On Page Navigation
On Page Navigation
Every tool below is good at what it does, and all of them cost less than we do. We pay for several of them ourselves. Each comparison sets one beside a service that picks the targets, writes the page, publishes it and goes after the links, and says plainly where buying the licence direct is the better purchase.
How it all works
Most teams shopping for an SEO tool are not unhappy with the tool. They are unhappy that traffic flattened and the report never said what to do about it. Those are two different problems and these pages separate them. If the second one is the problem you have, how the managed service is scoped is set out in full elsewhere.
1
Semrush, Ahrefs and Surfer all audit, and each will hand you a prioritised list within an hour of signing up. Find out whether anybody opened last month's list before you buy a second tool. An audit nobody reads is not a tooling problem.
2
Tool pricing looks flat until a second person needs a login. Semrush charges from forty five dollars for another user, Ahrefs between forty and eighty, and Screaming Frog sells a separate licence per person. Each comparison works the cost at one seat and again at three. Answer engines meter access differently again, and the AI visibility tool comparisons price that side of it.
3
If somebody in house will write the page, ship it and chase the link, buy the licence direct and keep the difference. If that person does not exist, no tool creates one. We say which case you are in on every page. Where writing the page is the actual bottleneck, the content tool comparisons cover that decision.
Four products, four different answers to who actually does the work.
VS
Platform, Not A Team
One Thirty Nine To Start
Seats Cost Extra
Semrush is the broadest dataset most small teams will ever need, running from one hundred and thirty nine dollars a month on the SEO plan to five hundred and forty nine on Advanced. If a tool is the only thing you are missing, that is honest value and it is cheaper than we are. What the subscription does not buy is anybody to make the change, write the page, or ask another site for the link.
Learn More
VS
Strongest Link Index
Weekly Rank Updates
No Trial Offered
Ahrefs runs from twenty nine dollars a month on Starter to four hundred and forty nine on Advanced, and its link index is the best reason to buy it. Read two lines before setting it beside us. Rank tracking refreshes weekly on every plan including the fifteen hundred dollar Enterprise tier, and each additional seat is forty to eighty dollars.
Learn More
VS
Content Optimisation Only
Forty Nine To Two Ninety Nine
Charged Yearly Upfront
Surfer is the narrowest product here and the best at the one job it takes on, scoring a draft against the pages already ranking for the term. Discovery is forty nine dollars a month and Peace of Mind two hundred and ninety nine, with every listed price billed yearly and charged for the full year upfront. It grades the draft. Somebody still has to write it.
Learn More
VS
Desktop Crawler
Free To Five Hundred URLs
Licence Per Person
Screaming Frog is the odd one out here, a crawler you install and run on your own machine rather than a service you log into. It is free up to five hundred URLs and one hundred and ninety nine pounds per person per year beyond that, which makes it the cheapest real technical audit on this page. It also hands you a spreadsheet of problems that somebody then has to go and fix.
Learn More
About the service
Managed SEO is not a tool licence with our logo on it. Your site, your content and the rankings they earn stay in your name on your own hosting. We run the audit, decide what is worth targeting, make the technical changes, write the pages, publish them and go after the links, and say so when search is not your real constraint. You run the business. Everything underneath the search channel is ours.
SEO tools mostly report the same things from slightly different crawls, and the gap between them matters far less than what gets done with the output. A rank tracker nobody opens is an expensive spreadsheet. Before comparing features, decide who is going to act on the report each month, because that person, not the tool, is what moves the numbers.
The tools are also best at the parts of the job that matter least. Crawling for broken links, missing titles and slow pages is genuinely useful and almost entirely automatable, and it takes an afternoon. Deciding what to write, which pages deserve to exist and what customers are actually searching for is the part that moves revenue, and no tool does it.
Where these platforms differ meaningfully is data freshness and index size, and that only matters above a certain scale. With fifty pages and a local market, the free tools plus Search Console tell you almost everything the paid ones would. With thousands of pages and several markets, the paid data earns its keep.
An audit that ends in a spreadsheet changes nothing. The findings sit in a tab, the crawl runs again next month, and the same errors are counted a second time because nobody had both the access and the hour to spare. We take the findings, make the change on your site, and confirm it cleared on the next crawl. Redirect chains and schema that never validated are the two that survive longest.
Search volume is the easiest number to over weight. Two hundred searches from people ready to buy is worth more to most businesses than four thousand from people who are only reading, and no tool knows which is which for what you sell. We pick the targets with your pricing in front of us and write down the reasoning so you can argue with it.
Authority is the slowest part of this work and the easiest to buy badly. We pursue placements on sites with an audience that would plausibly click, decline the networks selling volume, and report what was earned rather than what was requested. That last distinction is the one nobody else counts, and it is usually the difference between a slow result and a penalty.
What does a managed SEO service do that Semrush does not?
Semrush tells you a page is underperforming and roughly why. It does not decide whether that page is worth saving, rewrite it, publish it, or earn the links that let it compete. Those are the jobs that move a ranking, and each one needs a person with access to your site rather than another report.
Why did our traffic flatten while the audit score went up?
Because most audit scores measure hygiene rather than demand. You can clear every technical warning on a site and still target terms nobody searches, or terms where the top results belong to businesses ten times your size. A clean crawl is a starting condition. What moves traffic is choosing the right thing to rank for and then publishing something better than what already ranks for it.
Do we have to move our site or content to you?
No. The site stays on your hosting, in your accounts, under your domain. We work inside it. The pages we write and the rankings they earn are yours the whole way through, so if you ever stop working with us there is nothing to hand back. Owning the asset is the one thing we deliberately leave with you.
Does a content score actually predict rankings?
It is one input and not the biggest. A content score measures how closely a draft resembles the pages already ranking, which helps when you are staring at a blank page and is not the same as being more useful to a reader. Google weighs evidence a scoring tool cannot see, including who links to you and what people do after they arrive. Treat the score as a drafting aid rather than a target to max out.
Which of these tools publishes the changes for us?
None of them. Semrush, Ahrefs, Surfer and Screaming Frog all find what is wrong and several will rank the list for you, which is useful and is not the same as fixing it. Somebody still has to open the site, make the edit correctly, and come back when the next theme update quietly undoes it. On this service that somebody is us.
Why not just buy the cheapest tool and run it ourselves?
You should, if the tool is the only thing you are missing. Screaming Frog is free under five hundred URLs and Semrush starts at one hundred and thirty nine dollars a month, and set against our seven hundred and forty nine that is not a close contest on price. What none of them include is somebody who makes the change, writes the page and asks for the link, every month. That is what we sell, and it is the expensive thing to hire.
How long before SEO shows a return?
Three to six months for movement on terms you already sit near, and longer for anything competitive. Anyone quoting weeks is either targeting terms nobody searches or counting a ranking you already had. We report position and clicks side by side, because a page can climb ten places and still send nobody, and you are entitled to see that rather than the flattering half of it.
What happens if we already pay for one of these tools?
Keep it if you want to. We will work inside your account so the history stays with you, and we will not double up on a licence you are already carrying. Two tools doing the same job is waste rather than insurance, and if you are paying for that we will say which one to drop.
Can we keep our own writer and use you for the rest?
Yes, and it is a common arrangement. If somebody already writes well about your business, the hardest part is solved. We take the technical work and the authority building, and edit what they produce rather than replacing it.
Is there a dashboard we log into?
No, and that is deliberate. There is no seat to learn and no weekly export for somebody here to interpret. What arrives is a monthly summary covering what was published, what moved, what did not, and what we are doing about the part that did not. When something needs a decision from you, we come and ask for it.
At what point does paying us beat paying for a tool?
When search starts mattering to revenue and nobody on the team wants to own it. Below that line, buy a licence and work through the list yourself. Above it, once you employ somebody whose actual job is SEO, buy the tools direct and keep the difference. We will tell you which side of it you are on.
What if SEO is not our real problem?
Then we say so before taking your money, and the audit costs nothing. Search is one channel. A product nobody is looking for, or a site that loses people the moment they arrive, will survive a perfect ranking untouched. Selling six months of SEO against either of those would be dishonest.
What does the higher tier add?
Managed WordPress SEO at seven hundred and forty nine dollars a month covers technical fixes, keyword strategy, content, authority building, local search and monthly reporting. Growth at one thousand four hundred and ninety nine adds more content and link acquisition each month, plus multi location coverage where it applies. Most single location businesses do not need the second one, and we will say so before you buy it.
Are we locked in?
No. Month to month, thirty days notice, no setup fee. Because the pages live on your site there is nothing to hand back when you go. One thing worth stating plainly: SEO is not a purchase you finish. Competitors keep publishing and positions decay once you stop, so treat it as a running cost of the channel rather than a project with an end date.
What do you need from us to start?
Admin access to the site, read access to Search Console and analytics, and an hour to talk through what you sell and what a customer is worth. The audit runs first and takes a few days. We report what we found, fix what needs fixing, then start on content and links.
