Between metahead, whitmark.com, and the rest of my websites and domains, most days involve the same handful of tools. None of them are exotic. Each one answers a question I need answered across a lot of sites at once: is the site found, is it visited, is it up, and what should I write next.
Here’s what I use on a normal day and what each tool is for.
Google Search Console
Search Console shows how Google sees a site. It shows which pages are indexed, which ones aren’t and why, and the searches that showed a site in Google’s results.
It’s also part of my publishing routine. Every new post gets submitted through the URL Inspection tool the day it goes live. Google is clear about two limits: there’s a quota for submitting individual URLs, and asking for the same URL more than once won’t get it crawled any faster.
Search Console data is also what I lean on when I write about search. My post on zero-click searches was built from aggregated Search Console data across my own sites, plus AI referral traffic from Google Analytics.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Every new post goes to Bing too, through the URL Submission page in Bing Webmaster Tools.
Bing sets a daily URL submission quota for each site, based on how long the site has been verified, its impressions, and other signals, and you can see your site’s limit in Bing Webmaster Tools. Microsoft now recommends IndexNow as the main way to tell Bing about new or changed pages in real time, which is worth knowing if you publish often.
Google Analytics, for everything that isn’t search
Search Console tells me about Google. Analytics tells me about everyone else. My WordPress sites, including this one, use Site Kit by Google, so the numbers are a click away from the dashboard.
Analytics is also where I track referral traffic from AI assistants. It’s small next to search, but it shows whether those tools send real visitors.
Three SEO tools: SE Ranking, Semrush, and Ahrefs
I use three SEO tools: SE Ranking, Semrush, and Ahrefs. Keyword volumes are estimates, and tools use different methods to arrive at them, so the same keyword can show different numbers in each one. Difficulty scores are each tool’s own metric too.
They’re also where research starts. Before a post goes on a roadmap, I want to know roughly how many people search for it and how hard it is to rank for.
Google Sheets, where the plans live
My sites have content roadmaps in Google Sheets. Each row is a planned page: the title, the URL, the target keyword, its monthly searches and difficulty, the angle and sources, the status, the publish date, and the dates it was submitted to Google and Bing.
Drafts on my other sites also go through a review log in Sheets. Each draft gets a row, and nothing publishes until I’ve marked it approved. The same log has a tab for things I need to test in real life to support articles. A draft can go ahead while its test waits on the list.
ChatGPT and Claude
I use both to make design mockups, define content roadmaps, research the data I need for articles, and fact-check drafts. They also write the WPCode snippets and CSS that customize my WordPress sites.
Neither gets the last word on a fact. That comes from a source someone actually opened.
GoDaddy and Afternic, for the domains
Most of my domains are registered at GoDaddy, and the ones I’d sell are listed on Afternic, with whitmark.com as my storefront for them. Afternic says it has over 100 distribution partners, including 8 of the top 10 registrars, so a single listing shows up in a lot of places where people search for names.
Renewals get reviewed in monthly batches, at least 30 days before anything expires, with a recurring reminder on my phone. Views and offers on Afternic or Sedo are one of the signals I check before I pay for another year.
When I’m after an expiring name, I watch GoDaddy, NameJet, SnapNames, Namecheap, and Dynadot, and I browse expireddomains.net for names worth a closer look. Before any auction, I value the name and set a ceiling, and I walk away rather than get into a bidding war.
UptimeRobot, for uptime
UptimeRobot monitors my sites and alerts me when one goes down. Its free plan checks every 5 minutes, and depending on the plan, it can send alerts by email, SMS, Slack, and more.
WordPress and the hosting control panel
I also spend a lot of time in WordPress dashboards: drafts, updates, and small fixes. Behind them is my hosting control panel at KnownHost, which is also where my backups live, since I don’t run a backup plugin. I’ve written separately about the WordPress build stack I use, if you want the theme and plugin side of things.
That’s the list. Most of it answers a few simple questions: is the site found, is it visited, is it up, and what should I write next.
Top photo: Aleksi Tappura / Wikimedia Commons (CC0).
Sources
- Google: Ask Google to recrawl your URLs, Search Console reports at a glance
- Bing Webmaster Blog: Adaptive URL submission, Batch mode for the URL submission API
- Ahrefs: What is search volume
- Afternic: About Afternic
- UptimeRobot: UptimeRobot
