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What is each of Google's free SEO tools actually for?
Summary
Search Console is the only one that records what actually happened to your site in Google Search. Keyword Planner gives rounded search estimates built for ad planning, and Google Trends gives a 0 to 100 index of relative interest, not a count of searches. PageSpeed Insights and the Rich Results Test check speed and structured data, and neither one promises how Google will treat the page.
Search Console: your own record
Open the Performance report when you want to know which searches showed your pages and how often people clicked. It shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, defaulting to the past three months, and you can group the data by query, page, country, device, search appearance or date. Average position is the average rank of your highest-placed result for each search.
Two quirks trip people up. The newest data is preliminary and can change over the next few hours. And Google warns that a query can appear in your list even though you won't see your site when you run that search yourself.
The URL Inspection tool reports on the version of a page Google last indexed, and a live test checks whether the current version might be indexable. "URL is on Google" means the page is eligible to appear, not that it will. Each property has a daily inspection limit.
Keyword Planner: estimates for advertisers
Keyword Planner lives inside Google Ads, and you need to enter billing information to use even keyword ideas. Its monthly search figures are averaged over 12 months by default, rounded, and shown only for exact-match terms. Very low-volume keywords don't appear at all.
Google Trends: a share, not a count
Trends works from a sample of Google searches. Each data point is divided by total searches for that place and time range, then scaled from 0 to 100. Two regions with the same score can have very different search volumes. Low-volume terms show as 0, and Google adds small random noise that is most visible on low-interest queries. A Trends score of 100 and a Keyword Planner estimate of 1,000 are not in the same unit.
PageSpeed Insights: real users and a lab
PageSpeed Insights puts two kinds of data side by side. The field data comes from Chrome users over the previous 28 days (the CrUX dataset). The lab data comes from Lighthouse running in a simulated environment. A page passes the Core Web Vitals assessment when the 75th percentile of all three metrics is Good: LCP at or under 2.5 seconds, INP at or under 200 milliseconds and CLS at or under 0.1. New or low-traffic pages may fall back to site-wide data or show no field data at all.
Rich Results Test: is the markup readable?
Paste a URL or a code snippet and the test lists the rich result types it found, with errors and suggestions. It reads JSON-LD, RDFa and Microdata. Google says it doesn't guarantee the page will appear the way the preview shows.
None of these tools looks at competitors or tracks a keyword list on a schedule. The guide to Search Console versus paid SEO tools covers where that line falls.
Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.
Sources
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7576553?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7337243?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/3022575?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/trends/answer/4365533?hl=en
- https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v5/about
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7445569?hl=en
Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.