Thread by @authorityhacker

While we still talk about keyword research in #SEO, most of us don’t look at keywords as much as we used to anymore.

Instead, we use SEO Tools estimate traffic to identify the best pages of competing domains.

But how reliable are these numbers? (Thread 🧵) 👇👇

To evaluate how accurate these numbers are, we asked a bunch of our Pro members to share their analytics data with us.

Wecompared them with the numbers the tools give us.

We looked into:

@ahrefs
@serpstat
@semrush
@surfer_seo
@ubersuggest_seo
@Similarweb

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After crunching the numbers and comparing actual analytics data to estimate numbers, here is the general correlation data.

As you can see @ahrefs latest update helped them consolidate their top spot.

We however found @ahrefs to be consistently BELOW the actual traffic numbers. But at least they were consistent in their underestimation.

This is useful if you want to compare domains and pages with each other.

While @semrush had a decent overall correlation, they did not achieve the consistency of @ahrefs in terms of estimates which made it harder to compare pages with each other.

Meanwhile the estimates from @serpstat were the most inconsistent with massive over and under estimations.

We also found that @surfer_seo did a fair job despite traffic estimates not being why you use the tool. Like they say in soviet Russia: Not great, not terrible 🙉

Finally one tool that really surprised us was @ubersuggest_seo by @neilpatel. It did much better than many much more expensive SEO tools and while it didn’t beat @ahrefs in consistency, it looks like the best budget tool right now!

One final disclaimer: this study is mostly anecdotal evidence as it’s only based on 47 websites and all of them are content sites.

If you look into more site types and a broader data set, these results may change but we feel what we’ve found aligns with how consistent tools feel

If you want to watch our full analysis, don’t miss @markwebster1’s video on Youtube and don’t forget to subscribe!