Morgan What SEO tools do you think are great, but overpriced? I'll start – Ahrefs. Obviously one of the best tools for pretty much anything SEO-related (especially competitor and backlinks analysis), but I still think they could drop the prices a bit. 24 👍🏽3 🤭27 62 💬🗨📰👈
Kristine What they need for people like me is a consultant rate / independent person rate where you get like full access to everything but only maybe X projects because all of them are too much for me to Bay monthly because i may not need it for half the year. I only use those expensive ones with the client or when I have a client with a need and turn them on and turn them off.
Friedman » Kristine Maybe instead of them being overpriced, you just are not charging enough? Kristine » Friedman No I just don't need them all the time I don't handle 20-30 clients like an agency I handle maybe 1 to 5 every month. So the project I'm on right now is a big migration project. But I only need the Ahrefs for the last month of the project to make sure we do a redirects. The prices are too high for consultants you can ask any of us. We can't carry a couple thousand dollars worth of tools we may or may not use that month. They price them for agencies or they restrict them like your freelancer. If they were smart, and I've talked to them directly, so they've heard me say this. They would have a price they gave you full access, full crawls, or whatever but just limit the number of projects you could run at one time. Friedman » Kristine I am a consultant. Outside of Deepcrawl, I cannot think of another tool that makes you sign up for a full year. For something like Ahrefs, nothing is stopping you from signing up for a month and cancelling, then signing back up again when you need it. Kristine » Friedman That's how you operate …my life works differently I don't know why you have to criticize it. I believe the tools are too expensive for consultants. Friedman » Kristine But you were saying they were too expensive because you don't need them every month. That doesn't make much sense because you can just pay for them when you do need them. They aren't forcing you to pay for them in months that you don't need them. And I am not criticizing your life. It's a discussion. Kristine » Friedman It doesn't work that way for some of my clients some of my clients dip in and out four or five times a year. If I drop the account with the data then I won't have the data the next time. So I can't just dip in and out that's not a solution. And just because you don't need it doesn't mean other people don't so yes you are criticizing and you're telling me what I'm saying is wrong because XYZ is what you do … not oh I understand your opinion maybe we could do this — that's a discussion. And I'm sorry I'm not being personal, but i have had this discussion with quite a few consultants who feel the same way and it costs the tool makers money. Friedman » Kristine I'm curious what data you would need from a tool like Ahrefs months later when a client comes back? I'm not attacking anything. I'm genuinely trying to understand because outside of maybe ranking reports, I cannot think of anything I would need months later in Ahrefs or SEMrush if a client left me and came back later. Kristine » Friedman I do a lot of audits and recoveries so if i set up something it's to monitor during our time then often they want me to come back and reaudit in 6 months or a year and then help them with any new changes so I'll engage with them for 3 to 4 months at a time. So I need the same data to compare so either i keep it or I have to set it all up again. Sometimes i can get companies to invest but often i can't.
Koszo I think they're all cheap! Think about any other business. You need to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital just to get going. With no guarantees. With Search Engine Optimization (SEO) you just need a laptop and monthly subscription fees. No risk and a lot of reward. If you think SEO tools are expensive you're treating SEO like a hobby and not a business. Or you're buying tools you don't need. My 2c anyway 💟👍🏽21
Kristine » Koszo That's just not true. I have a single client right now because they require a lot of time and they don't require me to have all those tools. Been on this project for 17 months (I've had a couple other audits in between) should I be carrying three or four thousand dollars a month worth of tools for something I'm not doing for a year and a half? Of course not. The tools are not cheap for people that have large clients but only a few of them at a time. An agency is running 20-30-100-200 clients at a time so then yes the tools are not too expensive for them but for consultants they're too expensive to carry on a monthly basis especially one you are not using them every month. Friedman » Kristine But you said it yourself. You don't need all the tools. You not needing them does not mean they are too expensive. Pay for what you need. None of those tools are forcing you into long contracts with them. Charl » Friedman But they're also not charging for what you use. The minimum thresholds are far too high. Koszo » Kristine Some solutions I used when I was getting started: make the client pay for some of the tools (e.g., talk them into paying for it so that they have control of their data and not dependent on you, supports their other marketing efforts etc. etc. Also can partner with someone who lets you use their subscriptions while you work on their projects, which you can use for yourself too etc. hope that helps. Friedman » Charl That I definitely disagree with. The minimums for most of the tools are like $99/month. It would be nice if they could charge more a la carte versus their current packages, but that would probably be a major pain in the ass for them. I don't really blame them for not going that route. Kristine » Koszo It doesn't help because I wasn't asking you to solve the issue for me because my issue is a valid one with a lot of consultants. Glad you don't have a problem with it but telling everyone that they're not legitimate because they don't want to pay for these and carry these subscriptions every month is just inaccurate at best and insulting at worst. Kristine » Friedman Consulting pricing would get them more people who would carry the subscriptions longer and very easy to program — you just get X number of projects. Because some of my clients drop in and out so I can't just sign up for one month because then they might want information 6 months from now even though I'm not engaged in between and that information is gone now because I dropped the account so if I sign up for it for a client I'm going to have to carry it for a long time in some cases. Charl » Friedman 99 a month seems super-high considering what I can pay for some SEO tools with AppSumo and Dealify deals, getting lifetime access to a lot of them for $99 or less. Plus, if I'm running everything else for a startup business that currently gets most customers from referrals instead of search, I'm looking at SEO tools maybe once a month. Friedman » Charl There is no tool that does what Ahrefs or SEMrush do for $99. Just because something is cheaper, doesn't mean it is any good. Honestly, I wouldn't trust anything that tries to do what Ahrefs or SEMrush does on a lifetime access deal. There is no way they would be able to afford it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a priority for you it sounds like so spending money in general on SEO doesn't look like a great value. That doesn't mean the tools are not worth what they cost. You just don't really have a need for them in what you are doing. Charl » Friedman None of the cheaper tools even approach what someone could do with a paid SEMrush, Moz, or Ahrefs account, but they do give you a somewhat better awareness of how you're doing than the free tools do. I've been able to use tools like Zutrix to identify key phrases that we should have been ranking on, generate blog posts that addresses them, and then seen our ranking on those phrases jump from 100+ territory to top 5 territory in a matter of days. So they're not useless, just not nearly as powerful as the more expensive platforms. Carr When people start with SEO they are normally experimenting with building a site and starting to be able to prove to themselves and someone else they can do it. All the tools blatantly sell themselves (on the lowest tiers) as being for start ups and freelancers. They are good tools don't get me wrong but the question was which tools do you think are overpriced and if you look at the marketing they all are. Scherer » Friedman GSA =$99 lifetime Scrapebox =$97 lifetime. 😉 Friedman » Scherer Apples to oranges man. Neither of those do anything remotely close to what Ahrefs or SEMrush do. Those tools both run on your desktop. They are not crawling and storing large portions of the internet, nor are they collecting data on search queries. Scherer » Friedman Lol I know, but got to have some fun. I'm guessing most people don't know either of those tools. Technically speaking SB does collect data on search queries… I know not at the scale and depth of Ahrefs or SEMrush. Friedman » Scherer It does, but only when you tell it to and you are paying for the storage space. Great tool though. I think I have about 6 licenses. 😉
Bikram All depends on where you are living. People living in a expensive country may find it cheap but i live in Nepal where 180$ (ahrefs standard plan) can feed 4 family members for whole month and the the most expensive vip clients here ranges from 700$-1500$. So all SEO tools from our perspective are expensive.
Forster » Bikram I agree, in South Africa I think Ahrefs is too expensive. In saying that, with a smaller population, competition is not comparable to cities in the USA and so perhaps we don't need expensive tools. A tool like Ubersuggest might not be top of pile in terms of accuracy and what it can do, but it is often enough for local and national SEO where I live. If I could warrant the cost of Ahrefs, and was earning dollars, would I subscribe? Absolutely!!
Ammon Johns 🎓 Any tool you can't fully utilize and don't really need is overpriced, while any tool that is essential is, (due to that necessity), worth whatever you have to pay for it. It's not what the tools costs that determines whether it is priced well, but what you can make in profit from using it. Lucero I don't think they are overpriced. They require huge amount of computing power to keep on crawling, processing, storing millions of websites. Not to mention the years worth of data they have accumulated throughout the years. So we are actually purchasing their data not the SEO tools. Other SEO tools or companies out there are only using APIs from google, etc. They don't have the data to match against Ahrefs or SEMrush.
Waddington » Lucero Yes – plus the decades of computer systems programming experience behind them – which most people think comes easy – until they look at some code for themselves then its – duuurrrrrr!
