Studio, which used to be called Google Data Studio, is a free reporting tool. It pulls data from Search Console, GA4 and many other sources into dashboards with charts and tables.

It helps when you report to someone who will never log in to Search Console, or when you need more than the 1,000-row limit.

When you connect Search Console, Looker Studio asks you to choose between two tables. “Site Impression” counts data by site, which is better for overall totals. “URL Impression” counts by page, which is better for page-level reports. Picking the wrong one is the most common reason I see Looker Studio numbers that don’t match Search Console.

PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse and CrUX: Speed and Page Experience

• PageSpeed Insights is a free web page where you enter any URL and get a report. It shows two kinds of data.
• Lighthouse is the testing engine behind the lab part of that report. It is also built into Chrome, under DevTools.
• Chrome UX Report (CrUX) is Google’s public data set of real-user experience from Chrome users. It powers the field data part of the report.

Field Data vs Lab Data

This is the part most people get wrong. According to Google’s PageSpeed Insights documentation, field data comes from real visitors over the last 28 days. Lab data comes from a single simulated page load on one device and one network speed.

If the two disagree, I trust the field data for “is this a problem” and use the lab data for “what do I fix”.

The three Core Web Vitals are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how fast the main content loads. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone clicks or taps. Good is 200 milliseconds or less. INP replaced First Input Delay in March 2024.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the layout jumps around while loading. Good is 0.1 or less.

Don’t chase a perfect 100 score in Lighthouse. The score is a lab result, not a ranking factor. I’d rather see a page pass Core Web Vitals in field data with a lab score of 70 than the other way round.

Rich Results Test: Check Your Structured Data

Structured data is code you add to a page to describe its content in a standard format, for example that a page is a recipe, a product or an article. Google can use it to show rich results, such as star ratings or FAQ-style details, in search.

The Rich Results Test checks a URL or a piece of code and tells you which Google rich results the page is eligible for, plus any errors. It only reports on structured data types that Google supports for rich results.

For checking any schema.org markup, even types Google does not use, there is the Schema Markup Validator. It used to be Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, and is now run by schema.org. I use the Rich Results Test first, because it answers the question that matters for SEO: will Google use this?

Keyword Research With Google’s Free Tools

Google doesn’t offer a dedicated free SEO keyword tool, but three free options cover a lot of ground.

Google Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner lives inside Google Ads. It is free to use, but you need a Google Ads account. You can create one without running a campaign. It has two main features: “Discover new keywords” for ideas and “Get search volume and forecasts” for numbers.

The catch is that accounts with little or no ad spend usually see volume ranges, such as 1K–10K, instead of exact numbers. The tool is also built for advertisers, so its “competition” column means competition between advertisers, not how hard a keyword is to rank for in organic results.

Google Trends

Google Trends shows how interest in a search term changes over time and by region. It doesn’t show search volume. Values run from 0 to 100, where 100 is the peak interest for that term in the period and place you chose.

I use it to compare two ways of saying the same thing, and to plan content around seasonal peaks. If interest in your topic always rises in a certain month, publish or update your page a few weeks before.

Google Search Itself

The search results page is a free research tool too. Autocomplete suggestions, the “People also ask” box and related searches at the bottom all show what real people search for. I often find better long-tail ideas there than in Keyword Planner.

Google Business Profile and Merchant Center

Google Business Profile is your free listing on Google Maps and in local results. If you serve customers in a specific area, it is one of the most important things you can set up. You manage your hours, categories, photos and reviews there, and its Performance section shows calls and direction requests. My Google Business Profile setup guide covers it step by step.

Google Merchant Center is where shops upload product data. Products can then appear in free listings on the Shopping tab and other Google surfaces, not only in paid ads. If you sell online and haven’t set this up, you are missing a free source of visibility.

Other Free Google Tools Worth Knowing

• Google Alerts. Sends you an email when Google finds new pages that mention a term. I set one up for the brand name to spot mentions that don’t link back yet.
• Google Search Central. Google’s official SEO documentation and blog. When a blog post and Google’s docs disagree, I trust the docs.

Retired Google Tools You Can Stop Looking For

Many older lists of free Google SEO tools still mention tools that are gone. Here is what happened to them:

• Mobile-Friendly Test. Google retired it, along with the Mobile Usability report in Search Console, in December 2023. Use Lighthouse in Chrome to check mobile pages instead.
• Structured Data Testing Tool. Replaced by the Rich Results Test, with the general version moved to schema.org as the Schema Markup Validator.
• The cache: operator. Google removed the cached page links and the cache: search operator in 2024. URL Inspection in Search Console is the better way to see what Google saw on your own pages.

Free Google SEO Tools Compared

How I Set Up Google’s Free SEO Tools on a New Site

Some tools feed into others, so I follow this order:

1. Verify Search Console. I use a Domain property, verified through a DNS record at your domain provider. It covers every version of the site, including www, non-www, http and https, and all subdomains.
2. Submit the XML sitemap. In Search Console, go to Sitemaps and enter the sitemap URL. Most CMS platforms and SEO plugins create one for you.
3. Install GA4. Add it directly or through Google Tag Manager. Then raise data retention to 14 months and mark your main actions as key events.
4. Link Search Console to GA4. In GA4, go to Admin, then Product links, then Search Console links. You need to be a verified owner of the Search Console property and have Editor access in GA4. After linking, publish the Search Console collection in the GA4 Library so the reports appear in the menu.
5. Set up Business Profile or Merchant Center if you are a local business or a shop.
6. Test your main page templates. Run your homepage, a key service or product page and a blog post through PageSpeed Insights and the Rich Results Test.
7. Build one simple Looker Studio report if someone else needs to see the numbers.

Why the Numbers Don’t Match Between Tools

Search Console clicks and GA4 organic sessions will never match exactly. This is normal, and it is the question I get asked most about these tools.

• Search Console counts clicks on Google Search. GA4 counts sessions from all search engines, including Bing.
• GA4 only records a visit if the tracking code loads and the visitor allows it. Cookie banners and ad blockers reduce GA4 numbers.
• One click can create more or fewer than one session, for example if the visitor leaves the tab open and comes back later.
• The two tools can use different time zones and process data on different schedules.

Watch the trends in each one instead. If both drop at the same time, something real changed.

Common Mistakes I See With These Tools

• Setting up and never looking. Search Console emails you about serious problems, but you still need to check the reports. Google suggests about once a month, or after big changes to your content.
• Verifying only one version of the site. A URL-prefix property for https://www misses data from other versions. A Domain property avoids this.
• Sharing passwords. Every tool here lets you add users with their own Google account and a limited role. Give the least access someone needs and remove people when they leave.
• Fixing Lighthouse warnings before checking field data. If real users already have a good experience, there are usually better uses of your time.

Conclusion

The best free Google tools for SEO are the ones you actually use. Start with Search Console, GA4 and PageSpeed Insights, then add Business Profile, Merchant Center, Trends or Keyword Planner when your business needs them. Each tool answers one kind of question, so knowing which one to open saves a lot of time.

Your next step: verify a Domain property in Search Console today, and give it a few weeks to collect data. Then open the Performance report and look at which pages and queries already bring you clicks. That is where your first SEO wins usually come from.