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How have consumer behaviors and preferences changed across different generations?
Brandwatch Consumer Research
Formerly the Falcon suite
Formerly Paladin
How have consumer behaviors and preferences changed across different generations?
Brandwatch Consumer Research
Formerly the Falcon suite
Formerly Paladin
Published October 25th 2024
Find the best digital marketing tools to streamline your SEO, SoMe, content, and automation strategies in 2025.
Being a digital marketing manager is not easy. You create and manage all kinds of digital marketing campaigns across multiple channels. You analyze data to optimize campaigns and collaborate with other teams.
It’s a lot to handle, and that’s why digital marketing tools need to come into play. The right digital marketing tools will make your job much easier and take repetitive tasks from your shoulders, so you have more time to focus and more creative and strategic areas.
There are digital marketing tools for every aspect of your job. Whether it’s planning, analyzing, or creating visuals, there’s a tool to help you with that. There are tools for SEO (search engine optimization), email marketing, social media marketing, content creation, and more all waiting to be discovered.
With the right tools, you not only save time and money but improve your digital marketing strategy. You can reach more customers, track your performance better, and ultimately drive sales.
Feeling overwhelmed right now? Don’t worry, we have you covered. In this blog, we look at helpful tools broken down by different categories.
In this article, we cover the following:
Digital marketing tools are software and platforms that support your digital marketing activities. They make your job easier and save you time, be it reaching customers, collaborating with other teams, or running social media campaigns.
There are tools for every aspect of digital marketing:
As you can see, these tools support a wide range of marketing efforts. For example, social media management tools allow you to schedule posts in advance across multiple channels, while search engine optimization tools like Ahrefs provide essential features for optimizing websites, particularly focusing on backlink analysis and leveraging extensive data indexes.
That said, you don’t need to use every tool in our list. The right tool for you will depend on factors like your needs, business goals, size of your team, and budget. Whether you’re a beginner searching for budget-friendly options or seeking advanced tools for more complex needs, there are options for everyone.
The key is choosing the tools that can boost your digital marketing strategy. The right tools are easy to use, help you work smarter, and grow your online presence.
There are many reasons why you and your team should start using digital marketing tools. They save you time and money, help you boost your online presence, and take over automated tasks so you spend less time on routine work and can focus more on strategic and creative projects.
First off, these tools give you access to a lot of useful data about customers and prospects. You can learn about their preferences, behaviors, and needs. With this knowledge, you can create more targeted campaigns that resonate with your audience.
You can track your campaigns and see how they are performing in real time, which means you can tweak and optimize your campaigns as needed to get better results. With social media management tools and social listening, you can schedule posts in advance and see when your audience is the most active to publish at the best times. Meanwhile, email marketing tools help you send personalized messages to a large databaseand understand which email campaigns work best.
Improving collaboration is another plus. Collaboration tools make it easier for your team to work together, share ideas, and stay on top of projects. With the right tool, you can improve communication and productivity in your team and with other teams.
Here are some key benefits of using digital marketing tools:
By leveraging these tools, your marketing efforts can become more streamlined, leading to better results for your business.
Choosing the best digital marketing tool that fits your needs can feel overwhelming. There are a lot of factors to consider, such as your business goals, team size, and budget. If you are a small team with a limited budget, beginner-friendly tools might be the best options for you. On the other hand, if you are running more complex campaigns, you need something more advanced. Start making a list of features you need in a tool and go from there.
Another point to consider is whether the tool can be integrated with software you are already using which, again, will save you time.
A seamless user experience is also important. How easy is the tool to use? How long will it take your team to learn the features? Ideally, you want a tool that is intuitive to use but can help you grow your business. Check if the tool offers support and training materials that can help your team to get up to speed.
If possible, take advantage of free trials. They allow you to test the tool to see if it suits your workflow before committing. It’s also a good idea to talk to other marketers about what tools they’re using—their insights can save you from wasting money on something that doesn’t meet your needs.
Lastly, think long-term. As your business grows, your needs will likely change, so pick tools that can scale up as your campaigns become more complex.
Here are a few things to look out for when selecting a digital marketing tool:
Let’s dive into some of the top tools that can help you boost your digital marketing. We split the following tools into different areas of digital marketing to make it easier for you to find what you need.
Social media management tools make posting across platforms and tracking the performance easier. With the right one, you’ll save a lot of time and can identify which content and campaigns work best with your audience.
These tools help your website climb higher in search results. They provide helpful suggestions on how to improve your content and find the right keywords to target.
With email marketing tools, you can send out emails at scale, design them the best way, and track your campaigns’ performance.
These are designed to help you create eye-catching posts, videos, and images, making your marketing content look more polished and professional.
Analytics tools are important to understand how your marketing is performing. They can help you measure metrics like website visitors or ad clicks and give a clear picture of what is working and what is not.
These tools improve team collaboration by helping you plan projects, share files, and communicate all from one place. They’re perfect for keeping everyone on the same page and increase productivity.
With video marketing tools, you can create and share high-quality videos that capture the attention of your audience and bring across your message clearly.
The right tool can make a huge difference in your day-to-day work as a social media manager. They can help you to plan, create, and schedule posts across multiple social platforms, all from one dashboard. Plus, you can reply to comments, track engagement, and analyze your content’s performance without having to switch between multiple apps.
Using a social media management tool saves time and boosts your productivity. Instead of juggling different platforms, everything you need is in one place, making your workflow smoother and more efficient.
Each tool comes with its own set of unique features, so it’s important to choose one that aligns with your goals and needs. The right tool helps you to cut down repetitive tasks so you’ll have more time to focus on your social media strategy.
Brandwatch is a powerful tool for social media management and analytics, designed to give you a deep understanding of your audience, track brand mentions, and stay ahead of your competitors.
With Brandwatch, you can monitor conversations across social media platforms, blogs, and news sites. This helps you stay on top of what people are saying about your brand.
One of its many standout features is the ability to monitor conversations across multiple social platforms in real-time. With these insights, you can keep up with what people are saying about your brand and respond and adapt quickly.
Another big advantage is the many customization options that Brandwatch provides. You can tailor dashboards and reports to your needs. Brandwatch also integrates well with other marketing platforms, making it easy to be implemented into your existing workflow.
Brandwatch is also a great platform for content management. You can plan, create, and schedule posts for multiple social networks from one single dashboard. It also provides the latest AI technologies that help you improve your writing and automate replies.
With the in-depth analytics features, you can track trends, measure sentiment, and measure your performance. The many and customizable visualizations make it easy to break down a huge amount of data and share insights with your team or clients in simple and easy-to-digests reports.
Brandwatch is a perfect choice for medium to large companies and agencies. It’s advanced features can handle even the most complex social media strategies, and customer support and many training materials are available to help get your team up to speed in no time.
Sprout Social is another big name in the social media management tool market. The tool can help you streamline your social media workflow and give you insights about your online presence.
One helpful feature is the unified inbox, from which you can manage all your social interactions from one place. This makes it much easier to respond to messages and engage with your audience. You can publish and schedule posts across multiple social networks, saving you a lot of time and work.
The analytics capabilities are another key feature. You can track your performance, measure engagement, and identify trends that will help you improve your social media strategy. You can customize the reports to your needs.
Moreover, Sprout Social can be integrated with other popular platforms for a seamless workflow. While the platform has a user-friendly interface, some features can require some training.
Like Brandwatch, Sprout Social is useful for medium to large business that are looking for a social media management tool.
Hootsuite is another popular choice in the world of social media management. The tool can help you grow your online presence and improve your social media strategy.
The platform also offers analytics to track your performance. You can monitor how well your posts are doing, what’s working best, and make adjustments as needed. Like the other platforms on the list, with Hootsuite you can manage different social media accounts from one place and easily schedule posts across social networks like Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok. This means you can not only save time but also make sure that your content is consistent across all social platforms.
Hootsuite works well with other marketing tools. A downside can be that the interface is somewhat cluttered, and it takes some time to get used to all the features.
Overall Hootsuite is an option to consider regardless of your company size, with multiple plans to choose from.
Buffer is a handy tool for anyone looking to manage their social media presence. The tool can be easily integrated with many other tools – for example Canva, a graphic design tool. This way you can create stunning graphics without having to jump between different apps.
Like other social media management tools, you can post and schedule your content across multiple social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X, saving you a lot of time and helping you keep consistency.
Buffer also comes with analytics capabilities. You can measure how your posts are performing, and which kind of content gets the most likes, comments, and shares. With these insights, you can improve your social media marketing strategy.
Overall, Buffer is particularly well-suited for small businesses and individuals who want to simplify their social media efforts. Its user-friendly interface makes it accessible even for beginners, so you don’t need to be a tech whiz to get started.
If you are a digital marketer that wants to boost the visibility of your website, you need an SEO tool. With the right tool, you can track your rankings, optimize your content, and stay one step ahead of your competitors.
SEO tools are all about improving your search engine rankings. They offer valuable insights into keywords, backlinks, and competitor strategies. Search engine optimization tools like Ahrefs provide essential features for optimizing websites, particularly focusing on backlink analysis and leveraging extensive data indexes.
Here’s what you can achieve with SEO tools:
Choosing the right SEO tool can have a big influence on your digital marketing success. Let’s dive into some top tools available on the market and how they can enhance your SEO efforts.
Semruh is a solid tool for anyone working in digital marketing. It’s an all-in-one platform that covers a wide range of areas, including SEO, content marketing, competitor research, and PPC.
The platform provides tools that help you improve your content marketing. You can create, plan, and optimize your content to receive higher engagement. It offers topic suggestions, SEO recommendations, and even readability scores to ensure your content hits the mark.
If you’re running PPC campaigns, Semrush can come in handy. With its keyword suggestions and ad copy ideas, you can improve your advertisements. Once your campaigns are live, you can track the performance of your ads and compare them against competitors.
Speaking of competitors, you can also perform a more extensive competitor analysis. You can examine your competitors’ strategies, such as their top-performing keywords and backlinks. These insights can help you to optimize your strategies and stay ahead in the market.
Another great feature is Semrush’s keyword research feature. It lets you explore search volume, keyword difficulty, and related terms to help you boost your organic traffic. The backlink audit tool checks your website for technical SEO issues and offers suggestions to optimize your site for better visibility on Google.
Overall, Semrush is a fantastic option for businesses of all sizes, especially for digital marketers, SEO professionals, and content creators who want to have all of their data in one place.
Ahrefs is a top choice for many in the SEO and digital marketing field. The platforms come with many features like keyword research that lets you analyze millions of keywords with detailed metrics like search volume, difficulty, or potential traffic.
With the content explorer tool, you can discover popular content in your niche that give you inspiration for your content and campaigns. Ahrefs also shines in the realm of technical SEO. Its Site Audit tool crawls your website and identifies issues that might be hindering your search rankings.
The site explorer feature is another useful feature. You can look at your competitors websites and see their top pages, backlink profiles, and overall organic search performance. These insights can be incredibly valuable as you craft your SEO strategy.
Another great thing about Ahrefs is its user-friendly interface. Even if you’re just starting with SEO, you’ll find it easy to navigate and make sense of the data it provides.
Overall, Ahrefs is perfect for SEO professionals, digital marketers, and content creators who need deep insights and analysis. If you’re serious about boosting your website’s search performance, Ahrefs is definitely a tool worth having in your toolkit.
Email marketing is one of the most important areas in digital marketing. It’s a great way to connect with your customers, and there are plenty of excellent tools on the market that can help you launch and manage your email campaigns.
As you look for the right tool, think about your goals and budget. The ideal tool is user-friendly and integrates easily with other marketing software you use. Customer support is also an important factor to consider, making sure you have the assistance when a problem comes up.
Helpful email marketing tools will have:
Pre-designed email templatesList segmentation optionsAutomated workflowsDetailed analytics and reportingA/B testing capabilitiesChoose tools that empower you to create engaging emails and track their performance. With their analytics features you can track open rates, click-through rates, and conversations. Additionally, look for features that help grow your list, like signup forms and landing pages.
Mailchimp is a well-known platform in the email marketing space, and for good reasons. It’s an all-rounder that lets you create and send email campaigns, manage your customer lists, and track your performance.
One of the best things about Mailchimp is its easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor. You don’t need any design experience to create nice-looking emails. You can choose from a range of templates or design your own from scratch.
With Mailchimp, you can segment your audience into different groups. This helps you to tailor your messages and send emails to specific groups. You can categorize your contacts based on their purchase history or how engaged they are with your content.
Mailchimp also has automations features that will save you a lot of time. You can set up automatic welcome emails, birthday messages, and reminders for abandoned carts. The platform also comes with SMS marketing features, letting you send text messages for sales, promotions, or important updated.
When it comes to tracking performance, Mailchimp’s reporting tools are quite robust. You can monitor open rates, click-through rates, and other key metrics to see how your campaigns are doing. It can also be integrated easily with a lot of other marketing platforms.
Mailchimp is a great choice for small to medium-sized businesses that are looking for a comprehensive marketing solution. It’s useful for e-commerce brands that want to automate their email marketing. If you’re just starting in digital marketing, Mailchimp’s user-friendly interface and helpful resources will make it easy for you to get the hang of it quickly.
ActiveCampaign is a helpful tool to boost your email marketing campaigns. It combines email marketing with automation and customer relationship management, making it a great choice for businesses looking to grow and nurture leads.
The tool works smoothly with a variety of other platforms, allowing you to connect it to your website, e-commerce store, and other apps you are using. Its reporting and analytics features provide detailed insights into how your campaigns are performing, enabling you to make data-driven decisions for your marketing strategy.
With ActiveCampaign, you can create personalized emails. It has a user-friendly interface to easily design engaging email, even if you are not very tech-savvy.
Where ActiveCampaign truly excels is in its advanced automation capabilities. You can create complex workflows that engage customers based on their behavior and preferences, helping you build meaningful connections.
While the platform offers a wealth of features, it may take some time to get familiar with them. Fortunately, they provide a wealth of resources and support to help you along the way.
ActiveCampaign is perfect for small to medium-sized businesses that want to take their email marketing to the next level. It’s a great choice for companies that want to automate their customer communications and sales processes.
Creating compelling content is crucial for successful digital marketing and the right tool can help improve your content strategy.
A good writing tool will boost your productivity and increase the quality of your content. Platforms that have the latest AI technologies can assist you in crafting blog posts, ad copy, and other types of content. They offer suggestions for improvement, and they can speed up your writing process.
When it comes to graphic design, there are tools available that allow you to create eye-catching visuals without needing a design background. You can easily create social media posts, presentations, flyers, and more, either by customizing your designs to fit your brand style or by choosing from a library of templates.
With these tools, you can not only improve the quality of your content but save a lot of time. By streamlining your content creation process, you have more time to create more engaging content that resonates with your audiences.
Let’s explore some top options that can help you craft engaging posts, stunning graphics, and more.
Canva is a user-friendly graphic design tool that makes it easy for anyone to create stunning marketing materials, even if you don’t have a design background.
With Canva, you can create social media posts, presentations, flyers, and more. Its drag-and-drop interface is straightforward, making it easy to use even for beginners. The tool offers a big library of templates, images, and fonts you can choose from. You can also upload your own images and logos.
One great feature is the ability to resize your design for different platforms, which saves you a lot of time when you have to great content for multiple social media channels.
Canva also comes with video editing features, allowing you to create short clips for social media or presentations. While it may have some limitations for more complex projects, it’s more than enough for most digital marketing needs.
Jasper is an AI-powered writing assistant that can take your content marketing to the next level. Whether you need to write blog posts, social media updates, ad copy, or anything in between, Jasper has you covered.
The tool can generate content based on your inputs. Provide some basic information, and it will create entire paragraphs for you. You can choose from an extensive library of 50 writing templates that cover different types of content. Each template guides you through the writing process step-by-step, making it easy to get started.
Jasper can be integrated with popular SEO tools, allowing you to optimize your content for search engines as you write. While it might take a little time to get comfortable with all the features, the effort is worth it.
If you frequently create marketing content, Jasper is worth considering. It’s especially useful for content marketers, social media managers, and bloggers. The tool can adapt to different tones and styles, making sure the copy aligns with your brand voice.
You need to track your performance to discover areas for improvement, and this is the only way to make sure you stay ahead of your competition. Analytics and data tools provide the insights you need to make informed, data-driven decisions.
Analytics tools can offer offer detailed information about all kinds of things like your website visitors, their behavior, and how your content is performing. With the right analytics tools, you can:
By leveraging these tools, you’ll be able to fine-tune your digital marketing strategy and achieve better results.
Google Analytics is a must-have tool for anyone involved in digital marketing. It provides valuable insights into how visitors interact with your website, helping you understand where they come from and what actions they take.
You can identify which pages are the most popular and detect what content resonates best with your audience. The tool lets you track how long users stay on your site and whether they leave without engaging.
With Google Analytics, you can also discover which marketing channels are driving the most traffic. You can see how effective your social media, search engine, and ads efforts are. Its dashboard gives you a quick snapshot of your site’s performance, and if you need more detail, you can create custom reports. You can even set specific goals to monitor key actions like sales or sign-ups.
One other benefit of Google Analytics is that it can easily be integrated with other Google tools, such as Ads and Search Console. This way, you can get a fuller picture of your digital marketing performance.
Google Analytics is suitable for businesses of all sizes. It’s easy to set up, and you don’t need to be a tech expert to use its basics features. The huge amount of data can feel overwhelming at first, and it takes a bit of time to figure out what’s most useful for you. However, once you get the hang of it, the insights you gain are invaluable.
SurveyMonkey is a great online survey tool that can help you gather valuable insights from your customers to make better data-driven business decisions.
With this tool, you can make professional-looking surveys with ease. The platform features a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface and a variety of pre-designed templates, so you don’t need any prior experience to get started quickly.
You can choose from different question types, such as multiple choice, open-ended questions, and rating scales. SurveyMonkey lets you customize your survey to your needs to make sure that you collect the most relevant information from your audience. The platform also has advanced features like skip logic and questions randomization.
One of the great things about SurveyMonkey is its ability to reach a broad audience. You can share your surveys through email, social media, or even embed them on your website. Plus, it integrates smoothly with many popular marketing tools, allowing you to connect your survey data to other aspects of your marketing strategy.
Furthermore, SurveyMonkey provides insightful analytics that give you a quick overview of your survey results. You can monitor responses in real time and create visually appealing charts and graphs to help make sense of your data.
SurveyMonkey is perfect for marketers wanting to do market research, track customer satisfaction, and gather feedback on new products. It’s also an excellent choice for businesses aiming to enhance their customer experience based on direct input from their audience.
Managing digital marketing projects can be quite a challenge. Handling multiple projects and complex workflows quickly can become chaotic. Project management and collaboration tools can help you to keep your team organized and make sure that your campaigns are running smoothly.
Collaboration tools support you in streamlining tasks, sharing files, and making communicating among team members easier. They help you to manage complex projects with ease.
Great project management and collaboration tools will come with these important features:
The best tools are easy to use, can be tailored to your team needs, and will improve productivity. Think about what your team struggles with the most. Do you need better task tracking? Easier file sharing? More effective communication? Choose a tool that can solve your biggest challenges and boost teamwork.
Let’s explore some top options for project management and collaboration in the marketing space.
Trello is a great choice to help with your project management. You can keep tasks organized and boost collaboration within your team through its visual boards and cards.
You can set up different boards for various marketing campaigns or projects, with each board containing lists and cards that represent specific tasks or ideas. The drag-and-drop feature makes it easy to move cards between lists, giving you a clear view of your progress.
With Trello, you can assign tasks to team members, set deadlines, or add comments directly to the cards. There are plenty of productivity-boosting features, like labels for categorizing tasks, checklists within cards, and automation options to simplify workflows.
The tool is quite flexible. You can customize your boards to fit your needs, whether you’re planning content calendars, managing social media posts, or tracking campaign performance.
Trello excels in visual organization, but may not be the best choice for more complex projects. It’s a great choice for marketing teams of all sizes, especially for those who prefer a visual approach to managing tasks and need a tool that can easily adapt to various marketing workflows.
Asana is a popular tool in the project management and collaboration space. You can create boards, lists, and timelines, making it simple to visualize your projects. This helps you to see immediately what needs to be done and who is responsible for each task.
The platform also offers customizable templates tailored for different marketing activities. Whether you’re setting up workflows for content calendars, product launches, or social media campaigns, you can get started quickly.
Asana also comes with helpful reporting features. You can create charts and graphs to monitor progress and see what areas may need some extra attention. The tool can be easily integrated with other popular marketing tools for a seamless workflow.
While Asana has a lot of features, which might feel a bit overwhelming at first, once you get the hang of it, it will boost your team’s productivity. It’s perfect for marketing teams of any size that manage multiple projects and tight deadlines. Asana is also a great choice for remote teams, making sure that everyone is informed and on track.
Video marketing has become a vital part for many digital marketers. With the right video marketing tool, you can create, host, and analyze your video content all in one place without having to be an expert.
When choosing a video tool, it’s important to consider your specific needs. Are you looking for user-friendly editing features? In-depth analysis? Or perhaps the ability to add captions or interactive elements?
A great video marketing tool can help you to:
Let’s look at some of the top options that help you to create engaging videos without a hassle.
Wistia is a great video marketing platform that provides you with a set of tools to help you create, manage, and analyze your video content. You can easily upload your videos, and the platform comes with a lot of customization options. For example, you can tailor the video player to match your brand for a more cohesive viewing experience.
One helpful feature of Wistia is its lead capture capability. It lets you add forms directly to your videos, making it easy to turn viewers into potential customers. This feature can easily be connected to many popular CRM systems to manage your leads.
With the analytics features, you can see who is watching your videos, how long they stay engaged, and when they drop off. You can add chapters to your long-form webinars, allowing viewers to jump quickly to sections they are interested in.
Wistia is an excellent choice for businesses of any size that want to do video marketing. If you are looking for a tool that helps you generate leads and gain insights from your video content, Wistia could be the perfect fit for you.
Another well-known platform for video hosting and marketing is Vimeo. This advanced tool makes it easy to create, manage, and share high-quality video content. The platform comes along with strong privacy settings, allowing you to control who gets to see your content.
You can produce high-quality videos even if you don’t have a background in design. The tool offers plenty of customizable templates, an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, and you can tailor the videos to your brand’s style.
Vimeo also offers insightful analytics that give you a clear picture of viewer engagement, helping you understand which content connects best with your audience. You can add calls to action and email capture forms directly to your videos to generate leads. Vimeo can be integrated with many other popular marketing tools and content management systems.
If you want to enhance the quality of your videos and require professional-grade hosting, Vimeo is an excellent choice. It’s particularly useful for businesses aiming to cultivate a polished brand image through video content.
Digital marketing tools can boost your business by helping you with everything from social media management to customer engagement to analytics. Here are some of the most common questions people have about digital marketing tools.
As a beginner, focus on user-friendly tools. Google Analytics is fantastic for tracking your website traffic, Canva helps you to create amazing visuals, and with Mailchimp, you can improve your email marketing. Look for tools that offer free plans or are budget-friendly so you can try out their features before you make a commitment.
Free tools can help you to grow your small business without stretching your budget. While they may not have as many advanced features than pricier options, they typically will cover your essential needs. They can help you build your online presence and reach new customers without having to spend a lot of money.
Google Analytics is a must-have for any marketer, providing excellent insights into website data. For social media analytics, Brandwatch is a great tool that offers deep insights that can help you make smarter, data-driven marketing decisions.
Many digital marketing tools can be integrated with many social media platforms. For example, Brandwatch partners with major social networks and integrates with Salesforce.
Paid tools often have a wider range of features and better support. They offer more advance analytics, additional automation options, and higher usage limits. If you are a business with complex projects and a bigger team, paid tools are likely best placed to meet your needs.
It’s a good idea to review your toolkit every six to twelve months to check what updates or new features are available. See if the tools you are using are still meeting your needs and if they don’t it might be time to search for an upgrade. The digital landscape changes quickly, so being able to adapt quickly is key to staying ahead.
When it comes to understanding consumers, businesses choose Brandwatch ahead of any other tool.
Consumer Research gives you access to deep consumer insights from 100 million online sources and over 1.4 trillion posts.
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SEO Trends 2025 – Search Engine Journal
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTDownload your cheat sheet and checklist to start building content that works harder.
Large AI Overviews on SERPs are affecting visibility and causing a dramatic decrease in traffic.
Join us for a data-backed session where we break down how to detect, diagnose, and eliminate unnecessary branded ad spend.
Large AI Overviews on SERPs are affecting visibility and causing a dramatic decrease in traffic.
This template is your no-nonsense roadmap to a flexible, agile social media strategy.
Large AI Overviews on SERPs are affecting visibility and causing a dramatic decrease in traffic.
If there’s one thing that became clear throughout 2024, it’s that SEO volatility isn’t temporary. Working with less traffic is the new normal as Google and Microsoft forge ahead with AI integrated into their search engines.
The simple fact is – doing SEO is tough right now.
We’re sorting through the challenges with our latest edition of SEO Trends, designed to help you build new strategies that include developing technologies and adjust to what’s coming in 2025.
We’ve compiled six experts to share their strategy-focused insights into what’s driving SEO this year, and where it’s heading in the coming months.
In this ebook, you’ll learn:
Going into 2025, a lot is still up in the air, especially with Google search.
Our experts have plenty to say about the direction of search and how to build agile, resilient SEO strategies in a tumultuous business climate.
Our contributors include:
Start planning your SEO strategy for next year right now.
Download your copy of SEO Trends 2025 and discover what to be hopeful about in a changing search world.
source
Google I/O’s Android Show: all the news from the I/O pre-show – The Verge
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTGoogle did something a bit different this year. Instead of talking about Android during the I/O developer conference, which kicks off on May 20th, it hosted an extra show a week early dedicated to its mobile software.
The big announcement was the official reveal of Material 3 Expressive, the bouncy, colorful user interface that leaked recently, and which will be rolling out to both Android and Wear OS. Speaking of smartwatches, they’ll be getting Gemini support, as will TVs, cars, and XR headsets.
There was even a bit of love for the Find My Device network, which got a rebrand to Find Hub and some long overdue support for UWB, and a surprise appearance from a familiar face.
Dominic Preston
Alongside a shiny rebrand and airline integration, Google is expanding the range of trackers in its Find Hub network. But not with boring practicalities like better battery or more accurate tracking — no, we get Baby Yoda, thanks to a new set of Disney-themed tags from Pixbee.
Dominic Preston
Android XR didn’t get a lot of screen time at today’s Android Show — apart from confirmation that it’s going to get Gemini AI support — but Google promises that there’s more to come at the full Google I/O event next week.
Android president Sameer Samat even broke out the company’s prototype XR shades to promise some “really cool Android demos” to come. And as you can see, this is a man who knows what’s cool.
Jay Peters
[Insert Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme here!!!]
Dominic Preston
You’ll be able to share the location of trackers in its Find Hub network (formerly Find My Device) with airline staff when you need to find lost luggage, just like you already can with Apple’s AirTags. Support won’t arrive until “early next year” though, and only on five airlines — while Apple supports over 15.
[blog.google]
Dominic Preston
A year after launching its Find My Device location tracking network, Google is adding support for ultra wideband (UWB) for more precise tracking using compatible phones and trackers. The network and its Android app are also getting a new name: Find Hub.
Google says that UWB will be enabled “later this month.” UWB provides more accurate tracking at close range than Bluetooth, reporting both distance and direction so you can find a missing tracker quicker once you’re in the vicinity. Apple’s AirTag has supported the tech since its launch in 2021, as have Samsung’s SmartTags. Tile’s is now the only major tracker network to lack a UWB option, since the UWB-enabled Tile Ultra it first announced way back in 2021 never actually launched.
Allison Johnson
Google is celebrating another RCS milestone, and this one’s a doozy: one billion messages sent in the US every day. Considering RCS had just reached one billion total monthly users at the end of 2023, it’s a big jump. That’s no doubt thanks to Apple turning on RCS support in iOS 18 and making it the default protocol when you’re not on iMessage. Sure doesn’t hurt!
[blog.google]
Todd Haselton
Announced during today’s pre-I/O event, it’s called Material 3 Expressive. It adds more customization options and lots of colors and animations. It’ll drop as part of the Android 16 beta, which will also support Live Updates.
Emma Roth
Google is rolling out several new features to protect Android users from falling victim to phone call scams. Now, Android will automatically block users from sideloading an app for the first time from a web browser, messaging app, or other service while on a call with an unknown contact.
Google will also stop users from giving an app accessibility permissions while talking on the phone, helping to prevent a potentially dangerous app from gaining control of their device and stealing personal information. If you try to adjust these settings during a call, Google will display a message saying: “This setting is blocked to protect your device.” It also warns users that “scammers may try to take control of your device by asking you to allow accessibility access for an app.”
Victoria Song
After a few years of iterative updates, Wear OS 6 is shaping up to be a significant leap forward. For starters, Gemini will replace Google Assistant on the wrist alongside a big Material 3 Expressive redesign that takes advantage of circular watch faces. Oh, and for the third year running, the latest Wear OS will also come with some battery life improvements.
“Over the past couple of years, we really completely reimagined Android with Gemini right at the center, and now we’re expanding Gemini beyond the phone,” says Jaime Williams, Wear OS’ product manager.
Jay Peters
Google is bringing its Gemini AI assistant to devices with Google TV, cars with Android Auto and Google built-in, Wear OS smartwatches, and Android XR. But Google isn’t saying exactly when the AI assistant will come to those devices — right now, the company is giving more general timelines about when it might arrive.
On Google TV products, “you can ask for action movies that are age-appropriate for your kids, and get the best recommendations,” according to a blog post from Guemmy Kim, a senior director of product and user experience on Android. In an example, the company shows how you can ask something like “can you explain the solar system to my first grader,” and Google TV pulls up a short explanation, offers a button to press to learn more, and recommends YouTube videos about the solar system designed for kids. Gemini is coming to Google TV “later this year.”
Allison Johnson
Google just announced a bold new look for Android, for real this time. After a false start last week when someone accidentally published a blog post too early (oh, Google!), the company is formally announcing the design language known as Material Three Expressive. It takes the colorful, customizable Material You introduced with Android 12 in an even more youthful direction, full of springy animations, bold fonts, and vibrant color absolutely everywhere. It’ll be available in an update to the Android 16 beta later this month.
Support for the Live Updates feature that Google introduced in an earlier Android 16 beta is nestled among the new design flourishes. It’s Android’s take on Apple’s Live Activities, showing time-sensitive updates in a persistent notification bar. Unlike Apple, Android limits its use to food delivery, navigation, and rideshare apps.
Allison Johnson
We’re expecting to see Google’s colorful new design language as part of the Android pre-I/O show. New colors are fun! Fun is good! But I’m not sure Google can show us something “cool” enough to win the hearts of iPhone-loving teenagers.
Dominic Preston
There’s still a week to go until Google I/O 2025 starts in earnest, but some of the developer conference’s biggest announcements are likely to arrive today in a one-off livestream called The Android Show: I/O Edition.
The Android Show takes place today, Tuesday, May 13th, at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. You can watch it live on the Android site or its YouTube channel, and we’ve embedded the livestream at the top of this page too.
Jay Peters
Google’s next I/O developer conference will take place on May 20th and May 21st, the company announced today. The event will be “open to everyone online” and will include “livestreamed keynotes and sessions,” according to an FAQ. Like past years, there will also be an in-person component at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California.
The news comes after Google launched a fun puzzle game to help reveal the date of the event. (The company loves to release puzzles ahead of announcing its I/O dates.) This year’s show will run in the middle of Microsoft’s Build conference, which takes place from May 19th through May 22nd.
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6 Best SEO Tools for Digital Marketing Agencies in 2025 – 99signals
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTSince starting my own digital marketing agency in mid-2015, I’ve experimented with several SEO tools. I’ve tried them all — free, freemium, and paid.Semrush since the early days of my agency and it’s my go-to product for all things SEO.Semrush Site Audit tool, you’ll be able to quickly identify and fix all the critical errors on your clients’ websites.Semrush Semrush and Ahrefs, check out Semrush vs Ahrefs: Which SEO Tool is Better?Semrush , Ahrefs, and Moz are all similarly priced, which is not ideal if you’re just starting out.Semrush and Ahrefs for small agencies.Semrush or Ahrefs, but it’s still a reliable SEO tool. And considering the fact that Serpstat’s plans start at a modest $19/month, it’s well worth the investment.Semrush and Ahrefs offer advanced features that cater to these needs, allowing agencies to work more efficiently and deliver better results for their clients.
In some cases, I had to subscribe to a tool just because my client believed it provided the most accurate information about their website.
Here’s the harsh truth: Not all SEO tools are created equal. A majority of them are not worth your time and investment.
So in this article, I thought I’d help other agency owners avoid the pitfall of investing in a mediocre tool by listing down 6 SEO tools that are worth investing in.
Before we get started, let’s set some ground rules.
This list will feature only all-purpose SEO tools, meaning tools that include all of the following five essential capabilities:
The list will not feature tools like BuzzSumo, Ubersuggest, and Google’s very own Keyword Planner. While these tools are uniquely useful, they are not all-purpose SEO tools.
For instance, Keyword Planner is just that — a keyword analysis tool within Google Ads. You can’t perform an SEO site audit with Keyword Planner. Similarly, BuzzSumo is an excellent content marketing and influencer outreach tool. You can’t use it for backlink audit or position tracking.
As such, the tools that are featured below perform all functions of SEO and provide actionable reports — from SEO site audit to competition analysis to rank tracking. By using any of these tools, you can improve the overall SEO of your clients’ websites and expect them to rank higher in search results.
If you’re able to find a tool within your current budget and one which can perform all the key SEO functionalities reasonably well, then you’d have arrived at your go-to SEO tool. I hope you’ll be able to find one such tool in the list below.
So without further ado, here are the 6 best SEO tools you can consider to scale your agency business.
Note: Before we proceed, I’d just like to iterate that we will be focusing on paid SEO tools. If you’d like to use free SEO tools, I’d urge you to check out 35+ Best Free SEO Tools to Instantly Boost Your Rankings.
Table of Contents
Below are our top 6 recommendations for best SEO software for agencies. For an in-depth look at each of these tools, refer to the next section.
Use it if you want to do high-quality website audits and spend less time on SEO reporting.
Use it if your top priority is keyword research, competition analysis, and site audit.
Use it if your top priority is backlink analysis.
Use it if you have a smaller budget, but would still like a reliable SEO tool.
Use it for its phenomenal keyword research capabilities.
Use it if your top priority is optimizing your clients’ conversion rates.
Use it if you want to do high-quality website audits and spend less time on SEO reporting.
Use it if your top priority is keyword research, competition analysis, and site audit.
Use it if your top priority is backlink analysis.
Use it if you have a smaller budget, but would still like a reliable SEO tool.
Use it for its phenomenal keyword research capabilities.
Use it if your top priority is optimizing your clients’ conversion rates.
Almost any interaction with a client starts with the agency conducting an SEO audit of their website. SE Ranking handles this better than other tools as their Website Audit breaks any website down to details and identifies even the slightest issues preventing your clients from ranking at the top of the SERPs.
The tool analyzes websites against 110 parameters and lists errors divided into 19 categories. Each issue has a severity level so you can better prioritize fixes, a description to help you understand the problem, and fix tips to save time looking for an appropriate solution.
You can also customize the audit for each client, considering their specifics and needs.
SE Ranking offers several tools and it uses the same meticulous approach with each one of them.
Another critical issue is reporting to clients regarding their SEO progress. With SE Ranking, you can create manual and automated reports using ready-made or customizable templates. The White Label tool lets you re-style the SE Ranking platform to your agency’s brand.
Sign up for SE Ranking
Side note: SE Ranking has a special cost-effective pack for agencies that includes additional read-only seats, additional client-level seats at a lower price, team training, and personal manager.
Let’s kick things off with my favorite SEO tool: Semrush. I’ve been using
Semrush is primarily known for its keyword research and competitive intelligence capabilities. If your client is relatively new in the market or operates in a space with lots of competitors, then it’s not going to be easy to rank for high volume, high competition keywords. In such cases, your best bet would be to start targeting low competition keywords with high traffic potential.
You can use Semrush’s Keyword Magic tool to identify the best keywords to focus on for your clients’ websites. You can find both head terms and long-tail keywords for your campaign, but if you’re targeting long-tail keywords with high traffic potential, look for keywords that have low-to-medium search volume, low competition, and low keyword difficulty.
The Semrush toolkit also features one of the most advanced SEO audit tools on the market. With the
Sign up for
When it comes to backlink analysis, there’s no tool better than Ahrefs. It’s the preferred backlink analysis tool of leading experts in marketing and SEO because of its massive index size and the accuracy with which it presents the data.
Ahrefs boasts of having the world’s biggest index of live backlinks (16 trillion links) and its crawler processes up to 5 billion webpages a day. It also has a user-friendly interface which further bolsters its reputation as a top-notch SEO tool.
Over the last few years, Ahrefs has evolved into a complete marketing toolkit, offering separate tools for keyword research, site audit, and content. But Ahrefs continues to be known for Site Explorer — a backlink checker and organic research tool that offers an in-depth look at the SEO traffic and backlink profile of any website or URL.
With Site Explorer, you can see which websites link to your clients’ websites and their competitors’ sites and gauge the quality of their backlink profiles. You can also analyze the keywords the competitors are ranking for and see which pages bring the most search engine traffic.
Then there is Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker which is one of the most frequently used tools in SEO. With Rank Tracker, you can monitor your clients’ search rankings over time and chart their performance against that of their competitors’. You can also get scheduled reports delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up for Ahrefs
Side note: For a more in-depth comparison of features between
If SEO isn’t your forte, HubSpot’s SEO Marketing Software can provide the recommendations you need to optimize for your target keywords.
You can plan your content strategy around the topics that matter most to your business and audience using HubSpot’s content strategy tool. This tool helps you focus on relevant topics and create topic clusters based on insights and recommendations, making it easier for search engines to understand your site structure.
SEO is about continuously optimizing your content for your target audience’s search intent. HubSpot Marketing Software offers content optimization recommendations to enhance your search authority. It ranks the keywords that will have the most impact based on your website’s optimization needs.
From a data point of view, HubSpot’s SEO Marketing Software lets you quickly check keyword data and avoid any confusion related to content optimization. These reports help you understand what your pages are ranking for and the keywords that your pages could rank for, helping you improve your organic traffic. You can even integrate Google Search Console with HubSpot to import the impressions and click data.
The multi-purpose features let you do more in place, saving you much time.
Get a Demo
Related: 15 Free HubSpot Tools and Resources Every Marketer Should Be Using
The problem with most SEO tools is that they cost almost $100 per month. That’s the standard pricing practice in this industry. Popular SEO tools like
Serpstat breaks away from this standard pricing practice with its basic plan costing just $69/month, making it a great alternative to
Launched in 2013 as simply a keyword research tool, Serpstat has gradually evolved into a full-fledged SEO and PPC analysis platform.
With Serpstat, you can do keyword research, competitive analysis, technical site audits, backlink analysis, and much more. The data generated via this tool may not be as accurate or comprehensive as other tools like
Sign up for Serpstat
Last but not least, we have the Mangools suite of SEO tools. Launched in 2014, Mangools includes five SEO tools — KWFinder for keyword research, SERPChecker for SERP analysis, LinkMiner for backlink analysis, SERPWatcher for rank tracking, and SiteProfiler for website analysis.
Mangools is perhaps best known for its flagship tool KWFinder — a cloud-based keyword research tool that helps you generate the perfect keyword ideas that you can use on everything from blog posts, website content, landing pages, and copy on PPC ads. But the other SEO tools in the suite are just as useful and available at a fairly affordable price.
So if you’re operating on a shoestring budget, but would still like to invest in a tool that helps you with day-to-day SEO, Mangools is your best bet. It’s the most economical SEO tool on this list.
Sign up for Mangools
Related: Semrush vs Mangools: Which SEO Tool is Better?
So these are the six SEO tools I’d recommend to digital marketing agencies. Based on your top priority and budget, you can choose any of these 6 SEO tools:
Use it if you want to do high-quality website audits and spend less time on SEO reporting.
Use it if your top priority is keyword research, competition analysis, and site audit.
Use it if your top priority is backlink analysis.
Use it if you have a smaller budget, but would still like a reliable SEO tool.
Use it for its phenomenal keyword research capabilities.
Use it if your top priority is optimizing your clients’ conversion rates.
Use it if you want to do high-quality website audits and spend less time on SEO reporting.
Use it if your top priority is keyword research, competition analysis, and site audit.
Use it if your top priority is backlink analysis.
Use it if you have a smaller budget, but would still like a reliable SEO tool.
Use it for its phenomenal keyword research capabilities.
Use it if your top priority is optimizing your clients’ conversion rates.
You can also check out these free SEO tools to supplement your SEO efforts, but to get the best results for your clients’ SEO and PPC campaigns, you’ll need to invest in at least one of the above SEO tools.
Agencies often manage multiple client accounts and need tools that can handle bulk analysis, reporting, and tracking. Premium SEO tools like
Key features include keyword research capabilities, competitor analysis, comprehensive reporting tools, white-labeling options, integration with other marketing tools, scalability, and customer support.
An all-purpose SEO tool includes features for keyword research, competitive research, backlink analysis, technical SEO audits, and position tracking. These tools provide comprehensive functionality to handle a variety of SEO tasks.
The article focuses on paid SEO tools that offer comprehensive features for agencies. While free SEO tools can be useful, they often have limitations in features and scalability compared to paid options.
Consider your agency’s specific needs, such as the priority of SEO tasks (e.g., keyword research, site audit) and budget constraints. Also, think about the tool’s scalability and whether it offers features that can grow with your agency.
Yes, some tools mentioned offer budget-friendly options and are suitable for small agencies or those just starting out. It’s important to evaluate each tool’s pricing and features to find the best fit for your agency’s size and budget.
Investing in a paid SEO tool can significantly enhance your agency’s SEO capabilities, providing comprehensive data, insights, and automation that free tools cannot match. Consider the potential ROI in terms of time saved and improved SEO performance for your clients.
Regular use of SEO tools is essential for monitoring your clients’ website performance, tracking rankings, identifying technical issues, and staying ahead of competitors. Weekly checks and monthly in-depth analyses are common practices among successful agencies.
While SEO tools provide valuable insights and data to inform your strategies, they cannot guarantee better rankings due to the ever-changing nature of search engine algorithms. However, using these tools effectively can significantly increase your chances of improving your clients’ SEO performance.
Most SEO tool providers offer customer support through tutorials, documentation, online chat, email, and sometimes phone support. Look for providers with robust support options to help you maximize the tool’s benefits.
Integration allows agencies to streamline their workflows and consolidate data across platforms, making it easier to measure overall performance and ROI. This holistic view can lead to more cohesive and effective marketing strategies.
Agencies should assess their tools at least once a year or whenever there are significant changes in their needs, the landscape of SEO, or the tools themselves. This ensures that they are always using the best resources to serve their clients effectively.
Editor’s Note: This article was first published on October 3, 2019 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness.
Related Articles
Great tools you have mentioned. Some tools can be used by individuals also to track their personal blogs and network. Recently I came across diib.com (I’m not here to promote that ;)). It looks great once you connect with the GA and other social media networks. The price is also not that high. You can try it. I’m sure it will be useful for you and readers here.
SEMRush is one of the best tools available for affiliate marketers. You have mentioned really good tools that we can use.
I find AHREF data much precise and update compared to the SEMRUSH or any other tool. Unfortunately, it’s the most expensive one.
Really great seo tools you have mentioned here. I have been using semrush for my agency. Like Louiser said about diib.com, I had used their free version recently, it was really good, if you had been through this tool, can you provide an indepth review on diib.com.
I think SEMrush is all rounder, ahrefs is good backlinks checker, but Mangools is good enough to hold forth spot why you drop it to the end of your list, I think it is because it tired too early in free trial edition, I can not check it completely I think they want users to buy it to take a try. like ahrefs paid trial.
Just used your Link for SemRush and I Think my investment will not go in vain.
Great one!!! We are very happy to have access to your website. We have got to learn a lot by reading your articles. Most of the SEO tools that you are provided in this blog were really helpful for me. The tools like Answer the public, Majestic, Fat rank, Keyword everywhere, Cora, Bonus Tools these tools were really new info for me. Will try those for Search engine optimization. Which the team of ibusinessmotivation.com appreciates you and your team. Thank you.
Thanks for sharing your experience so transparently. As someone also running a digital marketing agency, I couldn’t agree more—choosing the right all-in-one SEO tool can make or break your workflow and results. I appreciate the clear criteria you set before listing the tools; it really helps filter out the noise. Looking forward to seeing which six made your list!
Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!
I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 to help SMBs leverage SEO, social media, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.
I launched 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other entrepreneurs and bloggers with all the right information and tools they needed to launch a successful online business.
Since then, 99signals has grown significantly and generates over $10,000 in side income each month. Read More about “About Sandeep Mallya”…
Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!
I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 to help SMBs leverage SEO, social media, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.
I launched 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other entrepreneurs and bloggers with all the right information and tools they needed to launch a successful online business.
Since then, 99signals has grown significantly and generates over $10,000 in side income each month. Read More about “About Sandeep Mallya”…
A few links on this blog are affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service through one of these affiliate links, I’ll receive a commission at no additional cost to you.
Rest assured, I recommend only those tools that I personally use and genuinely trust. In most cases, you’ll find in-depth reviews, tutorials, and how-to guides of these tools on my blog to help you make informed decisions.
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Ubersuggest vs Semrush: Which SEO Toolkit Is Better in 2025? – DemandSage
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTNew to SEO? Or having a hard time choosing between Ubersuggest and Semrush? Whatever the reason is, this post will solve all your queries.
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Over the years, Semrush has launched many proprietary SEO tools that have been helping businesses grow, including the recent introduction of toolkits.
Ubersuggest started as basic keyword research and has grown into an intermediate SEO suite in the past few years. Its simple interface and affordable pricing make it the best choice for beginners.
The differences are more. And in this article, I will provide an in-depth comparison so you can pick the right one for your business.
There’s a world of difference between Ubersuggest and Semrush. Both offer distinct features, databases, and usage limits, not to mention the huge pricing difference. To give you a quick overview, here’s a comparison table.
The main difference between Ubersuggest and Semrush is pricing. On one side, Ubersuggest is one of the most affordable options out there in the market, while Semrush sits among expensive tools like Ahrefs, Moz Pro, and SerpStat.
Ubersuggest offers three pricing plans catering to small and medium-sized businesses. Monthly prices range between $12 to $40 per month, but surprisingly, they don’t offer any yearly plan.
Why?
Because out of all the competitors, they are the only ones with a lifetime pricing option. This makes it a feasible option for small businesses (with up to 15 projects) who want unlimited accessibility to keyword research and tracking tools.
Here is a complete overview of available plans:
Apart from that, Ubersuggest also offers a basic free plan with limited accessibility, which is great for common searches every day. But if you truly want to explore the plans without any financial risks, there’s a 7-day free trial available for new users. You can cancel the subscription and get a refund upon canceling within 7 days if you are not satisfied with the services.
Semrush also offers three plans, but all of them are industry-level high-tier plans. Its basic plan costs even more than Ubersuggest’s entry-level lifetime plan. However, their advanced features and competitive tools explain their high pricing.
Here are all the details of Semrush pricing:
Monthly plans are definitely pricier, but if you switch to annual, you get a 17% discount and peace of mind from paying month-to-month.
Let’s start by introducing both Ubersuggest and Semrush.
Ubersuggest began as a free keyword research tool. Later, it was owned by digital marketing guru Neil Patel in 2017. Over time, Ubersuggest evolved into a robust, budget-friendly suite that offers keyword tracking, site audits, competitor analysis, and content ideas.
What I like the most about this platform is its user-friendly interface and no-nonsense approach catered to small businesses, solopreneurs, and entry-level digital marketers. Surely, it lacks the depth of enterprise-level features, but its affordability and ease of use make it a go-to for those who prioritize simplicity over complexity.
Semrush was established almost 10 years before Ubersuggest in 2008. With over 55+ SEO tools, including PPC, content marketing, and social media, it is the perfect option for agencies and enterprises.
Though its interface can overwhelm new users, Semrush’s precision, versatility, and accurate data justify its premium pricing. No matter if you’re auditing a website with 100K+ pages or setting up a global PPC campaign, Semrush delivers everything you need to edge out your competitors.
Semrush is crowned as the best SEO tool in the market, which is why we use it on a daily basis. That’s why we are aware of the core differences.
Here are some solid reasons for choosing Semrush over Ubersuggest:
After Google, Semrush has the biggest keyword database, with 26.4 billion keywords. It works in more than 142 geo-locations worldwide. If we talk about the United States only, you get a keyword database of 3.5 billion, which is more than the collective keyword database of many SEO tools.
The best part is that you get around 20 million keyword ideas with their search volume for a single seed keyword. When you get sorted keywords with their keyword difficulty, you know what keywords to incorporate within your content marketing strategies.
In contrast, Ubersuggest has a keyword database of 1 billion keywords only. Still, you can get 1 million keyword ideas from a seed keyword.
Keywords are the primary element of every SEO practice, so it is crucial for you to understand:
Guess what? Semrush offers all these keyword tools in one suite. That means you don’t have to look for different keyword tools for different types of keyword research.
The core keyword research tools are “Keyword Overview” & “Keyword Magic Tool.” Keyword Overview combines a list of different keywords to analyze their performance on the website. On the other hand, the Keyword Magic Tool gives you a huge list of relevant keywords based on a seed keyword, as I mentioned above.
The best part? These keywords are categorized properly in Informational, Commercial, & Navigational with their keyword difficulties. So you will know which keywords to use for your organic traffic and which ones to set up for PPC.
You can say Semrush’s site audit tool is a technical SEO powerhouse. It crawls up to 100K pages, whereas Ubersuggest’s top-tier plan only crawls up to 10K pages. After auditing, it identifies over 120+ issues, from broken links to duplicate content.
For example, it flags slow-loading pages with actionable tips like “compress images” or “eliminate render-blocking JavaScript.” Its crawlability visualization maps how search engines navigate your site, which spotlights orphaned pages or crawl budget waste.
This level of site auditing is not possible with Ubersuggest as it only highlights errors and warnings.
Semrush’s content marketing tools are something that sets them apart from Ubersuggest and any other SEO tools. The SEO Writing Assistant analyzes drafts in real-time while grading readability, SEO-friendliness, and tone simultaneously.
Its Topic Research Tool generates content clusters (e.g., “best CRM Software” could branch into “CRM for small businesses” or “free CRM tools”), complete with headlines and questions users ask.
Lastly, the Post Tracing feature monitors how published content ranks for target keywords over time. Ubersuggest’s content tools are helpful indeed, but lack this kind of depth. Still, you can get keyword suggestions and a readability score without strategic guidance.
With daily keyword ranking updates, Semrush ensures you are never blindsided by SERP fluctuations. Their backlink database is refreshed every 15 minutes, which alerts you to new or lost links.
For instance, if a high-authority site suddenly links to your competitor, Semrush flags it instantly. Ubersuggest, on the other hand, updates weekly, which can delay critical adjustments. For running agencies with time-sensitive campaigns, daily data is crucial. Even a 24-hour lag can impact their ROI.
Want to know how a keyword’s difficulty changed over the past year?
Semrush’s Historical Data tools track keyword trends, ranking history, and even competitors’ traffic shifts dating back to 2013. This is gold for spotting seasonal patterns and helping you evaluate long-term strategy effectiveness.
Ubersuggest’s historical data is limited to 12 months, so it can be difficult for you to understand trends changing over the years.
If you want to replicate competitors’ success, Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool will play a pivotal role. Combined with the Link Building Tool, you can not only find your competitors’ link sources but also automate outreach by finding prospect websites and generating personalized emails.
Let’s say your competitor earned a backlink from a niche blog. Semrush will help you pitch a guest post for the same site. Unfortunately, Ubersuggest lacks dedicated backlink tools beyond basic competitor analysis.
Beyond SEO, Semrush’s Social Media Tracker monitors Facebook ad performance, while the PPC Keyword Tool uncovers high-converting keywords for Google Ads. The Brand Monitoring feature alerts you to unauthorized trademark use or counterfeit products.
This all-in-one approach saves teams from juggling multiple subscriptions. Ubersuggest, meanwhile, focuses purely on SEO—no PPC or social integrations.
Despite being one of the costlier options in the SEO industry, Semrush offers a free trial to new users. Though the standard free trial is only 7 days, Demandsage readers can get an extended 14-day Semrush free trial through our partnership link.
On top of that, Semrush offers a 7-day refund policy for new users, too. If you are unsatisfied with the tool, you can simply cancel your subscription within 7 days. However, you will need to fill in a cancellation form where you must state the reason for canceling the subscription.
Now that you have plenty of reasons to ditch Ubersuggest, there is also some plus side that might fascinate new digital marketers or solopreneurs to pick it over Semrush.
Looking at the prices (mentioned above), Ubersuggest is a steal for bootstrapped startups. Even its top-tier Enterprise plan ($40/month) costs less than Semrush’s Basic Pro plan.
For solopreneurs or local businesses needing keyword tracking and site audits without breaking the bank, Ubersuggest delivers unmatched value.
One of Ubersuggest’s standout features is its simplicity. The interface is clean, intuitive, and designed for users who don’t have hours to spend learning how to navigate a complex tool.
Need keyword ideas?
Type a term, hit “Search,” and instantly get volume, difficulty, and CPC. The Traffic Analyzer simplifies competitor research with digestible graphs for traffic and backlinks.
Semrush’s interface is undoubtedly powerful but it requires tutorials to navigate—like finding the “Keyword Magic Tool” buried under four menus.
Ubersuggest supports 137 countries, making it a versatile tool for businesses targeting international markets. Whether you’re a local bakery in Paris or an e-commerce store shipping globally, Ubersuggest provides localized keyword data to help you tailor your strategy.
For example, you can check the search volume for “vegan protein powder” in Germany versus the United States, ensuring your content resonates with the right audience. While Semrush also offers geo-specific data, Ubersuggest’s global keyword volume feature is more accessible to users on lower-tier plans.
The Top Pages tool is a hidden gem in Ubersuggest’s arsenal. It shows you the most popular pages on a competitor’s site, including their estimated traffic and social shares. For instance, if a competitor’s blog post on “10 Best Running Shoes” is driving significant traffic, you can create a more comprehensive or updated version to outrank them.
This feature is particularly useful for content marketers looking to identify high-performing topics quickly. Semrush offers similar insights but often requires cross-referencing multiple reports, which can be time-consuming.
Ubersuggest’s usage limits are surprisingly generous, especially for its price point. The Individual plan allows you to track up to 300 keywords and manage 15 projects, while the Business plan ($20/month) increases these limits to 500 keywords and 30 projects.
This scalability makes Ubersuggest a viable option for small agencies or freelancers managing multiple clients. In comparison, Semrush’s Pro plan limits you to 5 projects and 500 keywords despite its higher cost. If you’re juggling several websites or campaigns, Ubersuggest offers more flexibility.
Ubersuggest’s free plan is one of the most generous in the industry. It includes 3 daily searches, basic keyword tracking, and limited site audits—enough for casual users or those just starting with SEO.
Additionally, the 7-day free trial gives you full access to all features, allowing you to test the tool’s capabilities without any financial risk. What truly sets Ubersuggest apart, however, is its lifetime pricing option.
For a one-time payment of $120 (Individual plan), you get unlimited access to all features—a rare offering in the SEO world. This is a game-changer for businesses looking to minimize recurring expenses.
Since Ubersuggest and Semrush cater to different audiences, both are often praised by their users.
Ubersuggest has a smaller user base, so there are fewer user reviews comparatively. Still, they have a 4.4-star rating on Trustpilot on 378 reviews. Let’s take a look at what its users say about after using the platform:
Here’s a negative one:
Semrush has an average 4.5-star rating across various review platforms like G2 and Trustpilot. Here are some positive and negative reviews from their users:
Some of the users are unhappy with their trial cancellation charges:
As you can see, both platforms have their fair share of positive and negative testimonials. But overall, both have a user base of happy & satisfied customers.
If you want my opinion on choosing between Ubersuggest and Semrush, I will say you must audit your needs first.
If you have just started with no prior experience or are still learning, I would suggest you pick Ubersuggest with your eyes closed. Because the financial risks are low, and you get almost everything you need to scale up.
However, if you are running a mid-size business or handling multiple projects, Semrush would be the right option. At Demandsage, we use Semrush’s Guru plan for our SEO needs and research. Since we have a team of multiple people, Ubersuggest won’t suffice our needs or help us grow at this level.
Even if you upgrade after some time and need access to advanced tools, you can always switch to Semrush anytime. Both platforms won’t tie you to a contract or force you to go long-term. You can always cancel or switch back & forth.
I hope, by now, you know the core differences between Ubersuggest and Semrush. Now, it will be easier for you to pick either of the platforms.
However, if you want to try them first before sticking to one, they both offer a free trial. Start with Ubersuggest’s 7-day free trial and get a thorough overview of its tools before shifting to a monthly or lifetime plan.
Or, if you want to get started with Semrush, take advantage of our 14-day free trial and get an idea of what Semrush has to offer.
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You're Missing Out on Hidden Android Updates – Lifehacker
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTKhamosh Pathak is freelancer tech journalist with over 13 years of experience writing online.
No matter how much Google has tried over the past couple of years, it’s never managed to make Android updates as seamless as iOS updates. On the iPhone, every compatible iPhone across the globe gets the same updates, at the same time.
On Android, it’s anyone’s guess. Google releases the latest and greatest Android updates for Developers and its Pixel devices, and then Android smartphone manufactures get started with developing their own versions. For instance, because Samsung’s version of Android 15 is different from what OnePlus is doing, that can sometimes mean key features don’t show up on your phone until quite a ways down the line.
To mitigate this to some extent, Google has decided to take matters into its own hands, pushing out some security, privacy, and device tracking features to all Android devices at once, using a little known framework called Google Play system updates.
And yes, it’s confusing. It’s not just about the Google Play Store or services, and it’s something that you might never come across on your own. Google doesn’t send notifications about it, nor is it a part of the regular Software Update screen. So what is it, where is it, and why is it so important?
As I mentioned above, unless you’re on a Pixel, any regular Android update comes straight from your phone’s manufacturer, and not Google itself. This is usually where you get big Android updates, like how Samsung phones got updated to Android 15 with the One UI 7 update.
But the Google Play System updates are different.
It all started in 2019 with Project Mainline, where Google started to split some of the key components of the OS. With this project, Google can enhance Android’s security and privacy features without going through the regular channels. This is why, in the past, Google has been able to push features like Android Theft Detection, Remote Lock, and Offline Lock to all Android phones running Android 10 and above overnight. Something like this just isn’t possible with regular Android updates.
While these are small features, they’re not all that Play System updates give you. Google Play System updates are also responsible for Google Play Protect, the framework that scans and reports malicious apps on the Play Store, plus they add new features to the Google Play Store and Google Wallet.
Unlike a regular Android update, which might show up at any time, Google Play system updates show up every month without fail. You can check out Google’s website to see what’s new each month.
It’s important to make sure you’re getting these. Alongside their new features, they also introduce important security updates and bug fixes to the entire Google Play Services platform.
These updates are critical. But sometimes months can go by before you actually have the newest one. That’s because Google doesn’t promote these updates in any fashion. There are no notifications for them, and they aren’t even automatically installed when you perform a regular Android OS update.
Weirdly, they are only automatically installed when you reboot your smartphone. And give how smartphones are used these days, that can be months apart.
I can’t say if Google will eventually change its ways and make Play system updates more prominent. But for now, there’s only one way to check for them, and that is to manually install them in the Security updates section in the Settings app.
Different phones have different menus, so I’ll use Pixels as an example for how to find this page. If you’re using a Google Pixel phone, go to Settings > Security & privacy > System & updates. You’ll see two sections, Security update and Google Play system update. Tap the latter option to download and install the update. The update will be installed after your device reboots.
On any other smartphone, search is going to be your friend. In the Settings app, search for “Play system update,” which should help get you where you need to go.
Khamosh Pathak is freelancer tech journalist with over 13 years of experience writing online.
Lifehacker has been a go-to source of tech help and life advice since 2005. Our mission is to offer reliable tech help and credible, practical, science-based life advice to help you live better.
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Lifehacker is a federally registered trademark of Ziff Davis and may not be used by third parties without explicit permission. The display of third-party trademarks and trade names on this site does not necessarily indicate any affiliation or the endorsement of Lifehacker. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product or service, we may be paid a fee by that merchant.
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Top AI Content Marketing Tools in 2025 I Tried & Tested – DesignRush
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTTop AI Content Marketing Tools in 2025 I Tried & Tested DesignRush
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June 2025 Google Play System Updates: What’s New – SammyGuru
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTGalaxy S26 Ultra, Z Fold7, Z Flip7 Mystery Box Sign-up Open!
by Binay Konwar | Jun 20, 2025 | News, Updates
Google keeps enhancing its core Android components, like the Play Store and Play Services, through monthly Play system updates. It recently detailed the June 2025 Google Play system update for hundreds of Android devices across phones, tablets, TVs, smartwatches, and other categories. If you own a Galaxy device, you can expect to receive the latest system update in the coming weeks.
This article is updated regularly to reflect the latest additions to the June 2025 Google Play system updates. You will find all the latest release notes at the end of the article.
Google Play system updates are crucial for Android devices, as they enhance security, improve stability, and fix bugs across the Android ecosystem. The first batch of June 2025 Google Play system updates contains a bunch of new features for the Play Store and Play Services.
The Google Play Services version 25.21 added new tools for developers to support account management-related processes in their apps. It has addressed bugs related to Wallet services to ensure more reliable transactions. Just like on smartphones, you will now receive alerts on your smartwatch as well when an earthquake happens. This first batch of Play Services updates focuses on just a few areas, but we expect to see more improvements in upcoming batches throughout the month.
Speaking of Google Play Store version 46.5, it brings a slew of new features for smartphone users. You will now see redesigned Webtoon samples, offering a more engaging preview of the content. It also enhances survey features that let you collect user feedback effectively in Google Play. The event cards in search results and app pages now include a new “View” button, making it easier to find event details. On top of that, featured in-app items have been updated to improve your overall experience.
As usual, Google does not share a specific timeline for the release of the latest Play system update. Rest assured, the company will soon begin rolling out the update through the Play Store and Play Services for eligible Galaxy devices. So, keep an eye out for the latest update by going to Settings > About phone > Software information > Google Play system update.
The Google Play Services version 25.23 brings several improvements across multiple categories. On phones, the update now includes Happiness Tracking Surveys within the Cast feature. On top of that, you will now get a smoother experience when you back up your device and photos. For Android Auto, the update adds a camera access toggle for Google Maps to the terms of service. Furthermore, you will get an enhanced experience on transit-related taps on your WearOS device.
As for Google Play Store version 46.7, it brings a host of new features for Android smartphone users. This update makes it easier to download large apps over cellular data. Additionally, you may notice a new grid format for ads on the Play Store homepage. For a more seamless experience, Google has redesigned the app download and installation process.
___________________________
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Jun 27, 2025
The new channel is now available in the UK and will launch soon in the United States
Jun 27, 2025
Galaxy A55 joins the One UI 8 test bandwagon
Jun 27, 2025
Can Lee finally breathe a sigh of relief?
Subscribe to get weekly updates on the latest Samsung Galaxy software, news, tips, tricks, and customization guides!
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16 Best Digital Marketing Tools in 2025 – Brandwatch
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTHow have consumer behaviors and preferences changed across different generations? Find out in our latest report.
Understand and be understood across all key platforms
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How have consumer behaviors and preferences changed across different generations?
Brandwatch Consumer Research
Formerly the Falcon suite
Formerly Paladin
How have consumer behaviors and preferences changed across different generations?
Brandwatch Consumer Research
Formerly the Falcon suite
Formerly Paladin
Published October 25th 2024
Find the best digital marketing tools to streamline your SEO, SoMe, content, and automation strategies in 2025.
Being a digital marketing manager is not easy. You create and manage all kinds of digital marketing campaigns across multiple channels. You analyze data to optimize campaigns and collaborate with other teams.
It’s a lot to handle, and that’s why digital marketing tools need to come into play. The right digital marketing tools will make your job much easier and take repetitive tasks from your shoulders, so you have more time to focus and more creative and strategic areas.
There are digital marketing tools for every aspect of your job. Whether it’s planning, analyzing, or creating visuals, there’s a tool to help you with that. There are tools for SEO (search engine optimization), email marketing, social media marketing, content creation, and more all waiting to be discovered.
With the right tools, you not only save time and money but improve your digital marketing strategy. You can reach more customers, track your performance better, and ultimately drive sales.
Feeling overwhelmed right now? Don’t worry, we have you covered. In this blog, we look at helpful tools broken down by different categories.
In this article, we cover the following:
Digital marketing tools are software and platforms that support your digital marketing activities. They make your job easier and save you time, be it reaching customers, collaborating with other teams, or running social media campaigns.
There are tools for every aspect of digital marketing:
As you can see, these tools support a wide range of marketing efforts. For example, social media management tools allow you to schedule posts in advance across multiple channels, while search engine optimization tools like Ahrefs provide essential features for optimizing websites, particularly focusing on backlink analysis and leveraging extensive data indexes.
That said, you don’t need to use every tool in our list. The right tool for you will depend on factors like your needs, business goals, size of your team, and budget. Whether you’re a beginner searching for budget-friendly options or seeking advanced tools for more complex needs, there are options for everyone.
The key is choosing the tools that can boost your digital marketing strategy. The right tools are easy to use, help you work smarter, and grow your online presence.
There are many reasons why you and your team should start using digital marketing tools. They save you time and money, help you boost your online presence, and take over automated tasks so you spend less time on routine work and can focus more on strategic and creative projects.
First off, these tools give you access to a lot of useful data about customers and prospects. You can learn about their preferences, behaviors, and needs. With this knowledge, you can create more targeted campaigns that resonate with your audience.
You can track your campaigns and see how they are performing in real time, which means you can tweak and optimize your campaigns as needed to get better results. With social media management tools and social listening, you can schedule posts in advance and see when your audience is the most active to publish at the best times. Meanwhile, email marketing tools help you send personalized messages to a large databaseand understand which email campaigns work best.
Improving collaboration is another plus. Collaboration tools make it easier for your team to work together, share ideas, and stay on top of projects. With the right tool, you can improve communication and productivity in your team and with other teams.
Here are some key benefits of using digital marketing tools:
By leveraging these tools, your marketing efforts can become more streamlined, leading to better results for your business.
Choosing the best digital marketing tool that fits your needs can feel overwhelming. There are a lot of factors to consider, such as your business goals, team size, and budget. If you are a small team with a limited budget, beginner-friendly tools might be the best options for you. On the other hand, if you are running more complex campaigns, you need something more advanced. Start making a list of features you need in a tool and go from there.
Another point to consider is whether the tool can be integrated with software you are already using which, again, will save you time.
A seamless user experience is also important. How easy is the tool to use? How long will it take your team to learn the features? Ideally, you want a tool that is intuitive to use but can help you grow your business. Check if the tool offers support and training materials that can help your team to get up to speed.
If possible, take advantage of free trials. They allow you to test the tool to see if it suits your workflow before committing. It’s also a good idea to talk to other marketers about what tools they’re using—their insights can save you from wasting money on something that doesn’t meet your needs.
Lastly, think long-term. As your business grows, your needs will likely change, so pick tools that can scale up as your campaigns become more complex.
Here are a few things to look out for when selecting a digital marketing tool:
Let’s dive into some of the top tools that can help you boost your digital marketing. We split the following tools into different areas of digital marketing to make it easier for you to find what you need.
Social media management tools make posting across platforms and tracking the performance easier. With the right one, you’ll save a lot of time and can identify which content and campaigns work best with your audience.
These tools help your website climb higher in search results. They provide helpful suggestions on how to improve your content and find the right keywords to target.
With email marketing tools, you can send out emails at scale, design them the best way, and track your campaigns’ performance.
These are designed to help you create eye-catching posts, videos, and images, making your marketing content look more polished and professional.
Analytics tools are important to understand how your marketing is performing. They can help you measure metrics like website visitors or ad clicks and give a clear picture of what is working and what is not.
These tools improve team collaboration by helping you plan projects, share files, and communicate all from one place. They’re perfect for keeping everyone on the same page and increase productivity.
With video marketing tools, you can create and share high-quality videos that capture the attention of your audience and bring across your message clearly.
The right tool can make a huge difference in your day-to-day work as a social media manager. They can help you to plan, create, and schedule posts across multiple social platforms, all from one dashboard. Plus, you can reply to comments, track engagement, and analyze your content’s performance without having to switch between multiple apps.
Using a social media management tool saves time and boosts your productivity. Instead of juggling different platforms, everything you need is in one place, making your workflow smoother and more efficient.
Each tool comes with its own set of unique features, so it’s important to choose one that aligns with your goals and needs. The right tool helps you to cut down repetitive tasks so you’ll have more time to focus on your social media strategy.
Brandwatch is a powerful tool for social media management and analytics, designed to give you a deep understanding of your audience, track brand mentions, and stay ahead of your competitors.
With Brandwatch, you can monitor conversations across social media platforms, blogs, and news sites. This helps you stay on top of what people are saying about your brand.
One of its many standout features is the ability to monitor conversations across multiple social platforms in real-time. With these insights, you can keep up with what people are saying about your brand and respond and adapt quickly.
Another big advantage is the many customization options that Brandwatch provides. You can tailor dashboards and reports to your needs. Brandwatch also integrates well with other marketing platforms, making it easy to be implemented into your existing workflow.
Brandwatch is also a great platform for content management. You can plan, create, and schedule posts for multiple social networks from one single dashboard. It also provides the latest AI technologies that help you improve your writing and automate replies.
With the in-depth analytics features, you can track trends, measure sentiment, and measure your performance. The many and customizable visualizations make it easy to break down a huge amount of data and share insights with your team or clients in simple and easy-to-digests reports.
Brandwatch is a perfect choice for medium to large companies and agencies. It’s advanced features can handle even the most complex social media strategies, and customer support and many training materials are available to help get your team up to speed in no time.
Sprout Social is another big name in the social media management tool market. The tool can help you streamline your social media workflow and give you insights about your online presence.
One helpful feature is the unified inbox, from which you can manage all your social interactions from one place. This makes it much easier to respond to messages and engage with your audience. You can publish and schedule posts across multiple social networks, saving you a lot of time and work.
The analytics capabilities are another key feature. You can track your performance, measure engagement, and identify trends that will help you improve your social media strategy. You can customize the reports to your needs.
Moreover, Sprout Social can be integrated with other popular platforms for a seamless workflow. While the platform has a user-friendly interface, some features can require some training.
Like Brandwatch, Sprout Social is useful for medium to large business that are looking for a social media management tool.
Hootsuite is another popular choice in the world of social media management. The tool can help you grow your online presence and improve your social media strategy.
The platform also offers analytics to track your performance. You can monitor how well your posts are doing, what’s working best, and make adjustments as needed. Like the other platforms on the list, with Hootsuite you can manage different social media accounts from one place and easily schedule posts across social networks like Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok. This means you can not only save time but also make sure that your content is consistent across all social platforms.
Hootsuite works well with other marketing tools. A downside can be that the interface is somewhat cluttered, and it takes some time to get used to all the features.
Overall Hootsuite is an option to consider regardless of your company size, with multiple plans to choose from.
Buffer is a handy tool for anyone looking to manage their social media presence. The tool can be easily integrated with many other tools – for example Canva, a graphic design tool. This way you can create stunning graphics without having to jump between different apps.
Like other social media management tools, you can post and schedule your content across multiple social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X, saving you a lot of time and helping you keep consistency.
Buffer also comes with analytics capabilities. You can measure how your posts are performing, and which kind of content gets the most likes, comments, and shares. With these insights, you can improve your social media marketing strategy.
Overall, Buffer is particularly well-suited for small businesses and individuals who want to simplify their social media efforts. Its user-friendly interface makes it accessible even for beginners, so you don’t need to be a tech whiz to get started.
If you are a digital marketer that wants to boost the visibility of your website, you need an SEO tool. With the right tool, you can track your rankings, optimize your content, and stay one step ahead of your competitors.
SEO tools are all about improving your search engine rankings. They offer valuable insights into keywords, backlinks, and competitor strategies. Search engine optimization tools like Ahrefs provide essential features for optimizing websites, particularly focusing on backlink analysis and leveraging extensive data indexes.
Here’s what you can achieve with SEO tools:
Choosing the right SEO tool can have a big influence on your digital marketing success. Let’s dive into some top tools available on the market and how they can enhance your SEO efforts.
Semruh is a solid tool for anyone working in digital marketing. It’s an all-in-one platform that covers a wide range of areas, including SEO, content marketing, competitor research, and PPC.
The platform provides tools that help you improve your content marketing. You can create, plan, and optimize your content to receive higher engagement. It offers topic suggestions, SEO recommendations, and even readability scores to ensure your content hits the mark.
If you’re running PPC campaigns, Semrush can come in handy. With its keyword suggestions and ad copy ideas, you can improve your advertisements. Once your campaigns are live, you can track the performance of your ads and compare them against competitors.
Speaking of competitors, you can also perform a more extensive competitor analysis. You can examine your competitors’ strategies, such as their top-performing keywords and backlinks. These insights can help you to optimize your strategies and stay ahead in the market.
Another great feature is Semrush’s keyword research feature. It lets you explore search volume, keyword difficulty, and related terms to help you boost your organic traffic. The backlink audit tool checks your website for technical SEO issues and offers suggestions to optimize your site for better visibility on Google.
Overall, Semrush is a fantastic option for businesses of all sizes, especially for digital marketers, SEO professionals, and content creators who want to have all of their data in one place.
Ahrefs is a top choice for many in the SEO and digital marketing field. The platforms come with many features like keyword research that lets you analyze millions of keywords with detailed metrics like search volume, difficulty, or potential traffic.
With the content explorer tool, you can discover popular content in your niche that give you inspiration for your content and campaigns. Ahrefs also shines in the realm of technical SEO. Its Site Audit tool crawls your website and identifies issues that might be hindering your search rankings.
The site explorer feature is another useful feature. You can look at your competitors websites and see their top pages, backlink profiles, and overall organic search performance. These insights can be incredibly valuable as you craft your SEO strategy.
Another great thing about Ahrefs is its user-friendly interface. Even if you’re just starting with SEO, you’ll find it easy to navigate and make sense of the data it provides.
Overall, Ahrefs is perfect for SEO professionals, digital marketers, and content creators who need deep insights and analysis. If you’re serious about boosting your website’s search performance, Ahrefs is definitely a tool worth having in your toolkit.
Email marketing is one of the most important areas in digital marketing. It’s a great way to connect with your customers, and there are plenty of excellent tools on the market that can help you launch and manage your email campaigns.
As you look for the right tool, think about your goals and budget. The ideal tool is user-friendly and integrates easily with other marketing software you use. Customer support is also an important factor to consider, making sure you have the assistance when a problem comes up.
Helpful email marketing tools will have:
Pre-designed email templatesList segmentation optionsAutomated workflowsDetailed analytics and reportingA/B testing capabilitiesChoose tools that empower you to create engaging emails and track their performance. With their analytics features you can track open rates, click-through rates, and conversations. Additionally, look for features that help grow your list, like signup forms and landing pages.
Mailchimp is a well-known platform in the email marketing space, and for good reasons. It’s an all-rounder that lets you create and send email campaigns, manage your customer lists, and track your performance.
One of the best things about Mailchimp is its easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor. You don’t need any design experience to create nice-looking emails. You can choose from a range of templates or design your own from scratch.
With Mailchimp, you can segment your audience into different groups. This helps you to tailor your messages and send emails to specific groups. You can categorize your contacts based on their purchase history or how engaged they are with your content.
Mailchimp also has automations features that will save you a lot of time. You can set up automatic welcome emails, birthday messages, and reminders for abandoned carts. The platform also comes with SMS marketing features, letting you send text messages for sales, promotions, or important updated.
When it comes to tracking performance, Mailchimp’s reporting tools are quite robust. You can monitor open rates, click-through rates, and other key metrics to see how your campaigns are doing. It can also be integrated easily with a lot of other marketing platforms.
Mailchimp is a great choice for small to medium-sized businesses that are looking for a comprehensive marketing solution. It’s useful for e-commerce brands that want to automate their email marketing. If you’re just starting in digital marketing, Mailchimp’s user-friendly interface and helpful resources will make it easy for you to get the hang of it quickly.
ActiveCampaign is a helpful tool to boost your email marketing campaigns. It combines email marketing with automation and customer relationship management, making it a great choice for businesses looking to grow and nurture leads.
The tool works smoothly with a variety of other platforms, allowing you to connect it to your website, e-commerce store, and other apps you are using. Its reporting and analytics features provide detailed insights into how your campaigns are performing, enabling you to make data-driven decisions for your marketing strategy.
With ActiveCampaign, you can create personalized emails. It has a user-friendly interface to easily design engaging email, even if you are not very tech-savvy.
Where ActiveCampaign truly excels is in its advanced automation capabilities. You can create complex workflows that engage customers based on their behavior and preferences, helping you build meaningful connections.
While the platform offers a wealth of features, it may take some time to get familiar with them. Fortunately, they provide a wealth of resources and support to help you along the way.
ActiveCampaign is perfect for small to medium-sized businesses that want to take their email marketing to the next level. It’s a great choice for companies that want to automate their customer communications and sales processes.
Creating compelling content is crucial for successful digital marketing and the right tool can help improve your content strategy.
A good writing tool will boost your productivity and increase the quality of your content. Platforms that have the latest AI technologies can assist you in crafting blog posts, ad copy, and other types of content. They offer suggestions for improvement, and they can speed up your writing process.
When it comes to graphic design, there are tools available that allow you to create eye-catching visuals without needing a design background. You can easily create social media posts, presentations, flyers, and more, either by customizing your designs to fit your brand style or by choosing from a library of templates.
With these tools, you can not only improve the quality of your content but save a lot of time. By streamlining your content creation process, you have more time to create more engaging content that resonates with your audiences.
Let’s explore some top options that can help you craft engaging posts, stunning graphics, and more.
Canva is a user-friendly graphic design tool that makes it easy for anyone to create stunning marketing materials, even if you don’t have a design background.
With Canva, you can create social media posts, presentations, flyers, and more. Its drag-and-drop interface is straightforward, making it easy to use even for beginners. The tool offers a big library of templates, images, and fonts you can choose from. You can also upload your own images and logos.
One great feature is the ability to resize your design for different platforms, which saves you a lot of time when you have to great content for multiple social media channels.
Canva also comes with video editing features, allowing you to create short clips for social media or presentations. While it may have some limitations for more complex projects, it’s more than enough for most digital marketing needs.
Jasper is an AI-powered writing assistant that can take your content marketing to the next level. Whether you need to write blog posts, social media updates, ad copy, or anything in between, Jasper has you covered.
The tool can generate content based on your inputs. Provide some basic information, and it will create entire paragraphs for you. You can choose from an extensive library of 50 writing templates that cover different types of content. Each template guides you through the writing process step-by-step, making it easy to get started.
Jasper can be integrated with popular SEO tools, allowing you to optimize your content for search engines as you write. While it might take a little time to get comfortable with all the features, the effort is worth it.
If you frequently create marketing content, Jasper is worth considering. It’s especially useful for content marketers, social media managers, and bloggers. The tool can adapt to different tones and styles, making sure the copy aligns with your brand voice.
You need to track your performance to discover areas for improvement, and this is the only way to make sure you stay ahead of your competition. Analytics and data tools provide the insights you need to make informed, data-driven decisions.
Analytics tools can offer offer detailed information about all kinds of things like your website visitors, their behavior, and how your content is performing. With the right analytics tools, you can:
By leveraging these tools, you’ll be able to fine-tune your digital marketing strategy and achieve better results.
Google Analytics is a must-have tool for anyone involved in digital marketing. It provides valuable insights into how visitors interact with your website, helping you understand where they come from and what actions they take.
You can identify which pages are the most popular and detect what content resonates best with your audience. The tool lets you track how long users stay on your site and whether they leave without engaging.
With Google Analytics, you can also discover which marketing channels are driving the most traffic. You can see how effective your social media, search engine, and ads efforts are. Its dashboard gives you a quick snapshot of your site’s performance, and if you need more detail, you can create custom reports. You can even set specific goals to monitor key actions like sales or sign-ups.
One other benefit of Google Analytics is that it can easily be integrated with other Google tools, such as Ads and Search Console. This way, you can get a fuller picture of your digital marketing performance.
Google Analytics is suitable for businesses of all sizes. It’s easy to set up, and you don’t need to be a tech expert to use its basics features. The huge amount of data can feel overwhelming at first, and it takes a bit of time to figure out what’s most useful for you. However, once you get the hang of it, the insights you gain are invaluable.
SurveyMonkey is a great online survey tool that can help you gather valuable insights from your customers to make better data-driven business decisions.
With this tool, you can make professional-looking surveys with ease. The platform features a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface and a variety of pre-designed templates, so you don’t need any prior experience to get started quickly.
You can choose from different question types, such as multiple choice, open-ended questions, and rating scales. SurveyMonkey lets you customize your survey to your needs to make sure that you collect the most relevant information from your audience. The platform also has advanced features like skip logic and questions randomization.
One of the great things about SurveyMonkey is its ability to reach a broad audience. You can share your surveys through email, social media, or even embed them on your website. Plus, it integrates smoothly with many popular marketing tools, allowing you to connect your survey data to other aspects of your marketing strategy.
Furthermore, SurveyMonkey provides insightful analytics that give you a quick overview of your survey results. You can monitor responses in real time and create visually appealing charts and graphs to help make sense of your data.
SurveyMonkey is perfect for marketers wanting to do market research, track customer satisfaction, and gather feedback on new products. It’s also an excellent choice for businesses aiming to enhance their customer experience based on direct input from their audience.
Managing digital marketing projects can be quite a challenge. Handling multiple projects and complex workflows quickly can become chaotic. Project management and collaboration tools can help you to keep your team organized and make sure that your campaigns are running smoothly.
Collaboration tools support you in streamlining tasks, sharing files, and making communicating among team members easier. They help you to manage complex projects with ease.
Great project management and collaboration tools will come with these important features:
The best tools are easy to use, can be tailored to your team needs, and will improve productivity. Think about what your team struggles with the most. Do you need better task tracking? Easier file sharing? More effective communication? Choose a tool that can solve your biggest challenges and boost teamwork.
Let’s explore some top options for project management and collaboration in the marketing space.
Trello is a great choice to help with your project management. You can keep tasks organized and boost collaboration within your team through its visual boards and cards.
You can set up different boards for various marketing campaigns or projects, with each board containing lists and cards that represent specific tasks or ideas. The drag-and-drop feature makes it easy to move cards between lists, giving you a clear view of your progress.
With Trello, you can assign tasks to team members, set deadlines, or add comments directly to the cards. There are plenty of productivity-boosting features, like labels for categorizing tasks, checklists within cards, and automation options to simplify workflows.
The tool is quite flexible. You can customize your boards to fit your needs, whether you’re planning content calendars, managing social media posts, or tracking campaign performance.
Trello excels in visual organization, but may not be the best choice for more complex projects. It’s a great choice for marketing teams of all sizes, especially for those who prefer a visual approach to managing tasks and need a tool that can easily adapt to various marketing workflows.
Asana is a popular tool in the project management and collaboration space. You can create boards, lists, and timelines, making it simple to visualize your projects. This helps you to see immediately what needs to be done and who is responsible for each task.
The platform also offers customizable templates tailored for different marketing activities. Whether you’re setting up workflows for content calendars, product launches, or social media campaigns, you can get started quickly.
Asana also comes with helpful reporting features. You can create charts and graphs to monitor progress and see what areas may need some extra attention. The tool can be easily integrated with other popular marketing tools for a seamless workflow.
While Asana has a lot of features, which might feel a bit overwhelming at first, once you get the hang of it, it will boost your team’s productivity. It’s perfect for marketing teams of any size that manage multiple projects and tight deadlines. Asana is also a great choice for remote teams, making sure that everyone is informed and on track.
Video marketing has become a vital part for many digital marketers. With the right video marketing tool, you can create, host, and analyze your video content all in one place without having to be an expert.
When choosing a video tool, it’s important to consider your specific needs. Are you looking for user-friendly editing features? In-depth analysis? Or perhaps the ability to add captions or interactive elements?
A great video marketing tool can help you to:
Let’s look at some of the top options that help you to create engaging videos without a hassle.
Wistia is a great video marketing platform that provides you with a set of tools to help you create, manage, and analyze your video content. You can easily upload your videos, and the platform comes with a lot of customization options. For example, you can tailor the video player to match your brand for a more cohesive viewing experience.
One helpful feature of Wistia is its lead capture capability. It lets you add forms directly to your videos, making it easy to turn viewers into potential customers. This feature can easily be connected to many popular CRM systems to manage your leads.
With the analytics features, you can see who is watching your videos, how long they stay engaged, and when they drop off. You can add chapters to your long-form webinars, allowing viewers to jump quickly to sections they are interested in.
Wistia is an excellent choice for businesses of any size that want to do video marketing. If you are looking for a tool that helps you generate leads and gain insights from your video content, Wistia could be the perfect fit for you.
Another well-known platform for video hosting and marketing is Vimeo. This advanced tool makes it easy to create, manage, and share high-quality video content. The platform comes along with strong privacy settings, allowing you to control who gets to see your content.
You can produce high-quality videos even if you don’t have a background in design. The tool offers plenty of customizable templates, an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, and you can tailor the videos to your brand’s style.
Vimeo also offers insightful analytics that give you a clear picture of viewer engagement, helping you understand which content connects best with your audience. You can add calls to action and email capture forms directly to your videos to generate leads. Vimeo can be integrated with many other popular marketing tools and content management systems.
If you want to enhance the quality of your videos and require professional-grade hosting, Vimeo is an excellent choice. It’s particularly useful for businesses aiming to cultivate a polished brand image through video content.
Digital marketing tools can boost your business by helping you with everything from social media management to customer engagement to analytics. Here are some of the most common questions people have about digital marketing tools.
As a beginner, focus on user-friendly tools. Google Analytics is fantastic for tracking your website traffic, Canva helps you to create amazing visuals, and with Mailchimp, you can improve your email marketing. Look for tools that offer free plans or are budget-friendly so you can try out their features before you make a commitment.
Free tools can help you to grow your small business without stretching your budget. While they may not have as many advanced features than pricier options, they typically will cover your essential needs. They can help you build your online presence and reach new customers without having to spend a lot of money.
Google Analytics is a must-have for any marketer, providing excellent insights into website data. For social media analytics, Brandwatch is a great tool that offers deep insights that can help you make smarter, data-driven marketing decisions.
Many digital marketing tools can be integrated with many social media platforms. For example, Brandwatch partners with major social networks and integrates with Salesforce.
Paid tools often have a wider range of features and better support. They offer more advance analytics, additional automation options, and higher usage limits. If you are a business with complex projects and a bigger team, paid tools are likely best placed to meet your needs.
It’s a good idea to review your toolkit every six to twelve months to check what updates or new features are available. See if the tools you are using are still meeting your needs and if they don’t it might be time to search for an upgrade. The digital landscape changes quickly, so being able to adapt quickly is key to staying ahead.
When it comes to understanding consumers, businesses choose Brandwatch ahead of any other tool.
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Ahrefs vs SE Ranking: Which SEO Tool Should You Buy? – 99signals
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTAhrefs and SE Ranking are two of the most widely respected tools in the SEO community.
As such, it’s not easy to decide which SEO tool is worth investing in. Both tools have their strengths and unique features.
In this article, I’ll put Ahrefs and SE Ranking to the test and help you decide which SEO tool is better suited for your business.
I’ll be evaluating these tools on the following parameters:
Let’s get started.
Editor’s note: If you’d like to implement some of the action items in this post, I’d encourage you to sign up for free trials or plans offered by both these tools. SE Ranking is currently offering a 2-week free trial on any of their plans, while Ahrefs lets you can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools to get free limited access to Site Explorer and Site Audit.
Table of Contents
Headquartered in Singapore, Ahrefs was founded in 2011 by Dmitry Gerasimenko. For the first few years, Ahrefs was purely a backlink analysis tool.
Within a short period of time, Ahrefs built a sterling reputation in the SEO community and became widely regarded as one of the most accurate backlink analysis tools on the market. Since then, Ahrefs has added a plethora of features to its toolkit.
Fast forward to today, Ahrefs is a multi-purpose SEO tool that includes keyword research, site audit, rank tracker, and other essential SEO capabilities.
SE Ranking was launched in 2013 as a cloud-based SEO platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and online marketing professionals. SE Ranking is based in London, UK, with offices in USA, Ukraine, and Belarus.
SE Ranking’s toolkit features SEO tools for keyword research, technical SEO audit, backlink analysis, competitor analysis, and more.
In just a few years, SE Ranking has established itself as a serious player in the competitive market space of cloud-based SEO tools. It’s used by over 400,000 users across the world and trusted by small and large businesses alike.
Now that you have a brief overview of both tools, let’s dive in to the comparison, starting with keyword research.
While most people have a broad sense of the keywords they’d like to rank for, it’s impossible to determine every search query under the sun for your topic. That’s why it pays to invest some time in keyword research to identify the exact keywords that people are using to search for your business, products, or content.
In this section, we’ll be comparing keyword research features offered by Ahrefs and SE Ranking and determine which tool is better than the other.
There was a time when Keywords Explorer was one of the least used tools in the Ahrefs toolkit. That changed in 2018 with the launch of Keywords Explorer 2.0. Ahrefs added a host of cool new features to their flagship keyword research tool and expanded their keyword database.
While Keywords Explorer is still a distant second to Site Explorer, Ahrefs’ backlink analysis tool, in terms of usage and popularity, it can still churn out a decent amount of keyword ideas with accurate data on search volume, keyword difficulty, clicks, and other SEO metrics.
To get started, head over to the “Keywords explorer” tab from your Ahrefs dashboard and enter your seed keywords in the search box.
Ahrefs will generate an overview report that’ll contain crucial keyword metrics to help you make quick, yet informed decisions about your target keywords.
There are two things that are unique about this report:
First, you get to see your target keyword’s Return Rate (RR). This metric indicates how often the same user searches for a given keyword over a 30-day period.
Second, you get to see the average number of monthly clicks on search results that users make for your target keyword. This metric should not be overlooked as high search volume does not necessarily equate to high search traffic.
For instance, the search query “new york population” has a monthly search volume of 51k searches, but fetches only 4k clicks per month (just over 7% of all searches).
It’s because search queries like “new york population” are typically answered by Google in the featured snippet section.
Which is why few users feel the need to go beyond the featured snippet to explore other search results.
Lots of platforms have since incorporated the “clicks” metric in their keyword research reports, but Ahrefs was the first one to highlight this useful metric.
While you’re still in the overview report, scroll down a bit to find keyword ideas for your seed keywords.
To expand the list of keywords, click on the “View all” button under each section to view a complete list of potential ideas for your seed keywords, alongside important SEO metrics.
You can play around with the filters in this report to obtain the most relevant keywords for your campaign.
The overview report also contains SERP overview for your seed keywords, allowing you to see all the pages that are ranking on page 1 for your parent topic.
Super useful data to learn who you’re competing against in organic SERPs.
To view this data, scroll all the way down till you find the “SERP Overview” section.
In addition to search results, you’ll also see all the high-level SEO metrics for each result that currently ranks on page 1 for your target keywords.
As you can see, Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer is remarkably effective for SEO analysis. But what about PPC analysis?
Sadly, Ahrefs provides little to no PPC data. You can find basic PPC information for your seed keywords in the “Ads history” report, but that’s the extent to which Ahrefs helps you in terms of PPC analysis.
SE Ranking has a massive keyword database with over 2 billion unique search queries and search engine suggestions from Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo. This database is updated on a monthly basis.
To perform keyword research on SE Ranking, visit the “Keyword Research” tab and enter your seed keyword(s) in the search box.
SE Ranking will then generate an overview report for your seed keywords. Here you’ll find important keyword metrics for your keywords, including search volume, difficulty, and CPC.
You’ll then see a list of keyword ideas for your seed keywords, grouped into 3 categories — similar keywords, related keywords, and low search volume keywords.
You can click on any of the keyword terms here to generate a keyword research overview report for those specific keywords.
Expand the list by clicking on the “View Detailed Report” button below each column to see different keyword variations for your target keywords.
If your seed keyword is too broad, this list is particularly useful to niche down and identify keywords with the right mix of search volume and difficulty.
If you’d like more data on any of the keywords in the list, simply select the specific keyword and you’ll be able to see the top organic search results for the selected keyword on the right side of the report.
In addition to SEO keyword metrics, SE Ranking’s keyword research reports can be used to unpack a ton of PPC insights for your target keywords.
While you’re in the overview report, scroll down till you find the “Advertisers” section of the report. You’ll see the top 5 websites that are bidding for your target keywords on Google Ads.
To expand this list, click on “View Detailed Report” or simply visit the “Paid results” tab from the left side menu.
Here you’ll find all the websites that are bidding for your target keywords on Google Ads. You’ll also see the ads they are currently running or have run in the past.
To view the ad copies, click on the “Expand all” button or simply move your cursor over the ad that you’d like to see.
The paid results report will give you a fair indication of the optimal campaign budget you’ll need to overcome your PPC competition and also highlight the kind of ad copies that are performing well on Google Ads.
Both tools have excellent keyword research features. You can generate countless keyword ideas for your website and get accurate information on search volume, competition, and keyword difficulty for each keyword.
But SE Ranking has a slight edge over Ahrefs because it offers better PPC insights. PPC analysis has always been a chink in Ahrefs’ armour. I’m hoping the company introduces new features to address this issue in the near future. Until then, if you run PPC ads on Google and Bing, you’ll be disappointed with the lack of PPC features in Ahrefs.
For that reason, I’d definitely place SE Ranking higher than Ahrefs in terms of keyword research.
Winner: SE Ranking
Google considers backlinks as votes of confidence. As a result, there’s a strong correlation between authoritative backlinks and higher search traffic.
As I mentioned earlier, Ahrefs was originally launched as a backlink checker and it has built quite a reputation among SEO experts as the most reliable backlink analysis tool. Despite adding multiple new features and tools to its platform, people still buy Ahrefs for backlink analysis.
So how does SE Ranking’s backlink checker measure up against a tool that’s highly regarded for its backlink analysis capabilities?
Let’s find out.
Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool is best known for providing an in-depth sneak peak at the backlink profile of any website.
You can use Site Explorer for not just auditing your site’s backlink profile, but also to spy on your competitors’ backlinks.
With this tool, you can get a deeper understanding of your competitors’ link building strategies and reverse-engineer backlinks for some of their top-performing pages. In other words, you can identify link building opportunities for your website and outperform your organic competitors in search results.
To get started, click on the “Site explorer” tab from your Ahrefs dashboard and enter the domain you’d like to analyze.
The Overview report will provide a quick glimpse of how well the website is performing in organic and paid search, alongside high-level SEO and backlink metrics.
Pay special attention to the referring domains number as this is the number of unique domains linking to your target website.
In this example, I plugged in “Buffer.com” into Site Explorer and found that it has 77.6k referring domains pointing to their website.
While this number may seem large at first glance, it’s always better to take a deeper look at the pace of link acquisition.
To that end, you can check out the interactive referring domains graph in the overview report to see the rate at which the website has acquired links over a period of time. This graph will clearly show how consistent the target website has been in terms of acquiring links.
To further contextualize this data, you can enter your competitors’ domain into Site Explorer and get insights into their link profile and the pace at which they’ve been acquiring new links.
To get deeper insights into the website’s backlink profile, click on the referring domains number. This report will contain all the unique websites pointing to your target website.
Add a “dofollow” filter to this list and sort by DR (domain rating) from high to low to view the most authoritative websites linking to your target website.
If you’d like to reverse-engineer your competitors’ best backlinks, this is a good place to start.
Now it’s time to explore SE Ranking’s backlink analysis features.
To analyze backlinks on SE Ranking, head over to the “Backlink Checker” tab and enter the domain you’d like to analyze.
The overview report will provide a sneak peek into the target website’s backlink profile. You’ll find the website’s trust score, anchors, dofollow/nofollow ratio, referring domains, and backlinks.
In the “Referring Domains” column, you’ll see the total number of links that point to the homepage vs. links to other pages.
Scroll down to find interactive graphs for referring domains, backlinks, new & lost referring domains, and new & lost backlinks.
Like with Ahrefs, clicking on the referring domains number will open the referring domains report. Here you’ll find all the unique domains that are linking to your target website.
You can add filters to the report to get the most relevant data and sort by DT (domain trust) from high to low to view all the top-authority websites linking to your target website. But there’s no option or filter to view only “dofollow” backlinks in the report.
While the overview report does show the dofollow/nofollow ratio of any website you enter, you won’t be able to view a filtered list of “dofollow” backlinks.
SE Ranking also appears to have a smaller link index than Ahrefs. Remember how I found 77.6k referring domains for “Buffer.com” on Ahrefs? With SE Ranking, the report showed only 38.1k referring domains pointing to Buffer.
When it comes to backlink analysis, Ahrefs is better than SE Ranking.
Backlink analysis continues to be Ahrefs’ strongest feature. They have a larger link index than SE Ranking, but more importantly, it takes fewer clicks from the overview report to arrive at the data you’re looking for.
Winner: Ahrefs
While technical SEO may not be as interesting or rewarding as keyword research and link building, it’s just as important. In the grand scheme of things, technical SEO errors pertaining to site structure, XML sitemap, SSL certificate, robots.txt, etc. can hold your site back from ranking higher on Google.
You can prevent these issues by performing regular site audits to make sure your site’s SEO health is up to speed. Luckily, most major SEO tools have built-in site audit features to help you identify and fix technical SEO issues as and when they occur on your website. Ahrefs and SE Ranking are no exception.
Let’s explore the SEO audit features offered by both these tools and find out which tool does a better job at identifying technical SEO errors on your website.
Right off the bat, I’d like to make it clear that SEO audit is not one of Ahrefs’ strengths. While the company has made significant strides in improving this tool since its launch, it still leaves a lot to be desired.
For starters, the audit tool takes a long time to crawl your website and return with an audit report. It took well over 2 hours to crawl my site and generate a report. My site has less than 1,000 pages to crawl, so if your site has more pages, it may take even longer.
Secondly, the audit report is not comprehensive enough to make it worth the wait.
Recently, I plugged in a client’s website into Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool. This site was riddled with numerous critical SEO errors. Broken internal links, duplicate title tags, and uncompressed JavaScript and CSS files were just a few of the errors on this site.
So you can imagine my surprise when Ahrefs generated an audit report with a health score of 90%!
When I dug deeper into the report, I found that Ahrefs was able to identify just a handful of errors on my client’s website. According to Ahrefs’ analysis, this site had no broken links and zero duplicate title tags.
I got a much more accurate picture of the site’s technical SEO health on SE Ranking and a few other tools, all of which returned a much more comprehensive audit report and in each case, the SEO health score of this site was below 50%. I was surprised to see the sheer amount of SEO errors Ahrefs allowed to slip through the net.
For that reason, it’s best to use Ahrefs’ site audit tool to identify and fix only the most basic on-page SEO and indexability issues on your site.
To run a fresh site audit on Ahrefs, visit the “Site audit” tab from your dashboard, select the project, and then hit “Run crawl.”
The Overview report will show the site’s SEO health score, alongside issues and error distribution.
In the same report, scroll down to find all the top issues on your website.
These are the errors you’d have to fix in order to improve your SEO health score.
The best part about SE Ranking’s site audit tool is that you don’t have to manually set up the audit feature. Your site gets automatically audited as soon as you add a new project on SE Ranking.
Once the audit is complete, SE Ranking will update your site’s SEO health score in the Website Audit column of your Projects section.
Just click on this score to view your full SEO audit report.
In addition to your site’s SEO health score, you’ll also see the number of important as well as semi-important fixes that you need to make in order to improve your site’s health score.
Scroll down till you find the full site audit report to get a complete picture of the errors on your website.
The site audit report is split into 5 sections:
Visit each section of the report to view important and semi-important errors that are affecting your site’s SEO health. Click on the link icon next to each error to view all the pages with that specific error.
Once you’ve taken the necessary steps to fix all the important errors, run a fresh audit by clicking on “Restart audit” and see if the fixed errors reappear in the latest audit report.
SE Ranking clearly has a better site audit tool than Ahrefs.
As explained earlier, Ahrefs’ Site Audit is best used only for identifying and fixing basic SEO issues on your site. If you rely too much on Ahrefs’ audit reports, you may be misled to believe there are no technical SEO problems on your website.
On the other hand, SE Ranking does a thorough job of auditing your website and gives you a complete picture of your website’s technical SEO health. It identifies errors and warnings that you didn’t even know existed.
SE Ranking also does a better job of prioritizing the technical SEO issues, so you know exactly which errors you should focus on fixing first.
Winner: SE Ranking
Now let’s compare the pricing plans offered by both these tools.
Ahrefs offers 4 monthly pricing plans:
As mentioned earlier, Ahrefs doesn’t offer a free trial. But you can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which offers free limited access to features like Site Audit and Site Explorer.
If you own a small business or run a blog-based business, then the Lite plan ($129/mo) should be sufficient for your needs. With the Lite plan, you can track 750 keywords in Rank Tracker and get basic access to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool.
If you run an agency, then you’d probably have to upgrade to the Advanced plan ($449/mo), which offers higher limits for Rank Tracker and Site Explorer.
SE Ranking currently offers 3 pricing plans:
* The prices on the above plans change based on the number of keyword rankings you select. For instance, if you’d like to track 500 keyword rankings in the Optimum plan, the pricing changes to $54/mo.
The best part about SE Ranking’s pricing structure is that it deviates from the standard pricing practice in the SEO industry. Most SEO tools charge $99/mo for their basic plan (including Ahrefs). With SE Ranking, you can get started for just $39/mo.
If you’re a small business owner or blogger, the Optimum plan ($39/mo) is probably the right fit your requirements and budget. If you run an agency, you should probably go with the Plus plan ($89/mo).
If you’re not sure which SE Ranking plan is best suited for your requirements, use the pricing plan calculator on their pricing page.
In terms of overall value, SE Ranking gets the crown. You get access to a full-fledged SEO and PPC software for less than half the price you’d pay for Ahrefs’ most basic plan.
Both Ahrefs and SE Ranking are formidable tools with a stellar reputation in the SEO community. But if we were to judge these tools individually on SEO and PPC features, then SE Ranking is the clear winner here because it provides you more PPC insights in your keyword research reports. Furthermore, SE Ranking’s site audit tool is better at identifying technical SEO issues on your site and providing actionable advice on how to fix them.
The other factor in SE Ranking’s favor is the price. As explained in the pricing section of this post, SE Ranking is far more affordable than Ahrefs and provides more bang for your buck.
If you’re an existing Ahrefs user who’s been rattled by the recently introduced usage-based pricing plans by Ahrefs, then SE Ranking is the one of the best Ahrefs alternatives you can opt for.
When all said and done, the decision between Ahrefs and SE Ranking comes down to your priority. If your priority is link building and price is not a concern, then Ahrefs is inarguably the best in terms of data and accuracy. On the other hand, if you value keyword research (both SEO and PPC) and site audit features over backlink analysis, and if budget is a major concern, then SE Ranking is better suited for your needs.
To summarize this post, here’s a visual representation of how Ahrefs compares with SE Ranking on key parameters:
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Editor’s Note: This article was first published on 5 August 2020 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness.
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Ahrefs is a great tool that would be gladly welcomed into any SEO arsenal.
Thanks! This proved helpful when making my purchase.
Sandeep sahab, I think SE ranking is a lot way better then Ahrefs cheaper in price but feature rich, and the other actual thing that I hate the paid 7 days trial of Ahrefs, what you say?
Ahrefs gets my vote. It has much more and better data for low traffic sites and niches.
SE Ranking is nice and cheap…
But when you are a Seo-Pro Ahrefs is better…you get high quality data…
Just my 5 Cents
Great review. I think Ahrefs has the edge but with the price point difference, will give the nod to SE Ranking. I’ve also been very happy with SE Ranking’s continuous improvements.
Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!
I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 to help SMBs leverage SEO, social media, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.
I launched 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other entrepreneurs and bloggers with all the right information and tools they needed to launch a successful online business.
Since then, 99signals has grown significantly and generates over $10,000 in side income each month. Read More about “About Sandeep Mallya”…
Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!
I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 to help SMBs leverage SEO, social media, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.
I launched 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other entrepreneurs and bloggers with all the right information and tools they needed to launch a successful online business.
Since then, 99signals has grown significantly and generates over $10,000 in side income each month. Read More about “About Sandeep Mallya”…
A few links on this blog are affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service through one of these affiliate links, I’ll receive a commission at no additional cost to you.
Rest assured, I recommend only those tools that I personally use and genuinely trust. In most cases, you’ll find in-depth reviews, tutorials, and how-to guides of these tools on my blog to help you make informed decisions.
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What to do when AI Overviews take the spotlight in search – Search Engine Land
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTWhat to do when AI Overviews take the spotlight in search Search Engine Land
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