The Pros & Cons of Free SEO Reports

[ChristinaRadisic]

Are the numerous Free SEO reports that are available around the internet, where I simply put a website address in and wait for the results actually any good?

I tend to stick with Moz & Semrush which takes a little time pulling all the information I need together, but many of our clients are being approached by SEO's waving these free reports at them.

Should I see these reports as valid, or ignore them and only concentrate on Moz.

Any views will be greatly appreciated.

-Christina

[Alick300]

Hi Christina,

In my experience whatever reports provided by those Free SEO tools is generally correct even I did verified many reports but not all of them is important.

IMO you should concentrate on moz, semrush & screaming frog. These three are enough for SEO report.

Thanks

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Christina,

Some are better than others, but all tend to be limited in functionality. They are free for a reason. SEMrush is probably the best of the free bunch (personal preference) but there is no substitute for a complete site audit.

Just take what you see when entering your URL as an indicator and use that to dig deeper into the problem. Be careful of those that only look at your homepage, as this can lull you into a false sense of security and not show what is going on with the rest of your site.

Screaming Frog and URL Profiler are my tools of choice these days. They cover everything needed to perform SEO & Content audits.

-Andy

[Fuel]

Hi Christina,

We tend to agree with the others - you get what you pay for.

Another important consideration is what you are including in your reports and what metrics are important to you. We have always felt that including analytics data into reporting is crucial for setting benchmarks and being able to see the historical data for trends and analysis in one place is also very useful. Many of the free sites can be an ok solution for identifying optimization ideas and opportunities for improvement but lack substance in benchmarking and comparison tracking with M/M or Y/Y true data.

We like to use Moz, SEM Rush, and Screaming Frog for some of our day to day work and use a combination of Conductor and Adobe SiteCatalyst (Omniture) for reporting.

Hope this helps!