SEO Pinpoint Turns a Search Console Export Into an Actual To-Do List

A friend running a small SaaS side project asked me last month whether an Ahrefs subscription was worth it for a site pulling a few hundred searches a month. It wasn't, not for six pages he'd touch twice a quarter. Semrush had the same problem in reverse: most of what the price covers is depth he'd never reach at that volume. So instead of pointing him at either one, I pulled the queries export out of his Search Console account and ran it through SEO Pinpoint, a tool built specifically to read that file.

What It Does With a Search Console Export

SEO Pinpoint doesn't crawl a site or maintain its own index the way Ahrefs and Semrush do, so everything it knows about a property arrives in the file you hand it. What it does with that file is re-rank the queries already sitting inside, and the number it ranks them by is a Pinpoint Score from 0 to 100, which folds keyword difficulty together with signals taken from your own search data rather than from a category average. The table sorts on that score, and the effect is that the query with the most impressions behind it frequently isn't the one at the top, because the tool has quietly decided you can't win it.

I tried the preview before signing up for anything, dropped in a queries CSV, and got back a summary, the traffic trend, a couple of sample keywords and the first step of an action plan. That tier stays free permanently, one report every 24 hours, no account and no card. Pro sits behind it at $4.99 a month with the first 30 days free, though the card goes on file at signup, so it's the sort of trial you have to remember to cancel rather than the sort that lapses quietly on day 31.

CSV or Excel

I started with the plain Queries.csv from inside the Search Console export zip, not the zip itself, which tripped me up on the first attempt and is apparently common enough that the export instructions call it out. That file on its own produced five sections: a summary with the query count and a written read of what the data says, the search vocabulary grouped so you can see the wording an audience uses against the wording the pages carry, a shortlist of keywords worth targeting, the keywords already winning, and the ordered plan. There are ceilings on what you can feed it, 10 MB and the first 5,000 query rows, and a site the size of my friend's is never going to come near either.

What the CSV didn't produce was weekly impressions or any breakdown of pages splitting their own traffic, both of which need the dates and page URLs it doesn't carry. I ran the same date range again as an .xlsx and both sections appeared, which is reason enough to just always take the Excel download. The page splits section turned out to be narrower than I'd assumed from the name: it looks for a single page ranking under more than one address, www against non-www or http against https, dividing clicks between URLs that should be one, rather than for two different pages fighting over the same query.

Bing Webmaster Tools is the other supported source, and its keyword export gets you the report minus the trend chart and the page splits, since that file carries neither dates nor URLs. Bing stays a manual upload on both plans, including Pro, where Search Console itself can be connected directly and never exported again.

What the Action Plan Includes

The part that separates this from a raw export dump is the last section: an ordered list of changes, most impactful first, each one naming a single element on a single page. Some are copy fixes with example text written around your own keywords, ready to paste in. Others are structural, like pointing a canonical tag at the stronger of two competing pages. The rest name a specific element to rewrite, a title tag, an H1 or H2, a paragraph, an FAQ entry, or a piece of structured data, and where a step is a judgment call rather than a copy change, it says so and explains the trade-off instead of pretending there's one right answer.

The keywords-to-target list is doing the real filtering work underneath that plan. It only surfaces queries the site already ranks for and is already getting impressions on, on the logic that a query with zero visibility isn't worth a rewrite before it's proven it can rank at all. Pro puts two more columns beside the score, monthly search volume and search intent sorted into learn, compare or buy, and the intent column changed what I'd have suggested on two of his pages, because a comparison query and an explainer query want very different things from the same product.

There's also a button that assembles the finished report into a single markdown prompt for ChatGPT or Claude. I assumed it was a gimmick until I pasted one in and watched an assistant work through the plan in order without needing the site re-explained to it at every step. Whether you want an assistant making those edits unsupervised is a seperate question, but the two roles are at least distinct: the model inside SEO Pinpoint sees only the keywords the algorithm picked out, and the export is what it wrote.

Against Ahrefs and Semrush, on Cost Alone

SEO Pinpoint's own comparison pages against both Ahrefs and Semrush decline to quote either competitor's pricing, on the stated grounds that it changes too often to print accurately. That's a convenient way to avoid a number that might read as small next to $4.99, though it also happens to be true, since both suites have shifted their tiers more than once in the past couple of years. What isn't in dispute is SEO Pinpoint's own price, which stayed the same across every page I checked, including the two comparison pages that wouldn't quote anybody else's.

For my friend's project the math wasn't close. Five dollars a month to answer one question, what to fix next, beat a suite priced for someone auditing backlinks across a dozen domains.

What signing up buys, beyond the volume of what you get back, is mostly permanence and a bit of setup. Reports run while signed in are saved rather than evaporating after the free tier's 24-hour window, Search Console can be connected so there's nothing left to upload, and there's an option called site context that reads a property's busiest pages before the plan gets written. That last one is the only paid feature I found that changes the output rather than the amount of it, and the difference showed up immediately, because with it switched on the plan named the headings his pages carry today instead of describing the changes in the abstract.

Free, without signing up for anything, hands over more than I'd expected going in. The traffic trend, the search vocabulary and the keywords you already own all come through in full on the grounds that it's your own data being given back to you, and what's held back is the analysis on top: your total keyword count with one or two samples out of the shortlist, and the first step of the plan rather than all of them. I never got a clean answer on what the 24-hour reset between free reports is keyed to. Account, browser or domain isn't stated anywhere on the site, which you'd think a pricing page would just say, and I tested it twice from different tabs without settling it either way.