In our previous blogs, we explored the top free keyword research and SEO data tools on the market, but what if you’re ready for a more comprehensive tool? One that can track your website’s keyword rankings, monitor technical issues, and keep you in the know on your backlinks. If you’re wanting an all-in-one solution, it may make sense to invest in a paid SEO tool.
Here’s our view of the top subscription-based SEO tools on the market.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is the tool of choice for SEOs when it comes to checking and auditing backlinks – that is pulling which sites are linking to you or your competitor’s sites, what content is being linked to, and the linking text itself. But what a lot of people don’t realize is the bevy of other features as related to keyword and competitor research that Ahref offers.
Unique Feature: Content Gap
One of the coolest features in Ahrefs is the Content Gap report. This shows the keywords where your competitors are ranking but your website isn’t. You can even filter to make sure that these gap results are in the top 10 rankings AKA the first page.
Content gap keywords should be a huge part of everything you do SEO-wise from your keyword research to blog writing as focusing on these gap opportunities will help you keep pace with your competitors and eventually overtake them.
Ahrefs Pros and Cons
For the money, Ahrefs is the most comprehensive backlink audit tool on the market. If linkbuilding is one of your company’s top digital marketing priorities, you won’t find a better tool to mine opportunities, keep an eye on competitor efforts, and research new targets than Ahrefs.
The organic keyword research part of Ahrefs is also just as robust with “shortcut” reports that let you see top organic pages, ranking keywords, and actual search results for specific keywords right in the tool.
On the downside, Ahrefs is so powerful that it can be overwhelming to the beginner user in terms of where to look where for what.
Ahrefs Pricing
A “lite” plan on Ahrefs is $99/month or $990/year. The tool does offer a $7/week plan to start to see if its worth investing in.
SEMRush
Probably the most popular paid SEO tool on the market today, SEMRush allows you to easily pull website keywords/rankings, general traffic patterns, and paid search data for you or your competitors. While it does possess some of the backlink capabilities of Ahrefs, SEMRush really shines when it comes to keyword research.
Unique Feature: Keyword Magic Tool
The SEMRush Keyword Magic tool generates thousands of keyword ideas from the input of just a single keyword. Showcasing broad match, phrase match, exact match, and related keywords for your query, the tool can be filtered by generic common keywords, search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC (PPC price), and general competition in order to give you great ideas for your keyword strategy.
Keyword research is a lot of brainstorming and that can get tedious, but with the help of the Keyword Magic tool, you can cut your research time tremendously.
SEMRush Pros and Cons
For nearly every report and tool in SEMRush, there is an export in either Excel, CSV or PDF. This is really helpful when trying to make sense of all the data. And unlike Ahrefs, most of the SEMRush tools and features are easy to grasp from the get-go with “tutorial” decks on the tool landing pages themselves.
SEMRush also offers position tracking that is easy to set-up, follow, and export if you’re interested in keeping an eye on how your website is performing for your target keywords.
The backlink features of SEMRush leave something to be desired as the interface is a little clunky and they attribute their own “scores” making it a little confusing, but all in all SEMRush is a solid choice.
SEMRush Pricing
SEMRush plans start at $99.95 a month or $999.36 a year. Free trials of varying length are available around the net if you’d like to kick the tires on this one.
Moz Pro
The name when it comes to SEO education, Moz has been in the business since basically the beginning of SEO. Their paid tool – Moz Pro – reflects the user-friendly attitude of the business while presenting some great SEO Data.
Unique Feature: Site Crawl
While both Ahrefs and SEMRush have site audit capabilities, they lack the slick interface and easy-to-understand fixes the Moz tool provides. Through a site crawl via Moz, the tool will provide you with all crawl, redirect, metadata and on-page issues on the site via visualizations and exportable spreadsheets, as well as instructions via expert blog links on how to fix and why its important to resolve these issues.
Most importantly, the Moz crawl is able to detect potential duplicate content on your site’s pages off the bat. Duplicate content can be a huge drain on your site so identifying and fixing these can have a huge positive effect on how Google sees your site. With other tools, you’d likely have to spend hours combing through the data to have an idea of any potential duplicate content issues.
Moz Pros and Cons
Moz does everything well, but some of their datasets are named differently and can be a little confusing, especially if you’re pulling data from other tools/sources to match up. For example, in their Keyword Explorer, Moz uses “opportunity” and “potential” whereas other tools use “competition” as a metric on how hard it will be to rank for a specific keyword.
Link research was once Moz Pro’s weak point but they’ve since revamped their Open Site Explorer into Link Explorer which can match up with SEMRush and even Ahrefs in terms of backlink research.
Moz Pricing
A standard Moz Pro package costs $99/month or $948/year. You can try Moz Pro out free for a month here.
Powerful Tools for Powerful SEO Insights
The paid SEO tool you choose will have a lot to do with what you think you’ll be using it the most for. If linkbuilding is your main focus, then Ahrefs is the best choice. If you’re more interested in keyword research and insights, SEMRush might be right for you. If you need more hands-on guidance around the issues on your site, Moz Pro may make sense.
Regardless of what tool you decide to go with, you’ll need a guiding hand to help you use it to its full potential. APSEO can help with our custom training and education services – we offer hands-on walkthroughs of advanced SEO tactics utilizing the SEMRush and/or Ahrefs platforms that will help increase your company’s bottom line in no time. Contact us today to see how we can help.