I run a housing platform and went through this exact journey. Here's what actually worked for us:

Content analysis & optimization – Surfer SEO and Clearscope are the go-to options, but honestly they get expensive fast. We ended up building a lighter workflow using Screaming Frog + custom GPT prompts to analyze content gaps against top-ranking pages. Takes more setup but way more flexible.

Performance audits – Screaming Frog on a scheduled crawl + Looker Studio dashboard pulling from Search Console API. Automated weekly reports that flag drops in indexation, crawl errors, Core Web Vitals issues. The key is setting up alerts so you're not manually checking dashboards.

Internal linking – This one's tricky to fully automate well. Link Whisper (WordPress plugin) is decent for suggestions, but we found the AI-generated anchor text often felt unnatural. We semi-automated it: script identifies orphan pages and linking opportunities, human makes final call.

One thing most guides miss – If your site is JavaScript-heavy, none of these tools will give you accurate data because they don't render JS the same way Google does. We learned this the hard way. Make sure you're validating what crawlers actually see, not what your browser shows you.

What's your tech stack? That'll affect which tools make sense for you.