Can you do SEO without Semrush or Ahrefs?

Yes. For most small sites you can do effective SEO with Google Search Console, a free analytics tool and a weekly habit, without paying for Semrush or Ahrefs. Search Console shows the real searches that already show your pages and what happens next. What you give up is competitor data, volume estimates and backlink research, which matter later, not first.

This guide explains what the free route covers, what it can't do, and when paying becomes sensible.

Why this question matters for a small team

Paid SEO suites are built for agencies and larger teams that manage many sites and chase many keywords. For a founder with one site, the monthly cost is real, and the interface can bury you in options. It's easy to spend a month exploring a tool and not improve a single page.

Google's guidance on third-party SEO tools is useful context. It says that third-party tools "don't have access to our internal ranking data", that they can't guarantee performance, and that Google doesn't evaluate them. It adds that whether or not you use a third-party tool, it strongly encourages using Google Search Console, which "provides you with key information and data directly from Google Search itself". That doesn't mean paid tools are useless. It means your own Search Console data is the one source that's definitely from Google.

What Search Console already gives you

Using labels from Google's Performance report help, the free data covers:

• Which searches show your site, with clicks, impressions, CTR and average position (the Queries tab).
• Which pages get the traffic (the Pages tab), by country and device.
• How things changed, using the Compare option, with up to 16 months of history in the interface, according to Google's drop guide.
• Whether pages are indexed, in the Page indexing report and URL Inspection tool.
• What search features you appear in, via the Search appearance tab.
• Impressions in AI features, in the Generative AI performance report.

With that you can do the work that moves small sites: rewrite titles for pages that get impressions but no clicks, strengthen pages just off page one, merge competing pages, and fix indexing for important pages. These are covered in SEO quick wins, impressions but no clicks and keywords you almost rank for.

What you give up without a paid suite

Be honest about the gaps:

1. Competitor research. Search Console only shows your own site. You can't see what a rival ranks for. The workaround is manual: search your important queries yourself and read what ranks.
2. Search volumes for searches you don't rank for. Search Console reports impressions only for queries where you appeared. For topics you haven't covered, you have no data. Use Google Trends for relative interest, and your own sense of what customers ask.
3. Backlink research. Search Console has a Links report for your own site, but it isn't built for studying who links to your competitors.
4. Scheduled rank tracking for specific keywords. Search Console's average position is an average across the searches where you appeared, not a fixed check from one place.
5. Site audits at scale. For a small site, Search Console's indexing reports and URL Inspection plus a manual look at your pages are usually enough.

None of these stop you doing useful work in your first months.

A free workflow that works

Here's a setup that costs nothing:

1. Verify your site in Search Console and leave it a few weeks to collect data.
2. Once a week, run a short routine. Our 30-minute weekly SEO routine is built for this.
3. Pick one fix a week from your own data: usually a title on a page that gets impressions but few clicks.
4. Annotate the chart and measure the result, as described in how to measure whether an SEO change worked.
5. Use Google Trends to check whether interest in a topic is rising or falling.
6. Search your key queries in a private window to see what Google shows, which is free competitor research for the searches you care about.
7. Use free analytics such as Google Analytics to see what visitors do after they arrive. Google's own suggestion is to track conversions and time on site there.

When a paid tool starts to make sense

Consider paying when you have a specific question your data can't answer:

• "Which topics do competitors win where I have no content at all?"
• "Who links to my competitors, and could they link to me?"
• "I manage ten client sites and need one place to track them."
• "I need weekly rank checks for a short list of keywords in a specific country."

Pay for one month, answer the question, and then decide whether to continue. Google's guidance applies here as well: judge a tool's advice against Google's official guidance, and be wary of anything that claims to use Google's internal data.

A worked example

This is an illustrative example, not real data.

A founder of a small invoicing app has one site with 60 pages and no SEO budget. She spends an hour setting up Search Console and waits a month.

In her first weekly session, the Queries tab shows "free invoice template" with a lot of impressions, a position around 8 and very few clicks. She rewrites the title and adds a download she'd already built. In week two she sees "invoice reminder email" appearing at position 18 with no page of its own, and adds a section to an existing guide. In week three she merges two overlapping posts.

By the end of the second month she's made around eight focused changes, annotated each one, and she has a log of what moved. She has not paid for a suite. When she later wants to know what a competitor's content calendar looks like, she'll know exactly what question she's paying to answer.

Common mistakes

• Buying a suite before you've used Search Console. You'll have two sets of data and no habit.
• Chasing volume numbers. Estimated volumes are rough. Impressions you already earn are real.
• Skipping competitor checks entirely. You can do a manual version for free.
• Collecting reports instead of making changes. One fix a week beats a spreadsheet of ideas.
• Treating any tool's data as Google's. Only Search Console is.

If the weekly routine feels like too much

If you'd rather not look at the tables yourself, a tool that turns Search Console data into a ranked list can sit on top of the free workflow. See Google Search Console tools for turning data into actions and simple SEO software for people who aren't SEO experts.

Doing this every week? Sense Console does it automatically

Sense Console is one way to keep the free route from turning into a chore. It reads the same Search Console data you'd read, compares your latest 28 days with the 28 days before, and lists opportunities by priority with a next action for each, plus a weekly email when something is new. It doesn't replace competitor or backlink tools, because it doesn't have that data. You can start on the Free plan, and you do not need a card.

Start free. Free plan. No card required.