How to choose the best SEO software

[James]

Morning all,
This is a question i get asked a lot, and I know many organisations both small and large who are regularly looking at what tools to invest in to automate tasks and improve insight.
So given the wealth of SEO talent on EcomCHat, i thought it would be useful to pull apart how you select the right software for your business based on your specific needs and business size/budget.
MY starter for 10:
Site crawl
For an SME most times Screaming Frog will be ideal (and only £149 per year) but for much larger, complex orgs with huge sites, lots of different sites etc. then Deep Crawl is incredibly powerful.
SEO site audit and assessment
For an SME I pretty much always go to SEMRush for site health analysis, competitor research and keyword targeting. I also think AWR is really good for rank tracking.

I know there are lots of other very good tools out there, each with its own merits. So please drop by and share your perspective on which tools suit different types of business.

thanks
james

[Simon]

Big subject!

Really does depend on what you want to achieve. I do Technical audits so I use Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl and a new kid on the block Sitebulb. Not one of these is perfect in any given situation bit between the three you should catch most of the issues.

Also of interest is metaforensics.io
For Speed GTMetrix.com is really useful at a page level

For Rank positioning for small projects, I use SERPLab.co.uk – a great little low-cost project that gives surprising amounts of data for a fiver a month.

For the multi tools SEMRush is the main choice but also consider CognitiveSEO which has very good backlink auditing tools if you need that.

I recently invested in SEOPowersuite – an interesting set of desktop tools and I am still getting used to it and it is a bit flakey at times – but some useful data coming out of it.

For content I have used Text Tools effectively for clients

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are an absolute must of course.

Then there are keyword research and all that backlink stuff…

[Stuart]

A +1 from me for Sitebulb – I had a site I thought was spot on in terms of indexation and it managed to find some pages that were getting indexed (which shouldn’t have been) that i’d missed in every other audit of the site.

[James]

Interesting, not come across Sitebulb before so will check it out. Are there any downsides to using it where it’s not as good as the other tools?

In terms of a toolkit like SEMRush, where do you think it’s (a) better (b) worse than other tools?

I think the project capability to pull out keyword/rank data and compare to competing domains is really good and the easiest UI i’ve found.

thanks
james

[Simon]

Really don’t think SEMRush is quite in the same space as Sitebulb, Deepcrawl and Screaming Frog. As mentioned they all have their foibles but for Technical Audits all are better than anything else out there inc SEMRush.

However, SEMRush wins hands down for other aspects – keyword, rank data, domain strengths, visibility, backlinks (with Majestic) competitors etc. – SEMrush is more aimed at marketing – clues in the name really!

Going forward I believe it is best to pick and mix your toolset to match the job at hand – each project normally has unique requirements.

[James]

Hi Simon,
Sorry i think i worded my post poorly – I meant how does SEMRush compare, in your opinion, to similar tools in the market like AWR, Moz, Sistrix, Raven etc.
Apart from SEMRush, I’ve only used AWR and Raven because i’m not a specialist SEO, so haven’t had the need to obsessively compare outputs.
Of the three, I find SEMRush the best for site assessment, competitor analysis, rank monitoring and keyword opportunity mapping. When combined with tools like Google Keyword tool, Google Trends, Answerthepublic etc. it’s great for keyword stuff.
I’ve not used SEMRush for backlink analysis yet – is it one of the best?
What do you use it for?
thanks
james

[Simon]

Ah OK, I see what you mean James – for the all-around tools if there was only one tool a business user was prepared to pay for then yes SEMRush is the most useful one out there at the moment. For the first step at expansion from it, I would add a Majestic account as you can them pull the Majestic data into SEMRush making it even better.

For crawling – SEMRush can audit your site as well so you may not need anything else. If your site is small then you can use ScreamingFrog in free mode – up to 500 URLs (that’s 500 pages if you turn off images, CSS and js etc. in the config). If bigger and they want to check just broken links then Xenu is still free – it is very old but works really well and is what inspired Screaming Frog.

When I was at HSBC we used it for a lot of things – monitoring sites, researching, competitor analysis and ranking.

But yes I’d recommend SEMRush over Moz and AWR at the moment.

[Nick]

Some great insights on this thread already, but I wanted to chime in since outside of spending thousands of dollars worth of software each month, we’ve built a handful of our own tools to support our clients and services.

Simon is a man after my own heart when it comes to crawling. For every site we crawl (unless it’s over 500k pages) we triage all 3 crawlers; ScreamingFrog, DeepCrawl, and Sitebulb (full disclosure: I’m on the advisory board for DC). For big sites (in the millions of pages) we built our own more primitive crawler using hadoop. We run SF on a dedicated instance of AWS EC2 and for the most part don’t have any hiccups on the smaller sites., however, I really do prefer the visualizations of the other 2 crawlers.

I still use SEMRush for a lot of quick checks, but Ahrefs has become my go to for getting quick visibility into a site’s top pages and overall keyword footprint. Ahrefs is my default link index tool but I do always cross reference via Majestic. Metrics like CF, TF, and TTF I still find incredibly valuable.

I messed around a bit with Text-Tools as well as Ranks.nl, but wasn’t really impressed so we build our own tf*idf tool and are working on a visualizer for LDA.. I don’t use these tools for keyword research but more so to help unearth topics that should be appearing on a page targeting specific concepts and then use that intelligence to expand the keyword research into those topic areas.

As for rank tracking I do like Ahrefs but we do also pay for several other services in addition including AWR Cloud, SERPwoo, and most recently Nozzle.

When it comes to keyword research we pull data from almost every one of the above mentioned sources and then use a process I designed to build what’s come to be known as a keyword matrix to get a full view of a site’s keyword universe as well as snapshots in time of the page 1 SERP’s for every term. I’ve found this to be the most effective way to find holes and dial in rank potential for a given site.

[Simon]

Every year I tell myself that when I have a bit of time I will bite the bullet and learn python so that I can build my own crawlers as I have some ideas about things to crawl for that are not in any commercial crawlers yet. Not found that time yet and I hesitate because there are probably better ways – but I really cannot write backend code or code code (as in are you going out or out out?).
Thank’s Nick – I will have a look at Hadoop – when I have some time of course!

[Author]

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