r/SEO_Experts

I'm interested in the perspective on this.

Since the recent changes with Google, it seems that SEMRush and Ahrefs and other tracking tools are becoming less and less effective.

How many of you are still using these tools and find them effective and worthwhile?

If you have moved on from these tools, what's your process changed to?

And yes, I know the standard Google Search Console answer, but I'd love to hear more in-depth information on your process if it has moved away from these tools, and how effective you think that has been for you.

Maybe this is a better way to put it:

For keyword research, competitor analysis, and finding backlink opportunities. That's essentially what I'm curious about here. Are they still the best, good, or mediocre tools for these types of activities? Or are they becoming outdated and are you finding better ways to work around these activities without them?

Hi everyone, I have enough budget to hire an Indian agency to seo 100 of my niche sites, they do an alright job, 7-10% of the sites will end up working out (I have been working with them for 2 years now).

The sites are targeting different niches (no high risk). (Courses, mock tests, notion templates, work certificates …).

I will be generating AI content on the sites & I’ll be obfuscating class names.

There won’t be any backlinks between these sites.

I don’t want Google to ban all of the sites, so what would be the best way to approach this?

Here’s my plan:
all sites will have unique AI content with surferseo keywords, the sites will have a few unique AI generated images on as well
All sites all the domains will be purchased in the same 3-4 weeks span & connected to the same cloudflare account (so same 2 unique nameservers for the 100 sites)
On all of the sites I will be using the same rybbit tracking stripy hosted on my private server.

I feel like the setup is a bit risky and that I need to spread the sites across multiple registrars, cloudflare accounts, hosting providers, different gsc accounts, and use different analytics scripts hosted on diff servers.
I’m just unsure if I’m supposed to go down this extra mile because it’s too much of a headache & ill likely need to hire someone to manage the complicated setup as well.

This is my first time helping a potential client to do a FREE SEO audit. My plan was, once the client get the free audit, if they are interested in my services, we set a time to meet and move on with next steps, like quoting and scope coverage. However, I have no idea how a typical free seo audit looks like. Since it is free, I only know that I should not be doing a full one, and only include the important one.

But,

1. How is the structure of a free audit?
2. Anything to be careful when giving free audit?

I can’t find any examples online so far. Would appreciate it if someone can share their experience and maybe samples.

Managing SEO for eight clients and four of them have started asking about press release distribution this year. No scalable workflow for it yet, been doing it ad hoc through freelancers which doesn't hold up.

For agencies that formalized this, what does the process look like? Platform? White label? How do you handle client reporting?

Imagine you've been watching a competitor for a while and suddenly their organic visibility starts going up.

What do you investigate first?
I'd probably want to know:
• Which pages are responsible?
• Which keywords changed?
• Did they publish new content?
• Did old pages get updated?
• Did they gain backlinks?
• Did several pages improve at the same time?
• Did something change in the SERPs?

The interesting part is that the traffic increase itself isn't really the useful information.
The useful information is what caused it.

Have you ever spotted a competitor growth spike and actually managed to figure out what caused it?

I’m building a frontend interview preparation website and trying to understand its Google Search Console performance before making more SEO changes.

Comparing September 1–28 with August 4–31, 2026:

Metric	Previous 28 days	Latest 28 days
Impressions	36,370	16,815
Clicks	98	93
CTR	0.27%	0.55%
Average position	19.4	13.6

Impressions dropped substantially, but clicks barely changed. Average position and CTR both improved.

Some technical articles have page-level average positions around 7–8 but receive very few clicks. For example, one article received 2,128 impressions and just 1 click, with an average position of 7.2. Broader interview preparation pages generally rank further down.

We’ve also acquired some backlinks. I’m mentioning this as context, but I don’t want to assume they should have produced an immediate increase in impressions.

I understand that average position can improve because the query mix changes, rather than because the same queries moved up. Another limitation: the visible query rows account for only 2 of the 93 clicks, so query level analysis is incomplete.

What would you investigate first?

• Which GSC breakdowns would help distinguish a change in query mix or search demand from an actual loss of ranking visibility?
• For pages averaging positions 7–8 with very low CTR, what would you check before changing titles or descriptions?
• What additional information about the backlinks would be useful for evaluating their possible impact?

Website is 10 months old.

I’d really appreciate your help on this because I feel so stuck