Someone asked a question recently that I think a lot of small business owners and beginners relate to. They’re new to SEO, they’ve heard about tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, and they want to know how to use them without paying the 120 dollars a month price tag that comes with them. And honestly the answer might not be what they were expecting to hear.
If your just starting out and $120 a month feels like alot of money for your business, you probably shouldn’t be worrying about those tools yet. And not just because of the cost. The bigger issue is that if you don’t already understand what all that data means and why it matters, your just going to log in and stare at a wall of numbers and charts that don’t mean anything to you. Ahrefs alone has something like 30 or 40 different sections in the sidebar and each one has its own sub-sections. If you don’t know why any of those things are important there’s no reason to be paying for access to them.
Like the backlinks tab for example. In there you can see new backlinks, lost ones, broken ones, internal links, external links, domain authority of each link, page authority, spam scores, all kinds of stuff. But if you don’t already understand why getting a backlink from a relevant high authority site matters way more than getting one from some random spam site, your not gonna know what your even looking at. The tool is only useful if you have the context to interpret what it’s telling you.
That kind of knowledge takes time to build. Not weeks, years. People who are really good at SEO have usually spent months just studying backlinks, then months studying on-page optimization, then years actually doing the work and watching what happens. And even then Google changes its algorithm and you have to adapt and figure it out all over again.
So what should you actually do if your in early stage and trying to get your business found without spending a bunch of money on tools. Just do the work. Start building citations. Work on your website content. Talk about your business online wherever you can. Write blogs. Get listed in directories. Tell people you exist. Google Analytics is completely free and it’ll show you if your getting traffic and where its coming from. That’s really all you need at this stage.
The metric that matters most right now isn’t your domain authority or your backlink profile. It’s whether your getting leads and whether your business is growing. Track that. If things are going in the right direction, the more advanced tools will start to make sense later on when you actually have enough going on to need them.
Think of it this way. It’s kind of like a first semester nursing student asking how to get paid like a doctor without going through all the schooling. You just gotta put in the time. There’s no shortcut that gets you there faster and spending money on a sophisticated tool before you understand the basics is just going to confuse you and waste your budget. Start simple, do the work, and let the tools come later when you actually know what to do with them.
