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I’m quuite new to SEO. How do i analyze cheap. Semrush or Ahrefs at 120/month is way out of my price range
Posted by on April 22, 2026 at 6:55 pmHey guys. I have a few projects running but it seems that I am making a lot of mistakes.. I have done a crawl/report on Ahrefs and it looks really valuable but at the price point its just not something i can handle.
Are there any cheaper alternatives or maybe some other ways I can monitor the health of my SEO ?
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1 Reply
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Claude code + data for seo
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All my homies hate semrush.
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Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster are free. Investing some time in analyzing the Impressions, Clicks and Indexing data will get you going in the right direction.
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Ahrefs has a starter plan for $35/month too. Just check their pricing page carefully – it is not promoted broadly.
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You can connect claude to search console and imo can get better info than with semrush/ahrefs
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Screaming Frog is a good alternative for technical SEO. It’s free up to 500 URLs.
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[removed]
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You can use Ahrefs for “years” as a free version. I’ve been using it for free for 5 years.
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Deploy a test site with all of the pages you plan. Let it fly for a month. Now you have real keyword data.
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Those tools are shit you don’t need them
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Google Search Console is the best, because this is real data straight from Google. Not estimates like semrush.
I built an MCP server that connects GSC to chatGPT and allows it to do research on what keywords are ranking better, what is loosing, and so on. All free.
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You don’t really need paid tools that early tbh. A mix of free stuff can get you pretty far if you’re just trying to learn and not scale fast.
Google Search Console alone gives a ton of insight if you actually dig into it, especially for indexing issues and what queries you’re showing up for. Pair that with a crawler like Screaming Frog’s free version and you can catch most technical issues.
For keywords and content ideas, I used to just piece things together from autocomplete, “people also ask,” and checking what competitors are doing manually. It’s slower, but you learn way more doing it that way.
Paid tools are nice for speed and convenience, but they’re not what’s fixing your SEO. The fundamentals matter way more at this stage.
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I’d say Google search console for free. But you can get UbberSuggest for cheap, and there’s also an option to buy a lifetime membership one time.
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You don’t need to be thinking about SEO if $120 is out of your price range.
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Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free!
Keyword Planner might even still exist
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