Toolbox
Technical SEO tools: methods, queries and checklists
I have always liked tools that make you autonomous: a well-chosen Excel formula, a query you can rerun every week, a checklist that keeps you from forgetting the essentials. This page gathers the ones I really use, each with the article that explains the why and not only the how.
Available
Contents:
What you can use right now
If you still work a lot in a spreadsheet, and there is no shame in that, start here. Each entry links to the full article, with screenshots and formulas.
Excel
Excel basics for SEO
CONCATENATE, VLOOKUP and pivot tables: three functions that are enough to process most crawl or rankings exports.
Excel
SEO Tools for Excel and XPathOnUrl
Fetch tags and response codes, or scrape a whole site, without leaving your spreadsheet. Article in French.
Logs
The 6 SEO criteria that influence crawling
A reading grid with figures, drawn from 7 million hits: what depth to aim for, how many internal links, what load time.
Dashboard
Building a dynamic SEO dashboard
Combine Search Console, Analytics, crawl and rankings in a single report. The method still holds in Looker Studio.
In progress
Methods, queries and checklists on the way
These entries will arrive with the next articles. All of them come from real projects on a network of 300 websites.
Method
Cleaning up a blog without losing its traffic
An inventory of every URL, a cross-check with twelve months of Search Console, one decision per URL, then a check after the switch. On this blog, two pages alone carried nine clicks out of ten, and they were not the ones I would have bet on.
Method
Monthly archives instead of deep pagination
What it changes for article depth, and the cache pitfall that keeps links to deleted pages alive.
Method
Testing a redirect rule before deploying it
Run it against the live sitemap to see what it would hit by mistake, then test it on one site before the whole network.
Query
Filling GA4 gaps in BigQuery with the intraday table
The query ready to copy, with the filter that avoids counting some days twice.
Checklist
5 rules to keep the BigQuery bill from exploding
Partition filters, estimating before running, an automatic safeguard, cost per user, useless jobs to switch off.
Checklist
Before handing an SEO task to an AI agent
The questions to ask before delegating, and the checks to keep for yourself.
Over to you
Missing an entry?
Tell me which topic you would like a method or a ready-to-use query for. If the question comes up often, it will get its own entry.