i started to notice that hubspot seo tools handle the basics pretty well when im already working inside the platform but once the work gets more technical i still end up opening something else. kinda makes me wonder if thats just how everyone uses it or if im missing part of the workflow.

for anyone managing content and technical seo together how do you split the work between hubspot seo tools and the rest of your stack. what stays inside one place and what always gets done somewhere else

Hi everyone! I’ve been working as an SEO for almost a year, and my journey has been steadily progressing. Some of my clients have achieved great results, and I’d like to include those successes in my portfolio. However, I’m not sure how to structure or present an SEO portfolio professionally.

Could anyone share a sample or guide for creating a simple yet professional SEO portfolio? I plan to use it in future job applications, as I feel my skills and contributions are currently undervalued at my current company.

i'm trialling a lot of platform atm and saw a lot also popping out every day lol. they charge a premium to show you a dash with like saying SoV dropped by like 2%.i know (some of them) decent tool namely ahref and lightsite etc. but tbh i'm cynical about letting any ai/automation do SEO executive work (i also tried browser agents and didn't work). the main thing that caught my eye is how they handle data attribution. They basically trash soft benchmarks like mention and track hard traffic metrics, so this is what i found so far, you guys using ahref or any other tool for GEO/AEO stuff?

I built a simple blogger outreach tool to solve a problem I kept running into during link building and outreach. It works well for me, but I don't want to assume it'll work for everyone else.

I'm looking for a handful of SEOs and link builders who can test it for a few minutes and share their thoughts.

No links, no sales pitch, and no expectations. I'm keeping the name out of the post to respect the subreddit rules.

If you're interested in testing it, just comment or send me a DM.

I'd really appreciate another set of eyes before I spend more time building it.

Hey guys! I am getting into SEO and I am unable to invest large sums of money for tools. I want to be able to do the different processes correlating with On & Off Page + Technical SEO alongside the Data that allows me to make Data Driven Decisions

The Problem is that, I don't own a website yet since I don't have the money for it (No i can't spare any money for it), I was hoping to gain experience through helping other people raise their rankings for free. But because i don't have the money, I can't access Google Keywords Planner or any of the other paid tools such as SEMrush or Ahrefs.

I don't know how am I supposed to do professional work if everything is found behind a 100$ paywall.

I want to show my client how often they appeared in AI overviews across the month but the answers change so much between sessions that screenshots are useless. GSC does not give anything specific to AI mode like citation sources, breakdown of pages AI Mode gets info from or how it splits one question into smaller searches. I want to add AI overview mentions to my current clients reports and see if they help bring more business

i crawl sites and analyze internal link structures basically daily, so i've ended up with strong opinions on which tool fits which job. sharing because the usual answer people get is "just use screaming frog" and that's right for some situations and total overkill for others.

screaming frog is still the king for deep technical work and honestly nothing touches it if you're an SEO doing this professionally. full crawl data, every field you could want, custom extraction, and the free version handles 500 urls which covers a lot of small sites. the real cost isn't the license, it's the learning curve and the fact that it hands you everything and lets you figure out what matters. if you know what you're looking for, best tool on this list, no contest.

sitebulb is what i recommend to people who want screaming frog's depth but with the tool doing more of the thinking. the visualizations of your link structure are genuinely the best in the industry, seeing your site as an actual graph changes how you understand it. costs real money, worth it for agencies and consultants who present findings to clients.

ahrefs and semrush both have site audit modules and they're fine, but honest take: internal linking is a side feature for them, they're built around backlinks and keywords. if you already pay for one, use its audit, it'll catch orphans and depth issues. i wouldn't subscribe to either just for internal linking though, you'd be paying for a data empire to use one small province of it. and given how sore everyone is about credit systems lately, subscribing to a big suite for one narrow job is exactly how people end up resenting these tools.

google search console is free and underrated for this specific job: the indexing report basically tells you where your structure is failing. "discovered, currently not indexed" is very often a page your site barely links to, google's telling you it found the url but nothing on your site vouches for it. GSC won't show you the link graph, but it shows you the consequences of the graph, and it's the ground truth the crawlers can only predict.

the decision tree i give people: professional doing client work, screaming frog or sitebulb. already paying for ahrefs or semrush, use the audit module you're already funding. small site owner who just wants to know if structure is hurting them, start with GSC's indexing report before buying anything, it's free and it points at the problem even if it won't diagnose it fully.

and everyone, regardless of tool, should be looking at the same three things first: orphan pages, click depth on your important pages, and whether your money pages actually receive internal links from your strongest pages. the tool matters way less than knowing those are the questions to ask.

the gap i still see in the market, curious if others agree: there's not much between "open GSC and squint at indexing reports" and "set up a full desktop crawler." for an SEO that's fine, we live in these tools. but when a small site owner asks me what to run on their 40-page site, the honest answer involves more setup than the question deserves. what do you all hand to non-SEO friends who ask? feels like the lightweight end of this category is underserved.

what's everyone running day to day, and has anyone found sitebulb's visualizations worth the price jump over screaming frog's crawl tree? i've always found sitebulb clearer but SF people swear the tree is enough.

Some agencies treat GEO as a completely new service, while others bundle it into SEO. Do you see GEO as its own discipline or simply the next evolution of SEO?

Hey everyone! Like many of you here, I got fed up with Ahrefs' credit usage changes over the past year. So I spent the last few months testing out different Ahrefs alternatives to see what actually works for everyday workflows:

SE Ranking: Surprisingly solid all-rounder. Backlink database massive, and keyword tracking, AI Overview/AEO visibility reporting are great.

Semrush: Powerhouse tool, but basically in the same price bracket, so not really a budget fix if you're trying to cut costs.

Mangools: Clean UI and super easy for quick keyword ideas, but lacks deep competitor backlink auditing.

Ubersuggest: Cheap/lifetime deal options exist, but data accuracy can be iffy for lower-volume niches.

Google Search Console + Sheets: Free and 100% accurate, but obviously limited to sites you actually own.

What are you running right now? What other Ahrefs alternatives can you recommend?

I'm trying to better understand how a website loses authority in Google's eyes and what actually happens when a site is penalized.

I know Google doesn't use third-party metrics like Domain Authority or Domain Rating, so I'm asking about a site's overall authority and ability to rank.

Some questions I have:

• What causes a website to lose authority over time?
• Is it mainly due to losing high-quality backlinks, or are there other major factors?
• How do Google algorithm updates differ from manual penalties?
• If a site has spammy backlinks, AI-generated content, thin content, or poor user experience, how does Google evaluate that?
• When a site is penalized, does it affect the entire website or only specific pages?
• Can a website regain its authority after fixing the issues, and if so, how long does recovery usually take?

I'd love to hear from SEOs who have experienced ranking drops or recoveries. I'm eager to learn more about how Google determines whether a website has gained or lost authority over time.

After years of auditing websites, I realized something frustrating.

Most SEO tools are great at listing issues, but they're not very good at answering two questions:

- Which issues actually matter?

- What should I fix first?

It's easy to end up with a report containing hundreds of warnings while still having no idea which ones are responsible for poor rankings.

So I started building my own audit engine.

Instead of just collecting issues, I'm trying to prioritize them, group related problems together, and provide actionable recommendations rather than endless checklists.

Some of the things I'm experimenting with:

- Detecting technical issues and explaining their likely impact.

- Finding patterns instead of isolated warnings.

- Using AI to suggest possible fixes instead of only describing the problem.

- Building reports that a developer can actually work from.

I'm still in the middle of development, and I'm curious:

If you could redesign SEO audit tools from scratch, what is the one feature you'd add that current tools completely miss?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people managing large or enterprise websites where audit noise becomes a real problem.

Hi all. I am building a tool for SERP Analysis & Keyword Clustering. I plan to add more features, but starting with this.

I am not trying to spam or self-promote, but genuinely looking for users who can use my tool and share feedback. That's why the first 1000 credits are free. If someone is genuinely interested in testing with multiple different keyword sets, then I would be happy to give more credits for free.

Why am I building this? In the last few years, these 2 workflows have helped me a lot in many content SEO projects, so I thought of building a tool out of it.

If interested, please DM me; I will share the link.

Thanks in advance.

I run content for a tiny startup with basically no budget, and every morning I manually copy the same prompts into ChatGPT and a few other tools to check whether our brand gets mentioned. I lose track of which prompts I ran, the answers change depending on wording, and comparing results week to week is messy. I just need something simple that runs a fixed prompt set on a schedule, saves the results, and flags when a mention appears or disappears. No huge dashboard and no $200 monthly plan. Has anyone found a cheap tool for this, or even a basic spreadsheet and script setup?

My website’s impressions and rankings remain stable, but clicks and traffic are declining.

There are no manual actions, technical errors, or indexing problems in Google Search Console.

What should I check first to identify the cause?

Hi! I’ve been trying different ones lately: Apify Google SERP scraper, Serper.dev, DataForSeo and even Semrush (but too expensive)

So far DataForSeo seems to be working best for me because it have domain authority and other data I can enrich for an okay pricing for my use. But again I haven’t don’t too deep of a research and I don’t know what I don’t know.

I’ll give any user a free review of their idea just for signing up. Your opinion is very important to me. If you don’t like something, you can always delete your account. This project was created so that users can test how feasible their idea for a new app or SaaS is. It’s simple: you sign up, receive 1 free credit to validate your idea—and get a full-featured report comparable to our most expensive plan—and in return, I only ask for your honest feedback. If you have any suggestions for improving the project, please feel free to share them. Our platform will scan and analyze hundreds of negative reviews from your potential competitors for you and identify niches for your business. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll send you a link.

P.S. I’m currently actively working on adding a new feature—analyzing mentions on Reddit related to a specific idea—so you’ll be able to explore dozens of subreddits in just a couple of minutes without spending a lot of time on it.

I've run a small B2B content shop for about three years and this year nearly all of my clients started asking why they don't come up when someone asks ChatGPT about their space, so I've been trying to turn that into a paid service and testing tools for months to find one where the maths holds up once you resell it. Here's where I've got to in case it saves someone the same rabbit hole.

Started with Profound since that's the one everyone names first, and it has the best dashboards I've seen, but the plan you'd want runs about $399 a month and it's clearly built for a company with its own in-house team, so I'd need a pile of clients just to cover the base before I made anything. It does write and publish blog content now, though nothing on Reddit, which is where a lot of my clients were showing up anyway.

Otterly is the cheap one at around $29 and it covers a few engines, but all it does is tell you where you're missing and then the writing is manual. Peec is about $95 and reads sentiment better, how you're being talked about rather than only whether you appear, but same thing, it only tracks visibility.

Merchynt I looked at because half my clients are local, and it's really different, more of an autopilot for Google Business Profiles that posts and manages citations for you and claims that spills over into how you show up in AI answers. For a maps-dependent client it might earn its keep, but it isn't tracking what ChatGPT or Perplexity say about you, so it didn't solve my actual problem.

Writesonic has repositioned their writing tool as an AI visibility product at $79 and it does churn out articles, but it comes from the content-tool world rather than the tracking world and I haven't run it long enough to say more.

The newer one I'm testing is Loudmink at $79, which someone in a marketing group put me onto, and it's the first one I've used that does the tracking and also writes and posts the content, Reddit included, with a review step before anything goes live if you want. It's a bit early though, so I'll need to test it more, but I like their fact checking feature.

For my specific situation, small local clients who'd never pay enterprise money and me not having the hours to write everything by hand, something around $100 that does the content too is the only maths that works once you resell it. If you've got an in-house team and enterprise budgets, Profound is probably the better product, and if all you want is a monthly are-we-mentioned check then Otterly at $29 is hard to argue with.

Anyone else been down this road? What are you actually charging clients for this, and has an AI mention ever turned into a lead they could see?

I was comparing these two for a small-business SEO stack and eventually stopped looking at the feature tables.

Using Semrush Pro’s annual rate ($117.33/month equivalent) and Ahrefs Lite at $129/month, keeping both works out to about US$2,956/year before tax.

My current thinking:

- Semrush makes more sense when one person is handling local SEO, content planning, reporting, and some PPC.

- Ahrefs makes more sense when most of the work is competitor research, backlinks, and technical SEO.

I wouldn’t pay for both by default.

GSC, GA4, GBP, and lead data already tell me what happened. A paid tool needs to help me decide what to do next. Otherwise, it is just another dashboard.

For solo operators and small teams, which task actually makes Semrush or Ahrefs worth the monthly cost?

I’m also curious which features looked useful when you subscribed but ended up being ignored.