Home / SEO Tools Cost Calculator / Start here
Can a beginner get by on free SEO tools, and when does a paid one start to pay off?
Summary
For a site that's only a few months old, Google's free tools cover almost everything. Search Console shows your clicks, impressions and average position, PageSpeed Insights checks load speed, and Google Trends shows how interest in a topic rises and falls. A paid tool becomes useful once you have a weekly job your own data can't answer, like studying a competitor's site or logging rankings every day.
Search Console
The Performance report gives four numbers for your site in Google Search: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, with the past three months shown by default. Average position is the one people misread. It's an average of where your topmost result appeared across many searches, and Google points out that results depend on the time, place, device and recent history of the person searching. It isn't a fixed rank you can confirm by typing the query yourself. The newest data is preliminary and can change within hours.
PageSpeed Insights
PSI reports two kinds of data. Field data comes from real users over the previous 28 days. Lab data comes from Lighthouse loading the page in a simulated environment, and the familiar score out of 100 belongs to the lab run: 90 or above is rated good, 50 to 89 needs improvement, below 50 is poor. Google notes that good lab data doesn't necessarily mean real users are having a good experience.
Google Trends and Keyword Planner
Trends doesn't show search counts. Each data point is divided by all searches in that place and period, then scaled from 0 to 100, and low-volume terms show up as 0. Keyword Planner does give monthly search estimates, but it lives inside Google Ads. You have to finish setting up an account, billing information included, before it will suggest keywords, and very low-volume terms don't appear at all.
Changes take weeks to show
Google's SEO Starter Guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months, and it suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether a change helped. A paid tool doesn't speed any of that up. It measures the same delay from the outside.
The point where paid data comes in
Search Console only covers your own site. To see what a competitor ranks for, or who links to them, you need a vendor's data. Ahrefs Starter is listed at $29 a month. Tracking a fixed set of keywords over time puts you in the next band up: Ahrefs Lite at $129 a month updates 750 keywords once a week, and Semrush's SEO plan at $139 a month updates 500 keywords daily.
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://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v5/about
- https://support.google.com/trends/answer/4365533?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7337243?hl=en
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
- https://ahrefs.com/pricing
- https://www.semrush.com/pricing/seo-ai-search/
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.