- Ever wondered, which SEO tool is best.
Well in this video, I'm gonna 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.
(high intensity upbeat music)
SEO tools let's be having yah,
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 sorts of content is performing best for them.
So whether you're unloading your own website
to see what sorts of errors might be holding
your ranking back or whether you're doing a little bit
of competitive snooping and identifying what
that link strategy is, or how they're using content
to generate traffic, some of the tools that we're gonna
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, and that Screaming Frog is great
for analysing 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 gonna 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 websites or authority.
Moz Domain Authority or DA
is pretty much industry standard recognition
of a site or authority now that Google has removed
its page rank number from the toolbar,
and whilst it's imperfect most DA is a very useful shortcut
to understand how authoritative a site
is in relation to other sites,
whilst the data that the Moz Domain Analysis tool
gives you is much more limited than some of the other tools
that we're gonna be looking at.
If you just need a quick overview of how authoritative
your site is or a competitor site, or you want to analyse
how authoritative a publication might be, Moz DA
is a pretty good place to start.
Next tool which is an absolute must have
for every website owner is a Google Search Console.
Now Google Search Console or GSC has become way more useful
for SEO 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 measure data that comes directly from Google,
i.e. this is that 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 gonna 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.
Or you can use Google Search Console, 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 wanna sleep well at night
you can use Google Search Console to find out
if Google things, your website has been hacked or not.
(chuckling)
It's just laugh a minute inside search console,
so these tools are great as the basics,
and they're really useful if you wanna analyse
your own site in depth or analyse your competitors,
but a very surface level.
But what about if you wanna take things up a notch,
if you wanna find new opportunities, analyse different types
of keywords, or most importantly, spy on your competitors,
so you can steal their best ideas.
Adapt, adapt their best ideas.
(indistinct chattering)
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 tool.
The SEO super tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, 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 that 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 bugbears 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 measure data is the stuff
that is reported, by the organisation 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 measure data.
But the trouble is if you're basing all of your SEO work
on only Google search console, your competitors,
probably aren't gonna 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 wanna do some snooping
you're gonna have to use one of these SEO super tools,
super tools which obviously leads to the question
how accurate is the data inside these super tools?
What you don't wanna 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, so all clients
have Exposure Ninja so we've got access to 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 measure 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 US sites.
And then secondly we wanted to choose sites
with different amounts of traffic.
Some of the sites that we're gonna 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 smaller,
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 gonna be
in that smaller, 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
and I'm not gonna share the website URL with you,
but I will share that 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 gonna guess
how much organic traffic a website gets,
is they need to measure the search results
for a huge number of different keywords.
'Cause 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 gonna 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 actually multiplies so many
of these different estimates together.
And any inaccuracy obviously is gonna 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 slope we measured actually
got 3,422 monthly organic visits.
SEMrush estimated 5,100, Ahrefs estimated 2,700,
Serpstat 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 223,000 a month.
SEMrush estimated 259,000 Ahrefs estimated 136,000,
Serpstat 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 ten.
Third site in our test got around 7,000 monthly visits
from organic search, so much estimated about 12,000,
Ahrefs estimated about 5,000 Serpstat again,
way off with 136,000 and SpyFu was 67,000.
The fourth site in the test was around 13,700,
SEMrush estimated 27,000, Ahrefs estimated 27,700.
Serpstat estimated at 218,000,
and SpyFu estimated 1.15 million.
The final site and our list had around 5,000 monthlies,
SEMrush estimated 2,908, Ahrefs estimated 1,500,
Serpstat 33,000 and SpyFu 38 and 1/2 thousand.
So in order to score these results,
and announce our overall winner to our little tests
that 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 a third closest and zero points to the tool
that was furthest away from the real data.
Are you ready for the results?
(drums rolling)
In last place came SpyFu with only two points
out of a possible 15,
I mean, if you 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 ways.
And third place, Serpstat 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, 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, (drums rolling) Ahrefs with seven points
out of a possible 15.
Pretty impressed with Ahrefs the data seemed
to be broadly pretty good.
And first place, (drums rolling) with 11 points out
of a possible 15, SEMrush.
(cheering)
And this is kind of why we use SEMrush
as our primary SEO tool here inside Exposure Ninja.
Not only has it performed best and our little test here
we also find the functionality is awesome.
And it also tends to blow everything outside of 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 TikTok for example,
so much 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 so much 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 only getting 3000 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 smaller medium sized businesses
that wanna make strategic decisions based
on the data inside them.
So we've got other videos on how to use so much,
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 thankyouninjas.com
you can actually get a free trial of so much
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 wanna 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 they sneaky little so and sos 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 enjoyed this video
hit subscribe and the bell notification
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to our egos, which are really really extremely fragile.
And don't forget if you want help
with your websites digital marketing,
then you can go to exposeninja.com
and request a free website and marketing review.
This is awesome, this is a super tool,
I should have said this at the start,
this is the ultimate SEO super tool.
What will happen when you go to exposureninja.com
and request your free website and marketing review
with one of our amazing team of consultants.
We'll take a look at your site,
they'll have a look at your competitors,
and they'll see how well your site is doing from there.
They'll map out a prioritised action plan
that you can follow over the next six to 12 months
to significantly increase the volume of leads and sales
that your website is generating for you.
It's totally free, there's no catch,
we're not gonna sell your data to Cambridge Analytica,
we're not gonna set up spy cameras in your house,
we're not gonna do any of that stuff,
we're just gonna give you a great view
and then of course, if you wanna work with us,
then you do have the option to.
Right, that's enough for this,
this is deteriorating let's end it,
from your number one digital marketing super tool,
over and out.
(high intensity upbeat music)