DEV Community: ליאור דניאל

The free SEO tools I actually keep open (and the ones I quietly closed)

ליאור דניאל — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:55:58 +0000

Ahrefs is great. It's also around a hundred bucks a month at the low end, and if you're a plumber or a one-person shop trying to figure out why your site doesn't rank, that's a hard sell for a tool you'll poke at twice a week. So people go looking for free SEO tools like Ahrefs, find a listicle of forty of them, download six, and give up.

I've used most of them. Most are junk or a five-day trial wearing a "free" costume. But a handful are genuinely good, and a couple I'd keep even if someone handed me a free Ahrefs login. Here's the short list, the honest version.

Google Search Console, and it's not close

If you use one free tool, this is it. Search Console is Google telling you, directly, what people typed to find you, which pages showed up, what position you sat in, and whether anybody clicked. No third-party tool estimates this. Google just hands it to you.

Most people set it up, glance at it once, and never come back. That's the mistake. The gold is the queries where you rank on page five or six with a decent number of impressions. Those are keywords Google already thinks you're sort of relevant for. Nudge one of those pages and you can jump from position 60 to the first page without inventing anything new. Everything else on this list is optional. This one isn't.

Google Keyword Planner for real search numbers

It's built for people buying ads, but you don't have to buy anything to use it. Type in a phrase and it tells you roughly how many people search it a month and how competitive it is. The volume ranges are wide and a little vague, but for figuring out whether "emergency plumber" or "24 hour plumber" is the bigger term in your town, it's plenty. And the numbers come from Google, not a scraper guessing.

Bing Webmaster Tools has a free keyword tool nobody uses

Everyone forgets Bing exists. Its Webmaster Tools are free, and they bundle a keyword research tool that's honestly better than it has any right to be. Because so few people bother, you get clean data without paying. Worth an account just for that.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, the free tier of the paid thing

This is the closest you'll get to real Ahrefs for zero dollars. If you verify that you own your site, Ahrefs lets you run a site audit and see your own backlinks for free. It's limited to sites you control, so you can't spy on competitors with it. But for finding your own broken links and technical problems, it's the strongest free option out there, and it's from the company whose paid tool everyone wants.

Where free stops being free

I'll be straight with you, because the listicles won't. Free tools are great for the checkup and the "what's broken on my own site" work. Where they run dry is competitor research at scale, watching hundreds of keywords over time, and untangling why a competitor with a worse-looking site keeps beating you. That's the stuff the paid tools genuinely earn their money on.

For a lot of small businesses, that ceiling is fine. Run Search Console every week, fix what it points at, and you'll be ahead of most of your competition, who aren't looking at any of this. If you outgrow that, either pay for one real tool or hand it off.

If you'd rather skip the whole learning curve, I keep a running rundown of free SEO tools like Ahrefs and how to actually use them, and doing this for home service businesses is our job. But you don't need us to start. Open Search Console tonight, find the pages sitting on page five, and you'll have a week's worth of real work before you've spent a cent.

Your customers are asking ChatGPT for a plumber. Do you know what it says?

ליאור דניאל — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:57:25 +0000

A year ago this would have sounded paranoid. Now it's just Tuesday. People open ChatGPT, or Google's AI answer at the top of the page, or Perplexity, and they type "who's a good plumber in Denver" or "best HVAC company near me," and the AI just... names a few. No map, no ten blue links. A short list, stated with total confidence.

And here's what keeps me up a little. Most business owners have no idea whether they're on that list. You can check your Google ranking any time you want. But when an AI recommends three companies and leaves you off, nobody tells you. The customer never sees you, never knew you existed, and you never knew you lost them.

This is a different game than Google ranking

For twenty years SEO meant one thing: get your blue link higher on the page. The AI answer breaks that. The AI reads a pile of sources, decides who the good options are, and writes a sentence. You're either in that sentence or you're not.

Being on page one of Google doesn't guarantee you make the AI's shortlist. And weirdly, sometimes a business that ranks lower does get named, because the AI is pulling from reviews, mentions, and how you're described across the web, not just your Google position. It's a related game with different rules.

Why you can't just eyeball it

You could open ChatGPT and ask about your own business, sure. I do it too. But it's a bad way to actually track anything. The answer changes depending on exactly how the question is worded. It changes from one day to the next. It's different in Denver than in the suburb next door. Ask "best plumber" versus "emergency plumber" and you can get two different lists.

So one lucky check where you show up tells you almost nothing. What you actually want to know is the pattern. Across the real questions your customers ask, in your real area, how often do you get named, and are you trending up or quietly disappearing? That's a monitoring problem, not a one-time look.

What actually gets you mentioned

The good news is it's not mystical, and it rhymes with regular SEO. The AI leans on the same signals that make a business look legitimate and well-regarded across the whole web. Lots of recent, genuine reviews. Your business described consistently everywhere it appears. Content on your site that plainly says what you do and where you do it, in language a normal person would use. Mentions of your name out in the wild, on other sites, not just your own.

Do that groundwork and you tend to show up in both places, the old Google results and the new AI answers, because they're reading a lot of the same evidence about whether you're the real deal.

The businesses paying attention now will look prophetic in two years

I keep coming back to how early this still is. Most of your competitors haven't thought about AI search for one second. They don't know if they're recommended or invisible, and they're not checking. Which means there's a real, brief window here for whoever decides to care first.

It's the same shape as local SEO ten years ago. The businesses that took Google Business Profiles seriously before everyone else spent the next decade sitting at the top. This feels like that moment again, just for a new front door.

If you want to actually see this instead of guessing, that's the exact problem we built tooling around: you can track your brand's visibility in AI search across the questions your customers really ask. But even before any tool, go do the manual version tonight. Open ChatGPT, ask it to recommend a business like yours in your town, and see what it says. Whatever comes back, at least now you know which game you're playing.

Roofing SEO: why the busiest roofer in town isn't the best one

ליאור דניאל — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:52:23 +0000

I'll tell you something that took me a few years to actually believe. The roofer who shows up first when someone Googles "roof repair near me" is usually not the best roofer in town. He's just the one who figured out roofing SEO before everyone else did. His crews might be fine. Might be great. But that top spot has almost nothing to do with the quality of his flashing work and almost everything to do with a few boring habits he keeps up that his competitors quit doing after two weeks.

If you own a roofing company and you're tired of buying leads from the shared-lead companies that sell the same homeowner to five of you, this is the way out. It's slower. It's also yours to keep.

People search for roofers differently than you'd think

When a homeowner's roof starts leaking, they don't type your company name. They don't know your company name. They type "roof repair," "roofer near me," "storm damage roof," or the one that means someone's wallet is open right now, "roof replacement cost." Then Google shows them a map with three roofers pinned on it, and most people call one of those three without ever scrolling past.

So the whole game, at least the first half of it, is landing in that map box. Not ranking your website on page one. The map box sits above the regular results, and for roofing it's where the phone calls come from.

Your Google Business Profile does the heavy lifting

That map box is powered by your Google Business Profile, not your site. So it's the first thing to fix.

Set your primary category to "Roofing Contractor," not "Contractor." Be exact. Add your service area by the towns you actually drive to, not a 50-mile radius you'll never honor. Load real photos, your trucks at a job, a tear-off in progress, a finished ridge line, before and afters of storm damage. Not stock photos. Google's gotten weirdly good at telling the difference, and so have homeowners.

Then post to it every couple weeks. Nothing fancy. A recent job, a note about the busy season, whatever. It's not graded. It just needs to look like somebody's home.

Reviews are the tiebreaker, and roofing is brutal on this

Here's where roofers lose. Roofing is a one-time job. You fix a roof, the customer is thrilled, and then you never talk to them again for fifteen years, and they never leave the review. Meanwhile the customer whose job went sideways leaves a one-star the same afternoon.

You have to fight that. Ask for the review the day you finish, while the new roof still smells like tar and they're standing in the driveway happy. Text them the link so it opens right on their phone. And when a storm rolls through and you do twelve roofs in a week, that's twelve review asks, not zero. Freshness counts. Ten reviews from this spring beat forty from three years ago.

Location pages, one real one per town

If you cover eight towns, you want a page for each of them. And I don't mean the same paragraph with the town name swapped in eight times. Google flagged and killed that trick years ago, and it can quietly hurt you now.

A page about roofing in a specific town should read like you actually work there. The kind of storms that hit that area. The age of the housing stock. Whether it's mostly asphalt shingle or you see a lot of tile. HOA rules if that's a thing there. It's tedious to write, which is exactly why your competitors won't, which is exactly why it still moves the needle.

This is a compounding game, not a switch

None of this is dramatic on its own. A filled-out profile. Reviews you actually chase after every job. A real page for each town you serve. Consistent name and phone number across Yelp and Angi and the rest. Boring, every one of them.

But stack them and keep them going for a few months, and Google starts reading your company as the established, legitimate roofer in the area. That's the thing that gets you into the map box and keeps you there. It's less about a clever trick and more about doing the dull stuff after your competitors got bored and stopped.

If you'd rather be on a roof than fussing with any of this, that's the honest reason we exist. We do SEO built for roofing companies so you can go run crews. But whether you hire it out or grind it yourself, go claim and fill out your Google Business Profile this week. It's free, it's the biggest lever you have, and the roofer across town is filling his out right now.