What SEO tools do you use and what do you use each for?

Google's own tools — free, authoritative, and non-negotiable:

• Google Search Console — the most important tool in SEO. Actual query data with impressions, clicks, position, and CTR; the Page Indexing report showing exactly why pages are not indexed; the URL Inspection tool for live testing; Core Web Vitals field data; manual action notices; and sitemap submission. Nothing else provides Google's own view of your site.
• Google Analytics — behaviour after the click, and conversions from organic.
• PageSpeed Insights — lab and field performance data.
• Rich Results Test — structured data validation.

Third-party tools:

• Screaming Frog — a desktop crawler for technical audits: broken links, redirect chains, duplicate titles, missing tags, orphan pages. Essential for any site audit.
• Ahrefs or Semrush — backlink analysis, competitor research, keyword difficulty, and rank tracking. Their traffic figures are estimates, which matters when reporting.
• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools as a free option for backlinks and basic auditing.

Note: The framing that impresses: tools produce data, not decisions. A Screaming Frog crawl of a large site returns thousands of "issues", most of which do not matter. The skill is knowing which findings affect indexing or rankings and which are noise — and being able to say that separates practitioners from people who send clients a raw audit export.