Enterprise SEO Platform Buying Guide

Choosing an enterprise SEO platform can be complicated. Let’s look at what is involved in the decision-making process.

Some popular enterprise SEO platforms include:

With so many different platforms and so many different needs at your organization, how do you know what’s right for you?

I’m obviously biased towards Ahrefs, but we’re really in a league of our own with 44% of the Fortune 500 choosing us. We know SEO and build our tools for SEOs. Look how our organic traffic and organic traffic value compares to other enterprise SEO platforms in the market.

And our organic search Share of Traffic Value (SoTV).

When choosing an enterprise SEO platform, you can consider things like your team needs, business needs, how to get support from leadership, and your budget. The process for shopping and onboarding an enterprise SEO platform is similar for most companies.

Figure out your company and team needs

What are your goals and your success criteria?

This is likely to be different based on your SEO maturity. You may want visibility into rankings. Or you may have specific goals like increasing the number of keywords ranking in the top three positions or increasing traffic by x% YoY.

Your goals may even be related to the organization, such as bringing SEO in-house or increasing SEO awareness in your organization. Thinking about where your company is in its SEO maturity can help you figure out your needs.

Who will use the platform? What will they use it for? What data is needed? This brainstorming session usually turns into a wish list of features.

Make sure they have the features you need

Enterprises usually have the highest demands for data. They also need high limits and easy access through APIs so they can get quick insights and report on progress.

Enterprise SEO platforms typically need to support more users and have controls and permissions for what different user groups can access. Companies need the user interface to cover many languages so teams all over the world can use the tools.

Some of the common features of enterprise SEO platforms include:

• Keyword research
• Content creation
• Competitor research
• Link building
• Rank tracking
• Reporting
• Site auditing
• International SEO
• SEO Forecasting
• Log file analysis
• Single sign-on (SSO)

Decide which platform is right for you

I’ve seen many companies evaluate platforms based on how well they fit their needs. They usually score features and tally up the totals to narrow down their choices.

I recommend using the scores as a guide, but don’t base your decisions solely on the scoring. Talk to your team about what they like about different platforms, check if they have the data they need, and make sure the platform is easy to use and they actually want to use it. An SEO platform is only valuable if it is used effectively by your team.

Get demos and trials of the platforms

This is the fun part. Companies will usually run you through how to use their platforms, show you cool use cases, and give you access so you can play around with the tools to make sure they fit your needs.

Make a business case

You will have to make a business case and get buy-in from leadership in order to secure funding for a platform.

This step may also come earlier in the process, but I personally think this is where it belongs. You’ve done the legwork needed to answer all the right questions about why an SEO platform is needed. And now, you know what platform(s) you want and the cost of it (them). With this information, you can make a much stronger business case and present your options.

The pricing for enterprise SEO platforms is often custom and determined by factors such as:

• Number of users
• Number of websites or projects
• Number of tracked keywords
• Number of crawled pages
• Number of API credits
• Hours of professional services included

Hang in there during onboarding

There’s no easy way to say this. Vendor onboarding is typically a painful process for everyone involved.

This can easily be the longest part of the process, as it usually involves a lot of people for sign-offs, budgeting, procurement, legal, and security. It’s the redlining process where things are marked out of terms, conditions can be intense, and the information that companies ask for can be extremely specific.

Don’t panic! It’s never fun, but lots of companies have been through this before. Just take deep breaths, and you’ll survive this part of the process.

I’ve been through the vendor evaluation process at companies like IBM, I’ve consulted on this process for several companies, I’ve talked with many people who have been through it, and have the unique vantage of also having seen this process from the vendor side.

I’ve made mistakes and learned a lot that I believe will help you with your selection. Here are some things I’d suggest looking into more.

Watch out for the jack of all trades, master of none

Some platforms seem to build features to check all the boxes on the shopping lists we talked about earlier. They may look great on paper. But when you go to use them, you realize that many of those tools may be mediocre and contain questionable data.

For example, as a technical SEO, I’ve found some tools to have things in their audit that they flag as issues—even though Google has said many times those things are not issues. (I’m looking at you, low text-to-HTML ratio). They don’t always check all the places they should check either—for example, some will only check for hreflang in the HTML when they can also be in the HTTP headers and the sitemap.

The platforms often become reporting platforms rather than being used to help people do their jobs better. This can be because of long update frequencies. Or in some cases, you have to submit a request to get data, which slows down the process.

You may encounter features that sound great on paper, such as automated insights. These insights are supposed to help with democratizing SEO, but these platforms are often bad at prioritizing things that actually have an impact. They often waste everyone’s time.

If you want real guidance, check out the Opportunities report in Ahrefs Site Explorer. These are the things I believe will move the needle for most companies.

Ahrefs is generally the preferred tool for people who work in SEO. SEOs trust our data and find our tool full-featured and easy to use. We also have so much educational material that SEOs can rely on to be accurate and help guide them through almost any subject.

We also have real SEO experts on staff who use the platform daily and help shape its future.

Pricing may be obscured

Most companies in this space require you to contact them for pricing. They will build a “custom” package for you after asking about your budget—because they want to know what you’re willing or able to pay.

One company may be paying much more than another company for the exact same package. This part of the process can be far from transparent.

At Ahrefs, we list the starting price and the price for each add-on to make it transparent.

Check the cancellation process

I personally think this can tell you a lot about any company. Some companies may make this difficult. You may have to contact them to cancel or have a meeting before you’re able to cancel.

Read your contract very carefully. Some companies require a written notice several months in advance if you want to cancel. Of course, they’re not going to remind you of this when your contract is about to be due.

At Ahrefs, we send you a reminder before your renewal date.

Aggressive sales teams are a nightmare

I have nightmares about being contacted by a person from a certain company after being overwhelmed by him a few years ago. I still remember his name to this day, and I’m pretty bad with names in general.

That company isn’t the only one known for aggressive salespeople. Some will call you, email you, email your personal email, call your personal cell phone, and message you on every social platform you’re on.

When that doesn’t work, they start doing the same to coworkers, your boss, your boss’s boss. They may even email your boss and tell them how bad of a job you’re doing because you don’t use their platform. Yes, it’s really a thing, and it’s ridiculous.

They also tend to overpromise. They’ll tell you things like the tool is all you need and can replace an SEO team. This is never true.

I’d recommend searching a few platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit for the names of the companies so you can see some of the stories and what people think about some of the enterprise SEO platforms. You should hear the stories and experiences of others before signing a contract. You’ll find that many of the enterprise platforms do not have the best reputation with SEOs.

At Ahrefs, we have a small accounts team to help teams assess whether Ahrefs is a good fit for their organization. After an initial discovery call, our team will develop a custom demo, guide the evaluation process by bringing all the stakeholders on the same page, and help navigate any red tape. Transparency is core to the process. To avoid surprises, Ahrefs lets customers test-drive the product before purchasing.

Once a customer decides to work with us, the Ahrefs team will provide custom training sessions specific to the use cases they need, help them learn how to use Ahrefs quickly, and ultimately reduce the time it takes to reach their goals.

Agencies are typically better than platform services

SEO platforms offering services can be a positive or a negative. It’s kind of a fine line that vendors have to walk when also providing services. I’ve seen some vendors step over this line and try to steal work from agency partners—even those who had recommended their platform to the company.

If you need services, check what the vendors are offering. See if you can find some people who work with them so you can ask some questions. Some of the consultants at companies do good work, and others will provide work at about the same level as a junior SEO. I’ve seen services pitched as SEO consulting when all they really did was use the hours to help set up the platform or provide reports that just seemed to be automated.

Your reps will likely vary in their skill sets a lot, and some of the companies have high employee turnover. In many cases, you may be better off with an agency partner.

Ahrefs does not offer client service work. However, if you’re looking for an enterprise SEO agency, check out our agencies directory.

Some platforms don’t innovate

Some of the enterprise SEO platforms can be slow-moving. You will hear typical excuses like it’s on the roadmap or it’s coming soon. But in many cases, the features just never show up. In some cases, they may acquire other tools to try to make up for the lack of innovation, but they may kill whatever made the previous tool worth acquiring and spend years integrating them into their platform instead of building new features.

We do roundups of all of our product updates every month. You can see the kind of progress we make and the innovative features we launch.

Don’t trust vendor comparisons and studies

Lots of these platforms will show you cherry-picked comparisons that make them look awesome and studies they have run where they declare themselves the winner. They may even provide you with feature lists to help with your comparisons, but that will be biased in their favor. Take all of this with a grain of salt.

Don’t just take any tool’s word that it’s the best. Ask around. See who comes up as the platform of choice. See who real users favor. Ahrefs is proud of our data and our platform and we invest heavily to make sure it’s the best.

Help us improve our platform

As we’ve built out our enterprise offering, we’ve added a lot of features that enterprise companies need to be successful and all the pieces they need to meet compliance guidelines. If you have a feature you want to see us add, message me on X or LinkedIn.