DEV Community: Mustafa Aydemir

What Should You Write Next? Compare These 7 Keyword Research Tools

Mustafa Aydemir — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 06:10:27 +0000

A keyword tool can give you 500 ideas and still leave you with the same question: what should you actually write?

I'd choose the tool around the decision that's blocking you. You might need to check demand, understand the kind of page people want, or find the questions a useful article should answer. Those are different jobs.

Here are seven keyword research tools compared on that basis. I'm a co-founder of Screpy, which is included. This is based on official product information checked on October 24, 2026, not a hands-on accuracy test. The images are the companies' own homepage social graphics, where available.

Choose the decision before the tool

These tools overlap, but they aren't interchangeable.

Tool	The decision it helps with	The boundary to remember
Screpy	Which ideas fit my market and existing website?	Keyword Research requires an eligible plan
Google Keyword Planner	Is there search demand around this subject?	Advertising competition isn't organic SEO difficulty
Ahrefs Keywords Explorer	Should these keywords belong to one topic or separate pages?	Metrics and topic suggestions still need a SERP check
Semrush	Which part of a broad keyword list should I investigate?	Free report allowances are shared across tools
KWFinder	Which terms matter in this particular market?	The free version returns a small sample
AlsoAsked	Which follow-up questions should the page answer?	A question map isn't a search-volume report
Google Trends	Is interest seasonal, growing or briefly spiking?	Its index measures relative interest

You don't need seven subscriptions. Start with the missing piece of evidence, then use another tool only when it answers a different question.

1. Screpy: research alongside your website data

Screpy Keyword Research starts with a seed topic, country and language. It brings together volume, organic difficulty, intent, CPC and trend signals. I'd use that combination to narrow a topic before deciding on the page format.

There's a useful existing-content check too: with Search Console connected, the Pages action can show your site's pages for the exact query. That's a reason to consider improving a page before creating another one. Missing rows don't prove there's no demand.

The plan requirement matters. Pro excludes Keyword Research. Max includes 50 successful research requests per day across the billing account, and pagination also consumes requests. Its regular annual price is $456, paid upfront. Welcome offers can change the checkout total; the advertised discount continues while the subscription stays active. Trials become paid subscriptions unless cancelled before they end.

Screpy also combines eligible research with audits and tracking. That can be useful if you need those jobs in one subscription. Keyword Research records and actions aren't currently exposed through Screpy MCP, so this particular workflow still uses the dashboard.

2. Google Keyword Planner: establish demand, not SEO difficulty

Keyword Planner can generate ideas from words or a website and provide monthly search estimates. It's a useful starting point when you need language closer to what people search for, rather than what your product team calls a feature.

The setup isn't completely frictionless. Google's current instructions require completing a Google Ads account setup, including billing information, to access basic keyword suggestions. The tool itself has no separate subscription fee; advertising spend is a different decision.

Keep its advertising context in mind. Competition and bid information help advertisers. They don't tell you how hard an article will be to rank organically.

I'd use it to build a demand shortlist, then inspect the actual search results before committing to an article. A phrase with commercial interest might call for a product page rather than another blog post.

3. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer: decide whether a topic needs its own page

Keywords Explorer is worth considering when the problem is interpreting a large list. Parent Topic can help you investigate whether a phrase belongs under a broader topic instead of becoming its own article.

Traffic Potential is another useful distinction from individual keyword volume: it looks at the estimated traffic of the top-ranking page. Treat that as context about a page's reach, not a forecast for your website.

Ahrefs also explains that its Keyword Difficulty calculation is based on backlinks to top-ranking pages. That makes it one input, rather than a complete assessment of your chances.

The Lite plan is listed at $129 per month. Advanced Keywords Explorer capabilities, including keyword clusters and search-intent features, vary by tier. Check the specific feature you want before buying the entry plan.

I'd shortlist it for recurring research where understanding topic overlap is more valuable than simply collecting more suggestions.

4. Semrush: turn a broad seed into a focused shortlist

Semrush's keyword tool, powered by Keyword Magic Tool, combines related suggestions with volume, difficulty, intent and CPC. That makes it a candidate when you already have a broad subject and need to decide which angle deserves a closer look.

Intent is especially useful for rejecting the wrong article format. A buying query and a troubleshooting query can share a product name while requiring completely different pages. Read the current results alongside the label.

The free account lists ten reports per day across its vital tools. That's a shared allowance, not ten reports for every tool. Full research access and limits depend on the paid plan.

I'd evaluate it when keyword research is recurring work alongside competitor analysis. For an occasional content idea, try the limited access before paying for a broader subscription. Check monthly versus annual billing in the currency shown to you.

5. KWFinder: research a narrow market without a huge workflow

KWFinder by Mangools supports seed-keyword and domain research, with location-specific keyword analysis. I'd consider it for focused questions such as which wording suits a service in a particular market.

Its free allowance is concrete: five lookups per 24 hours, with 15 related keywords and five competitor keywords per lookup. That's enough to sample the workflow, but it isn't a complete keyword universe. A short result list doesn't mean you've exhausted the subject.

The paid product is part of the wider Mangools toolkit. Compare the lookup allowance you need before upgrading, rather than assuming the free sample represents the full plan.

For a writer investigating one narrow topic at a time, this is a reasonable shortlist option. Keep location settings consistent when comparing candidates.

6. AlsoAsked: find the follow-up questions

AlsoAsked organizes Google's People Also Ask questions and their relationships. It helps with a different stage of research: understanding what readers may need explained once you've chosen the subject.

I'd use a question map to find missing explanations, not turn every branch into another H2. Several questions may need one clear answer. Others may belong on a separate page or be irrelevant to your audience.

The pricing page offers limited free monthly search credits for non-registered users and credit-based paid plans. Basic lists 100 credits per month. Check search depth, exports and billing options before choosing a tier.

The limitation is just as useful as the feature: appearing in a question map doesn't establish monthly search volume or the value of writing a standalone article.

7. Google Trends: decide when the topic belongs on your calendar

Google Trends is a useful companion when timing is the question. You can investigate whether interest around a subject repeats seasonally or mainly reflects a short-lived event, without buying another SEO subscription.

Be careful with the chart. Google's data explanation says results are normalized for the selected time and location, then scaled from zero to 100. A score of 100 isn't 100 searches, and two regions with the same score don't necessarily have equal search volume.

I'd use it to question the publishing calendar, not to estimate how many visitors a page will receive. Keep the geography, period and query type consistent when comparing subjects. A sudden spike deserves investigation before it becomes your entire content strategy.

Turn the shortlist into one publishable idea

Here's a hypothetical example, with no measured keyword data: you're building a backup product for small development teams. Your initial ideas include “database backup tools,” “how to restore a database backup” and “database backup checklist.”

Those phrases point toward different jobs: choosing software, completing a recovery task and checking a process. I'd investigate the audience's job before picking whichever phrase has the largest volume.

Use a demand tool to check the wording in your target market. Review the current results to see the page types they favor. Use question research for missing explanations and Trends when timing could change the decision. Check your existing content before adding another URL.

Then write a small brief:

Reader: the person responsible for backups in a small team.
Job: perform a restore safely, rather than shop for software.
Page: a restore walkthrough, if the results and audience research support it.
Evidence: steps, prerequisites and validation you can actually demonstrate.
Existing content: update a matching walkthrough instead of publishing a near-duplicate.

That brief gives you something to write. Another thousand keyword suggestions might not.

If you're keeping costs down, start with one tool for demand and one for the missing context. Pay for a larger research workflow when the limits interrupt useful work, not just because the dashboard has more numbers.

Small Agency, Small Budget: Which of These 5 SEO Platforms Fits?

Mustafa Aydemir — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 06:12:59 +0000

A cheap SEO subscription gets expensive when your second teammate needs access or your fourth client pushes you into another plan.

For a small agency, I'd compare the number of client sites, tracked keywords and people you need to support before comparing feature lists. These five SEO platforms make different tradeoffs there.

Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Screpy, which is included below. This is a comparison of official product information checked on October 22, 2026, rather than a hands-on accuracy benchmark. The images are each company's homepage social preview graphics.

Compare the client capacity, not just the price

Here's the starting point. These are different billing options, so the first column of prices is deliberately explicit about the commitment.

Platform and plan	Price checked	Client capacity to notice	Tracking limit to notice
Screpy Pro	$192 per year, paid upfront	5 projects, 5 team seats	100 keywords per project
SE Ranking Core	$129 per month on monthly billing	10 projects, 1 manager seat	2,000 keywords, daily tracking
Seobility Premium	€59.90 per month, plus VAT	3 projects	300 keywords across projects
Mangools Basic	$30.50 per month on the monthly card	Unlimited domains for tracking; no extra seats available	200 keywords, weekly updates
SpyFu Basic	$39 per month on monthly billing	1 Live Site tracking project, 1 user	5,000 weekly tracked keywords

Official plan details: Screpy, SE Ranking, Seobility, Mangools, and SpyFu.

A keyword allowance and a project allowance solve different problems. Plenty of keywords won't help if the plan only supports one monitored client site. Likewise, a per-project allowance cannot be treated as one big pool for your busiest client.

Prices here aren't a currency-converted ranking. Compare the actual invoice, tax, renewal terms and required extras before choosing annual billing.

1. Screpy: audits and rankings for a small client roster

Screpy is worth considering when your recurring work is checking client sites, reviewing technical issues and watching rankings. Pro allows 5,000 crawl pages per project, alongside the five projects and five team seats in the table.

The boundary matters: Pro does not include AI Visibility, keyword research or backlink analysis. Don't buy that tier expecting the entire platform's feature catalog. Its regular annual price works out to $16 per month for budgeting, but the $192 is paid upfront. Welcome offers can differ; check the final total and ongoing discount conditions. Trials convert to paid subscriptions unless cancelled before they end.

The report builder creates PDFs on demand from project data. Branding controls and available sections depend on your plan. Automatic delivery schedules for those templates aren't included in that workflow.

For a developer working with an assistant, Screpy MCP can bring supported project data into the conversation. It doesn't unlock excluded features or automatically fix client websites.

I'd shortlist it for a small roster with modest tracking needs. A client needing 120 tracked keywords already exceeds Pro's 100-per-project allowance, even if your other projects barely use theirs.

2. SE Ranking: broader delivery with a higher starting bill

SE Ranking Core gives a growing client roster more room: ten projects and a larger tracking allowance. But its single manager seat is a real constraint for two people doing the work.

The pricing page lists Core at $103.20 per month with annual billing, compared with $129 on monthly billing.

Agency features also need their own budget. The Agency Pack is an additional $69 per month and is available with annual billing only. It adds features including white-label reporting and unlimited scheduled reporting. Additional manager access is another item to check.

I'd price the base plan, working teammates and required reporting features together before judging whether it fits the retainer.

3. Seobility: crawl capacity with a clear project ceiling

Seobility Premium is an option for an agency whose workload centers on site audits. Its plan comparison allows 25,000 pages per crawl per project, but only three projects and 300 tracked keywords across them.

An extra Premium project costs €14.90 per month and adds no keywords. If the fourth client also pushes you over the tracking allowance, adding a project alone won't solve both problems.

For team access, Professional is the clearer tier to evaluate: €99.90 per month, seven projects, 700 tracked keywords and up to three member accounts. Prices are plus VAT.

Choose the tier around client count and staff access, then check crawl capacity.

4. Mangools: research when weekly tracking is enough

Mangools makes more sense when keyword and competitor research drive the work. KWFinder supports keyword and domain searches, including location-specific research. The wider toolkit includes SERP analysis, backlink research and rank tracking.

On the current pricing card, Basic tracks 200 keywords across unlimited domains, with weekly ranking updates. Daily updates are listed on Agency. If you promise daily ranking checks to clients, Basic doesn't match that promise.

Basic also lists no extra seats available. Premium shows $40.50 per month on monthly billing, 700 tracked keywords and three extra seats available. Check the seat charges before assuming they're included in the subscription price.

I'd shortlist Mangools for a research-focused solo operator who can work with weekly updates. Treat its site metrics overview separately from a full technical website crawler when planning the rest of your workflow. Confirm any bundle discount and renewal amount at checkout.

5. SpyFu: competitor research before multi-client monitoring

SpyFu is a candidate when competitive research is central to your service. Basic lists more than ten years of historical data, with limits on search results and exports.

Its Basic plan is $39 per month, or $29 per month on annual billing. The 5,000 weekly tracked keywords look generous, but the same plan lists one Live Site tracking project and one user.

Researching prospects and maintaining client projects are different jobs. The keyword allowance doesn't remove the project ceiling.

Basic also lists 50,000 site audit crawl pages per month and ten automated reports. Those features don't remove the project and user constraints.

Be careful with higher-tier introductory pricing too: Pro + AI's $59 first month becomes $119 per month afterward.

What fits a three-client agency?

Take a hypothetical agency with three client sites, two people doing SEO and 80 tracked terms per client. Assume one tracking configuration per term. That's 240 tracked terms, before adding more locations or devices.

For that workload:

Screpy Pro has enough project, seat and per-project keyword capacity. Its fit depends on whether audits and rankings cover the job; research-heavy or AI visibility work needs a different feature budget.
SE Ranking Core has room for the sites and keywords, but the second working manager needs an access arrangement beyond the included seat. Add the Agency Pack only if you need its delivery features.
Seobility Premium fits the three-site, 240-term allocation. Check member access; Professional explicitly supports up to three member accounts. A fourth client with another 80 terms would exceed both Premium's project count and its 300-keyword allowance.
Mangools Basic falls short of 240 terms, and its seat restriction matters for the second teammate. Compare Premium's complete seat cost if weekly tracking suits the service.
SpyFu Basic requires a closer look at multi-client project support before that keyword allowance becomes useful for this setup.

That is the comparison I'd make before buying SEO software for a small agency: put one real client's workload into the plan, then add the next client and the next teammate. The first limit you hit tells you more than the longest feature list.

After the Launch: 7 Tools to Keep an Eye on Your Website

Mustafa Aydemir — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 06:31:11 +0000

Your website can return a perfectly healthy HTTP response while the signup form is broken. It can load for you while a recent release makes it painfully slow on someone else’s phone.

After the launch, the useful question is what you would want to know before the next support message arrives.

These seven website monitoring tools cover different failures: downtime, application errors, broken user flows, slower pages, SEO regressions and unexpected content changes. You can start with the gap that matters most instead of installing everything at once.

I’m a co-founder of Screpy, one of the tools below. This is a comparison of official features, pricing and limits checked on October 21, 2026, not a hands-on benchmark of all seven products.

Choose website monitoring tools by the failure you need to catch

These are different kinds of monitoring, with some overlap. A free uptime check and a paid performance platform do not answer the same question.

Tool	The question it helps answer	Starting option	Main constraint
UptimeRobot	Is this public URL responding?	Free: 50 monitors, five-minute checks	Checks are periodic, not continuous
Sentry	What errors is the application reporting?	Free Developer plan for one user	Requires application integration and quota management
Checkly	Can an automated browser complete this flow?	Hobby: 1,000 browser runs/month	Frequency and run allowance are separate limits
DebugBear	Did page performance get worse?	14-day trial; Startup is $1,188/year	Synthetic tests and real-user page views have quotas
Screpy	What changed in technical SEO and tracked visibility?	Pro regular price: $192/year	Features and monitoring behavior depend on eligibility and limits
Google Search Console	Is Google discovering and showing my pages?	Free	Search reporting is not an immediate outage alert
Visualping	Has important visible content changed?	Free: five pages, 150 checks/month	Page allowance does not remove the check quota

Annual totals above are paid for the year. The individual sections explain the limits worth checking before choosing a plan.

1. UptimeRobot: know when your public URL stops responding

UptimeRobot is a practical starting point when your immediate concern is whether an important public URL is reachable.

Its free plan includes 50 monitors with a five-minute monitoring interval. Paid plans offer shorter intervals; the entry Solo configuration includes ten monitors and 60-second checks. Check the selected monitor tier and billing cycle before comparing paid totals.

For a small project, start with a meaningful visitor-facing page rather than an endpoint that stays healthy while the rest of the site fails. Decide where the notification should arrive and who will respond.

Remember what a periodic check can miss. If a brief outage begins and ends between checks, your recorded history may not capture it. A successful HTTP response also does not prove that a visitor can log in or submit a form.

Choose UptimeRobot for straightforward external availability monitoring. If the failure you care about happens after someone clicks a button, add a check that actually exercises that behavior.

2. Sentry: see application errors after release

Sentry helps with a different problem: the application is reachable, but something inside it is failing.

For browser JavaScript, its SDK setup captures errors such as uncaught exceptions and unhandled promise rejections once installed and configured. Adding your homepage URL to an uptime service will not provide that application context.

Imagine a release that breaks the code handling a signup response. The HTML can still load successfully. Error reporting can give you evidence to investigate the failure, provided that the affected code is instrumented and the event is captured.

The Developer plan is free for one user. Team is listed at $26 per month when billed annually with the default prepaid data configuration. Included quotas and additional usage matter; that figure is not a promise of unlimited telemetry or a flat final bill.

Choose Sentry when you need application error evidence after deployment. It complements an external availability check: captured errors help investigate what ran, while a synthetic browser check can deliberately attempt a flow even when no real visitor is using it.

3. Checkly: monitor a critical user flow

Checkly is useful when “the page responded” is too weak a definition of working. It supports Playwright browser checks and API monitoring, with checks maintained as code.

A useful first flow might open the login page, sign in with a dedicated test account and confirm that the expected screen appears. An assertion about the result is what makes the check more informative than merely loading the page.

The Hobby plan, marketed for personal projects and learning, includes 1,000 browser runs and 10,000 API runs per month. Starter is listed at $24 per month with annual billing, including 3,000 browser runs and 25,000 API runs.

Work out the schedule before choosing a plan. As a simple illustration, one browser execution every five minutes for 30 days is 8,640 executions at one location. That exceeds both of those included browser allowances. Additional locations, retries and how your checks are organized can change usage further.

Choose Checkly when a specific journey must keep working and someone will maintain its script. Use test data and a flow designed to avoid creating real purchases or repeatedly emailing customers.

4. DebugBear: notice when a release makes pages slower

DebugBear focuses on page performance. It combines scheduled browser tests, performance diagnostics and real-user monitoring, so you can investigate a slowdown rather than just note that a URL is reachable.

Its synthetic monitoring runs page-load tests in a controlled environment and provides request waterfalls and Lighthouse reports. That is useful when a release adds a heavy image or another script to a shared template.

Real-user monitoring answers a separate question: what performance did actual visitors experience? That requires collecting visitor measurements. A lab result by itself does not establish that every real visitor had the same experience.

The pricing page lists a 14-day trial without a credit card. With yearly billing selected, the Startup plan is $99 per month, billed as $1,188 per year. It includes 4,000 synthetic tests and 100,000 real-user page views per month.

Choose it when performance investigation is worth dedicated tooling. Budget for the pages, device types, locations and test frequency you need, rather than assuming “one website” means one test.

5. Screpy: keep technical SEO maintenance in view

Screpy fits the ongoing SEO side of website maintenance: audits, tracked search rankings and related website signals in one workspace.

After changing navigation or templates, use its website audit to investigate broken links, unexpected redirects or repeated metadata problems. Compare completed crawls with similar settings so that discovering more URLs is not automatically mistaken for a new regression.

The regular Pro annual price is $192, paid upfront. Pro includes five projects, 5,000 crawl pages and 100 tracked keywords per project. Its listed uptime interval is ten minutes. AI Visibility and keyword research are not included in Pro.

There is also a 72-hour welcome offer whose displayed discount should be confirmed at checkout. The offer says the discount continues on renewals while the subscription stays active. The seven-day trial converts to a paid subscription unless cancelled before it ends, and paid subscriptions renew unless cancelled.

The uptime documentation is worth reading if that feature influences your choice. Each project checks one configured public URL on an eligible active paid plan. Checks slow after project-team inactivity and stop after 30 inactive days. Outage emails have qualifying conditions and daily limits; this is not a substitute for a dedicated on-call alerting setup.

A connected AI assistant can also read saved uptime context through Screpy’s MCP. That request does not run a fresh availability check, bypass plan eligibility or repair the website. Check the result’s timestamp.

Choose Screpy when you want SEO maintenance and tracking together. Pair it with application error reporting or a maintained browser journey when those are the failures you need to catch.

6. Google Search Console: watch for search visibility changes

Google Search Console belongs in this list because a website can remain online while important pages become harder to discover in Google.

It provides search queries, clicks, impressions and indexing information for a property you own or can access. Google also sends alerts for identified site issues.

After a release that changes URLs or page templates, inspect an important landing page and review the relevant indexing reports. When investigating a visibility change, compare the affected pages with what you intended to publish. A change in clicks alone does not tell you what caused it.

Use this as an ongoing review of search discovery and indexing. Keep it separate from immediate runtime monitoring: it is not the tool to rely on for a minute-by-minute login failure alert.

Choose Search Console even if you already pay for another platform. Its direct view of Google’s reported search activity serves a different purpose from a crawler’s latest snapshot.

7. Visualping: spot unexpected changes on key pages

Visualping monitors visual, text and element changes. It is useful when the page still responds but something important looks different or disappears.

Think of a pricing page where a deployment unexpectedly removes a plan, or a landing page where the main call to action changes. Select the relevant area and decide which changes deserve attention. A detected difference still needs investigation; rotating banners and other expected content can change too.

The free plan includes five pages and 150 checks per month, with a fastest interval of 60 minutes. Those are separate limits. As an illustration, checking one page every hour for 30 days would require 720 checks, already above the free monthly allowance.

Personal 1K is listed at $14 with monthly billing, or $120 per year with annual billing, for 1,000 monthly checks and ten pages. Higher frequency and more pages can quickly change the budget.

Choose Visualping for a small set of important content changes. A comparison of page content does not prove that the button still completes a signup or payment flow; use a functional check for that job.

Start with one failure, one owner and one next step

Write down the failure that would hurt most tomorrow. If it is an unreachable site, begin with an external availability check. If it is a broken signup, add an automated journey and application error reporting. If it is a slow landing page, collect performance evidence for that page.

Then decide who receives the signal and what they should inspect. An alert that nobody owns adds noise. A dashboard nobody opens does not create a maintenance routine.

For example, imagine an uptime check is green while the login journey fails. Start with the failed step and available error evidence instead of assuming the server is down. If only a search report changes, investigate the affected URLs and recent changes rather than treating it as the same incident.

For every tool you add, keep three things clear: what it checks, how fresh the evidence is, and what remains outside its coverage. Review run quotas when changing schedules, and confirm that the notification reaches a responsible person.

You can build a useful post-launch monitoring setup with a few well-chosen checks. Add the next tool when you can name the failure it will help you investigate.

5 Affordable SEO Tools for Your First Online Store

Mustafa Aydemir — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 06:12:30 +0000

Your first online store needs a way to check whether Google can find your products, whether your product information is correct, and whether the storefront works well on a phone. You can start most of that work for free.

The expensive mistake is buying a large SEO subscription before you know which of those jobs needs help.

These five affordable SEO tools cover different parts of running a small store. You do not need five subscriptions, and some of the tools work best together.

I’m a co-founder of Screpy, which is included below. This comparison uses official documentation and pricing, checked on October 20, 2026. It is not a hands-on performance benchmark.

Compare the tools by the job your store needs

A product missing from Google, a rejected product listing, and a slow product page require different checks. Pick the row that matches your problem.

Tool	Most useful for	Starting cost	Important boundary
Google Search Console	Search performance and product-page indexing	Free	Needs access to your website’s property
Google Merchant Center	Product data and eligible free listings	Free; advertising is separate	Listing eligibility does not guarantee exposure
Screaming Frog SEO Spider	Crawling your catalog and finding technical patterns	Free up to 500 URLs per crawl	JavaScript rendering requires the paid license
Screpy	Keeping audits and rank tracking in one workspace	Pro: regular $192/year, billed upfront	Plan limits apply; AI Visibility is not in Pro
PageSpeed Insights	Investigating mobile product-page performance	Free	A new store may have no real-user data

The prices below are for the stated billing terms. An annual price divided by twelve is a budgeting equivalent, not a monthly subscription.

1. Google Search Console: check whether Google finds your products

Google Search Console is the first tool I would set up. It shows queries, impressions and clicks for your site, alongside information about crawling and indexing. You need to verify ownership or receive access to the relevant property.

For a new store, start with one product you actually want customers to find. Inspect its URL rather than searching your brand name and assuming the whole catalog is fine.

Check the reported indexing status and, when available, the Google-selected canonical. That is the URL Google treats as the main version. If the selected URL is unexpected, investigate the product page, its links and its canonical settings before changing anything across the store.

One important distinction: the indexed report describes Google’s recorded version. A live test checks the current page’s potential indexability. It does not prove that the page has been indexed or predict which canonical Google will select. Google explains this in its URL Inspection documentation.

Use Search Console for evidence about your own search visibility. If you need a whole-catalog inventory of broken links or repeated metadata, a crawler is the more direct tool.

2. Google Merchant Center: manage free product listings

Google Merchant Center deserves a place in a store’s SEO toolkit because it addresses product discovery directly. The service is free, and eligible products can appear in free listings across Google. Paid advertising is a separate choice.

Search Console helps you investigate a page in Google’s index. Merchant Center helps you manage the product information supplied for listings. For a store selling physical products, that is a useful distinction.

Suppose you reduce a lamp from $40 to $32. The product page displays $32, but your submitted product data still says $40. Opening a keyword report will not resolve that mismatch. Compare the submitted data with the live page, then correct the source that is out of date.

Google’s free listings requirements cover product attributes, policies and shipping requirements that vary by market. Check Products → Needs attention for reported issues. Keep price and availability consistent with your store.

Eligibility is the limit to remember: enabling free listings does not guarantee your products will appear. You still need suitable products, compliant information and accurate landing pages.

3. Screaming Frog: audit the catalog before it grows

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler. Use it to investigate broken links, redirects, duplicate metadata and canonical patterns across your store.

The free version crawls up to 500 URLs per crawl. That can be enough for a small catalog, but count URLs rather than products.

Here is an illustrative example. Imagine a store with 80 products. If each exposes a base URL plus four separately linked variant URLs, that is already 400 product-related URLs. Another 30 category and content pages bring it to 430. If the crawler discovers 100 additional filter URLs, the total becomes 530.

Those numbers describe one possible configuration, not a typical-store benchmark. Your platform might expose far fewer variant URLs. The useful check is what the crawler actually discovers and whether the crawl reaches its cap.

Do not remove useful variants just to fit a free plan. Investigate why alternate URLs exist and which pages should serve customers and search engines.

The paid license is £199 per year. JavaScript rendering requires the paid version, which matters if important product content depends on client-side rendering. Paid crawl capacity also remains subject to your computer’s resources.

Choose this when you want detailed, deliberate catalog investigations and are comfortable working with a desktop application.

4. Screpy: keep store SEO checks in one workspace

Screpy is worth considering when you want audits and rank tracking together instead of managing each check separately.

Its website audit organizes pages, links and images so you can investigate repeated problems. For a store, a useful question might be whether several broken product links come from one category template. Fixing the shared cause is more manageable than treating every affected URL as an unrelated task. Run a comparable crawl afterward to check the change.

The regular Pro annual price is $192, paid upfront, equivalent to $16 per month when budgeting. That annual plan includes five projects, up to 5,000 crawl pages per project and 100 tracked keywords per project. AI Visibility and keyword research are not included in Pro; check higher-plan eligibility if you need them.

The pricing page also offers a conditional 72-hour welcome discount. Confirm your displayed discount and final total at checkout. The offer says the discount continues on renewals while the subscription remains active. The seven-day trial converts to a paid subscription unless you cancel before it ends; paid subscriptions also renew unless cancelled.

Compared with a desktop crawler, the reason to choose Screpy is the combined workspace and ongoing tracking. It does not replace Merchant Center’s product-data requirements or apply website fixes for you.

5. PageSpeed Insights: check the mobile product page

PageSpeed Insights is a free place to investigate how a public product or category page loads on mobile and desktop.

Test a representative product page, not just the homepage. Then check a category page with several product images. They have different layouts and can expose different problems.

For example, if a product image takes a long time to appear, inspect the relevant diagnostic and the image being loaded before installing another optimization app. If a page shifts while it loads, investigate which elements move. Treat the report as a lead to investigate, not an instruction to change every flagged item blindly.

Google separates lab and real-user data. Lighthouse provides a controlled diagnostic run. Available field data describes real experiences over the preceding 28 days.

A new store may not have enough traffic for page-level field data. The report can show origin-level data covering the wider site, or no real-user data at all. Read that scope before describing a result as “this product page passed.”

Use it after a theme, image or app change to investigate a specific public-page regression. One score is not evidence that every shopper, device or page now has a good experience.

Which tools should you start with?

For a first store on a tight budget, I would start with Search Console, check Merchant Center eligibility, and run PageSpeed Insights on representative public pages. Add a free Screaming Frog crawl if its limits fit your storefront.

That gives you several useful checks without adding a paid SEO subscription. Store hosting, platform fees and any advertising are separate costs.

Pay for a crawler when you need its paid capabilities or more crawl capacity. Consider Screpy when keeping audits and tracking together would make recurring work easier. Those purchases solve different needs, even though their auditing features overlap.

Before spending money, write down one question: “Which product URLs need attention, and what will I do with the answer?”

If the answer is fixing stale product data, work on the data source. If it is a broken template affecting many products, fix the template and verify the affected URLs. Choose affordable SEO tools around that next action, rather than the longest feature list.

No Traffic to Your SaaS? 7 Tools to Help You Find Out Why

Mustafa Aydemir — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 06:05:43 +0000

If your SaaS has no traffic, first check whether visits are being recorded. Then investigate whether people can discover the site, whether your pages answer what they search for, and whether the website works when they arrive.

Those are different problems. Buying another SEO subscription before separating them can give you more charts without a clearer next step.

These seven tools help you collect different kinds of evidence. Most offer a free starting point, and you can begin with the one that answers your immediate question.

I’m a co-founder of Screpy, one of the tools below. This is a comparison based on published features and limits, not a hands-on benchmark or a promise that a particular tool will bring you visitors.

Compare the tools by the question you need answered

Before opening a report, write down what “no traffic” means. No recorded sessions? No Google clicks? Visits from your launch, followed by silence? Those observations lead to different checks.

Tool	Best starting question	Cost or free allowance	What it cannot establish by itself
Google Analytics 4	Are visits being recorded, and where do recorded sessions come from?	Standard product is free	Every visit or a complete explanation of buying intent
Google Search Console	Does Google know my pages, and do they get search impressions?	Free	Traffic from every channel
Google Trends	How does search interest vary by term, place, and time?	Free public exploration	Absolute search volume or willingness to buy
Screpy	Are technical issues recurring across important pages?	Pro: $192/year regular annual price	That fixing an audit warning will create demand
PageSpeed Insights	Is poor page performance worth investigating?	Free web checks	That speed caused your traffic problem
Ahrefs Free	What links and search data can I inspect for my own site?	Verified-site access with limits	Unrestricted competitor research
Microsoft Clarity	What do recorded visitors do after arriving?	Free heatmaps and recordings	Why people who never visited stayed away

The order matters more than the size of the stack. Validate measurement before treating an empty report as a verdict on the product.

1. Google Analytics 4

Use GA4 when the first uncertainty is whether the analytics setup works. The standard Google Analytics product is free; collecting useful data still requires a working implementation.

Start with a controlled check on your own device. Follow Google’s DebugView instructions, enable debug mode for that device, and confirm that the expected events arrive as you navigate. If they do not, investigate collection before rewriting your marketing pages.

Respect your consent setup during this check. Google notes that privacy controls and consent choices can affect what appears in DebugView. The goal is to verify expected collection under the relevant conditions, not to bypass those choices.

Once collection is understood, use the Traffic acquisition report to compare session sources and channels over the same dates. Separate launch referrals from organic search instead of averaging them together.

For a SaaS, also distinguish the public marketing site from the signed-in application. Seeing your own dashboard activity is not evidence that prospective buyers reached the pricing page. A verified test event confirms that particular test path; it does not prove that every visitor is measured correctly.

2. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the next stop when you mean “no traffic from Google.” It provides search impressions, clicks, queries, and indexing information for properties you can access.

Inspect a page that should attract a plausible buyer: perhaps a use-case page, integration guide, or comparison. Check its indexing information before assuming the title needs another rewrite.

The URL Inspection documentation explains an important boundary: the indexed result describes Google’s stored version, while the live test checks the current page. A successful live test does not guarantee indexing. Check the Google-selected canonical in the indexed result if another URL seems to be getting the attention.

Then separate two observations. Few impressions give you a discovery question to investigate. Impressions without many clicks give you a different question about the queries, position, and search result people see. Neither observation alone identifies the cause.

Search Console is free, but it is a Google Search view of the problem. A launch can generate referral visits while Google clicks remain near zero. Do not treat those reports as contradictory just because they count different things.

3. Google Trends

Use Google Trends to investigate the language and timing around a problem. It is useful when you have built pages around a category name but are unsure whether that is how people describe the job.

For example, a hypothetical document product could compare a broad phrase such as “document automation” with a specific task such as “generate PDF invoices.” Keep geography and time range consistent, and distinguish a search term from a topic when selecting comparisons. This is an example of a research question, not a claim about those phrases’ popularity.

Google explains that Trends data is sampled and normalized. Its 0–100 scale represents relative interest within the selected context, not a monthly search count. Low-volume terms can appear as zero.

That makes Trends a clue, not a market verdict. A niche B2B problem may be commercially useful even when the phrase produces little visible data. Combine the pattern with the words actual prospective users use. If you cannot find evidence for your chosen terminology, investigate the wording before commissioning dozens of pages around it.

4. Screpy

Screpy fits the technical investigation and repeated monitoring part of this process. Its SaaS SEO workflow brings website audits, tracked rankings, performance, and uptime signals into a shared workspace.

The practical question is whether important pages share a technical problem. Imagine several integration pages with missing metadata or broken internal links. Group the affected URLs and inspect the shared template before making isolated edits. An audit finding gives you something concrete to investigate; it does not prove that the issue explains every missing visit.

The published Pro plan has a regular annual price of $192, paid upfront. It includes five projects, 5,000 crawl pages per project, and 100 tracked keywords per project. On October 19, the page advertised a 40% welcome discount during a 72-hour window and a seven-day trial. The trial becomes paid unless cancelled, and the stated welcome discount continues on renewals while the subscription remains active. Confirm the final total and conditions at checkout.

Pro excludes AI Visibility; Max includes 50 AI Visibility prompts per project. That is an additional discovery measurement, not a requirement for diagnosing a broken landing page.

If you already work with an AI assistant, Screpy MCP can provide eligible project context for questions such as which affected pages to investigate first. Project access and plan limits still apply. The connection does not automatically change your website or deploy a fix.

Choose this kind of monitoring when you need to revisit findings after releases. It cannot tell you, on its own, whether buyers want the product.

5. PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights helps investigate whether the pages you send people to have performance problems. Check the actual landing page and a representative pricing or use-case page, rather than assuming a fast homepage tells the whole story.

The official documentation distinguishes Lighthouse lab diagnostics from real-user Chrome User Experience Report data. Field data covers a trailing 28-day period and requires sufficient samples. A small SaaS may have origin-level results instead of page-level data, or no field data at all.

Read those labels before drawing a conclusion. No field data does not mean users had a good experience. Equally, one disappointing lab run does not prove that speed caused your lack of traffic.

Use a result to narrow an investigation: a large loading image, unexpected layout movement, or expensive scripts. Make a focused change and compare the same page under similar conditions. Keep that technical verification separate from the later question of whether more qualified people arrived.

The public web tool is free. It is particularly useful once you have identified a page worth sending visitors to; it cannot decide which audience should care about that page.

6. Ahrefs Free

Ahrefs Free, previously called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, gives you another view of your own website’s links, search visibility, and technical issues.

Its published verified-site allowances include 5,000 Site Audit crawl credits per project per month, plus up to 1,000 backlinks and keywords visible at once in Site Explorer. The free access is for verified websites; unrestricted research into unverified competitor websites is not what this plan offers.

For a SaaS with an established blog, use it to investigate specific pages. Which of your guides has acquired links? Does a page you expected to be important have any visible search footprint in this dataset? These are research prompts, not automatic explanations for why another page gets no visits.

Keep estimated or indexed third-party data separate from your own recorded sessions and Google’s click data. They are different views, not numbers that must reconcile exactly.

There is also overlap with other audit products. If Search Console already answered your indexing question and your next task is to repair one template, another audit may not be the next thing you need. Add Ahrefs when its link or search data answers a specific remaining question.

7. Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity provides free session recordings and heatmaps. Use those to investigate what recorded visitors do on the page: where they click, how far they scroll, and where they appear to get stuck.

This is the last tool in the sequence for a reason. If nobody arrives, a recording tool cannot explain the behavior of people who never visited. Skip this stage until you have visits to investigate.

For example, suppose a small launch brings relevant visitors to your pricing page, but few continue. Reviewing recorded sessions could reveal a button that does not work as expected or content that people repeatedly miss. That gives you a testable page question. It does not reveal every visitor’s motivation.

With only a few sessions, avoid treating a pattern as representative of the whole market. Use it to decide what to check next, then speak to prospective users when the uncertainty is about understanding or trust.

Keep the implementation appropriate to the pages being observed. Review privacy and masking settings, especially if the same application handles customer documents or other private data. Public landing-page behavior is often enough for this investigation; you do not need to record sensitive product workflows to answer a marketing question.

Run one investigation before buying another tool

Use the first unanswered question to choose your next step.

What you know	What to investigate next	Useful evidence to keep
Your own expected test events do not arrive	Measurement configuration	The tested URL, device conditions, consent state, and event observed
Measurement works, but important pages are not indexed	Technical access and indexing	URL Inspection findings and affected page patterns
Pages are indexed but have little search exposure	Terminology, relevance, and distribution	Actual queries, page purpose, and comparisons in the same market
Search impressions exist but clicks are scarce	The specific query and result people see	Query, page, position context, clicks, and dates
Visitors arrive but do not continue	Landing-page experience and fit	Observed behavior, working buttons, and direct user feedback

Keep denominators separate. In a hypothetical week, 100 search impressions and five clicks produce a 5% search click-through rate. If Analytics records three sessions, that does not turn the other two clicks into proven lost customers. The systems count different things, and collection conditions can differ. Those figures are an illustration, not a benchmark for a healthy SaaS.

Write a short investigation note: what you observed, what you think might explain it, what you changed, and which result would support or weaken that explanation. Keep the comparison dates and audience as consistent as practical. At low volume, report counts alongside percentages.

For an initial stack, start with verified analytics and Search Console. Use the other tools when they fill a specific gap: demand context, recurring technical findings, performance diagnostics, link data, or behavior after arrival.

A SaaS with no traffic needs a clearer diagnosis before it needs a larger stack. Find the next piece of evidence, make a focused change, and check what happened.

5 SEO Tools for Next.js: What Do You Actually Need?

Mustafa Aydemir — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 06:04:56 +0000

For a public Next.js site, start with Google Search Console to understand indexing and PageSpeed Insights to investigate performance. Add a crawler when you need to inspect many routes, and pay for monitoring when repeated manual checks become a problem.

That is the useful way to compare SEO tools for Next.js. Five tools can cover five different questions; you do not need five subscriptions on launch day.

I’m a co-founder of Screpy, which is one of the options below. This comparison is based on the tools’ published features and limits, rather than a hands-on benchmark. The examples focus on public pages such as landing pages, articles, and product listings.

What Next.js already gives you

In the App Router, Next.js supports metadata and generated metadata, along with file conventions for sitemaps, robots.txt, and social images. The metadata exports belong in Server Components. Pages Router projects use different conventions, so check which router a tutorial targets before copying its examples.

You can configure these things without adding an SEO package. External tools answer the next question: did the deployed website produce the result you intended?

Tool	Question it helps answer	Starting cost or allowance	Important boundary
Google Search Console	What does Google know about this URL?	Free	Requires access to a verified property
PageSpeed Insights	What is making this page slow?	Free web checks	Field data needs enough real-user samples
Screaming Frog SEO Spider	Is this problem repeated across routes?	Free up to 500 URLs per crawl	JavaScript rendering needs a paid licence
Screpy	How do I keep reviewing SEO and monitoring data over time?	Pro: $192/year regular annual price	Plan limits apply; annual payment is upfront
Ahrefs Free	Who links to my site, and what else does its audit find?	Free for verified websites	Restricted access and data allowances

These are complementary jobs with some overlap. Pick the missing evidence before picking another tool.

1. Google Search Console

Use Google Search Console first when a page is missing from Google, an expected query gets no impressions, or Google appears to have selected a different canonical URL.

The useful distinction is between Google’s stored information and a check of the page as it exists now. The indexed result can describe an earlier deployment. A successful live check does not prove that the current page is indexed.

For example, suppose /blog/new-feature loads correctly after you fix a metadata bug. Inspect that exact URL, check the last crawl information, then use the live test to investigate the current response. Read the Google-selected canonical in the indexed result; the live test cannot predict which canonical Google will choose.

Google’s URL Inspection documentation also explains how to view the rendered page and available HTML. That is useful when the browser looks fine but you want to inspect what Google’s testing tool received.

Search Console is free, with property access and verification requirements. It gives you indexing and search-performance evidence. It does not fix your route code, and repeatedly requesting indexing is not a substitute for resolving the underlying issue.

2. PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is a useful free starting point when a route loads slowly or feels unstable. Check a representative article, product page, and listing page instead of assuming the homepage represents the whole application.

Its two main kinds of evidence answer different questions. Lighthouse provides a controlled lab run for debugging. Chrome User Experience Report data describes real-user experience over the previous 28 days, where sufficient samples exist.

A new route can have lab results and no page-level field data. The report may show origin-level data, or no field data at all. Check the label before treating a result as evidence about that exact URL. Missing data is not a passing result.

For a Next.js product page, an illustrative investigation might start with the largest visible image, layout shifts around its placeholder, or scripts loading before they are needed. Follow the report’s diagnostics and compare the same route after a focused change.

The official explanation of PageSpeed Insights is worth reading before comparing lab and field numbers. A better lab score is useful feedback, but it does not establish that Google indexed the page or that real users immediately experienced the same improvement.

3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider fits investigations where checking URLs individually becomes tedious: repeated titles, redirect chains, broken internal links, or unexpected canonical tags across a route family.

Its free version crawls up to 500 URLs in one crawl. The important Next.js detail is that JavaScript rendering is a paid feature. A small site fitting under the free URL limit does not automatically mean the free version can perform the rendering investigation you need.

Start by understanding the response your site serves. If important content and links are already present in the HTML, a raw HTML crawl can reveal plenty. If links appear only after JavaScript executes, compare raw and rendered output with an appropriately configured paid crawl.

For example, a listing page might show all its product cards in your browser while its raw HTML exposes none of their links. That discrepancy is a reason to inspect the implementation and rendering behavior. It is not proof that every search engine sees exactly what your crawler saw.

The paid tool uses an annual licence, and practical crawl size depends on available memory and storage. Choose it when you need detailed crawl control. If your problem is simply whether Google indexed one page, Search Console is the more direct starting point.

4. Screpy

Screpy fits the ongoing part of the job: reviewing website audit findings, tracked rankings, and monitoring data after the initial implementation work is finished.

For a Next.js project, the useful unit is an affected URL and the route template behind it. If several articles share a metadata issue, investigate their shared implementation before editing pages individually. Screpy works with the deployed website; you do not need to describe it as a native Next.js integration to use it for that workflow.

The current plan comparison lists Pro at $192 per year before the welcome discount, with five projects, 5,000 crawl pages per project, and 100 tracked keywords per project. The annual total is paid upfront.

As checked on October 18, the page advertises a 50% welcome offer during a 72-hour window, bringing annual Pro to $96. It includes a seven-day trial that converts to a paid subscription unless cancelled. The page says the discount continues on renewals while the subscription stays active. Check the final checkout terms before subscribing.

Pro does not include AI Visibility. Max includes 50 tracked AI Visibility prompts per project; only choose that extra capacity if you need to measure AI answers as well as conventional SEO.

For developers already using an assistant, Screpy MCP can bring eligible project data into that conversation. A useful request would be: “Show the affected article URLs from the latest completed crawl and group the findings I should investigate together.”

The assistant still needs access to the right project, and plan eligibility still applies. Connecting MCP does not edit your Next.js repository or deploy fixes. Use the findings to decide what to change, then verify the deployed result.

5. Ahrefs Free

Ahrefs Free is worth considering when your next question is about links to your site or the search visibility of its existing pages. The product previously called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools now points users toward Ahrefs Free.

For verified websites, its published allowances include 5,000 Site Audit crawl credits per project per month and up to 1,000 backlinks and keywords visible at once in Site Explorer. The free scope is your verified websites; analyzing unverified competitor websites requires a paid plan.

That makes it a useful addition when you have published a Next.js documentation site or blog and want to investigate which pages attract links. It does not require the framework to expose a special SEO plugin interface.

There is overlap with other audit tools in this list. If you already have a crawl report and no concrete backlink question, another audit dashboard may add little to your next decision. Use its distinct data when it answers something you cannot currently answer.

Do not read “free” as unrestricted access to every Ahrefs product. Check the allowances against the size of the site and the investigation you actually need to complete.

Which SEO tools for Next.js should you actually use?

Start with a small sample of public routes: one landing page, one article, one listing, and one detail page. These examples can help you choose the next investigation; they are not results from a test of a particular website.

What you notice	Start here	Useful next action
A new article is absent from Google	Search Console	Separate the indexed result from the live test; inspect the reported reason and canonical
Every article seems to share the same title	A crawler	Compare affected URLs, then inspect the shared metadata implementation
Listing links appear in the browser but not in raw crawl output	Screaming Frog with paid JavaScript rendering	Compare HTML and rendered output before deciding which code needs changing
A product page is slow on mobile	PageSpeed Insights	Read its diagnostics and check whether field data represents the page or the origin
You need ongoing findings or backlink context	Screpy or Ahrefs Free, according to the gap	Choose monitoring for repeated review, or verified-site link data for a specific link investigation

For a new, small site, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights are a sensible starting point. Add a free crawl if the issue spans multiple URLs. Pay for rendering when the investigation requires it, or for monitoring when you need a repeatable review process.

After a change, check the affected routes again using the same kind of evidence. A resolved crawl warning, a changed lab result, and a later indexing update are different outcomes. Keep them separate so you know what actually improved.

The best SEO tools for Next.js are the ones that help you make the next decision. Start with the question your current setup cannot answer, and expand only when another tool has a clear job.

7 Marketing Tools for Developers Who’d Rather Be Coding

Mustafa Aydemir — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 06:08:47 +0000

You can spend your coding time building a campaign dashboard, a scheduler, and a lead pipeline. Or you can pick a few marketing tools that handle those jobs and get back to your product.

The useful question is which task keeps getting postponed: checking where signups came from, fixing search issues, publishing updates, or following up with interested people. Start there. Seven tools doesn't have to mean seven subscriptions.

These are seven options for developers doing their own marketing, compared by the job they handle and the limits worth checking. Prices and published capabilities were reviewed on October 17, 2026. This is a documentation-based comparison, not a hands-on benchmark. I'm a co-founder of Screpy, which is included below.

Compare the job, not the feature count

These tools solve different problems. Compare them against the work on your plate, rather than treating them as interchangeable alternatives.

Tool	Job to hand off	Entry option / main limit	Skip it for now if...
Plausible	Traffic and signup reporting	Starter: $9/month for 10k monthly pageviews, one site	Your existing analytics already answers your questions
Screpy	Recurring SEO investigation	Pro: $192/year regular annual price; AI Visibility requires Max or higher	Search isn't a channel you're working on yet
Buffer	Social publishing queue	Free: three channels, 10 queued posts per channel	You haven't chosen a social channel
Brevo	Email campaigns and contact management	Free plan available; paid tiers have volume and feature limits	You don't yet have people who want your updates
Tally	Lead and feedback forms	Free forms and submissions, subject to fair use	Your existing form already collects what you need
Microsoft Clarity	Session recordings and heatmaps	Free behavioral analytics	You don't have a specific page problem to investigate
Zapier	Repeated work between apps	Free: 100 tasks/month, two-step Zaps	A native feature or occasional manual action does the job

The prices above use different billing periods. Screpy's annual price is paid for the year; it isn't a monthly charge. Plan links and relevant conditions follow.

1. Plausible: find out which channels bring signups

Plausible gives you traffic sources, campaign reporting, and conversion goals in a focused analytics interface. Its Starter plan is $9 per month for up to 10,000 monthly pageviews and one site. It includes goals and custom events; the hosted service offers a 30-day trial without a credit card.

A practical starting point is one signup goal and consistent UTM tags on campaign links. If you're sharing a tutorial and a product update, give them distinct campaign labels so you can investigate the visits and goal completions each brings.

The output you want is a decision: which source or piece of content deserves another attempt? A campaign label helps organize that evidence, but it doesn't reveal every earlier interaction someone had with your product.

Choose it when you want a smaller reporting surface. If your current analytics already provides a report you understand and act on, switching tools is another task. Also check the pricing at your actual traffic volume, not just the entry tier.

2. Screpy: turn SEO checks into a maintenance routine

Screpy fits the search side of marketing: investigating website issues and following keyword positions without building your own reporting system. The Pro plan includes five projects, 5,000 crawl pages per project, and 100 tracked keywords per project. Its regular annual price is $192, paid yearly.

The current 30% welcome offer displays $134/year for Pro and has a 72-hour window. The discount continues on renewals while the subscription stays active. The seven-day trial becomes paid unless cancelled.

AI Visibility requires Max or higher. Max's regular annual price is $456, and it includes 50 AI prompts per project. Don't choose Pro expecting that feature.

Screpy SEO MCP can bring supported project data into a compatible assistant. It doesn't bypass plan eligibility or automatically fix your website.

The routine matters more than the report. Pick a page you're actively promoting, inspect the relevant finding, make one scoped correction, and verify the result. Keep “the implementation is fixed” separate from “search traffic improved.” The first is something you can check directly; the second needs subsequent evidence.

I'd consider it when search is an ongoing acquisition channel and SEO checks keep falling behind product work.

3. Buffer: batch your social posts

Buffer handles the gap between writing a useful update and remembering to publish it. The free plan supports three channels, one user, and 10 scheduled posts per channel.

That last limit is queue capacity, not 10 posts per month. When a post publishes, its slot becomes available again. Essentials currently starts at $5 per month per channel with annual billing, or $60 per channel for the year. On paid plans, every connected channel is billed, including channels you previously used for free.

For a developer, a manageable workflow is to batch a few updates from work you've already shipped: the problem, what changed, and a useful example. Schedule them for the channel where your audience actually spends time.

Buffer handles publication logistics. You still need to choose what is worth saying and respond when someone asks a question. If you're still deciding who the product is for, filling a month's queue can simply postpone that decision. Start with one channel before paying to manage several.

4. Brevo: keep in touch after the first visit

Brevo provides email campaigns, contact management, templates, and forms. A free plan is available. Paid Starter begins at 5,000 emails per month; check both the sending volume and contact allowance of the exact tier. In the published catalogue, that 5,000-email Starter tier allows 500 marketing contacts.

The distinction matters when you collect a waitlist but send only occasionally. Your subscriber count and your sending volume are different numbers, and either can affect the plan you need.

For an early product, one useful campaign might explain a new capability to people who asked to hear about it, with a link to the relevant example or release note. You don't need a complicated lifecycle system to send that message.

If you need automated multi-step journeys, inspect the Standard plan rather than assuming the entry plan includes the same automation. Also check branding and add-on costs before comparing totals.

Brevo already includes forms. If its signup form covers your needs, you may not need the next tool at all. Keep the stack small enough that you actually maintain it.

5. Tally: collect leads without building a form system

Tally offers unlimited forms and submissions for free, subject to its fair-use guidelines. Conditional logic, Google Sheets integration, and webhooks are among the listed free features. Pro adds features such as removing Tally branding and using a custom domain.

Use it when the marketing task needs more than a single email field. A demo request could ask what someone is trying to accomplish and which part of the current workflow is difficult. A feedback form could route different questions based on an earlier answer.

The benefit is that you can change a campaign questionnaire without treating every field adjustment as a product release. The output should be something you can act on: a qualified demo request or a concrete problem to investigate.

Don't add a separate form builder just because it exists. If Brevo's form or your own signup flow already captures the necessary information, keep that. And “unlimited” still has conditions; review fair use and any feature-specific limits before routing a large campaign through the free plan.

6. Microsoft Clarity: see where visitors get stuck

Microsoft Clarity provides free session recordings and heatmaps. Those are useful when traffic reports show that people arrive, but you need to investigate what happens on a particular page.

Plausible and Clarity answer different questions. Campaign analytics can show a source and a goal completion; a recording can provide context about the interactions before someone leaves. You may need both kinds of evidence, but you don't automatically need both tools.

For example, if people visit your pricing page without continuing, inspect relevant sessions for repeated behavior around the plan selector or signup button. Use that to identify a question worth checking. A pause or repeated click doesn't establish what a visitor was thinking, and one recording doesn't prove a widespread problem.

Go in with a page and a question, then leave with one change to investigate. Otherwise session replay can become another way to spend an afternoon watching a dashboard. Configure collection and masking appropriately before using recordings on pages that contain customer information.

7. Zapier: connect a workflow you already understand

Zapier connects triggers and actions across apps. Its free plan includes 100 tasks per month and two-step Zaps. Multi-step Zaps, premium apps, and webhooks are listed on Professional.

Consider it after you notice repeated copying between systems. A possible workflow is a new form response creating a record in the place where you manage follow-up. Confirm that the source app, destination, and required action are supported on the plan before building around it.

The budget unit is tasks, not visitors or leads. Don't translate a 100-task allowance into 100 complete customer journeys without checking which operations consume tasks.

Start with one workflow, give it a clear owner, and check failed runs and duplicate records. Automating an unclear process just makes mistakes travel faster.

I'd use a native integration first when it already does the job. Zapier earns its place when the cross-app handoff is real, frequent, and annoying enough to maintain an automation for. If you copy five records once a month, doing it manually might still be reasonable.

Build a routine that leaves room for coding

Here's a possible one-week routine for a small product that gets visitors but few demo requests:

Monday: choose one page and confirm how you're measuring a demo request. Check the traffic sources in your existing analytics or Plausible.
Tuesday: investigate a specific page issue. Use Screpy for a technical SEO question or Clarity for an interaction question; you don't need to inspect every report.
Wednesday: publish one useful explanation of a customer problem, then schedule a few relevant updates with Buffer.
Thursday: review the questions coming through your existing form or Tally. Send an appropriate update through Brevo to people who subscribed.
Friday: decide what to repeat, change, or stop. Add Zapier only if a repeated handoff from this routine needs it.

This is an illustrative routine, not a claim that five days produces more customers. Its output is one informed next action, such as clarifying the demo page or continuing a particular distribution channel.

Good marketing tools for developers make a recurring job easier to finish. Keep the ones that support a decision or remove repeated work. Leave the rest until you have a reason to use them.

Does AI Recommend Your Brand? 5 Tools to Find Out

Mustafa Aydemir — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 06:11:31 +0000

You can check whether AI recommends your brand by tracking the questions your customers might ask, then reading the answers behind the numbers. Asking ChatGPT about your company once gives you one answer. It doesn't tell you how often you appear when someone asks for an alternative, a cheaper option, or a tool for a specific job.

AI visibility tools make those checks repeatable. The useful ones help you get from a chart to the question, response, and cited source behind it.

These five options suit different budgets and workflows. This is a comparison of their published capabilities and current plans, checked on October 16, 2026, rather than a hands-on performance benchmark. I'm a co-founder of Screpy, which is included below.

What counts as an AI recommendation?

A brand name appearing in an answer is only the starting point. For this comparison, I'd separate three outcomes:

Illustrative answer	What it tells you
“Brand A also sells monitoring software.”	A mention. It says you exist.
An answer links to your pricing page.	A citation. Your page was referenced.
“For this budget and use case, choose Brand A.”	A recommendation tied to a buyer's needs.

A response can contain more than one of these. It can also mention your brand while recommending a competitor.

Don't assume a visibility percentage or positive sentiment score proves the third outcome. Open the saved response and read the surrounding sentence. Also check whether the price, feature, or limitation it describes is actually correct. A confident recommendation based on outdated information still needs attention.

Five AI visibility tools at a glance

These are the relevant entry conditions for the plans discussed below. The prices use different billing periods, so the annual figure is an upfront commitment, not a monthly subscription.

Tool	Price / billing	Included monitoring sample	Main purchase check
Screpy Max	$456/year regular annual price	50 AI prompts per project	Pro doesn't include AI Visibility
OtterlyAI Lite	$29/month, monthly billing	15 prompts, four core engines	Extra engines cost more
Peec AI Starter	$95/month, monthly billing	50 prompts, three chosen models, one project	Check the models and market you need
Promptwatch Essential	$95/month, monthly billing	50 prompts, four models, 6,000 responses	Agent credits and responses are separate allowances
Profound, for brands	Free seven-day trial; ongoing Enterprise pricing is custom	50 prompts daily during the trial	Trial prompts aren't customizable

Official plan links and the relevant limitations are in each section. This isn't a ranking by accuracy: published allowances can't establish that.

1. Screpy: AI visibility alongside technical SEO

Screpy's AI Visibility is worth considering if you're also responsible for technical SEO and keyword tracking. You can investigate brand appearances alongside the wider SEO work instead of buying a separate product for every question.

Choose your prompts, country, language, and supported platforms. Then inspect the saved responses, competitor mentions, and cited pages. One detail matters: the recorded position is the order of detected tracked brands in the answer. It isn't a Google ranking or proof that the assistant recommended you first.

You can also use Screpy MCP to investigate stored AI Visibility evidence from an assistant. It doesn't search every AI conversation, bypass plan eligibility, or automatically fix your website.

On the current pricing page, Max includes 50 AI Visibility prompts per project and 15 projects, alongside technical SEO and rank tracking. Its regular annual price is $456, billed yearly. Pro doesn't include AI Visibility.

The page currently displays a $319 annual welcome price under its 30% offer. That offer has a 72-hour window; the discount continues on renewals while the subscription stays active. The seven-day trial converts to a paid subscription unless cancelled. Check the applicable offer and billing choice before subscribing.

I'd shortlist it when the same person needs to investigate AI answers and maintain the site's SEO. If you only need a tiny prompt sample, compare that bundled scope against a smaller dedicated monitoring plan.

2. OtterlyAI: a small daily monitoring setup

OtterlyAI Lite costs $29 per month on monthly billing and includes 15 search prompts with daily tracking. The four core engines are ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. Claude, Google AI Mode, and Gemini are extra add-ons.

Lite also includes citation analysis, brand reports, and one workspace. API and MCP access appear on Standard, currently $189 per month, rather than on Lite.

That makes Lite a sensible shortlist option when you've already narrowed your questions and want a small recurring baseline. For example, you could focus on one product's main buying scenarios instead of trying to monitor every topic around your business.

The constraint is the 15-question budget. If different markets, languages, or products need separate prompts, write those out before choosing the plan. Also price the engines you actually need. A low entry price is useful only if the included coverage matches the questions you're trying to answer.

3. Peec AI: shared tracking for a marketing team

Peec AI Starter currently displays $95 per month on monthly billing. It includes 50 prompts, three chosen models, daily tracking, one project, and unlimited users. Additional models are offered separately.

Its reporting covers visibility, position, sentiment, and share of voice, with source analytics to investigate cited domains and URLs. Prompt suggestions can help you expand the questions you're tracking.

The team allowance is relevant if a founder, content marketer, and SEO specialist all need access to the same brand's results. You can discuss a question together instead of passing around an isolated percentage.

Before subscribing, confirm the three models you want and the country coverage of the selected tier. Starter's comparison column lists one country. Don't assume a feature shown somewhere in the full product catalogue is included in that entry plan.

I'd consider Peec when the immediate job is shared monitoring and source analysis for one brand. Keep suggested prompts subject to review: a question can be relevant to your category without being a question your buyers would actually ask.

4. Promptwatch: monitoring with API and MCP access

Promptwatch Essential is $95 per month on monthly billing. The plan includes one project, 50 prompts, four tracked models, 6,000 responses, country-level tracking, and API and MCP access.

That access matters if you want monitoring data inside a workflow you already use. For a developer, the purchase question becomes: can the supported interface provide the evidence needed for your report or assistant, without exporting and reformatting everything manually? Check the actual operations before building around it.

Essential also includes 500 agent credits per month and Agent Chat. Those credits are a separate allowance from tracked responses. The plan lists no AEO articles, so don't buy it expecting the higher tiers' article allowance.

This is the option I'd investigate when programmatic access is an entry requirement. Still check which four models your setup includes. A long platform list on a homepage isn't the same thing as having every model in your subscription, and an API connection doesn't make a sampled response representative of every customer conversation.

5. Profound: a trial before an enterprise rollout

Profound's current offering for brands pairs a free seven-day trial with a custom-priced Enterprise plan for ongoing use.

The trial runs 50 prompts daily across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Here's the important restriction: those prompts are recommended based on your industry, and trial users can't customize them. The trial also lists one region and one language, with no history, exports, or API access.

Enterprise adds ongoing daily monitoring, customizable prompts, and tailored coverage across up to nine answer engines. Pricing requires a conversation about the package.

I'd put it on the shortlist when you're evaluating a wider organizational rollout and can work through procurement. The trial can show how Profound frames your category, but it can't serve as an exact comparison against another tool running your own custom question set.

Ask for a demonstration using the questions and markets you care about before treating an enterprise proposal as a fit. Also separate a free trial from a sustainable monitoring budget: seven days of access doesn't establish the cost of the ongoing program.

How to choose without chasing a score

Start with a buying question that doesn't contain your brand name. For a fictional uptime product, that could be: “Which uptime monitoring tool suits a solo developer managing three client sites?” Add the actual constraints your customers care about, such as budget, alerts, or team access.

During an evaluation:

Keep the question wording, market, language, and platform consistent wherever the tools allow it. Record differences where they don't.
Open the responses. Check whether your brand was recommended, merely mentioned, cited, or missing. Keep the date and source URLs with that answer.
Separate unavailable or failed checks from answers that genuinely omit your brand. Changing the sample can also change the percentage.
Compare the recurring bill for the coverage you'll use, including extra engines and the commitment required by annual billing.

These tools can help you answer “Does AI recommend us for this job, in these collected answers?” They can't turn that into a claim about every person asking an assistant.

Choose the one that lets you investigate a meaningful question at a cost you can maintain. A score becomes useful when you can explain the answer behind it.

7 Affordable SEO Tools for Indie Hackers

Mustafa Aydemir — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 09:48:09 +0000

You can start doing useful SEO work without an expensive subscription. Search Console can show whether people find your project. A free crawler can expose broken links. A small paid tool can make recurring research or monitoring easier.

The trick is choosing the tool for the problem you actually have. If your pricing page is missing from search, another keyword dashboard probably isn't your next purchase.

These seven affordable SEO tools give indie hackers a few practical options, from free diagnostics to paid monitoring. You don't need all seven.

Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Screpy, which is included below. This is a guide based on official product documentation and pricing, rather than a hands-on benchmark of all seven tools.

Tool	Useful for	Entry option
Google Search Console	Google search performance and indexing	Free
Screpy	Ongoing audits and rank tracking	Pro: $77/year welcome offer; $192/year before offer
Screaming Frog	Local technical crawls	Free up to 500 URLs per crawl
Ahrefs Free	Your site's backlinks and audit data	Free, with verified-site limits
Keywords Everywhere	Keyword research in your browser	Bronze: $84/year
PageSpeed Insights	Page performance diagnostics	Free
Bing Webmaster Tools	Bing search and indexing diagnostics	Free

Pricing checked October 15, 2026. Dollar amounts are USD; check checkout for applicable taxes and the final total. Annual plans require an upfront payment; Screpy's welcome offer has a time limit, explained below.

1. Google Search Console: see what Google is already sending you

Start here if you have a live project and don't know whether anyone is finding it through Google.

Google Search Console is free. It gives you search performance and indexing reports for your site, including queries, clicks, impressions, and average position.

A useful first job is to inspect one important page. Open its search queries and compare them with what the page actually offers. If people find your invoice generator through searches about recurring invoices, does the page explain whether it supports them?

You now have a specific content question to investigate. You don't need another subscription to discover it.

Use URL Inspection when an important page seems absent from search. Keep that investigation separate from rewriting its title: an indexing problem and an unconvincing search result need different fixes.

The limit is scope. Search Console reports your site's Google performance; it doesn't provide a competitor research database or tell you which visits became paying customers.

2. Screpy: keep ongoing SEO work in one place

Consider Screpy when you want to keep checking your site as you ship, with technical audits, keyword rankings, and performance monitoring in one product.

For a small project, the practical question is whether you need recurring checks or an occasional diagnosis. If you only want to crawl a few pages today, a free option may be enough.

The current Screpy pricing gives you two relevant starting points:

Pro: $192/year before the welcome offer, currently shown at $77/year with it. Includes five projects, 5,000 crawl pages per project, and 100 tracked keywords per project.
Max: $456/year before the welcome offer, currently shown at $182/year with it. Adds AI Visibility, including 50 monitored prompts per project, along with keyword research and backlink tools.

Pro does not include AI Visibility. Choose Max if tracking brand mentions and citations in stored AI answers is part of the job you need done.

The pricing page advertises a 60% welcome offer with a 72-hour window and a seven-day trial. Check the checkout total and renewal terms before committing.

There's also Screpy MCP. With a compatible AI assistant connected, you can investigate project evidence without opening the dashboard for each question. Account permissions, available data, and plan limits still apply.

3. Screaming Frog: crawl a small site for free

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler. The free version lets you crawl up to 500 URLs at a time, which makes it worth considering for a small marketing site or a focused technical check.

For a developer, a useful time to run it is after changing routes, navigation, or page templates. Look for broken internal links, redirects, missing titles, and duplicated metadata. Trace a finding back to the page or template that needs changing.

For example, if your navigation still links to an old pricing URL, update the source link rather than adding another redirect to hide it.

The free tier has important boundaries: saving and reopening crawls and JavaScript rendering require a licence, as the official FAQ explains. That matters if your app's content only appears after JavaScript runs.

Use it for a specific diagnostic task. You can decide whether the paid features are necessary once you know what the free crawl leaves unanswered.

4. Ahrefs Free: inspect backlinks to your own site

You don't need a paid Ahrefs subscription just to start looking at your own site's backlink profile.

Ahrefs Free, previously called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, includes limited Site Explorer and Site Audit access for websites you verify. It is a permanent free account, rather than a trial that expires after a week.

The documented limits include 5,000 crawl credits per month per project and up to 1,000 backlinks or keywords visible at once.

Start by looking at which pages attract links. Is a useful free tool getting attention while your product page gets none? That can suggest where to improve the path from the resource to the product, provided the link would actually help its readers.

The ownership requirement matters. This free account is useful for investigating your own properties; it isn't unrestricted access to competitors' backlink profiles.

It also overlaps with other audit tools in this list. You can use the backlink reports without deciding to maintain another full auditing routine.

5. Keywords Everywhere: research keywords while browsing

If you prefer exploring search results to learning another dashboard, Keywords Everywhere is worth a look. It adds keyword metrics to supported websites as you browse.

The Bronze plan costs $84 per year, equivalent to $7 per month, with 100,000 credits and one user seat. You pay annually. Credits expire after a year.

One credit retrieves metrics for one keyword. A single search can spend more than one credit because related-keyword widgets also request data. That detail matters more than the headline allowance if you leave the extension running during ordinary browsing.

A practical starting point is to compare phrases around one product use case: “invoice generator,” “invoice generator for freelancers,” and “recurring invoice software,” for example.

Then open the results and inspect what searchers are being shown. Are they looking for a free utility, a software subscription, or an explanation? A volume estimate helps prioritize research; it doesn't answer that intent question for you.

Buy it when you'll do keyword research regularly enough to use the allowance. An annual commitment deserves more thought if you only need one afternoon of ideas.

6. PageSpeed Insights: find the performance problem worth fixing

PageSpeed Insights is a free place to investigate a slow landing page before buying another performance tool.

Run an important page on mobile and desktop. Look at the diagnostics behind the score, especially after adding a video, a large hero image, or several third-party scripts. Choose one supported finding, make the change, and check the page again.

The distinction to understand is lab data versus field data. Lab results come from a simulated run. Field results describe real users' experiences and need enough samples to appear.

An indie project may not have page-level field data yet. The report may show origin-level data instead, or no field data at all. Check which you're reading before drawing conclusions.

A higher lab score can help confirm progress in that test. It doesn't tell you whether your signup flow works better, and it isn't a promise of higher search rankings. Keep the goal tied to the actual page problem.

7. Bing Webmaster Tools: check a second search engine

Google Search Console can't tell you everything about how Bing sees your site. Bing Webmaster Tools is free and supplies its own performance, indexing, and crawl diagnostics.

You can import a verified site from Search Console to get started. Then inspect an important URL, check your sitemap, and look at Bing's search performance reports. Site Scan also provides an on-demand technical audit.

Its value is the additional search-engine perspective. If Bing reports a problem, investigate the affected URL instead of assuming a clean Google report settles the question.

Keep the claims modest, though. Being indexed by Bing doesn't prove that an AI assistant recommends your brand. Indexing reports and recorded mentions in AI answers measure different things.

This is a sensible free addition when Bing is relevant to your audience. You don't need to invent a daily reporting ritual if there's little data or no decision to make yet.

Build a small SEO stack before buying a bigger one

For a new side project, I'd start with three jobs:

Understand search visibility: set up Search Console and inspect your important pages.
Find technical problems: choose a crawler or audit workflow and turn the findings into a short fix list.
Check page performance: use PageSpeed Insights on the pages visitors actually land on.

Add paid tooling when you can name the recurring task it will handle. That might be keyword research with Keywords Everywhere, or ongoing audits and tracking with Screpy. Neither purchase is automatically necessary just because the project launched.

There's overlap here. Screpy, Ahrefs Free, Screaming Frog, and Bing Site Scan can all contribute technical findings. You don't need four versions of the same backlog. Keep the tools whose output helps you decide what to change.

If you already use an AI assistant, my five SEO workflows with ChatGPT show how to turn available data into reviewable work.

Before paying for your next SEO tool, write down the next task you'll use it for. If that task is unclear, spend an hour with the tools you already have.

5 SEO Tasks You Can Automate with ChatGPT

Mustafa Aydemir — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:21:12 +0000

You have a crawl report full of warnings, a few pages losing clicks, and a backlog that already needs attention. ChatGPT can help turn that information into work you can actually finish: a prioritized fix list, a focused investigation, or a batch of metadata drafts.

The useful part of ChatGPT for SEO is giving it real evidence to work with. Asking it to “audit my website” without crawl results or access to your search data leaves too much room for guesses.

You can supply exports and page content yourself. A connected SEO tool makes the process more repeatable by letting ChatGPT retrieve the data during the conversation. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is one way to provide that connection.

These five tasks automate the repetitive retrieval, sorting, and drafting. You still review the findings and decide what to change. They run when you request them; recurring execution needs a separate scheduling setup.

For the connected approach, check OpenAI’s current MCP app requirements. The workflows below depend on the data and tools your account can access.

1. Turn a technical SEO audit into a fix list

A crawler might report hundreds of affected URLs. That does not necessarily mean you have hundreds of separate problems. One template can produce the same missing title across an entire section of a site.

Give ChatGPT the latest completed crawl and tell it which pages matter to your business. Ask it to group the findings into work items instead of repeating the warning list.

Use the latest completed crawl for [project/domain].
Confirm the crawl date and scope before analyzing it.

Review broken internal links, failed pages, redirect chains,
and missing or duplicate titles. Retrieve affected page records,
following pagination as needed.

Group findings that may share a template or root cause.
Prioritize these page types: [business priorities].

Return: issue, evidence, affected URLs, proposed fix,
reason for priority, and how to verify the change.
Separate observed facts from suspected causes.
Do not modify the site or start another crawl.

The result should give a developer somewhere to start. “Check whether the product template omits titles” is more actionable than a long list of pages with the same warning.

That template explanation is still a hypothesis until someone inspects the code or output. ChatGPT can group the evidence; your repository or CMS needs its own access path if you want it to prepare changes there.

After a fix, check the affected output again. A new crawl can confirm whether the specific finding was resolved on those pages. Search performance is a separate question.

2. Investigate pages losing organic traffic

A falling click count tells you where to investigate. It does not tell you why the decline happened.

You might be looking at lower search demand, a position change, a different mix of queries, or a technical problem. Google’s traffic-drop guidance covers several possible causes. A useful ChatGPT workflow narrows the investigation before recommending a fix.

Use connected Google Search Console data, with the same property and filters throughout the comparison.

For [project/domain], confirm the connected Search Console property.
Compare the most recent 28 complete days available with the preceding
28 days. State the exact dates and use the same search type and filters.

Find pages with the largest absolute click losses.
For the top 10, compare clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position.
Inspect query, device, and country breakdowns where available.

Explain which patterns each comparison supports, what it cannot prove,
and the next check needed. Consider seasonal context.
Flag incomplete or unavailable data rather than estimating it.
Do not change content.

The important output is a short investigation list. A decline concentrated in mobile results may deserve different checks from a decline across every device. If impressions fell while positions stayed broadly similar, search demand is worth investigating, but those totals alone do not establish the cause.

Add release dates or change notes when you have them. They help identify things to inspect. A deployment happening near a traffic drop is a lead, not proof.

3. Draft better titles and meta descriptions

Metadata work is a good fit for ChatGPT because the output is small enough to review properly. You can compare a proposed title with the actual page and reject it if it promises something the page does not deliver.

Start with missing, duplicated, or vague metadata. Pages with substantial impressions can also be worth reviewing, but low CTR alone does not prove the title is the problem. Position, query mix, and the results surrounding your page matter too.

The model needs existing metadata, relevant search queries, and the page content. A URL by itself is not enough evidence.

Review these pages: [URLs].
Use their current titles, descriptions, page content, and available
Search Console queries. Tell me which inputs are missing.

For each page, draft two title options and one meta description.
Make them specific to the reader's task and the actual content.
Keep product names and factual claims accurate.
Do not invent prices, results, reviews, or features.

Return the current copy, proposed copy, and reason for each change.
Avoid keyword stuffing. Save nothing to the website.

Review the drafts for clarity before publishing. If the page does not answer the query well, a more attractive title will not resolve that mismatch.

Google recommends descriptive, concise titles, but it can generate a different title link. It can also build a snippet from page content instead of using your meta description. Treat these as improvements to your page copy, then measure what happens.

4. Find useful internal linking opportunities

You publish a new guide. Older pages already discuss parts of the same problem, but nobody goes back to connect them.

ChatGPT can help find those opportunities when it has a known URL inventory, the relevant content, and existing link records. Ask for the exact passage where a link would help. That makes the suggestion much easier to judge than a list of pages that happen to share a keyword.

Find contextual internal links to [target URL].
Use the known page inventory, available page content, and existing
internal link records for [project/domain].
If page content is unavailable, ask me for it before proposing placements.

Suggest up to 10 additions. For each, return the source URL,
destination URL, source passage, proposed anchor text, and reader benefit.
Check whether the source already links to that destination.
Use existing destinations only; do not invent URLs or page content.
Do not insert links.

For example, a deployment checklist might usefully link to an existing guide on checking redirects. The connection should follow the reader's next question, rather than squeeze an unrelated product link into the paragraph.

When implementing suggestions, use crawlable links and descriptive anchor text. Check the destination and placement before shipping.

Be careful with claims about orphan pages. A URL missing from a partial crawl is not proof that nothing links to it. Ask ChatGPT to state the inventory and crawl coverage behind that conclusion.

5. Build a weekly SEO report with next actions

The reporting task worth automating is the repetitive part: pulling the same metrics, comparing periods, and turning changes into a readable update.

Give ChatGPT a stable reporting definition and your current backlog. That helps it distinguish new work from an issue someone is already handling.

Prepare a weekly SEO update for [project/domain].
Use the latest seven complete days available in Search Console and
the preceding seven days, with the same property and filters.
State the dates, data freshness, and any missing sources.

Include changes in clicks and impressions, the main page-level gains
and losses, and relevant findings from the latest completed crawl.
Do not imply the crawl covers the reporting week if it is older.

Compare against this backlog: [current work items and owners].
Finish with three proposed next actions, the evidence for each,
and questions we still need to answer.
Do not send the report or change project settings.

The deliverable should help you choose what to do next. A click increase is useful context, but a Search Console report cannot tell you whether those visitors became customers. That needs conversion data from another source.

You can reuse this request each week. An MCP connection makes the data accessible; it does not schedule the conversation. If you want unattended weekly runs, you need a scheduling system that can execute the workflow with those same tools and permissions.

Connect these workflows to Screpy MCP

I'm a co-founder of Screpy. We built its SEO MCP so you can bring project data into the AI tools you already use.

Once your project is set up and the relevant data is available, ChatGPT can retrieve crawl findings, page details, internal link records, stored keyword rankings, and connected Search Console performance. You can investigate that data and prepare the outputs above without opening the Screpy dashboard for each report.

Start with an existing project, a completed crawl, and a connected Search Console property for the traffic workflows. If a request needs page content that the available tools do not return, supply that content separately.

To connect:

Use ChatGPT on the web with permission to create or use a custom MCP app. Enable developer mode where available; managed workspaces may require an administrator.
Create the custom app from the Apps settings available to your account. Add https://mcp.screpy.com as the server and select OAuth.
Scan the available tools, complete the Screpy OAuth sign-in, and finish creating the app. Select it in a new chat.
Check the connection with a small read request:

Use Screpy to list my projects. For [domain], show the latest completed
crawl date and check whether Search Console is connected.
Do not start a crawl or change anything.

OpenAI currently documents read/fetch MCP access for Pro users and full MCP support in beta for Business, Enterprise, and Edu. Availability and workspace controls matter; a ChatGPT subscription alone does not establish access to every custom app or action. Screpy also checks project permissions and plan eligibility.

Follow the Screpy MCP setup guide for ChatGPT for the connection details. This SEO connection supplies evidence; editing your site or repository requires separate capabilities.

Start with one task from your actual backlog. Ask ChatGPT for a result you can review, check the evidence, and reuse the workflow when the next report arrives.

Your Side Project Works. So Why Does Nobody Use It?

Mustafa Aydemir — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 23:06:01 +0000

Working software answers one question: does the code run? People still have to find it, understand it, and get something useful from it.

When a side project has no users, adding features without knowing why is a guess. Find where the path breaks. You can investigate that without a marketing team or a complicated analytics stack.

Find the First Place People Drop Off

Start with observations. "Nobody uses it" can describe several different problems:

What you observe	What to investigate	A useful next check
Few visits from plausible users	Discovery or targeting	Where do people already discuss this task?
Visitors cannot explain what it does	Positioning	Ask someone to describe the product after reading the page
People start, but never finish the core task	Setup, usability, or trust	Watch a first attempt without coaching
People get a result, then disappear	Recurring need or value	Ask what happened the next time the problem arose

Treat this as a shortlist. Price, existing habits, and integration requirements can also stop adoption.

At tiny volumes, a conversation can explain more than a percentage. Exclude your own testing and obvious bots, and keep traffic sources separate. A launch audience may behave differently from people seeking a solution.

For a one-off utility, successful completion may be enough. Daily return visits would measure the wrong thing.

Choose One Person and One Painful Task

"Developers" is too broad to guide your next move. Choose someone with a specific job to finish.

Imagine a CSV comparison tool. Its homepage could say:

Compare two CSV exports and see which rows changed.

That gives someone a task they can recognize. "A powerful data productivity platform" gives them adjectives.

Find people already doing the task and ask:

When did you last need to do this?
How did you do it?
What was difficult enough that you looked for another option?

A compliment is easy to give. An existing workaround, a shared sample, or willingness to try the tool gives you something to investigate.

Paul Graham's argument for manually recruiting early users is useful here. A few relevant conversations can expose assumptions before you invest in broad distribution.

In a community, answer the actual question, follow its rules, and disclose your connection when sharing your tool.

Make the First Useful Result Easy to Reach

For that CSV tool, a signup is one step. The useful outcome is seeing a difference report that helps finish the job.

Watch someone attempt it. Where do they hesitate?

They must configure a workspace before comparing anything.
They have no safe sample data to try.
They cannot tell whether their files are uploaded or stored.

Fix the obstacle you observe. Keep necessary authentication and security, and explain data handling truthfully. A sample comparison can show the result before someone commits their own files.

Track the path with simple events, such as comparison_started and difference_report_viewed. Then ask whether the output was useful. An event proves an interaction happened; it cannot tell you that the task was solved.

Give Search Engines Something Worth Finding

If people already search for the task, SEO is a discovery channel worth testing. A novel product may need direct explanation before search becomes useful.

For the CSV example, a public guide could demonstrate comparing exports with reordered rows, including sample input and output. It should help even if the reader never signs up.

Check the basics:

Access: Pages intended for search are public, return HTTP 200, allow crawling, and have no accidental noindex directive.
Meaning: Use descriptive page titles and explain the task in visible text.
Paths: Link relevant guides and product pages together; fix broken destinations.
Evidence: Inspect important URLs in Search Console.

These checks follow Google's technical requirements and SEO Starter Guide. Meeting the requirements does not guarantee indexing or rankings.

Search Console's performance report shows queries, impressions, and clicks. Use it to investigate discovery, then check product usage separately. Search visibility alone cannot tell you whether someone needs your product.

Run One Small Experiment

Choose a change that tests the suspected obstacle. Keep a short record so you can explain what happened.

For the hypothetical CSV tool:

Hypothesis: Interested visitors cannot picture the output.
Change: Put a sample difference report beside the first action.
Audience: People who currently compare exports, reached through the same source.
Outcome: Among recruited users who see the page, how many complete a comparison and find the result useful?
Follow-up: Ask people who stop what prevented them from finishing.

Change one major variable where practical. Record counts alongside rates, and note changes in who arrived. A small before-and-after comparison gives clues; it does not establish causation.

If people understand the tool and still prefer their current workflow, investigate why. They may need a missing capability, or the problem may be too minor to justify switching.

Before You Build Another Feature

Open your backlog and choose one task that addresses an observed obstacle. Write down what you expect to see afterward. That task might be a feature, a clearer page, or a conversation with someone who tried the product.

For the technical discovery checks, Screpy's website audit can surface broken links, missing metadata, and indexing signals, then help you compare findings across completed crawls. That helps you investigate technical barriers to discovery. Whether people need your project still requires evidence from actual users.

Your AI Agent Can Handle SEO

Mustafa Aydemir — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 13:26:14 +0000

You notice that a group of pages has lost organic traffic. You open your SEO dashboard, filter a report, export the results, paste them into an AI assistant, and ask what happened. Then you open the repository to see whether a recent release changed those pages.

You are carrying context between systems before the investigation has even started.

SEO should be available in the environment where you build and maintain your project. You should be able to ask an agent to investigate a problem, give it access to the relevant evidence, and review what it proposes.

That is why SEO MCP matters. It creates a practical connection between SEO tools and AI agents, so working on search performance does not have to begin with another dashboard.

The Dashboard Should Be Optional

A dashboard can show you what changed. Making sense of that change often requires information from somewhere else: the page itself, its template, your release history, or a business decision.

In a connected workflow, the request can start where the work happens:

Which pages lost organic traffic, what evidence might explain the change, and what should we investigate first?

The agent retrieves the data it is allowed to access and returns an investigation you can inspect. You do not have to know which menu contains each report or manually copy the same URLs into three tools.

Charts still help people explore patterns and communicate results. But opening a separate application should be a choice rather than the price of getting an answer.

For routine SEO work, the interface can become the agent you already use. The product's value then depends on the quality of its data and capabilities, even when you never visit its dashboard.

What MCP Actually Changes for SEO

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI applications to external data and tools.

For SEO, a server might expose operations to retrieve keyword rankings, inspect crawl findings, or query search performance. A compatible agent can discover those operations and call the ones relevant to your request.

There are three distinct roles here:

The SEO tool supplies data and exposes capabilities.
MCP provides the connection through which the agent discovers and uses them.
The agent interprets the results and decides what to investigate next.

MCP itself does not diagnose a traffic drop. It also does not guarantee that a server offers every report you need. The available operations, account permissions, and data coverage determine what the agent can actually do.

The useful shift is that SEO data becomes accessible during the task. You no longer have to turn a dashboard into a spreadsheet and then turn that spreadsheet into a prompt.

What It Means for SEO to "Think"

A report might tell you that clicks fell. A useful investigation asks what else changed.

Did impressions decline too? Did click-through rate change while impressions stayed relatively stable? Are the affected pages concentrated in one template? Does the timing overlap with a release?

Those questions lead to different next steps. A tool that only restates the click count leaves that work to you.

When I say SEO should be able to "think," I mean the agent should work through an investigation: form a hypothesis, request relevant evidence, compare explanations, and show what remains uncertain. The reasoning belongs to the agent, grounded in the data its tools return.

It should also be able to stop with an honest answer: there is not enough evidence yet.

Access to live data makes an investigation possible; it does not make every conclusion correct. A release happening near a traffic decline is a clue, not proof that the release caused it.

The outcome to expect is a better-supported next action, with enough evidence for a person to question it.

SEO Becomes Part of the Project

An SEO report knows about URLs. Your repository knows how those URLs are produced.

Combining those perspectives can make an issue easier to investigate. Several affected pages might share a layout. A metadata change might come from one component. A redirect might be generated by a routing rule rather than written into each page.

With appropriate access, an AI coding agent can examine that project context alongside SEO evidence. Instead of handing you a generic recommendation, it can identify where a proposed change belongs and explain which pages it could affect.

This requires separate capabilities. Connecting an SEO MCP server does not automatically give an agent access to your code, CMS, or Git history. Those resources must be available through the agent's existing environment or other authorized integrations.

That distinction matters because useful SEO automation needs context on both sides: what search data suggests and how the application actually behaves. A report cannot supply the second half by itself.

From a Traffic Drop to a Reviewable Fix

Consider a hypothetical investigation in an agent environment with access to search performance, crawl results, and the repository:

Investigate pages that lost organic traffic over the last four weeks. Compare equivalent periods, look for shared patterns, and check relevant code changes. Explain the evidence before proposing a patch. Do not deploy anything.

The agent first confirms the property, dates, and filters. If the available data cannot support the requested comparison, it says so.

Next, it groups the affected pages and checks whether the decline is broad or concentrated. Suppose the affected URLs share a template. Inspecting the rendered pages reveals that their canonical links point to an unrelated category page, and a recent diff shows where that behavior was introduced.

This is a reason to investigate the template. Google's canonicalization guidance explains how canonical annotations communicate a preferred URL, but they remain signals rather than a command Google must follow.

The agent proposes a focused diff and identifies other pages using the same template. You review whether the intended canonical URLs are correct before approving a release.

After deployment, the relevant pages can be fetched or crawled again to check their output. Search performance is evaluated later, separately.

The deliverable is an evidence trail, a reviewable change, and a verification step. Nothing in this example guarantees traffic recovery, and none of it depends on you manually transporting a report into the coding environment.

Why MCP Support Should Be a Standard Feature

For an SEO tool that wants to participate in agent workflows, I would now treat MCP support as a core product expectation.

Developers should be able to use its capabilities from a compatible client without building a separate custom integration for every workflow. Direct APIs can also connect agents to tools. MCP offers a shared interface that makes those capabilities discoverable across compatible environments.

A useful SEO MCP should provide:

Clear operations with documented inputs and predictable outputs.
Data context, including dates, filters, units, and source freshness.
Explicit unavailable states when a result cannot be retrieved.
Permissions that distinguish reading data from changing it.
Clear pagination and usage limits, so a partial response is not mistaken for a complete analysis.

The protocol supports discoverable tools and schemas. SEO products still have to design meaningful operations and responses around them.

Adding a chat box to a dashboard does not meet this need by itself. The capabilities should be accessible to the agent the developer already uses, with enough context to interpret results correctly.

A product built only around human navigation increasingly leaves another important user outside the door: the agent acting on that human's instructions.

Humans Still Own the Decisions

The purpose of integrating SEO into an agent is to reduce the work between a question and a useful decision.

People still define the goal. A business might care more about qualified leads than total visits. A proposed content change might improve keyword coverage while making a page less helpful to its readers. The agent needs that context, and someone has to judge the tradeoff.

Consequential changes also need a clear boundary. Reading a report, proposing a diff, publishing content, and deploying code are different actions. Access to one should not silently imply permission for the others.

A good workflow makes the evidence and proposed changes easy to review. It leaves room to reject a recommendation, request another comparison, or decide that the available data is insufficient.

For the developer in the opening example, that means staying with the problem instead of carrying files between tools. The agent brings relevant evidence into the project, helps investigate it, and leaves a decision you can inspect.

That is the direction SEO tools should take: reliable capabilities available wherever the work happens. The dashboard remains an option. The SEO capability becomes part of the project.

Put This Into Practice With Screpy

Screpy's SEO MCP brings this workflow into AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Codex, and Cursor. Connect its hosted MCP server, sign in with your Screpy account, and give your assistant access to your projects.

Once your project and the relevant data connections are set up, you can automate SEO investigations, prioritize technical issues, start crawls you authorize, and compare completed crawl results without opening the Screpy dashboard. Your AI assistant can work with available crawl findings, tracked rankings, and connected Search Console data directly.

For example:

Use Screpy to investigate my latest crawl. Find missing titles and broken internal links, identify the affected pages, and prioritize the work. Check the relevant code in this project and prepare fixes for my review.

With a coding agent that also has access to your repository, the workflow can extend from identifying an issue to preparing or applying an authorized fix, then checking the findings in a subsequent crawl. Screpy supplies the SEO evidence; the agent uses that evidence alongside your code.

You can keep the investigation and implementation in your AI workflow, with changes under your control. Screpy's dashboard is there when you want it, but it does not have to be where your SEO work happens.