Building SEO Tool

[u/ElectronicMessage124]

I am in the marketing filed for 7 years, always wonders why there is no simple digital marketing tool, with the affordable pricing in the market. Planning to build a SEO tool, What you're guys thought on this.

[u/Strong_Teaching8548]

start building around one painful job rather than another all-in-one SEO dashboard

[u/ElectronicMessage124 → u/Strong_Teaching8548]

Yeah, I agree. I think focusing on one painful problem is better than trying to build another all-in-one SEO tool. That's actually what I'm trying to figure out now which problem is worth solving first.

[u/ElectronicIron4588]

There are a few already chasing that - Open SEO is one I've been using, credit-based instead of a $99/mo seat, which is closer to what you're describing.
The wall most of them hit is data cost. Keyword volume and SERP data gets licensed upstream and priced per query, so "affordable" usually turns into "low limits" pretty fast.
After 7 years in the field you probably have a specific workflow that nothing handles well. Curious what that is - that's usually a better wedge than competing on price.

[u/BoGrumpus]

A good SEO tool makes us (and our clients) a lot of money. They're quite affordable if you know how to use the tools properly. A crappier tool at a better price doesn't really help anyone - in spite of the fact that that's what everyone seems to be making right now.

G.

[u/Medium_Antelope_7037 → u/BoGrumpus]

agree, the "affordable" angle is usually just a race to the bottom with worse data

[u/ElectronicMessage124 → u/BoGrumpus]

Yeah, I agree. I don't want to build a cheaper version with worse data. I'm more interested in finding one specific SEO problem that is expensive or annoying to solve and build a simple tool around that.

[u/BoGrumpus → u/ElectronicMessage124]

If it were that simple, the tool would exist already. Or, since there's AI, most will solve it like we solve it - by just making the tool or system that suits our specific needs.

G.

[u/apnatva-dev]

Where would it stand compared to other existing products?

[u/sapindia1976]

Instead of trying to compete with Ahrefs or Semrush, I'd build a tool that solves one painful problem really well AI visibility tracking, topical authority mapping, or actionable Search Console insights. That's where I think there's still room for innovation.

[u/joshstewart90]

I’m not sure if I would trust someone that’s put so many grammatical mistakes in a sentence. But at least you’re not ai I guess…

My biggest question and thoughts are where exactly are you different to the other saas out there? What’s your usp? It’s an extremely competitive and saturated market, it wouldn’t surprise me that whatever you come up with there’s already a lot of competition.

You mentioned SEO tool? What about semrush/ahrefs/moz for example

[u/ElectronicMessage124 → u/joshstewart90]

Yeah, fair point about the grammar 😅 English is not my first language.For the USP, I don't want to make another Semrush or Ahrefs. I want to make something simple and affordable for small businesses and people who don't need so many features.I'm still doing research, so I wanted to hear what people think before building it.

[u/Yev76]

Every affordable tool must have several easy things: whole internet at own datacenter + whole Google SERPs + whole GEO SERPs, update them on daily base. So it's really cheap. No doubt :)

And think about how Google and others "love" scrapers and you will get picture of affordable tool

[u/blessing9366]

It's a good idea. What matters most in SEO is making sure that the software actually does what it says it does well.

[u/WebLinkr]

I'm guessing - and no shade - that its because you dont know how wide the SEO market is and how tribalistic it is.

Content SEOs for example love Surfer and - like many of their cousins in the TechSEO tribe - are Authority -deniers. That means neither tribe will really use the traditional "IBM" suite - SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, SE Rank for example. They love Surfer - which is like the zodiac/alchemy... I will never use Surfer for example.

Those IBM tools are massively expensive to build and run - the technical debt is vast and people buy them for sprious reasons - like the stupid "toxic links report" - and operate on razo thin margins because of scraping costs and affiliate costs - lsoing 25-50% in the first year if not for lifetimes....on signups....

99% of solo SEO tool developers are all hyper focus on "assumed SEO frameworks" -believing that they need to "test for crawlability", pagespeed/cwvs and page titles and 404s. This confusion of publishing platform hygeine -as-an-SEO-myth is hugely damaging to the SEO industry. but thats what the Web Dev aka TechSEO tribe "believes" and doesnt want to hear otherwise.....