Which SEO Tool is Cutting Edge? - Google Search and SEO forum at WebmasterWorld - WebmasterWorld

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Which SEO Tool is Cutting Edge?

goodroi

2:48 pm on Feb 18, 2019 (gmt 0)

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Was privately asked which SEO tool is the most cutting edge. I'm gonna share my response here and invite everyone to share their own perspective.

I don't care which tool is cutting edge. I care which tool is most valuable for me. The tool to use depends on what you need plus which ones you already pay for/have legacy pricing locked in plus what is your available budget.

All tools have flaws & weaknesses as they try to emulate Google. You don't want to blindly follow any tool. Some seo tool providers should be more honest about their limitations but it helps me to outrank my competition. Those tool companies mislead their fans into a false sense of security and makes it easier to outrank them.

Ahrefs/Majestic/SEMRush/Moz and others are all valid SEO tools with different limitations/weaknesses. If you pay for all of the SEO tools you can go broke with bloated monthly recurring bills. Before you spend money ask yourself if you are confident you will make at least twice that money in added profits.

If you are working on a short time client gig or just want to test drive a SEO tool without risking your credit card, head over to fiverr and hire other people to run the report/tool for you instead. They might not run the report with the exact settings you want but its a quick & affordable way to test out the value multiple tools. For what you sacrifice in accurate comparison/testing you gain in ease.

PS If your unpaid mod team thinks any message is spam, they are going to delete first and ask questions later. You can mention specifics but be honest and fair. Share the good & bad so your insight is more valuable to others.

tangor

3:28 pm on Feb 18, 2019 (gmt 0)

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If you ask the tool makers, each of theirs is "cutting edge".

TheRealSaxman

7:26 pm on Feb 18, 2019 (gmt 0)

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I think the better question here is who is the consensus winner among us... I'm really more on the Paid Search end of things these days, but I have always liked SEMRush...

FranticFish

8:29 am on Feb 20, 2019 (gmt 0)

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The one I'm going to build this year ;)

cnvi

6:51 pm on Feb 20, 2019 (gmt 0)

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Interesting thread because I've been reading over the past few years that Google doesn't want websites to "SEO" - just produce content that best benefits the end user. But as long as G monopolizes the web, there will be a need for such tools. I've been happy with SEMRush in the past but the problem I have seen is that any tool can tell you X but if you don't have the budget or resources to resolve what any tool reports, you are just throwing $ away as suggested by Goodroi above. Interested to see what other tools are suggested here for 2019.

JS_Harris

10:37 pm on Feb 20, 2019 (gmt 0)

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Legit answer: A tool is useless unless it gets the job done. You need actionable data, not more data. If you're spending a lot of hours looking at data but in the end can't fully put the info to use, and have it work as intended, you wasted a lot of hours.

One of the most under-rated tools, that every webmaster happens to have, is Google's Search Console(or Bing's if you optimize for Bing instead). All of the other tools make guesses about traffic levels based on expectations for the page's ranked position but in reality you can have a HIGHLY ranked page getting 2% of the CTR or a 10th ranked page pulling 20%.

The actual clicks and impressions data is priceless. Lots of impressions but no clicks for a keyword/page? Hmmm, bad title? Technical issue? impossible competition or branded result? There's no monthly fee and no code to add with this tool, just register to see it. The data is already there.

Dear Google - you could make your tool "more awesomer" if, on the keyword reports, you put the url of page(s) receiving those impressions.next to the keyword. It used to be that way but the new console forces me to click between page and url a bunch unless I fully export and play in excel. Fix it? Thanks.

tangor

12:26 am on Feb 21, 2019 (gmt 0)

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^^^ always do your own work. The data is there. Heck, even raw logs will provide a lot!

Magical tools exist only in advertising of same (pun intended). Meanwhile, do not expect the SE's to make it easy. After all, that's THEIR biz you want to get involved with.

JS_Harris

5:03 am on Feb 21, 2019 (gmt 0)

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I agree, and today a #1 ranking typically takes an article having been published for a year or more.

The days of publish to #1 in a weekend are looooog gone.

I don't wager that there are too many tools out there with a crystal ball that can tell you the lay of the land a year in advance. In fact, most look backwards.

brotherhood of LAN

5:17 pm on Feb 21, 2019 (gmt 0)

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Not really bread and butter, but the latest word vector tools are pretty cool. Word2vec to begin with, GloVe and fastText (by Facebook) are all open source and free to play with.

NickMNS

5:49 pm on Feb 21, 2019 (gmt 0)

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@brothehood_of_LAN
How do you use these for SEO? It seems obvious that Google and others are using these or similar algo's to determine the meaning and relevance web pages. Are you suggesting to somehow reverse engineer the outcome their prediction. Example if you want to create a page about widgets, determine the vectors for "widgets" and the use only the highest ranked terms found to write the copy for you page on widgets. Is that the idea?

brotherhood of LAN

6:05 pm on Feb 21, 2019 (gmt 0)

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@NickMNS
I suppose you could say they're not a tool you'd use daily, but indicative of how things are today which should be remembered in the broader sense. Words and phrases aren't a series of symbols, they're in a vector space relative to all other words. Synonyms and words/phrases that co-occur near each other are thematically relevant and you can see this in results i.e. words you didn't search for are matched and highlighted.

So those tools are just good for getting round to the idea of how search engines (may) deal with text nowadays, especially unstructured text.

Another tool, wikidata is great for the structured stuff and knowledge graph. [blog.dgraph.io...] is a recent article that illustrates how the data can be sliced and diced. I'd searched today for 'friends cast ages', good example of that data at work.

There's good datasets wrt unsupervised learning as well as the structured data from wikidata. They're good to be familiar with IMO.

billygg

7:31 pm on Feb 21, 2019 (gmt 0)

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I'd have to say, for me, Majestic. All points above are well received. It does depend on the job and what you're doing. We do tons of backlink analysis, so this tool shines for us. When comparing this to ahrefs, Majestic is a little less fancy, but the data is very good and can be manipulated.

I second Search Console as well. Darn I need to use this more :D

casperb

10:55 am on Feb 22, 2019 (gmt 0)

Majestic is terribly slow. TF can easily be manipulated. Sometimes you check a domain and you think wow 43 tf / 40 cf 1500+ ref domains, ideal stats.
Check it out in ahrefs, 100 ref domains, some 301's half a year ago to stack TF. For backlinks ahrefs is the way to go, it's been like this for a long time aswell.

Jeff_Fidler

4:46 pm on Mar 5, 2019 (gmt 0)

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I'd say SEMRush offers the most useful, user friendly, and customizable features, however one of the biggest issues with this SEO tool surrounds the 430 errors when crawling Shopify sites. Because there isn't enough control over the crawl speed, i.e. you can't slow it down enough, it triggers an IP ban, which results in the 430 response codes.

This effectively makes any of the site audit reports useless, which in effect makes the tool practically useless except for ranking reports, and back link audits.

I've reached out to both SEMRush and Shopify and while SEMRush is supposedly working on a fix, it's not there yet, and Shopify in their infinite wisdom won't allow any mods to the robots.txt file - where you could add a simple crawl delay to help eliminate the crawl errors.

I think SEMRush should be providing a reduced price on their tool for customers using it for Shopify sites, but I've asked our rep about this and got "sorry, we can't offer you a discounted rate due to the issue". What's taking them so long to add simple crawl controls like Screaming Frog has is beyond me.

So I use SEMRush where it's useful and Screaming Frog to fill in the gaps.

My 2 cents. :-)