Which SEO Tool is Best in 2022.
Which of these SEO Tools has the best data enjoyed SEO tools, let's be advocates. 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 competitors snooping things like identifying which pages on your website are broken,
But also have a look at what your competitors doing, how they're building links, what sorts of content is performing best for them.
So whether you're analyzing your own website to see what sorts of errors might be holding your ranking back, whether you're doing a little bit of competitor snooping and identifying what that 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.
Best Free Seo Tools in 2022
1. Screaming Frog SEO Tool.
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 another more detailed blog 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 blog, but we primarily use Screaming Frog to perform site audits and tell us sort of pages that might have issues with meta or pages being indexed.
2. Moz SEO Tool.
That shouldn't be the next free SEO tool in most domain analysis. Now this is a great way to get a free fast overview of any particular website or authority,
Moz domain authority or GA is pretty much industry standard recognition of a site authority now that Google has removed its page rank number from the toolbar and whilst is imperfect was the A is a very useful shortcut to understand how authoritative a site is in relation to other sites.
Whilst the data that the most 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 your competitor's site or you want to analyze how authoritative a publication might be.
Mostly A is a pretty good place to start. The next Tool which is an absolute must-have for every website owner is Google Search Console, or Google Search Console GSC has become way more useful for SEO is over the last few years and it has one massive advantage over the other tools in this blog.
And that massive advantage is that the data Google Search Console gives you is measured data that comes directly from Google I this is about first-party data.
That's great because you know that is accurate. Whereas some of the other tools that we're looking at today, they are guesstimate data, they're projections that are based on 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 the 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 or you can use Google Search Console to 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 to 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 how Google thinks your website has been hacked on.
It's just last-minute and slowed Search Console. So these tools are great as the basics and they're really useful.
Paid Tools For Seo 2022 (SEO Super Tools)
If you want to analyze your own site in-depth or analyze your competitors, but at a very surface level but what about you want to take things up a notch if you want to find new opportunities,
Analyze different types of keywords for most importantly, spy on your competitors so you can steal their best ideas, adapt, adapt their best ideas.
Okay, that was our 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 to the SEO super tools like SEMrush Ahrefs SpyFu SERPs that 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 there and your rankings 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. This leads us on to 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 to measure 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 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 going to give you access to their Google Search Console.
So that you can see which pages are performing the best that 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.
How accurate is the data inside these super tools?
This 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 the 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 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 some 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 the UK and US 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 volumes. 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 reading this blog and considering these tools are going to be in that small or 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 we're 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 the 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 or 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 are being searched 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 tabs every month.
How much organic traffic does each of these sites get?
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 is estimated how much organic traffic each of these sites gets. The first slide we measured actually got 3422 monthly organic visits sem rush 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 slide, the real organic traffic was about 223,000 a month SEMrush estimated 259,000 hrs 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.
That site in our test got around 7000 monthly visits from organic search SEMrush estimated about 12,000 hrs estimated about 5000 Serpstat.
Again weigh-off with 136,000 and SpyFu was 67,000 the foresight and the test was around 13,700 SEMrush estimated 27,000 hrs estimated 27,700 SERPs are estimated at 218,000 and SpyFu estimated 1.1 5 million.
The final site on our list had around 5000 months these SEMrush estimated 2900 a truss estimated 1500 Serpstat 33,000 and SpyFu 38 and a half 1000. 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 tour. There was a third closest and zero points to the tool that wasn't furthest away from the real data. Are you ready for the results?
Ahrefs & Semrush is The Best SEO Tools
In last place came at SpyFu with only two points as 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 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 poll, say 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 a trust the data seem to be broadly pretty good in the first place.With 11 points out a possible 15 SEMrush. This is kind of why we use sem rush 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 else out 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 tick-tock, for example, sem rush tends to give the best data for those sorts of keywords. So we award sem rush, the overall best data in this very simple quick, and dirty little test.
The other thing I would say is, 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 and helps us find blog posts and content that's ranking best for competitors to finding related keywords. And spying on competitors paid our traffic even though we love it and the data is 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 guestimate data is 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 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 small and medium-sized businesses that want to make strategic decisions based on the data inside. So we've got other videos on how to use sem rush. (My Youtube Channel)