The Best SEO Tools — 🥊 Tested and Compared

Key Takeaways

ever wondered which seo tool is best well in this video i'm going to share some of the free seo tools that we use here at exposure ninja and also do a bit of a shootout to see which of these seo tools has the best data enjoy seo tools let's be having you so seo tools are really useful whilst no seo tool is ever going to do your work for you there are some really important tools to have in your toolbox as a digital marketer which can help you get more data that you might not otherwise see and also do a lot of competitor snooping things like identifying which pages on your website are broken but also having a look at what your competitors are doing how they're building links what sort of content is performing best for them so whether you're analyzing your own website to see what sort of errors might be holding your ranking back or whether you're doing a little bit of competitor snooping and identifying what their link strategy is or how they're using content to generate traffic some of the tools that we're going to be looking at today can give you immense input and show you a whole bunch of stuff that would take years to dig out otherwise so first up let's look at some of the free seo tools that pretty much every seo or digital marketer needs in their toolbox first up screaming frog now screaming frog is great for analyzing your website and finding technical seo tweaks to make to improve your ranking we've got other more detailed videos on that so i'm not going to go too much into exactly how to use screaming frog or in fact any of these other tools in this video but we primarily use screaming frog to perform site audits to tell us the sort of pages that might have issues with meta or pages being indexed that shouldn't be the next free seo tool is moz domain analysis now this is a great way to get a free fast overview of any particular website's authority moz domain authority or da is pretty much industry standard recognition of a site's authority now that google has removed its page rank number from the toolbar and whilst it's imperfect mozda is a very useful shortcut to understand how authoritative a site is in relation to other sites whilst the data that the mods domain analysis tool gives you is much more limited than some of the other tools that we're going to be looking at if you just need a quick overview of how authoritative your site is or a competitor's site or you want to analyze how authoritative a publication might be mozda is a pretty good place to start next tool which is an absolute must-have for every website owner is google search console now google search console or gsc has become way more useful for seos over the last few years and it has one massive advantage over the other tools in this video and that massive advantage is that the data google search console gives you is measured data that comes directly from google i this is their first party data that's great because you know that it's accurate whereas some of the other tools that we're looking at today they are guesstimate data they're projections they're based on a small sample size or crawling or scraping or taking data from looking at how people are using websites you know that when you go into search console that data is going to be as close as google will give you to being completely accurate so you can pretty much rely on things like impressions and the number of clicks your site's getting as being accurate now you can use google search consoles see all sorts of useful things like how many times your site is showing up in search how many clicks it's getting and also the keywords that are driving clicks too and you've got the really useful kind of basic stuff such as how is google able to crawl your site how's google processing any schema on your site and also are there any mobile issues and of course if you really want to sleep well at night you can use google search console to find out if google thinks your website has been hacked or not it's just laugh a minute inside search console so these tools are great as the basics and they're really useful if you want to analyze your own site in depth or analyze your competitors at a very surface level but what about if you want to take things up a notch if you want to find new opportunities analyze different types of keywords or most importantly spy on your competitors so you can steal their best ideas adapt adapt their best ideas okay that was l page from the competition commission adapt their best ideas well then it might be time to take a look at one of the seo super super super tools the seo super tools like semrush href spyfu serpstat claim to do all sorts of things awesome things showing you how much traffic each of those pages is getting and from which keyword tracking their and your ranking from particular devices from different locations over time now a lot of people understandably get really obsessed about finding out how much traffic their competitor sites are getting which leads us onto this topic of data one of my personal bug bears inside the world of seo is how people treat data as all the same broadly speaking we actually have two types of data we have measured data and we have what i call guesstimate data so measured data is the stuff that is reported by the organization or by the tool that it is measured from now as we've seen google search console is a great seo tool if you want to use measured data but the trouble is if you're basing all of your seo work on only google search console your competitors probably aren't going to give you access to their google search console so that you can see which pages are performing the best so you can build a content strategy to crush them into the ground so if you really want to do some snooping you're going to have to use one of these seo super tools which obviously leads to the question how accurate is the data inside these super tools what you don't want to do is build an entire seo strategy around the data in these super tools only to find out that it's completely inaccurate and the strategies that you thought were working really well for your competitors are actually doing absolutely nothing for them so i wanted to find out which of these super tools has the most accurate data so i devised a little test to find out so we decided to have each tool tell us how much traffic they thought five different websites were getting from organic search now these five websites are all clients of explosion ninja so we've got access their analytics and their search console so we know exactly how much data they are getting from organic search so we're basically putting up the tools against the measured data to see which one is closest now we chose these five sites based on a couple of different factors firstly we wanted to choose a mixture of uk and u.s sites and then secondly we wanted to choose sites with different amounts of traffic some of the sites that we're going to be looking at are much newer so they have lower traffic volume but some of them are more established and have larger traffic volume now all of these fit into the small and medium-sized business category we're not looking at sites like facebook here because most of the people who are watching this video and considering these tools are going to be in that small and medium-sized business category so whilst it's much easier to have accurate estimate data for huge massive sites with millions and millions of visits each month we wanted to focus this test on smaller sites that were getting four five or six figures of monthly organic traffic now because these are all clients of exposure ninja i'm not going to share the website url with you but i will share their data now before i do so i just wanted to talk about how these tools are getting to this data now answering a question like how much organic traffic a particular website gets might seem really straightforward but actually it's really not because in order to make an estimate of how much organic traffic a website is going to get the first thing these tools need to do if they're going to guess how much organic traffic a website gets is they need to measure the search results for a huge number of different keywords because they need to know where each of these websites is ranking for a whole range of different keywords then the tools need to estimate how many times each of these keywords is being searched per month in each of the locations then they need to estimate what percentage of those searches are clicking on that website based on its ranking for those keywords so in order to give accurate data these tools need to measure a huge number of keywords they need to track the positions accurately for the ranking of each of these keywords they need to know approximately how many people are searching for each of these terms every month and then they need to be able to work out how much of that search traffic each of these sites is getting based on its position so we've really got these four metrics which are then multiplied together and give us this output which is how much organic traffic a site is going to be getting so whilst on the surface it might seem like a really basic simple question for one of these tools to answer it's a great test because it actually multiplies so many of these different estimates together and any inaccuracy obviously is going to be multiplied out and can give wildly different results which by the way is exactly what we got okay so remember each of these tools has estimated how much organic traffic each of these sites gets the first site we measured actually got 3400 monthly organic visits semrush estimated 5100 ahrefs estimated 2700 serps that measured 31 600 so out by almost a factor of 10 spyfu estimated 124 000. so that's out by a factor of 40. the next site the real organic traffic was about two hundred and twenty three thousand a month semrush estimated two hundred and fifty nine thousand ahrefs estimated 136 000 serps that estimated 1.4 million and spyfu 140 000. again we can see how the difference between the closest and the furthest off is just insane we've literally got these tools for the same site estimating differently by a factor of 10. third site in our test got around 7 000 monthly visits from organic search semrush estimated about 12 000 ahrefs estimated about 5 000 serps that again way off with and thirty six thousand and spyfu was sixty seven thousand the fourth sight in the test was around thirteen thousand seven hundred semrush estimated twenty seven thousand ahrefs estimated twenty seven thousand seven hundred serps that estimated two hundred and eighteen thousand and spyfu estimated one point one five million the final site on our list had around five thousand monthlies semrush estimated two 2 900 ahrefs estimated 1500 serps that 33 000 and spyfu 38 and a half thousand so in order to score these results and announce our overall winner to our little test we decided to award three points to the tool that was closest two points to the tool that was second closest one point to the tool that was the third closest and zero points to the tool that was furthest away from the real data are you ready for the results in last place came spyfu with only two points out of a possible 15. i mean spyfu had some ridiculously inaccurate data and it wasn't consistently over or under which means i'd actually be pretty cautious about even using it to compare different sites because it doesn't seem to be consistently wrong it just seems to be very wrong in different ways in third place serps that with three points out of a possible 15. again a bit like spyfu there was some really inaccurate stuff here you know any tool that gets things wrong by an order of magnitude might be quite difficult to trust for particular data um it did tend to overestimate across the board though so for comparison purposes maybe it's usable but even so i'd be reluctant to trust data for sites of this size in second place ahrefs with seven points out of a possible 15. pretty impressed with ahrefs the data seem to be broadly pretty good in first place with 11 points out of a possible 15 semrush and this is kind of why we use semrush as our primary seo tool here inside exposure ninja not only has it performed best in our little test here we also find the functionality is awesome and it also tends to blow everything outside to the water with search volumes for trending keywords so things that see a large spike in keyword search volume this can be useful for seasonality for promotional stuff or if you're trying to piggyback on a trend like trump's ban of tick tock for example semrush tends to give the best data for those sorts of keywords so we award semrush the overall best data in this very simple quick and dirty little test the other thing i would say is that on the whole the lesson from this is to take guesstimate data always with a pinch of salt we use and love semrush because it gives us loads of different tools from helping us find blog posts and content that's ranking best for competitors to finding related keywords and spying on competitors paid ad traffic even though we love it and the data's pretty good we would never trust the data as gospel because at the end of the day all of this data from these super tools is guesstimate data it's not measured data that comes directly from the source it's all susceptible to things like seasonal changes growth or drops over time and basically extrapolating from lots of low volume searches what traffic might be it's really difficult to estimate the organic traffic to a site that's only getting 3 000 visits a month that's a really really tough thing to do now of course most of these tools performed better for high traffic high volume keywords but many of the businesses using them are not huge corporations they are small and medium-sized businesses that want to make strategic decisions based on the data inside them so we've got other videos on how to use semrush it is our preferred seo tool of choice and we've actually managed to negotiate a free trial for viewers of the exposure ninja videos on youtube if you go to thank youninjas.com you can actually get a free trial of semrush it isn't advertised anywhere on their website we managed to negotiate it with them because we love it and we use it so you can get stuck in you can track your competitors you can see what sorts of things they're ranking for that you might want to copy and don't forget we've got other videos on our youtube channel about how to use so much and how to do competitor analysis to snoop and find out what those sneaky little so-and-so's are doing so i hope you've enjoyed this and i hope you found it useful and dare i say do you know what i'm just gonna say i hope you found it fun i hope that looking at seo super tool data was fun for you if we can make that fun we can do anything don't forget to hit like if you 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sales that your website is generating for you it's totally free there's no catch we're not going to sell your data to cambridge analytica we're not going to set up spy cameras in your house we're not going to do any of that stuff we're just going to give you a great review and of course if you want to work with us then you do have that option too right that's enough of this this is deteriorating let's end it from your number one digital marketing super tool over and out