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“e83606c3-7746-41ea-b405-439129885ead”, “type”: “simple_question”, “value”: {“question”: “How often do you use Google AI tools like Gemini and NotebookLM?”, “responses”: [{“id”: “32ecfe11-9171-405a-a9d3-785cca201a75”, “type”: “item”, “value”: “Daily”}, {“id”: “29b253e9-e318-4677-a2b3-03364e48a6e7”, “type”: “item”, “value”: “Weekly”}, {“id”: “5c5bb2ba-19b7-41dd-9000-2e3741878d19”, “type”: “item”, “value”: “Monthly”}, {“id”: “697372e1-80b1-4901-81eb-48bf090a6a05”, “type”: “item”, “value”: “Hardly Ever”}, {“id”: “b8e1604d-1146-4f2c-9184-6ed0f06fd863”, “type”: “item”, “value”: “Unsure”}]}}]”, “target_article_pages”: true}}, {“model”: “blogsurvey.survey”, “pk”: 7, “fields”: {“name”: “Article Improvements – March 2025”, “survey_id”: “article-improvements-march-2025_250321”, “scroll_depth_trigger”: 75, “previous_survey”: null, “display_rate”: 75, “thank_message”: “Thank you!”, “thank_emoji”: “✅”, “questions”: “[{“id”: “5a12fd89-d978-4a1b-80e5-2442a91422be”, “type”: “simple_question”, “value”: {“question”: “How could we improve this article?”, “responses”: [{“id”: “30122b0d-1169-4376-af7c-20c9de52c91c”, “type”: “item”, “value”: “Make it more concise”}, {“id”: “18f3016a-7235-468b-b246-ffe974911ae9”, “type”: “item”, “value”: “Add more detail”}, {“id”: “5d19c11d-6a61-49d3-9f1d-dad5d661ba4f”, “type”: “item”, “value”: “Make it easier to understand”}, {“id”: “97064d1f-d9af-4a83-a44f-a84f8ed899d6”, “type”: “item”, “value”: “Include more images or videos”}, {“id”: “a9ec2a70-c7c5-4f00-a179-31a7b5641879”, “type”: “item”, “value”: “It’s fine the way it is”}]}}]”, “target_article_pages”: true}}]
How to Use ChatGPT for SEO: 9 Ways to Optimize AI to Drive Visibility (With Sample Prompts) – DesignRush
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTHow to Use ChatGPT for SEO: 9 Ways to Optimize AI to Drive Visibility (With Sample Prompts) DesignRush
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Screaming Frog vs. Ahrefs: Which is The Best SEO Tool in 2025? – Exploding Topics
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTBlog > Screaming Frog vs. Ahrefs: Which is The Best SEO Tool in 2025?
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Many digital marketing professionals, myself included, use more than one search engine optimization (SEO) tool. This combo typically includes Screaming Frog and another option like Ahrefs.
So why don’t we just pick one and stick with it?
The reason is because Screaming Frog is primarily a website crawler, while Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO platform. The two tools serve different purposes—although there’s a little overlap.
Let’s take an in-depth look at how Screaming Frog and Ahrefs are different … and when you might want to use both.
The Screaming Frog SEO spider is a web crawling tool that mimics the way search engines access and view your website. The tool offers detailed information about:
Screaming Frog is useful for analyzing individual sites, but you can’t use it to conduct keyword research or look at a map of your search engine results page (SERP) competitors.
I use Screaming Frog when:
I like that Screaming Frog produces easily downloadable reports in spreadsheet format and lets me explore site architecture in a visual way.
Screaming Frog is also a solid choice when you want to:
Screaming Frog has a free version that allows you to look for SEO issues on sites with fewer than 500 pages.
To audit larger sites or take full advantage of Screaming Frog’s crawl configuration options, you’ll need the paid version. Options start at $279 per license, per year. Volume discounts are available if you purchase five or more licenses at once.
Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool that you can use for on-page SEO, off-page SEO, search engine marketing (SEM), and more. Its standout features include:
Ahrefs is a great choice whenever you need to conduct on-page and off-page SEO research. Unlike Screaming Frog, Ahrefs works for both technical site audits and keyword research.
Ahrefs also includes tools for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, content optimization, local SEO, and more.
I used Ahrefs as my tool of choice for many years. While I’ve since switched to Semrush, I still find Ahrefs to be a reliable and helpful platform for both conducting keyword research and improving a website’s performance.
You can use Ahrefs for free on a site that you own. This plan only gives you access to site-specific metrics; you can’t use it to conduct keyword research.
If you want to use more of Ahrefs’ features, including analyzing SERPs and auditing sites you don’t own, you’ll need a paid plan. Options start at $29 per month; some features, like the Ahrefs Brand Radar AI or Content Kit, require an additional monthly fee.
If you’re strictly working on improving your site’s on-page and technical SEO, then you may be well suited by a single Screaming Frog license. And if your primary interest is in keyword research, then Ahrefs will be a better fit.
Check out how the two tools stack up in terms of website audits, link building, content marketing, and more.
The biggest difference between the Screaming Frog and Ahrefs site audit tools is how the results are presented to users. Screaming Frog gives you multiple sheets of data; it’s up to you to figure out what actions to take.
Ahrefs, on the other hand, provides less data up front but gives you a list of suggested fixes organized by importance—from correcting duplicate headers to addressing problems related to pagespeed insights reports. You can also automate crawls so they happen on a recurring basis.
The Verdict: Experienced SEO professionals should give Screaming Frog a try, as you can customize nearly every aspect of a web crawl (with a paid license). Beginner SEOs and small business owners will be better served by Ahrefs’ list of post-audit fixes and recommendations.
Ahrefs and Screaming Frog both include tools to help you analyze your site’s internal links and find opportunities to add new connections.
Ahrefs site audits include access to an internal linking report that suggests spots to embed new links. I find this tool to be hit-or-miss: sometimes works well, other times it suggests linking low-value pages in a way that would clutter my landing pages with too many links.
Screaming Frog offers a similar feature, though it requires connecting your account to an API from select large language model (LLM) companies like OpenAI.
If you do that, though, you can save specific prompts that will identify pages that have semantic similarity. You can then use this information to connect related pages through internal links.
The Verdict: Ahrefs’ internal link identification tool is much easier to use than the Screaming Frog workarounds—and potentially cheaper, in the long run, as you don’t have to pay for an LLM API key and credits on top of your SEO tool license.
Screaming Frog isn’t helpful when it comes to backlink analysis. Because the tool only accesses pages of the site you’re crawling, you aren’t able to analyze the larger SERP or other sites' links.
Ahrefs is a great tool for conducting backlink analysis and improving the health of your backlink profile. You don’t even have to run a complete site audit—just pop a domain into the Site Explorer tool and click the backlinks report to see all of the sites linking to yours.
You can then sort and organize the results by domain reputation, page traffic, and more. This is useful for identifying toxic backlinks.
The Verdict: You’ll need to use Ahrefs (or a similar tool like Semrush) if you want to conduct backlink analysis on your site.
The only way to use Screaming Frog for competitor analysis is to crawl a known competitor’s site with the tool. While you can do this, and it might show you some of their strengths and weaknesses, I find this to be overkill.
Ahrefs is a better choice for conducting competitor analysis, as you can:
Find out who’s linking to them and build a better backlink strategy.
The Verdict: Ahrefs is a much more actionable and straightforward choice than Screaming Frog when it comes to doing competitive analysis.
Screaming Frog is a little better than the standard Ahrefs plans when it comes to content optimization tools.
While you can’t use Screaming Frog to generate lists of semantic keywords or score your text’s SEO value, you can see a decent amount of information about your existing pages. Screaming Frog’s LLM API integration can also help you identify duplicate content based on semantic similarities.
If you choose to add the Ahrefs Content Kit onto your plan for an additional $99 per month, though, you can generate semantic keywords for different topics and get an SEO score for content you create with their grading tool.
The Verdict: Try Screaming Frog—it gives you the most information about your content, without the need to pay for an additional tool on top of your software license. For even better content optimization support, though, try a dedicated tool like the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant.
Screaming Frog isn’t useful for keyword research. Because it doesn’t return information about SERPs or sites other than the one you’re crawling, there’s not much you can do with it to find new keywords.
Ahrefs is a better choice if keyword research is a high priority for you. Each keyword report includes information about:
If keyword research is the only reason you’re considering Ahrefs over Screaming Frog, though, give our free keyword research tool a try. You can use it to see basic data about any keyword without a subscription.
The Verdict: Ahrefs is a better choice than Screaming Frog if you’ll be doing a lot of keyword research.
Screaming Frog can show you if a page is indexable by search engines, but it doesn’t include any information about when and where you appear in search results.
Ahrefs, does, though—its position tracking reports make it a much better choice for anyone concerned with monitoring their SERP rank over time.
The Verdict: Use Ahrefs to track how your site appears in Google SERPs over time. Screaming Frog can help you make your pages more appealing to search engines, but it can’t show you how your work has (or hasn’t) paid off in terms of SERP rank or organic traffic.
I really like Screaming Frog for SEO analysis, but I’ll be honest: the interface is clunky. It’s a very utilitarian tool. This is fine for me as I’m someone who’s well versed in how it works and what data I want to find.
If you’re new to SEO, though, or even new to Screaming Frog, it’s going to take a while to figure out what you’re doing. You’ll need to experiment with crawl settings and configure the tabs that appear in every crawl result until you’re happy with the tool.
Ahrefs is much easier for new users to navigate. Every tool is clearly labeled and organized in the app’s menu; you’ll be prompted to set your preferences any time configuration is an option.
There are also lots of user-friendly Ahrefs tutorials and lessons available on the company’s website and on YouTube.
The Verdict: Ahrefs has a friendlier user interface than Screaming Frog does—this is doubly true if you’re new to the world of SEO.
You can do a lot of great technical and SEO strategy work with Screaming Frog and Ahrefs—either by using one tool or both at the same time. But there are a few things missing from both platforms, including:
While you can use LLM APIs to enhance your Screaming Frog crawl analysis, you can’t gather any information about how your brand appears in LLM search results.
Ahrefs doesn’t offer a dedicated way to track LLM rank for specific keywords, either. The closest option is the Ahrefs Brand Radar tool, which lets you get a feel for how your brand is represented in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the AI Overview.
Tip: I like using the Semrush position tracking tool as it lets me set up specific keyword lists and track ranking changes across both Google and ChatGPT. Give it a try if you want to know how your brand ranks for very specific queries across traditional and LLM search.
Analyze how LLMs like ChatGPT feature your brand and get actionable recommendations to improve your business strategy, products, and market position.
Screaming Frog offers zero support for trend analysis, and Ahrefs’ trend data is very minimal. The Ahrefs Keywords Explorer tool shows you historical and projected search volume growth, but no information about topic popularity on other channels.
For that, you’ll need a dedicated trend spotting tool like Exploding Topics. I actually recommend getting an Exploding Topics Pro subscription regardless of the SEO tool you use—be it Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or another option.
This is because Exploding Topics gives you deep insights about the popularity of different topics across multiple channels. You’ll know exactly what your audience is interested in, and where they’re talking about it—highly valuable information for any digital marketing campaign.
Give Exploding Topics a try with a free seven-day trial and see how its unique trend forecasts can help you get more value out of your Screaming Frog website crawls or Ahrefs SERP analysis.
Use real-time topic data to create content that resonates and brings results.
Exploding Topics is owned by Semrush. Our mission is to provide accurate data and expert insights on emerging trends. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.
Use real-time topic data to create content that resonates and brings results.
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Emily is a freelance content writer at Exploding Topics. A former news correspondent, she has over 15 years' experience creati… Read more
Research shows that the value of LLM search traffic could overtake Google by 2028. Find out what this means, how to prepare, and more in this report.
Explore free SEO competitor analysis tools for marketers and uses cases. Includes ChatGPT for LLM-readability, Semrush and Exploding Topics for analysis.
Screaming Frog and Semrush are two widely recommended SEO tools—but which one is best? See how the two platforms stack up, and learn how to get an extended Semrush trial.
Use these proven strategies to improve your website SEO for higher visibility in traditional Google search and AI-driven results.
Compare Google Keyword Planner vs Ahrefs with our detailed analysis. Learn key features, pricing, and limitations to choose the best keyword research tool.
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Use AI to understand complex text online with Simplify, now on the Google app for iOS.
/in Google, Online Marketing, website SEO/by Team ZYTWhen you’re trying to learn about something new on the web, you might come across content that uses jargon or technical concepts you’re not familiar with. Simplify, a new feature in the Google app on iOS, uses AI to make dense text on the web easier to understand — without leaving a web page.
To use Simplify, select any complex text on a web page you’re visiting in the Google app. Tap the “Simplify” icon that appears, and you’ll see a new, simpler version of the text, helping you quickly understand a new concept so you can keep reading.
Simplify features a novel prompt refinement approach developed by Google Research, and uses Gemini to make complicated text more digestible — without losing key details. In research testing, people found the simplified text to be significantly more helpful than the original complex text, and better retained the information. Learn more about these findings and Simplify with Google Research.
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Serpstat vs Ahrefs: Which SEO Tool is Better? – Exploding Topics
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTBlog > Serpstat vs Ahrefs: Which SEO Tool is Better?
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SEO is changing. Actually, it’s always changing, just at a varying pace.
That doesn’t change the fact that you need really good SEO tools in your corner, though, to help you succeed today and beyond.
But which SEO tool is the right one for your website, marketing plan, and budget?
I’ll compare two of the most popular choices (Serpstat and Ahrefs) to help you pick.
White-label reports
Affordable pricing
Local SEO addon
Advanced filtering
Large backlink database
Good accuracy
Serpstat and Ahrefs are both near the top of the popular SEO tool list. There are a few key differences, though, that might help you choose the right tool for you.
Let’s get into comparing the two.
Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform that helps users to:
Recently, Serpstat released a new set of AI content tools in the dashboard to help generate titles and descriptions, write articles, and detect AI content.
Ahrefs is an advanced SEO toolset that provides keyword research, backlink analysis, site audits, and competitor monitoring.
It offers a large backlink index and keyword database, making it ideal for improving search visibility, tracking rankings, and analyzing website authority.
Ahrefs also recently added a tool called Brand Radar that can help you track your site’s visibility in AI Overviews and watch how your competitors are doing in large language models (LLMs).
Keyword research is arguably the most important part of any SEO strategy (yes, even with AI Overviews and LLMs taking some of our search traffic). It helps you get a feel for how hard it’ll be to gain visibility for a topic, what related topics your audience might be interested in, what content gaps you have, and more.
It also helps you nail down user intent, which is vital.
Get More Search Traffic
Use trending keywords to create content your audience craves.
Use trending keywords to create content your audience craves.
In Serpstat, there are a few different reports that can help you with keyword research.
You can use the Keywords dashboard under Site analysis to see which keywords you (or a competitor) ranks for, or use the Keyword gap tool for finding new keyword and content ideas:
All of the reports under the Keyword research tab are helpful, too.
You can get your classic list of keywords that your audience might be using, or choose the Related keywords report or Search questions report to break things down a bit and find related search terms.
My favorite report in this section is actually the Search suggestions report, which shows you a list of the suggested searches that Google is showing searchers as they type in the search bar.
It’s really helpful for seeing the different kinds of intents searchers might have and gathering ideas for subtopics to include in your content:
You’ll find similar reports in the Ahrefs dashboard, although it looks a little different. There’s more of a main dashboard called Keywords Explorer in Ahrefs with a summary of:
Ahrefs also has a Search suggestions report, and what I like most about this one is the Parent Topic column. It can really help with putting together topic clusters and pillar pages.
The winner: Ahrefs wins this one. It presents more data in one dashboard so you can get a better feel for a keyword without clicking around to other reports.
How do Serpstat and Ahrefs stack up when it comes to backlink analysis?
In Ahrefs, you can find a handful of backlink reports within the Site Explorer tool, including broken backlinks, referring domains, and anchor text.
In Serpstat, you get a nice-looking Backlink dashboard report with tons of backlink data, including malicious sites, an external links report, a top pages report so you can break links down by page.
The winner: In my opinion, Serpstat wins for backlink analysis. There’s more data, the graphs make it easier to read, and there aren’t any reports blocked by an upgrade notice (the Broken backlinks, Outgoing links, and Linking authors reports all require the $249/month plan in Ahrefs).
Spying on your competitors is, I think, one of the top most important SEO and content strategy tactics you can use today.
Not so you can copy exactly what they’ve done, but so you can use data about what’s working for them to come up with your next great marketing idea.
With both Ahrefs and Serpstat, you can do a pretty bang-up job of seeing what your competition is up to.
In Ahrefs, you can pop a competitor’s URL right into the Site Explorer tool to get an overview of:
So, although you’d have to upgrade to the next paid subscription for the Competitor Analysis toolset, I think there’s more than enough here to get a handle on what your competition is up to.
In Serpstat, there are also some really handy reports that you can use for competitor analysis. I showed you the Keyword Gap report already up above, but there’s also a Competitors report within the Site analysis section:
Within this report, you can:
The winner: I’m honestly surprised to say that I prefer Serpstat for this one. Once again, I’m not prompted to pay more to get access to competitive analysis features. I can access all the helpful data I need quickly and easily to see what my competitors are doing, and it’s presented in a straightforward dashboard.
Need to audit your site to identify any issues that might be holding you back from getting as much traffic as you could? You can do that with both Serpstat and Ahrefs.
Want to Make Google
Love Your Site? 🔎
In Ahrefs, you’ll get a site audit dashboard with a long list of different reports, from links and indexability to internal link opportunities and a page explorer. There’s a lot of data here, and it’s presented in a really clean way.
In Serpstat, there’s also a site audit dashboard summary report, but just three other reports:
I like that it breaks your issues down for you into different priority buckets. If you’re not an SEO pro, these are incredibly helpful for deciding what to fix first that’s going to make the biggest impact on your site’s overall wellbeing and your search visibility.
The winner: Although I’m tempted to hand this one to Serpstat for their issue priority breakdown, Ahrefs has more data and is laid out in a way that’s much easier to navigate. So, the winner here is Ahrefs.
Alright, let’s take a look at how Serpstat and Ahrefs stack up in terms of their pricing structures and their reviews.
For Ahrefs, reviews are primarily positive (4.5/5 stars or above) on both G2 and Capterra.
However, it does have only 2 stars on Trustpilot. This seems to be mostly because they raised their prices a few years ago and had some complaints, but I also see some potential issues with their credit limit for paid users as well.
I also saw a few complaints here and there about the data in Ahrefs being really different from the data inside Google Search Console, but for the most part, their data is considered to be some of the most accurate and complete in the SEO tool space. Semrush is also considered to be very accurate.
For pricing, Ahrefs has five different pricing plans that include different features and allow different numbers of projects. The Starter plan, at the most basic, includes basic access to three of the top tools: Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and Site Audit.
It also includes a few add-on tools for an additional charge.
For Serpstat, reviews are pretty positive (4.6 on G2 and 4.7 on Capterra), but they’ve also got a lower TrustPilot score in the 2-3 star range, mostly for customer service-related reviews.
I noticed that Serpstat’s data is widely considered to be less accurate than Semrush and Ahrefs.
As far as pricing goes, Serpstat is more straightforward. You don’t have to navigate as many add-ons or too-low credit limits.
Yes, you can switch from Ahrefs to Serpstat pretty easily. You can export your keyword lists from Ahrefs and import them to Serpstat, for example. They also have similar project organization, making the transition feel smooth.
Serpstat offers a 7-day free trial of its Team plan with access to core features including keyword research, backlink analysis, and site audits. You will have to provide credit card information to access it. Ahrefs does not have a free trial, but you can get very basic access to a few of its tools for free to test it out with Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
Serpstat has a local SEO addon tool you can purchase for $20 per month per location. The tool will help you manage your Google Business Profile and other local listings. Ahrefs does not offer much for local SEO beyond tracking keywords with a local modifier (i.e. “drain unclogging plumbers in new york city”).
Yes, both tools offer APIs but with some different capabilities and price points. Serpstat’s API is available at the Team and Agency levels, but they also offer special API plans for heavy users. For Ahrefs API, you’ll need the Enterprise plan to use it fully but it delivers enterprise-grade data access.
No, both tools have keyword tracking limits. Serpstat's Individual plan provides 10,000 position checks per month, and the Team plan includes 50,000 position checks per month. Ahrefs Lite plan tracks 750 keywords and updates weekly and Standard tracks 2,000 keywords and updates weekly.
If you’re trying to choose between Serpstat and Ahrefs, my recommendation is to think in terms of budget first:
Not sure if either tool is right for you? Check out the Top 19 SEO Tools We Use to Drive 65% of Site Traffic.
Use real-time topic data to create content that resonates and brings results.
Exploding Topics is owned by Semrush. Our mission is to provide accurate data and expert insights on emerging trends. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.
Use real-time topic data to create content that resonates and brings results.
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Written By
Jolissa Skow
Senior Content Writer
Jolissa Skow is a senior content writer and content strategist with a background in SEO, Google Analytics, and WordPress. She's be… Read more
Research shows that the value of LLM search traffic could overtake Google by 2028. Find out what this means, how to prepare, and more in this report.
Explore free SEO competitor analysis tools for marketers and uses cases. Includes ChatGPT for LLM-readability, Semrush and Exploding Topics for analysis.
Screaming Frog and Semrush are two widely recommended SEO tools—but which one is best? See how the two platforms stack up, and learn how to get an extended Semrush trial.
Use these proven strategies to improve your website SEO for higher visibility in traditional Google search and AI-driven results.
Compare Google Keyword Planner vs Ahrefs with our detailed analysis. Learn key features, pricing, and limitations to choose the best keyword research tool.
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The latest AI news we announced in April
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Synthesia to Animaker AI: Find Best AI Video Generators in 2025 – Analytics Insight
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTSynthesia to Animaker AI: Find Best AI Video Generators in 2025 Analytics Insight
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Here's our statement on this morning’s press reports about Search traffic.
/in Google, Online Marketing, website SEO/by Team ZYTWe continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms. More generally, as we enhance Search with new features, people are seeing that Google Search is more useful for more of their queries — and they’re accessing it for new things and in new ways, whether from browsers or the Google app, using their voice or Google Lens. We’re excited to continue this innovation and look forward to sharing more at Google I/O.
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2025 Google Search Console guide: Everything you need to know – Search Engine Land
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYT2025 Google Search Console guide: Everything you need to know Search Engine Land
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Social SEO: Guide to more reach on social media + free tool – Hootsuite Blog
/in website SEO, Website Traffic/by Team ZYTFind out what social SEO means, why it matters, and — most importantly — how it can help you grow your business accounts on all social media platforms.
Social SEO is the practice of optimizing your social content to help people find you when they search on social media platforms.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. Social networks may not technically be search engines — but people are increasingly using them the way they used to use Google.
There has been a seismic shift in search behaviors, especially among younger people.
Recent research from Forbes Advisor and Talker Research found that Generation Z is 30% less likely to use search engines for brand discovery than Baby Boomers are. Nearly a quarter of people of all ages (24%) said they only or primarily use social media for online search. Among Gen Z, that number rises to 46%.
Even more important, 21% of Gen Z starts their brand searches on social media. 44% of Gen Z finds new brands on social media every single day.
People are actively using social platforms to look for information. Social SEO helps your content rise to the top of the results.
Download a free social SEO checklist and follow pro tips for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn to get your posts seen by more people.
We just said that social SEO helps you reach people who are actively searching for content or products like yours on social platforms. They have typed a query into a search bar in hopes of surfacing something specific.
On the other hand, social algorithms serve up content to people who are passively scrolling through their social feed.
Understanding the algorithms and optimizing for social search are both ways to improve brand visibility and discoverability on social platforms. But SEO is particularly useful because it connects you with people at the exact moment that they want to hear from brands like yours.
A quick heads-up here. This post focuses on how to improve your search results on social platforms. The main benefit is, like we said, reaching the growing audience that uses social search. But optimizing your social profiles with SEO best practices has an added off-platform benefit.
Consistent, credible, and SEO-optimized social profiles rank highly in traditional search engines like Google, too. When you create your profiles with SEO in mind, you boost your content visibility in two ways. First, to people who search on the social platforms (mainly Millenials and Gen Z) but also to people who search elsewhere.
For instance, look at the first two Google search engine result pages (SERPs) for Smitten Kitchen. After their own website content, it’s all social profiles and social media posts.
Source: Google search results for “Smitten Kitchen”
Social SEO helps you connect with audiences across the generations, no matter where they start their brand search. Here’s how to optimize your profile.
Use all the available fields in every social profile to your advantage:
For more details, check out or post on how to optimize your social profiles.
The prevailing wisdom used to suggest that it was a good idea to switch up your “link in bio” pretty regularly. The idea was that this allowed you to drive traffic through to your latest blog post or campaign, keeping things fresh.
However, this is not a great strategy if your focus is on social SEO. As you’ll see below, consistency is critical in helping platforms (both social platforms and regular search engines) understand what your account is all about. Keeping your bio link consistent helps search engines understand the connection between your social profiles, your brand, and your other web content.
A good way to get around this while still being able to link to new content or campaigns is to use a custom link hub with a tool like Hootbio.
Good cover and profile photos help establish your social account’s credibility and quality. These are important ranking factors for both social platforms and traditional search engines.
Your profile photo also appears next to your account in the social search results. So, it helps signal credibility to users, too, making them more likely to click.
Always remember that ranking high in the search results is only useful if people actually click on the result! A good, easily identifiable profile photo makes this more likely to happen.
Search engines love consistency. It helps their ranking engines understand what’s happening on a social page, and how that page is related to other content across the web. That’s all important information for the search algorithms as they work to match content to search intent.
This means you’ll have better luck with social SEO if you stick to consistent themes and content pillars on your social accounts. We’ll get into the details of how to set this up later in this post. But for now, just remember that you’ll have better social SEO (as well as more loyal followers) if your account has a clear purpose. Stick to content that resonates with that theme.
As you’ll see below, Meta specifically says that buying into their Meta Verified program includes the benefit of search optimization on Facebook and Instagram.
But that’s not the only reason to pursue a verification badge.
A verification badge is an important social signal of credibility and legitimacy, both to users and to search engines.
“Our Facebook verification unexpectedly proved most valuable for local SEO,” said Matt Harrison, VP of Global Operations & Marketing at Authority Builders. “Our local search visibility improved notably because the verified status helped establish our business as a legitimate entity across the digital ecosystem.”
Now that you’ve got the profiles on your social media accounts sorted, let’s look at how to create a valuable content strategy for SEO.
Any social media SEO strategy must begin with a solid foundation of keyword research. But don’t simply choose keywords based on how you think people will search for your content. Instead, you need to understand how people actually search for content like yours.
Some good tools to get you started are:
Going down the keyword rabbit hole can sometimes provide more results than you know what to do with. To keep you focused, it’s a good idea to create content pillars. These are key themes, topics, or content clusters. You should be able to map all the content you create back to one of your content pillars.
In the context of social SEO, think of your content pillars as keyword buckets. Take that big list of keywords and try to group or categorize them in a meaningful way. What themes emerge? How can you map those back to your larger social media marketing strategy?
You don’t need to ditch a promising keyword just because it doesn’t fit into one of your content pillars. In fact, this situation might suggest your content pillars need revisiting. However, in general, staying true to your content pillars helps search engines recognize the topics where you are a credible source and worthy of a higher rank.
The point is just to make sure you keep your keywords focused and tie them back to your social strategy rather than running away with a term that doesn’t serve you just because it has high search volume.
Tip: If Gen Z is your target audience, think about ways to link your content pillars to some of their most-search topics on TikTok and Instagram.
Source: Forbes Advisor
When you decide to focus on social SEO, there needs to be a shift in the way you think about content creation. Rather than choosing keywords and hashtags that fit your content, create content designed to fit the keywords surfaced in your research.
Then, make sure to use all aspects of your post to focus on one keyword cluster.
You might want to include both a general keyword (like “pet products”) for general reach as well as a more niche one (like “poodle shampoo”) to be more targeted. But your caption, image, hashtags, voiceover, and text overlays all work together to help the search robots understand what your post is about. Keep them focused on variations of a single keyword theme.
But don’t get carried away here. Stuffing too many keywords or hashtags into your content annoys both social media users and search robots. Use keywords in a natural way. Incorporate them into sentences that sound like they could be spoken by a real human. And keep the hashtags to a minimum – aim for 3 to 5.
For a couple of bonus ways to include target keywords in your social content, try text-based images (like infographics) and text overlays on videos. And be sure to say your primary keyword out loud in any social videos.
Tip: Hootsuite has a free hashtag generator tool that will show you the best hashtags for each platform based on your content description and keywords.
Just pick a language, describe your content, add keywords, and you’ll get 10 AI-generated hashtags to use in your post.
Please note: This tool may display inaccurate or offensive material that doesn’t represent Hootsuite’s views. You’re solely responsible for use of any content generated using this tool, including its compliance with applicable laws and third-party rights.
Alt text and subtitles are primarily accessibility features that help make your content more useful for a larger range of people. But they are also great tools for helping the social platforms understand what your content is about.
The platforms auto-generate alt text for you using image recognition software, but it is often very generic. Edit the alt text under the accessibility options when creating a post. Include your primary keyword, but make sure what you write still accurately describes what’s in the photo. This needs to be a clear image description rather than a bonus caption.
Source: @ckjnewberry
For video, turn on subtitles, and make sure to say your primary keyword out loud during your voiceover.
About a year ago, Google added a Short Videos tab to its search results, joining the Videos tab that’s been available for years.
Here’s why this is extremely important for marketers focused on social SEO. The Videos tab contains some content from Instagram, Facebook, and other sources but it’s quite heavily populated with YouTube Videos.
Source: Google search results (Videos tab)
However, the Short Videos tab serves up loads of videos from Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook in addition to YouTube shorts.
Source: Google search results (Short Videos tab)
That means creating SEO-optimized short-form videos like TikToks and Reels is another good way to get your content into traditional search results, as well as social search.
In addition to the overarching tips listed above, here are some platform-specific tactics to include in your social SEO strategy.
For more, check out our complete guide to Facebook SEO.
For more in-depth Instagram SEO strategies, check out our full blog post on Instagram SEO.
We’ve got even more on TikTok SEO in our complete guide.
Optimizing your business Page? Check out our LinkedIn SEO guide for even more info.
Pinterest itself is a powerful visual search engine, so if it’s your primary social channel, check out our top 10 tips to Pinterest SEO.
YouTube is definitely the social platform that functions most like a search engine. This is no surprise, since it’s a Google product.
Find more details (and useful tools!) in our full post on YouTube SEO.
As you saw in the Smitten Kitchen example above, Google indexes public X posts, and they can appear quite high in the search rankings.
Learn more in our top tips for managing Twitter SEO.
The most common form of cross-promotion on social media happens when a brand collaborates with an influencer. Both accounts can then share content from the partnership on their accounts.
This results in an expanded audience for both accounts. But it also benefits SEO by helping to establish credibility and build trust through association with a recognized expert in your niche. This helps the search algorithms better understand what your account is about and what topic areas you should rank for.
Cross-promotion also helps increase the number of backlinks to your accounts, posts, and web content. Link building is especially valuable for off-platform SEO.
Repurposing content into different formats across social media channels and surfaces makes sense for any digital marketing strategy. On the SEO side, it gives you the chance to break a larger piece of content into more specific short pieces that target different keyword sets.
Tip: Use your long-tail keywords as the subheads in a blog post or whitepaper. Then use each of those chapters or subheads as its own social post.
Monitoring your results helps you understand how your SEO efforts are working, and when you might need to switch things up.
This looks a little different for social SEO than for SEO on the web. On the web, you’d be tracking where your content places on the SERPs for your targeted keywords.
On social platforms, that’s essentially impossible to do, since social SEO ties so closely in with personalized algorithms.
However, there are several social metrics that can help you understand whether your social SEO is working. Here are some key ones to track:
For more details, check out our post on the top social media metrics to track.
Demand research is all about understanding how many people are interested in specific topic areas, so that you can create content optimized with keywords that they’re searching for.
Social listening is an important strategy here. Social listening tools help you see in real time how many people are talking about a subject, as well as how they feel about that topic. You only want to create content targeting topics and keywords that lead to positive social sentiment.
In fact, Hootsuite Listening can even help you predict demand and conversation volumes months in advance.
Nearly a third of Internet users globally (31.5%) now use voice assistants every week. Within the Google App, 20% of searches are now by voice. TikTok has already been testing native voice search, and Meta allows users to speak out loud to its built-in Meta AI.
Preparing for more voice search requires leaning into long-form keywords. Voice searches tend to be more conversational. When speaking out loud, even to machines, we still like to ask questions rather than saying a few keywords.
When developing your content marketing strategy, look for questions in your demand and keyword research. Create content that answers specific questions. Really build out your conversational, long-tail keyword targeting to ride this emerging search trend.
AI is especially useful for keyword analysis and prediction. Rather than combing through keyword reports manually, you can lean on AI-powered tools like Hootsuite Listening to get insights about what keywords you should be targeting in the next week, month, or quarter.
AI is also useful for creating captions and alt text optimized with your relevant keywords, and finding optimized hashtags. Hootsuite has a free SEO caption generator and Hashtag generator to get you started.
AI is also very useful for your content repurposing strategy. Hootsuite’s OwlyWriter AI can identify and repurpose your top-performing posts. It can even generate post ideas based on a keyword or topic, and then write posts expanding on the ideas you like best.
Ecommerce brands using social media storefronts can improve product search results by incorporating keywords into product names. Rather than giving your products unique names that don’t mean much, try to base them around your keywords.
Say you sell embroidery patterns for cute animals. Rather than giving those animals names, use your keywords. Be specific. Mirror the terms potential customers use in their search queries to improve product match results.
Use this free social SEO tool to generate captions optimized for better visibility in search results on social platforms.
Save time managing your social media and get your content seen using Hootsuite. Schedule and publish content, engage your audience, and measure the performance of all your accounts, across networks — all from a single dashboard. Try it free today.
Do it better with Hootsuite, the all-in-one social media tool. Stay on top of things, grow, and beat the competition.
Christina Newberry has been writing about digital marketing since the prehistoric days of 2002, when email opt-ins were every marketer’s biggest goal. With a deep understanding of how to connect to online audiences, she shifted her focus to social media and has been contributing to the Hootsuite blog since 2016.
Create. Schedule. Publish. Engage. Measure. Win.
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Read our new report on how we use AI to fight scams on Search.
/in Google, Online Marketing, website SEO/by Team ZYTToday we published a new report called “Fighting Scams on Search.”
We’re constantly investing in our spam-fighting technology, including systems to prevent online scams from showing up in your Search results. That’s because when you come to Search, we want you to trust that the results you get are relevant, helpful and safe.
Thanks to new AI-powered additions to our scam-fighting systems, we’re preventing hundreds of millions of harmful and scammy results from appearing in Search every day.
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