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What does SEO software actually do, and what is beyond its reach?
Summary
Most SEO software does some mix of four jobs: measuring how your own site performs in search, researching other sites and keywords, recording rankings for a keyword list on a schedule, and crawling your site for technical problems. The numbers behind those jobs come from different places. Search Console reports what Google actually recorded for your site, while competitor traffic and search volume in third-party tools are the vendor's estimates. No tool can raise your ranking or guarantee that Google indexes a page.
The four jobs
- Measuring your own site. Search Console shows impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position. It only covers sites you control.
- Researching others. Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking and SpyFu build their own databases of keywords, backlinks and estimated traffic, so you can look at a competitor's domain.
- Recording rankings. You give the tool a keyword list and it checks positions on a schedule. That schedule varies: Semrush and SE Ranking update daily, Ahrefs weekly on every plan.
- Crawling your site. A crawler walks your pages and reports broken links, error pages, duplicate titles and similar issues. Screaming Frog does only this; the suites include it as a site audit module.
Content tools such as Surfer sit a little apart. They compare your draft with pages already ranking and suggest changes.
Where the numbers come from
Search Console is Google's own record of your site's performance in Search. Everything a third-party tool says about someone else's site is modeled from that vendor's crawling and data, which is why two tools can give the same domain very different traffic figures without either being wrong in its own terms.
Google Trends is a third kind of number. Each data point is divided by total searches for that place and time range and then scaled from 0 to 100, so a 100 marks peak relative interest, not a search count.
Paying for cloud tools versus installed ones
The suites run in a browser on the vendor's data and servers. You pay monthly or annually, and the limits are counted in sites, tracked keywords and audit capacity. Ahrefs Lite gives 100,000 crawl credits a month for Site Audit; SE Ranking Core audits up to 250,000 pages a month.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is installed on your own Windows, macOS or Linux machine. A license costs $279 per user per year, and the free version crawls up to 500 URLs at a time. The paid version has no URL cap; how far it can go depends on the memory and storage you give it. Since it has no database of other sites, it can't do competitor research.
What no tool can do
Google says it doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more often or rank it higher, and it doesn't guarantee crawling, indexing or serving even for pages that follow its guidelines. A software subscription doesn't change that.
An audit gives you a list of problems. Fixing them, and deciding which keywords and pages deserve the effort, stays with you.
Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.
Sources
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7576553?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/trends/answer/4365533?hl=en
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/how-search-works
- https://www.semrush.com/pricing/seo-ai-search/
- https://ahrefs.com/pricing
- https://seranking.com/subscription.html
- https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/pricing/?wmc-currency=USD
- https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.