Optimize 360 is a digital strategy and SEO agency founded in 2012, serving small and medium-sized businesses across France and Europe.
Tools used to achieve results:
- Site Audit
- Content Gap, Competitor Analysis
- Backlinks report, Site Explorer
Problem
When Optimize 360 first started out, Semrush was their go-to SEO tool. Over the years however, they grew unhappy with it. They found Semrush’s keyword database to be insufficient, and their technical audits were frequently flagging false positive and false negative issues for both their client’s website and their own.
Lots of time was wasted working with client webmasters looking for issues that did not exist. According to their experience, Semrush also tended to be late in reporting semantic SEO data. This made it difficult for the team to discover and respond to SEO opportunities in time.
Solution
Optimize 360 decided to switch to Ahrefs. Internally, they also found it very helpful to have a single platform as a source of truth.
Using Site Audit, they finally managed to resolve technical SEO issues flagged correctly on their website. Being able to focus more on deepening their SEO expertise rather than diagnosing discrepancies previously caused by false positives was a great boost for the team’s productivity.
In addition, Optimize 360 found that Ahrefs was more reliable and better than Semrush, particularly in the technical SEO analysis and semantic SEO departments. Ahrefs’ larger keyword database also allowed for more in-depth semantic analysis by using Competitor Analysis reports to benchmark against their competitors.
For example, Content gap was used to uncover programmatic SEO strategies their competitors were using. This inspired them to use similar strategies on their own site and saw enormous gains in both share of voice and rankings.
Optimize 360 also managed to identify cannibalized pages for important keywords, something they weren’t able to achieve with Semrush. They used Rank Tracker to monitor important keywords and found both their homepage and their dedicated “SEO Agency” page competing for multiple “SEO agency” related keywords with the same intent.
In Semrush, we could only see the keyword position number, without being aware that we had multiple pages ranking closely for the same topic. The Positions history chart was very helpful in finding out our content cannibalism issues. Without Ahrefs, we would still be focusing primarily on competitive analysis with external websites, without realizing that the initial issue was actually an internal one.
Results
All of this led to Optimize 360 seeing their own website grow more than 3x in organic traffic in the last 12 months.
Site Explorer Overview graph, Organic traffic and referring domains over the last year.
Ahrefs is simply the best SEO tool on the market! The tool offering is very complete, covering many areas of SEO. I use both Semrush and Ahrefs, and I can see that Ahrefs’ data is more precise so far.
