What tool(s) do you use for technical SEO work? Select all that apply:
We asked all of our respondents to select all SEOs tools that they used. The most popular answer with 93% was Google Search Console, followed by Screaming Frog with 88% and SEMrush at 67%.
What the experts think…
Google Search Console is extremely dependable, so I'm not surprised to see it at the top of the ranks again this year.
It's a fantastic and reliable way to monitor, identify and diagnose technical SEO issues, especially for businesses like ours that don't have the budget for a more varied tool set. However, it is best used in conjunction with Screaming Frog so that you can validate and dig deeper into the data.
It's really great to see so many different vendors feature in this list, though. Different tools excel in different areas, so it's worth mapping their features and reliability when choosing which to use alongside each other.
Google Search Console or bust. I still find features I didn't know existed or new ways to get important insights!
In my opinion, Bing Webmaster Tools often goes overlooked, yet it can provide valuable insights that other tools may miss. While Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and SEMrush are undoubtedly popular choices, Bing Webmaster Tools has the potential to uncover hidden gems crucial for comprehensive technical SEO analysis.
GSC is a stable when it comes to tech SEO. We would be pretty blind without it! Also not surprised to see Screaming Frog's popularity being stable - a purpose-built tech tool which doesn't break the bank! We've started training our non-tech SEOs on the use of SF too as it can be used in so many situations, for example ensuring a PR campaign page is indexable.
We've only just started using SEOmonitor at our agency, but we're loving their forecasting tool!
I'm also using ChatGPT, which can double as an awesome technical SEO tool, to write schema markup and regex statements.
If you could only choose ONE technical SEO tool, which one would you choose?
Next, we wanted to force the issue a little bit and from the same list, asked respondents to tell us the single technical SEO tool that they would use. Here, the top answer with 42% was Screaming Frog.
What the experts think…
I would personally always choose Screaming Frog - you can do so much with it that you can't with other tools. It's our go-to tool for migrations too, we would be lost without it!
The depth and breadth of Screaming Frog's capabilities makes it a clear winner here.
It makes surfacing technical issues effortless and helps businesses of all sizes get a better grasp on their website hygiene.
I believe the only reason it's used less frequently than Google Search Console is because of the barriers to purchase, such as budget.
Fortunately, free tools like GSC and Keyword Planner can get you a lot of the way there until you can get that budget signed off!
When crawling a website, which of the following tools do you use? Select all that apply:
Next, we went a little more specific and asked about SEO tools for crawling. The most popular tool that technical SEOs use for crawling, at 92%, is Screaming Frog. This was followed by SEMrush at 29% and closely behind was Ahrefs at 26%.
If you could only choose ONE tool for crawling a website, which would you choose?
Forcing SEOs to choose just one tool for crawling, the clear winner was Screaming Frog with 78% of SEOs choosing it as their tool of choice for crawling.
What the experts think…
I'm not surprised to see Screaming Frog and Sitebulb up there, but I am surprised to see Ahrefs and SEMRush so high on the list.
I love Ahrefs and use it religiously for lots of things. However, the site audit feature isn't one of them.
There are certainly more detailed and reliable tools for crawls out there, and I find Ahrefs' functionality to be quite restricted compared to some of the tools lower on the list.
When assessing the search visibility of a website, which of the following third-party tools do you use? Select all that apply:
For tools that measure search visibility, SEMrush was the most popular tool, with 69% of SEOs using it. This was followed by Ahrefs at 56% and Sistrix at 18%.
If you could only use ONE tool to assess the search visibility of a website, which one would you use?
When forced to choose just one tool, the majority of respondents (45%) chose SEMrush as their tool of choice for measuring search visibility.
What the experts think…
Tools have different ways of measuring, so if possible it's always great to cross compare e.g. search volumes in keyword research.
When carrying out log file analysis, which of the following tools do you use? Select all that apply:
When it comes to log file analysis, 78% of technical SEOs said that they used Screaming Frog for this, followed by Botify with 11%.
What the experts think…
Splunk is SO COOL but the tool is so huge and complex, it's not a surprise to see it so low on this list. Splunk would probably see a good return on marketing to and writing more documentation specifically for SEOs...
Could have happier to see Jetoctopus here. Its user-friendly interface and visual insights make it accessible even to non-technical individuals, facilitating clear reporting to client.
If you could only choose ONE tool for carrying out log file analysis, which one would you use?
Answers were very similar when it came to choosing just one log file analysis tool, with Screaming Frog leading the way again with 72% of respondents choosing it as their one tool.
When measuring organic search rankings, which of the following tools do you use? Select all that apply:
Our next question focused on tools to measure organic search rankings and respondents were asked to select all tools that they used for this purpose. The most popular answer with 77% was Google Search Console, followed by SEMrush (60%) and Ahrefs (45%).
What the experts think…
It's a bit worrying that GSC is not used by everyone! One of the most shocking moments in my career was hiring someone with 5 years of agency experience who did not use it. I didn't even know that was possible! It's definitely on my list of recruitment questions now but it points to a bigger issue with the industry, over-reliance on external SEO tools as the main point or only point of truth.
I think a lot of SEO tools will see changes in their customer base when pricings change - although the reasons for recent price increases are understandable, I'm not surprised to see Ahrefs losing popularity over other tools.
If you could only choose ONE tool to measure organic search rankings, which one would you choose?
When it comes to choosing just one ranking tool, Google Search Console was the winner again with 42% of respondents choosing this as their tool of choice.
What the experts think…
Google Search Console. It's a free tool, any client would have it and it's reliable as for how my users finds me and you can get tons of optimization and low hanging fruits ideas only from deep looking at the data there.
This is proof of difficulty to justify spend on expensive SEO tools, whether in-house or agency. GSC is of course free, and can be easily integrated into SEO reports for tracking purposes. It would be great to start seeing more independent tools gaining popularity too.
If you could choose just ONE non-eCommerce platform to work on, which one would you choose?
Next up, we wanted to ask technical SEOs which platforms they preferred to work on, starting with non-ecommerce ones. WordPress was by far the most popular answer with 65% of respondents choosing it as their platform of choice.
What the experts think…
I love how far different CMS have come in terms of SEO optimisation potential! I think it's a non-negotiable for even smaller businesses moving forward.
You just can't go wrong with WordPress. Like all platforms, it has its flaws, but its flexibility is unmatched and the community behind is also fantastic.
In your opinion, which non-ecommerce platform is the most problematic to work on?
We then asked the inverse of this question and asked respondents to tell us which non-ecommerce platform they didn’t like working on. Wix was the least popular platform to work on with 17% of respondents saying it was the most problematic for them. This was followed by Drupal at 14%.
What the experts think…
A couple of years ago, Wix might have been my top problematic platform, but they've made significant improvements to enhance its SEO friendliness. The changes they've implemented have certainly improved the platform's usability for SEO purposes.
It's surprising to still see Wix platform topping the list of non-preferred non-ecommerce platforms. I feel wix has improved since the past year, it's much flexible and has improved their SEO capabilities. Perhaps there are other factors influencing this perception.
If you could choose your favourite eCommerce platform to work on as a technical SEO, which ONE would you choose?
We then asked respondents if they had experience working on ecommerce platforms. 74% said that they did and they were then asked which platform they preferred working on. The top three answers were relatively close here, with Shopify just about winning with 44% of the votes. Closely following were WooCommerce (25%) and Magento (14%).
What the experts think…
Shopify being most popular doesn't surprise me, but I would have expected to see Bigcommerce closer to the top - we've worked on more Bigcommerce migrations than ever in the past year, so I would have expected to see them closer to the top!
In your opinion, which eCommerce platform is the most problematic to work on?
Again, we asked the inverse of this and 37% of respondents said that Magento was the most problematic platform to work on from a technical SEO point of view.
If you could choose just ONE project management tool to use, which one would it be?
Finally in this section, we asked about project management tools that technical SEOs prefer to work with. The result of this question was a tie between Asana and JIRA with 23% each, followed by Trello with 11%.
If you could choose just ONE project management tool to use, which one would it be?
What the experts think…
I've heard great things about how well-integrated JIRA can be.
However, I think it's important to meet teams where they are. For us, the rest of the business works in Notion, so it makes sense to centralize task and project tracking there too for wider visibility.
I also believe that a project management tool will only perform as well as you enable people to use it. You could have the most functional task tracker in the world but it's useless if it's not adopted or maintained effectively.
I've always seen JIRA more as a dev PM tool, so it's incredible to see it being rated equal with Asana by SEOs! We recently moved all our PM systems to Clickup - I wonder if we will see them in the list in the future? Although, some of our clients still prefer to share their internal projects (Asana, Notion etc) with us so perhaps integrated systems are the future!