How we rate and what the numbers mean
Every listing in the index carries the same instruments. This page says where each one comes from, and what it can and cannot tell you.
Pricing
Prices are read on the vendor's own pricing page, not copied from other directories. Each listing shows the date the page was read and links to it. Monthly and yearly-billed prices are kept apart, because a “$99” plan billed yearly and a “$129” plan billed monthly are often the same plan. Prices are shown as listed, before tax. When a vendor quotes on request, the listing says so; it never shows an estimate.
Free plan or free trial
A free plan has no end date. A trial does. Listings keep the two apart, and the free plans category only includes the first.
The TopSEOTools Score
The score on every listing is computed, not typed in. Nobody on the team picks a number. Six measures are each ranked against every tool in the directory, weighted, and added to a base of 2.0, so the score runs from 2 to 5: a tool that is live and does its job starts at 2, and earns the rest.
| Measure | Weight | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| User reviews | 25% | Trustpilot and G2 together, weighted by how many reviews stand behind each. A small sample is pulled towards an average of 4.0, so five stars from three reviews do not beat 4.6 from three thousand. |
| Demand | 20% | How often people search Google for the tool by name, ranked against the directory. |
| Reach | 15% | Estimated monthly organic visits to the tool's own website, worldwide. |
| Trust | 15% | How many websites link to the tool's site, and how long its domain has existed. |
| Momentum | 10% | Whether brand searches and organic traffic rose or fell over the last twelve months. |
| Value | 15% | The cheapest paid plan against the median of its category, and whether the tool can be used or tried for free. |
Demand, reach and trust are ranked on a logarithmic scale, so one giant does not flatten everyone else. Where a measure has no data for a tool, it counts as below average, and the listing says so instead of leaving it out. On the result, below 3 is weak, 3 to 3.9 mixed, 4 to 4.4 good, and 4.5 or more a standout. The score's panel on each listing shows all six measures, the figure each one was computed from, and how they add up.
The score is recomputed whenever the data behind it is refreshed, which is monthly. Trustpilot and G2 also appear next to it on every listing, linked to their source pages, so the reviews that went into it can be read directly.
Demand and traffic
Two of the numbers behind the score are also shown on every listing, refreshed monthly from DataForSEO. Brand searches is how often people search Google for the tool by name, worldwide, averaged over the last twelve months, with the monthly trend beside it. It comes from Google Ads data, which rounds volumes into bands and can merge a name with similar words, so read it as an order of magnitude. Organic traffic is a modelled estimate of the monthly visits the tool's own website gets from Google's US results, with the number of keywords it ranks for. Neither measures quality; both say how many people are looking.
Categories and alternatives
A tool sits in up to three categories, by the jobs its own site says it does. Alternatives are computed: the tools that share the most categories, then the closest in price, then the better rated. Nobody picks them by hand.
What we do not do
- We do not invent user counts, awards or testimonials.
- We do not show a price we could not read on the vendor's site.
- We do not keep tools that no longer exist: listings whose product has closed, moved to another business or stopped being an SEO tool are removed.
Spotted something out of date? Write to [email protected].