Why do people pay monthly for SEO tools?

25 replies
  • SEO
  • |
I've been racking my brain trying to figure this out, but I can't.

People are paying $47-$497+ PER MONTH, for tools that include features like:

- Keyword generation

- Rank tracking

- On page SEO analysis

- View top 100 results

- Find what keywords people used to visit a site

ALL of these functions can be found in FREE tools or with a simple Google search.

So, WHY do people pay all this money for these tools?

The only reason that comes to mind is that some of these tools generate white label SEO reports, which buyers of these tools (like SEO agencies) can send to their customers.

But again, WHY would the end customers want to receive such reports in the first place? Sounds like some SEO agency convinced them that they "need" to know this stuff and only "they" (the agency) can provide the info (which is of course not true).

So, what's the deal with all this? I'm so confused, lol.
#monthly #pay #people #seo #tools
  • Profile picture of the author King Manu
    Are you sure you can find FREE good alternatives for these ones?

    All the free ones (except Google) are just a tease to buy their premium versions, and Google gives little info on what you mentioned.
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    • Profile picture of the author Dina Dav
      Agree, with King, I have tried many free tools, they are not providing full details, for full details and access to everything they will ask you to buy there subscription or free trial etc.
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  • Profile picture of the author skzahidul2
    Mainly we use 2 SEO tools Aherfs for doing competition research and Serprobot for keyword tracking.
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Originally Posted by perneali45 View Post

    - Keyword generation
    I have no idea wtf this is.

    Originally Posted by perneali45 View Post

    - Rank tracking
    There is no free tool that does this well, especially at scale and especially for local results.

    Originally Posted by perneali45 View Post

    - On page SEO analysis
    Depends at what scale you have to do this at. If you have one site with 10 pages, not a big deal. If you are managing 25 sites that all have between 25-500 pages with new pages being added regularly, that is much different.

    Originally Posted by perneali45 View Post

    - View top 100 results
    Again, I don't know wtf this is.

    Originally Posted by perneali45 View Post

    - Find what keywords people used to visit a site
    There is no free tool that does this well either.

    Originally Posted by perneali45 View Post

    The only reason that comes to mind is that some of these tools generate white label SEO reports, which buyers of these tools (like SEO agencies) can send to their customers.
    Nope. None of this stuff is the kind of thing I would include in reports to clients. They could not possibly care less about most of this stuff. They want to see results.
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    • Profile picture of the author perneali45
      Originally Posted by King Manu View Post

      Are you sure you can find FREE good alternatives for these ones?

      All the free ones (except Google) are just a tease to buy their premium versions, and Google gives little info on what you mentioned.
      It's difficult for me to assess the quality of the free options. I feel they do the job. Not sure in what specific ways a paid tool would be better.

      * * * * * *

      - Keyword generation

      Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

      I have no idea wtf this is.
      I mean keyword research. Finding:

      - What terms people are searching for.

      - What secondary LSI keywords the top ranking sites are using in their content.

      * * * * * *

      - View top 100 results

      Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

      Again, I don't know wtf this is.
      Sorry, my fault. I mean: "For a specific keyword, these are the URLs that appear in the first 100 positions in the Google SERPs."

      I know there may be some value in deduplicating URLs or showing unique domains, but this can be done with one time fee tools (or a free spreadsheet).

      * * * * * *

      - Find what keywords people used to visit a site

      Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

      There is no free tool that does this well either.
      I believe the Google Search Console (free) shows this info.

      Thank you all for the answers so far!
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by perneali45 View Post

        I mean keyword research. Finding:

        - What terms people are searching for.

        - What secondary LSI keywords the top ranking sites are using in their content.
        No free tool does this as well as the suite of tools offered by SEMrush.

        Originally Posted by perneali45 View Post


        Sorry, my fault. I mean: "For a specific keyword, these are the URLs that appear in the first 100 positions in the Google SERPs."

        I know there may be some value in deduplicating URLs or showing unique domains, but this can be done with one time fee tools (or a free spreadsheet).
        At scale, I'm not sure that anything does this well for free.

        Originally Posted by perneali45 View Post

        - Find what keywords people used to visit a site


        I believe the Google Search Console (free) shows this info.!
        Search Console is only going to help you with your own site. It will not help you with competitor sites.
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  • Profile picture of the author Medon
    Of course, there are free tools you will get on Google search but you must go a noth higher than what most people are doing. Goingg premium adds value to what you do.
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  • Profile picture of the author talfighel
    Nothing wrong with paying a monthly membership to something that can help your business grow.

    Regardless of what anyone thinks.
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  • Profile picture of the author Devilfish168
    Depend individual seo service providers. Some is kinda crappy, whereas some is good even provide contents , in conjunction with backlinks service.
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  • I actually quite agree with monthly subscriptions for SEO tools, even though I haven't done that at all.

    Because it can provide unlimited research assistance when compared to free tools on various websites.

    But if you still want to use a free platform, maybe Ahref and MOZ can be said to be enough.
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  • Profile picture of the author fastreplies
    Originally Posted by perneali45 View Post

    So, what's the deal with all this? I'm so confused, lol.
    If you have business which future depends on it success
    specifically how good it's doing online, there is nothing wrong
    with spending a few dollars per day to make thousands in return.

    The question you should be puzzled about is - how good these tools are?



    fastreplies
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  • Profile picture of the author lerxtjr
    You can really beat your head against the wall with this stuff. When I used to do seo work for clients, I would sign up for semrush for 3 or 4 months to diagnose the structural problems. I never did find any substitute (paid or free) that could get to such a granular level. Then after all the problems were fixed, I would switch to a less costly monitoring tool. For me, it was purely a time saver to use monthly paid serp systems.
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  • Profile picture of the author seoexpertinindia
    You have to use many free tools to get the report you want.

    The paid tools are customised to fulfil the needs of the user. So it is worthy to get premium tools.
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  • Profile picture of the author muhammadosama
    First of all, search console never provides the complete data.

    Secondly, paid tools save you a ton of time and the entire report can be exported in a single click.

    Time is money and everyone wants to do more in the smallest amount of time and these tools really make your life easier.

    Like how you are supposed to accurate rankings on mobile for California? A tool makes it done in no time.

    Keyword research? Just enter a primary keyword and boom! you have thousands of related queries in front of you. Export them.

    View top 100 results? tools help you find the SERPs in any location you want. No need to fill captchas anymore.

    On-Page analysis? Would you really go and see the source code of every competitor to see what is written in <title>,<meta>, <strong>, <h1> to <h6>?

    These tools are made when there is demand and people want to pay for it.
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  • Profile picture of the author Angelina Gil
    You are correct that all the above SEO functionalities can be done with free tools. But, have you noticed that free tools provide limited data generation.
    When, we are analyzing the website in deep, these free tools don't work.
    Ex. - To check plagiarism for the whole website or some specific full pages, free tools turns limited.
    So, some people take monthly paid subscription according to their SEO Analysis requirements.
    Thank you.
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  • Profile picture of the author parmarjeet
    This is a very common question which eats up the minds of many bloggers and website owners.

    These SEO tools contain lots of value and responsibility of collecting data and generating reports. Free tools on other hand are very very cheap quality. It will harm your website a lot rather than adding any value to it.

    SEO cannot be done using one or 2 tools. We need a top mixture of 5 to 6 best tools which all together can create a campaign and sends a positive signal to Google. SEO experts have to pay hundreds of dollars each month for these premium tools and that's the reason it makes SEO service so expensive.

    Hope I have cleared some points of your question. Correct me if I am wrong.
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  • Profile picture of the author mydigitalsketch
    Yes, for doing menial research, you can use free tools but otherwise you need get hold of premium ones.
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  • Yes, there are a lot of free tools available in the market. But nothing gives you the perfect solution as paid. You should have gone through the features of it.
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  • Profile picture of the author Aileen Joey
    Its coz all the tools which you are using will not give full potential result for your niche or page. Once you go for premium versions you can easily observe the difference
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  • Profile picture of the author LisaRuizLove
    yes there are tools available to do above work. But if you know about actual SEO you have to cross check all the details that generated by tools. So it is better to take help of tool and pay to person/s, agencies and try to minimize the errors and increase the ranking
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  • Profile picture of the author Kenneth Holland
    "ALL of these functions can be found in FREE tools or with a simple Google search."

    No. No, they cannot.

    You obviously haven't been doing any decent level SEO work.
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  • Profile picture of the author EvolveBest
    I've been online since I was 10 years old, all the technical sh$t is TIME CONSUMING

    Also all of those services that are paid for is because it goes to pay the tech support, programmers, overhead, etc. SEM ruush charges $6,000 dollars per year, that is not a lot of money if you save yourself about 30-100 days of manual research per keyword and going to do it manually. I am super grateful that there are services like this online .

    especially for a business owner who has nothing to do with the internet like restaurants, people aren't eating chips/hardware (yet,lol, but seriously)

    Also, when very intelligent seo agencies get involved and brings results, the business owner will want to know how and why and where, it is like literally winning the lottery for them. Just last month I built a website for a client and then I started to do the adversting, when I told him I got him 2,000 visitors for .03 cents per click on the internet (for forum readers, it was using google combined with mobile and desktop ads), the client was completely shocked. The client is okay with spending $1-3k before lunch on the stock market in the OCTmarkets even on a whime.

    Business owners KNOW (the ones who advertise or market) how much it costs to get things online or offline (remember yellowpages, people were like paying $5000 to $12000 year just get into yellowpages, crazy to me think it really was like that, but it was)

    Also, the end customer will want to know these things but the customer DOES SEE OTHER insane great results page online (sales page) people want to know.

    If you look at sales page and they have proven results, people want to know.

    There are some client that could care less because they have their time full family, kids, friends, bills, exercise, food, dinner, etc,etc,etc.....then of course it would be pointless. but if their lifestyle completely changed bc of an seo agency, then the end customer will want to know "this stuff"

    The short answer is: SEO and Research and Online Success is a science and software services makes things and life a lot less stressful and time consuming.
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  • Profile picture of the author Yvon Boulianne
    try find tool like ahref for free....
    Paid stuff are usually so much better
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    30$ / task, pay after done!
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  • Profile picture of the author juanforce
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    • Profile picture of the author fastreplies
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  • Profile picture of the author freda12387
    General SEO needs to be paid, and no free SEO service has been found yet.
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  • Here are some reasons why People paying monthly for SEO Tools :
    • Save Time
    • In-Depth Analysis
    • Fix Issues
    • Make/Save you Money
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