Tools and Setup, September 2026

Lesson 12 of 14 11 min read
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You want to know what to install, what to pay for and what to look at each week, without spending the blog’s first income on subscriptions you’ll forget to cancel. This lesson is that list, and it carries a date in its title on purpose. Tools change faster than the rest of the course and prices change faster still, so wherever a plan name or a price would normally sit, the line says “confirm current pricing” instead. Every tool fact below was checked on 11 September 2026, and a fact with a date of its own carries it.

The short version is this: the free tools do most of the work, one paid tool is enough once the blog can pay for it and the plugin choice matters far less than the forum threads suggest.

One Paid Tool Is Enough

Search Console gives you Google’s own record of your site. It shows which queries showed your pages, which pages Google indexed and why it skipped the rest, which sites link to you and whether your pages load properly for real visitors. No paid tool can replicate that, because none of them has Google’s data. If I had to keep 1 tool, it would be this one, and it costs nothing.

A paid tool adds what Search Console cannot show: what other sites rank for, how hard a query is likely to be, a crawl of your own site for broken links and missing tags, plus a rank check that runs every day. You need 1 of these, not 3. Paying for 3 does not make the site rank 3 times faster; it splits the same hour across 3 dashboards. A workable trigger is the month the blog’s income makes the subscription a small share of it, and you confirm current pricing before you draw that line. At that point the subscription stops being a stretch and starts paying for itself in hours saved, and before that point the free stack and a clear weekly habit do more than any dashboard can.

The Free Stack

Most of what a solo blog needs is free, and most of the free tools are Google’s, which is the point. They show you what Google sees rather than a third party’s estimate of it. The free-tier limits below are as checked on 11 September 2026, and these move, so confirm the current ones on the vendor’s page.

  • Google Search Console. Google’s own record of the site. The reports that matter for a blog:
    • Performance, for queries, pages, countries and devices, with the Web search type carrying AI Overviews and AI Mode inside its totals
    • Page indexing and URL Inspection
    • Links
    • Core Web Vitals
    • Sitemaps
    • Manual Actions and Security issues
    • the generative AI performance report
    • the Settings page
  • Bing Webmaster Tools. A second search engine’s view of the same site, and since February 2026 an AI Performance report that shows how often Copilot and Bing’s AI answers cite your pages, which pages they cite and the phrases the AI used to find them. It imports your site from Search Console in a few clicks.
  • Google Analytics 4. What visitors do after the click. The 2 settings that carry the weight are key events, which are the actions you count as wins (a newsletter signup, an affiliate click, a sale), and channel groups, where visits from AI Overviews and AI Mode sit inside Organic Search and visits from ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Grok and Deepseek sit in a channel called AI Assistant.
  • PageSpeed Insights. It puts 2 things on 1 page: a lab run (Lighthouse, 1 simulated load) and field data from real Chrome users, drawn from the Chrome User Experience Report. The field numbers, judged at the 75th percentile of visits, are the ones Google uses and the ones the Core Web Vitals report shows. The lab score is a hint; the field is the record.
  • Lighthouse, inside Chrome’s developer tools, for the mobile check. It is what remains after Google retired the Mobile-Friendly Test and the Mobile Usability report in December 2023.
  • The Rich Results Test. Paste a URL and it lists the structured data Google can read and the rich results the page is eligible for. Eligible is not the same as promised; Google decides whether the result shows.
  • Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends. Planner shows demand in ranges, Trends shows seasonality and whether interest in a topic is rising or falling. Neither replaces a keyword tool; both are free and both are Google’s own numbers.
  • Ahrefs Free, sold as Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. For a site you verify: a site audit, a view of your own keywords and backlinks and a small analytics tool. The caps on backlinks, keywords and monthly crawl credits change; confirm the current limits.
  • Semrush’s free account. About 10 lookups a day across keyword and domain research, a small site audit and a short list of tracked keywords. That is enough to check 1 query properly and not enough to plan a quarter.
  • Screaming Frog SEO Spider, free up to 500 URLs a crawl. For a blog under 500 pages that is the whole site, and one crawl finds the broken links, the missing titles, the redirect chains and the noindex tag you forgot on a page that mattered.

That stack covers indexing, speed, links, markup and the reader’s path after the click, and it costs nothing. What it does not cover is the competition, and that is what the paid tool is for.

The One Paid Tool

The choice is Semrush or Ahrefs. Both cover keyword research with a difficulty score, a look at what other sites rank for, a site audit, rank tracking and backlink data. Their difficulty scores run on different scales, so a number from one is not a number from the other, and Keyword Research That Still Pays scores per tool for that reason. Both have the free tier described above, and both change their plan names and prices often enough that any name printed here would be wrong within a year, so confirm current pricing on the vendor’s own page before you decide.

Both now sell add-ons that track how often AI answers mention a brand. For a solo blog these are optional. Search Console’s generative AI report and Bing’s AI Performance report answer the citation question for free, and the money does more in the core plan.

It is wise to pick on the free tiers, on whichever interface you find yourself opening without thinking, and then to stop relitigating the choice. The two are close enough that the weekly habit matters more than the tool it runs in.

The WordPress SEO Plugin

Rank Math, Yoast SEO and SEOPress do the same job: title and description fields, canonical tags, a robots setting per page and per archive, an XML sitemap, Article and Organization markup, breadcrumbs and a redirect manager in the free or the paid tier. Google ranks the page, not the plugin, and the green lights in the editor are the plugin’s opinion about your draft, not a ranking. There is no ranking difference between the three.

So pick one, configure it once and move on. The settings worth a few minutes:

  • the site name, and whether the site is a person or an organization, which feeds the Organization or Person markup and its sameAs links
  • the default schema type for posts, Article or BlogPosting
  • the sitemap, switched on and then submitted in Search Console
  • noindex on tag, date and paginated archives that carry nothing of their own, with category archives left indexed where they act as hubs
  • breadcrumbs, if the theme shows them
  • the social profile URLs, which the plugin turns into sameAs
  • redirects managed inside the plugin, so a changed URL never becomes a 404

What is not worth the minutes: switching on every schema type the plugin offers, adding FAQ or HowTo blocks (Google no longer shows either) and moving between plugins for a feature. A migration costs a day and buys no rankings.

Search Console Setup

Do these once, in this order.

  1. Add a Domain property and verify it through DNS. It covers http and https, the www and bare versions and every subdomain in a single property. Use a URL-prefix property only when you cannot touch DNS.
  2. Submit the sitemap URL your plugin generates in the Sitemaps report. Check that its lastmod dates are real: Google uses lastmod only when it is consistently accurate, and it ignores priority and changefreq entirely.
  3. In Performance, open the query filter, choose Branded queries and save the view, then do the same for Non-branded queries. The filter reached every eligible site by March 2026, and a site with very few impressions is not offered it.
  4. Add an annotation for today, then one for every update, redesign, plugin change and URL change from now on. A property holds 200, and each one is a note of up to 120 characters pinned to a date on every Performance chart.
  5. Open the generative AI performance report. It shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, not clicks, and has been available to every site since 31 August 2026. Discover has its own version.
  6. Find Settings, then Search generative AI. The default includes your site in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the AI summaries in Discover; the other choice removes your links from all 3. Google says the setting is not a ranking signal for the rest of Search, and a site that opts out receives no impressions or traffic from those features. The decision belongs to The Owned Audience; this step is so you know where the switch is.
  7. Open Bing Webmaster Tools, import the site from Search Console, submit the same sitemap and open the AI Performance report once, so you know what it looks like before you need it.
  8. In Google Analytics 4, mark the 2 or 3 events that count as wins as key events. Until you do, the organic traffic report can only tell you how many people came, not how many did the thing you built the page for.

The Weekly Check

The check takes 15 minutes on the same day each week. Consistency does more here than intensity, because the point is to notice a change the week it happens rather than the quarter after.

  1. Search Console, minutes 1 to 5. Open Performance, last 7 days against the 7 before. Sort the queries by impressions and read the top 20. Note any query that is new, and any query where impressions rose and clicks did not. Then open Page indexing and note any new reason.
  2. Rank tracking, minutes 5 to 10. With the paid tool, read the tracked keywords: anything that moved from page 2 to page 1, anything that fell off page 1, anything new. Without it, run the same compare on the Pages tab in Search Console.
  3. The content queue, minutes 10 to 15. For whatever publishes this week, run the page checklist from the workbook lesson: the title as it will show in results, a first paragraph that answers, headings that read as an outline, internal links planned in both directions, images with alt text and the piece of first-hand proof the page carries.

Log 1 line a week. What a change means belongs to Measuring What Matters; whether to act on it belongs to Surviving Updates.

The Monthly Review

The review takes 45 minutes to an hour, on the first Monday of the month.

  1. Performance, 15 minutes. Compare this month with last month and with the same month last year. List the pages that grew and the pages that fell. Write them down; do not act yet.
  2. Technical health, 10 minutes. Page indexing for new reasons, Core Web Vitals for new Poor groups and a crawl of the site with the paid tool, Ahrefs Free or Screaming Frog.
  3. Links, 10 minutes. The Links report for new referring sites. No disavow file; Links and Mentions says when that tool applies.
  4. Competitors, 10 minutes. Read 1 or 2 sites in your subject: what they published and which queries they picked up.
  5. The calendar, 15 minutes. Updates for the pages that fell, new targets from the queries you found and an annotation for everything you changed.

The numbers go on the monthly review sheet in the workbook lesson, which carries the columns Measuring What Matters sets out.

What Goes Stale First

Prices and plan names go first, then report names: the Coverage report became Page indexing, the Mobile Usability report is gone, the generative AI report is new. The Search Status Dashboard is the record of ranking updates, and the vendor’s own page is the record of its pricing. Where this lesson and either of those disagree, they win.