Devstars
Measuring an SEO campaign properly takes a stack of tools, not just one. We use Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console as the foundation, Google Tag Manager to control what gets tracked, BrightLocal for local SEO, SE Ranking for audits and keyword analysis, RankMath for on-page WordPress control, and Screaming Frog for technical crawls. Each one answers a different question. Here’s how the pieces fit together, and why.
The reality is GA4 was rushed. It was built to combat privacy concerns around how cookies were being used to gather data, and it shows. We used to get a lot more data than we get now.
Everything today hinges on explicit consent. If a visitor doesn’t click OK to cookies, they’re largely invisible, even for anonymised use. So GA4 takes a lot more setup than Universal Analytics ever did, and it’s harder to read once it’s running.
It’s still a really useful resource though. We invest quite heavily in the team that manages and analyses GA4 for our clients, because once it’s configured properly it tells you what people actually do on your site. What they read, where they convert, where they drop off. You just have to work harder for it than you used to.
GA4 shows what’s happening in the browser. Google Search Console looks at things from Google’s side.
It shows what people are searching for, how many times you’re appearing in results, your average position, and who’s actually clicking through. And here’s the important bit: those numbers are gathered without any cookies. No consent banner gets in the way.
That creates a mismatch worth understanding. You might have 100 clicks recorded in Search Console, but if 25% of those visitors declined cookies, you’ll only see 75 visits in GA4. There’s a bit of invisibility going on in your analytics. Which is exactly why Search Console has become a much more important tool in the arsenal. It’s the closest thing you have to the full picture.
That was the idea. Give marketeers access to Google Tag Manager and they could add tracking into Google Analytics without getting developers involved.
In practice, it’s made things harder. Yes, you can easily set tags up. You can also easily add a massive payload to every page on your site without realising it.
Quick example. We recently took on a SaaS company running over 80 tags through GTM. After a few days of a specialist working through and optimising the container, we were down to 20 tags, and page load speed improved by about six times. That’s not a tweak. That’s a different website.
So whilst GTM isn’t really a monitoring tool, it earns its place in this list because it controls what gets measured and how much weight your site carries doing it. Getting it set up right is a specialist task. Treat it like one.
BrightLocal is our choice. It gives us a really good view of local performance, including search grids that show exactly how you rank in the map pack across your local area, street by street. For multi-location businesses, that grid view is invaluable.
Moz Local, Semrush and SE Ranking all have their own local SEO platforms, and they’re all capable. We’ve used most of them over the years. BrightLocal is definitely our favourite now, particularly for citation building and tracking NAP consistency across listings.
We use it daily on clients like Giant Storage, where six locations each need their own citation campaigns, listings and local rank tracking. The thing is, local SEO lives or dies on consistency, and you can’t manage consistency you can’t see.
SE Ranking. It handles our website audits, ranking reports, competitor analysis and keyword research in one platform.
Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz all do very similar things, and honestly, it comes down to taste, spend and volume. We’ve worked with all of them. SE Ranking gives us the right balance of depth, reporting and value for an agency running multiple client campaigns, so that’s where we’ve settled.
Whichever platform you choose, the job is the same: track positions over time, spot the keywords where you’re close to page one, watch what competitors are doing, and catch technical issues before they cost you rankings.
We used Yoast for years. It was considered the standard, and it served us well.
Since the AI era, RankMath has tipped the balance for us. The control it gives over schema is the big one. Structured data is how AI platforms and search engines quickly understand your content, and RankMath lets us manage it page by page without touching code. It’s a core part of how we approach GEO implementation for clients who want their content cited by AI search.
Managing 404s and redirects within the browser is the other win. Broken links and redirect chains quietly erode rankings, and being able to monitor and fix them from the WordPress dashboard keeps small problems small.
Screaming Frog is our technical crawler. It works through a site the way a search engine does and surfaces the issues that don’t show up anywhere else. Broken links, redirect loops, missing meta data, duplicate content, orphaned pages.
We run it on every new client site and at regular intervals after that. The reality is that technical problems accumulate quietly on any site that’s actively maintained, and a crawl is how you catch them before Google does.
There’s a bonus most people miss. Screaming Frog can crawl any site, not just your own. Point it at a competitor and you can see how their site is structured, what they’re targeting in their titles and headings, how deep their content goes, and where their internal links concentrate authority. It’s basically an x-ray of their SEO strategy, all from publicly available pages.
This is where monitoring tools stop being about your site and start being about the gap between you and the sites beating you. Two gaps matter most.
Keyword gaps. SE Ranking compares your keyword profile against your competitors and shows you the terms they rank for that you don’t. Some of those will be irrelevant. But in every gap analysis we run, there’s a cluster of commercially valuable keywords a competitor is quietly winning on, usually because they’ve built a page for it and you haven’t. That’s your content plan, written for you by your competition.
Backlink gaps. The same comparison works for links. If three competitors all have links from the same industry directory, trade publication or supplier page, and you don’t, that’s not a mystery to solve. It’s a list to work through. These are sites already proven to link to businesses like yours, which makes them the warmest outreach targets you’ll find.
The thing is, competitor analysis isn’t a one-off exercise. We set up competitor tracking in SE Ranking from day one of a campaign, so every ranking report shows movement on both sides. When a competitor jumps, we can usually trace it to a new page, a new batch of links, or a site restructure spotted in a crawl. Then we decide whether to respond or whether they’ve gone after something not worth having.
| Tool | What it answers | Cost of getting it wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics 4 | What visitors do on your site | Decisions based on incomplete data |
| Google Search Console | How Google sees you, cookie-free | Missing the full search picture |
| Google Tag Manager | What gets tracked, and the payload | Slow pages, bloated tracking |
| BrightLocal | Local rankings, citations, map pack | Invisible in local search |
| SE Ranking | Rankings, audits, keyword and backlink gaps | Flying blind on campaign progress |
| RankMath | On-page SEO, schema, redirects | Weak signals to search and AI |
| Screaming Frog | Technical health, yours or a competitor’s | Hidden issues eroding rankings |
Search Console records clicks without cookies. GA4 only records visitors who accept cookie consent. If a quarter of your visitors decline, GA4 will show roughly a quarter fewer visits than Search Console shows clicks. Both are right. They’re measuring different things.
For a small site, GA4, Search Console and a decent WordPress SEO plugin will cover the basics. Once you’re running campaigns, working across locations, or competing in a serious market, the rest of the stack earns its keep quickly.
You can, and that’s often the problem. Adding tags is easy. Adding them without slowing your site down or duplicating tracking is the specialist part. If your site has been through a few marketing teams, an audit of the container is usually overdue.
For single-location businesses, the built-in local features may be enough. For multi-location businesses, BrightLocal’s search grids, citation management and per-location tracking justify the separate subscription. That’s been our experience across storage, salons and retail clients.
Quarterly at minimum. Monthly for large sites or anything with frequent content changes. Any time you migrate, redesign or restructure, crawl before and after.
A comparison of the keywords your competitors rank for against the keywords you rank for. The gap is the list of terms they’re winning on that you’re not, and it’s usually the fastest route to a content plan grounded in proven demand.
Stuart Watkins is founder of Devstars, a digital marketing agency helping businesses navigate measurement, SEO and digital growth since 1999.
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