There is SEO and then there is SEM, but you pretty much need both to succeed. The good thing is that most big players in the search engine optimization game offer free research tools to their punters to try/test  out their tools before buying.

These are the popular softwre companies like SEO MAJESTIC, AHREFS, SEM RUSH and MOZ.com

No prizes then for guessing which of these are my favourites

 

1. Ahrefs.com

2. Semrush.com

3. Moz.com

4. Seomajestic.com

5. Alexa.com (not a tool – Nielpatel – but he thinks that this also pulls the most relevant keywords from your blog)

 

 

 

Yes my likeability for them is pretty much in that same order. Now I have not been able to afford a full membership, because many of them start at a price between $69 to $150 a month which is a bit steep to me, but you on the other hand – if you have the money go ahead and try it.

I would like to try SEMRUSH if I had the chance & money as i like their interface and they are updating their indexed URL at a good pace to compete with the top guns( You know one of my wish list now – so feel free to buy me one :)

So what this post/case study  can help you with

• Finding the Keywords Your Competitors Use
• Checking Google Keyword Rankings and money maker keywords
• FIND a good software SEO Tool

Anyway back to what I intended to show you today, how good is the data really on these SEO tools providers. I am going to compare them to the big daddy of data hoarders (Google webmaster tools and analytics) as google pretty much knows which website is doing what and have the most data on the internet on websites.

It’s pretty simple what I’m doing here

I go to stat counter and webmaster tools and then sync my keyword data from Google to what I have in stat counter dashboard and have a look at the merged and comparison keyword data in stat counter ( click link to see how its done).

This then will give me the keywords that are bringing in the most traffic to my blog and I can see which ones are bringing in the revenue.

NEXT….

·

• Meat lover Australia
• Bacon and yoghurt bbq
• Lemon and cheese special
• Bourbon cucumber weed
• Raw prawn chia seed pizza

Next : I do a comparison of these keywords against these SEO tools. I enter my blog url in SEM rush, Ahrefs etc and see if any of them picks up (keywords)  that i found via the data matching i did with &  found from Google and statcounter data

What I am trying to do here?

The aim of this case study is to find out – if any of the above listed seo tool providers can find out/match the ranking and banking keywords that I have got from GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS/STATCOUNTER (merged) from doing a search on their webpage without signing in on their full membership. So pretty much we are trying to gauge – how good they are with the little data they are giving out before a person signs up to their membership plan for the full data.

Now I’m not going to use my sites for this experiment, even though I have used one of them… but im replacing some keywords with say Dominos pizza kinds of site keywords to make it interesting.

So the keywords will actually reflect the actual case study I have done for actual money maker & Google ranking keywords – but replaced it with pizza keywords

So let’s say those keywords (from stat counter and GWT merged data) were

So my data tells me that this is the money maker (Google ranking) keywords and I need to check with the big guns (Ahrefs, SEM rush etc if they can find that out) with a URL check.

::::::: I did these checks without logging into any of these providers’ websites::::

( I refer to snapshot page in this post as the first results page of the SEO tool provider after I enter url an click enter for results to display )

 

SEMRUSH

I put in the URL of the website and do a search on semrush.

So Semrush has one of the organic keywords (Raw prawn chia seed pizza) in their list that matches my GWT/statcounter keyword. But point to be noted is that they have many more organic keywords listed for the website but it can be seen only with a full SEM rush membership

[Additional note- Semrush gives you a basic snapshot of also your MAIN ORGANIC COMPETITORS  so you can also spy on your competitors for their  keywords]

 

Ahrefs

It gave no keyword data that matched my GWT/statcounter keywords.

I think SEM RUSH did a better job of listing my top 10 competitor’s urls, considering that the domain name I compared for this case study was a .com.au Australian domain. SEM rush returned not only Australian competitors but also relevant .com competitors in their snap shot, while the Ahrefs Top 10 competitors didn’t look relevant at all

[Additional note- Ahrefs give you a good look at the rising numbers of referring pages in their snapshot page .A steady rise in this number is good for SEO. It also gives you a good idea of how you’re US and UK organic traffic is increasing in numbers – under organic traffic heading and chart]

 

Seo Majestic

They didn’t provide any keywords in their snapshot page, but under pages column in snapshot the three urls/pages were present there that were the get/statcounter keywords pointing to those pages. Only somewhat helpful – not much ( and that is only because I knew what I was looking for , so wish they actually listed what keywords the website is organically ranking for in the snapshot page like the rest )

[Additional note – they do give a trust flow and citation flow ranking , but what I like is their pretty colourful charts showing backlink breakdown and anchor text breakdown – their backlink history graph can also be useful for SEO]

 

Moz.com

Moz did not give me any matching keywords on their open site explorer page. They did not list any keywords for website in their snapshot page

[additional note – Moz does a good job of giving you a Domain authority (DA) and Page authority (PA) score – I like the spam analysis they did on linking sites – which is sites linking to you, these can be good if you want to disavow (remove) links that are bad and linking to you]

Moz bad links analysis

 

Alexa.com

Alexa.com didn’t give me any keywords that matched. They had five different keywords to what I got from GWT/statcounter.

Under their headings

Top Keywords from Search Engines

Which search keywords send traffic to this site?

I did not get any matched keywords to my GWT/Statcounter Keywords for the 5 keywords that they pulled of my website, so there you go (nielpatel)

[Additional note : I like the way how alexa give s you a global rank and show you if it’s been climbing high recently and also the stats of how much time people are actually spending on your website (How engaged are visitors) which can give you an idea of bounce rate and if you should improve content + also — > Which sites did people visit immediately before this site?]

Now I do know that I could possibly get much more relevant keywords and ranking data from these SEO DATA providers after signing up for a membership, but aren’t these companies supposed to provide good free data to entice us signing up for their full membership with their free SEO snapshot. Most failed in this and so there is plenty of marketing opportunity to improve I suppose for them.

I hope you have got something useful from this case study , as you can see I prefer to use sem rush for my SEO needs and also use other tools like AHREFS, Seo majestic etc to compare results . If you think there are some good tools that can give me that data I need, do leave a comment or get in touch with me via contact page and i would be glad to add it to this research/case study page