With so many options on the market, choosing an SEO platform means striking the right balance between cost, efficiency, and every capability to fit your business needs.
Whether this is your first time investing in an SEO solution, or you're looking to upgrade from a tool (or multiple tools!) to a platform, there's a lot to consider when you're ready to scale your organic search visibility
We believe an informed buyer is the best kind of customer, so in this post, we share our research and insights about the SEO marketplace, including:
- What is an SEO Platform? >
- The Value of an SEO Platform >
- The Best SEO Platforms >
- Capabilities to Look for In an SEO Platform >
- Security and Stability of an SEO Platform >
- What are Enterprise SEO Tools?
- The Best Enterprise SEO Tools
By providing you with this high-level information you need to know before you invest in a platform, you'll be equipped to make the best choice for your team's needs and your overall business success.
Want to compare some of the most
well-known SEO software on the market?
Take a look at our SEO tools comparison page.
What Is an SEO Platform?
An enterprise-level SEO platform allows you to research, devise, implement, manage, and measure every aspect of your appearance in search engine results pages (SERPs).
It's used to conduct research around new topics, manage content ideation and creation, and implement SEO as part of a larger digital marketing strategy — all while continuously monitoring results.
With a centralized system, teams can integrate data sources, simplify workflows, and achieve consistent organic growth without relying on spreadsheets or manual calculations.

The Value of an SEO Platform
With a strong team to leverage the capabilities and insights of an enterprise SEO platform, the value you receive is unmatched. For example, an SEO platform allows you to:
- Tackle massive amounts of data by gathering, managing, and analyzing more easily and at scale using dashboards and automated reporting as well as additional automation
- View a single source of truth and uniform approach across your entire enterprise which:
- Reduces inefficiencies and drives scale
- Helps inter-department communication as everyone speaks the same way about SEO
- Enables enterprise-level reporting as everyone’s using the same metrics
- Take the guesswork out of SEO by providing actionable insights
- Enhance the customer search experience throughout the entire buyer journey
- Provide repeatable workflows that deliver a consistent and trackable approach to SEO
Our research from our own clients who shift to an SEO platform after using multiple point solutions shows that SEO professionals spend 77% of their working hours on analysis, data collection, and reporting.
Platforms provide SEO professionals with the time to generate insights, deliver strategy, and help others drive better results - all of which gives you the organizational oversight that makes SEO scalable.
What Is the Best SEO Platform for Your Business?
Below, we've provided detailed insight into four of the leading enterprise platforms to help you make an educated decision on which option is right for you.
- BrightEdge
- Conductor
- Searchmetrics (acquired by Conductor)
- seoClarity (hey, that's us! 👋)
Recommended Reading: The Top 4 Enterprise SEO Platform Tools (via Search Engine Journal)
SEO Platform Comparison
BrightEdge
BrightEdge helps its customers create powerful content marketing strategies, build high-performing websites, and identify SEO results and the associated return on investment plus performance versus the competition.
Recommended Reading: How Much Does an SEO Platform Like BrightEdge Cost?
This software provides users with research, keyword rankings, and recommendations that help users:
- Identify what customers are looking for on the internet
- Develop an effective content strategy that targets the right customers, guides them further down the sales funnel and keeps them engaged with your brand
- Boost your social media campaigns
- Be visible in local searches
- Put mobile consumers at the center of your SEO
Further Reading: Compare seoClarity to BrightEdge, or explore other BrightEdge competitors
Conductor
Conductor believes that SEO is as simple as connecting customers who are searching for information with your company’s expertise.
They do this by providing ‘beyond the platform’ services that — similar to BrightEdge — uncover new customer insights, create powerful marketing content and track performance.
By performing advanced SEO tasks, like rank tracking, the platform generates insights that inform strategic digital services like content optimization and performance measurement.
And of course, their overall aim is to maximize the ROI of your SEO and content marketing investment. To learn more, check out their app which provides an instant snapshot into your customers’ world.
Further Reading: Compare seoClarity to Conductor Searchlight
Searchmetrics
Note: In early 2023, Searchmetrics became a part of Conductor. At last update, it was unclear how this would impact current Searchmetrics clients.
Searchmetrics offers the ability to spot global and local search opportunities, support decision-making, and connect SEO with marketing strategy all with a clear link to revenue through:
- Analysis of mobile search engine rankings and traffic to optimize search specifically across mobile devices
- Access to millions of data points across 30 countries
- Enabling you to drill down into data for hundreds of cities in 14 countries
- Optimizing web page performance with backlink analysis
- Optimal site architecture to make your site attractive to search engines
- Evaluating the effectiveness of paid search campaigns and comparing them to organic search results
- Identifying opportunities with keyword analysis and making web pages and content more complete
Further Reading: Compare seoClarity to Searchmetrics
seoClarity
seoClarity provides clients with a single source of truth that help them simplify, structure, and scale SEO within their organization through a secure partnership and data-driven product offering.
Clients get access to all metrics, capabilities, and data without limitations, and our automation makes it easy to access information in any way that suits their business needs.
Our platform seamlessly combines it all:
- Content optimization
- Rank tracking, analytics
- Backlink analysis and link management
- Dashboards for executive teams
- Out-of-this-world crawler capabilities
- AI-driven content writing
And so much more.
Instead of chasing the never-ending algorithm updates and endless ranking factors, seoClarity focuses on delivering the best search experience for your user.
We also provide clients with the ability to access rankings for any domain, sub-domain, URL and backlink index, and we're the only SEO platform to offer unlimited competitive comparisons.
Search Analytics integrates directly with Google Search Console click data with ~100% visibility to address term "not provided". And, feel free to take that data with you with our ranking data API and custom extracts.
To help users get the most out of our platform, nearly all of our package options come with a dedicated Client Success Manager to offer support when you need it.
And, if you need help forming your data-driven strategies, our Professional Services Team is here to accelerate your SEO efforts.
If that's not enough, our clients rave about the marriage of data at scale and our amazing partnership, where seoClarity acts as a true extension of your team. The proof is in the praise we've received on sites like G2 and Capterra.
For a list of accolades, awards, and articles where seoClarity is heralded, visit our Reviews page, a one-stop-shop for good news about our platform.
A Summary of the Best SEO Platforms
If we had to sum up these enterprise SEO platforms, we’d say that they:
- Provide comprehensive functionality
- Have the capabilities to provide insights based on your KPIs and metrics
- Create actionable roadmaps
Search Engine Land annually prepares an amazing Marketer's Guide to Enterprise SEO Platforms that takes a deeper look into the aforementioned platforms as well as many others to provide an even broader scope of the SEO tech industry.
We've also done our homework and evaluated the top solutions on the market. Visit our SEO software comparisons page to help you choose the best SEO platform solution for your organic search program.
What Capabilities Should I Look for in an SEO Platform?
We covered the 8 must-have capabilities of an SEO platform in a previous post, but as you start to think about how your business objectives could be met with this type of solution, it's important to keep the following capabilities in mind as you determine what's best for your business's goals:
1. Unrestricted Access to the Data in One Place
2. Repeatable Workflows for Your Team to Follow
3. Site Audits With Unlimited Crawls
4. Actionable AI-Driven Insights
5. Technology Built Based on Real Challenges
6. Platform Adoption and Live Chat
7. Data Transparency and Accessibility
8. Artificial Intelligence That Remains One-Step Ahead
When evaluating enterprise platforms in the marketplace, it's important to consider more than just basic functionality requirements on your checklist. Be sure to consider its integrations, security features, stability, support, and insights as well.
→ We created an easy-to-use platform evaluation worksheet to help you evaluate your options in the marketplace.
How Secure and Stable Is an SEO Platform for My Business?
Platforms that deal with large data sets and large clients require nothing less than enterprise-grade security in their solution.
You want to choose a provider that not only offers rigorous security but also provides you with the reassurance of stability of data and ability to scale over time, thus providing you with the freshest data available.
With seoClarity, clients receive the best security, stability, and scalability available in the industry with the following:
Security of an SEO Platform
Every security assessment we complete for our clients includes several key components:
- PII and Confidential information
- User Authentication, Access Management: SSO and SAML 2.0
- Business Continuity, Security and Disaster Recovery
- Privacy, GDPR and Related Programs
Recommended Reading: FAQs About seoClarity Security
Stability of an SEO Platform
Our clients love us for our reliability. seoClarity offers accurate, fresh, and reliable ranking data at scale - we haven't missed a day of rankings in over a decade.
We don't rely on others for our ranking data, and we provide our users with quality ranking data delivered daily (or weekly) for desktop and mobile.
Scalability of an Enterprise Platform
Our platform is built to scale, much like the enterprise clients we work with. We're extremely proud to offer our clients the largest and freshest keyword and topic research tool available anywhere!
With a dataset size of 30+ billion keywords across 170+ countries (updated weekly!), we provide marketers and SEOs with confidence that:
- They are seeing a detailed picture of how their audience searches.
- Their research is capturing the absolute latest in search demand trends.
- They can easily identify new and trending terms.
As the market evolves, it's important that you work with a research data set that will keep track of it and make it available with a single click.
What are Enterprise SEO Tools?
Enterprise SEO tools specialize in one component of SEO.
One thing to keep in mind with SEO tools is that your data will become decentralized. Since each tool has one unique function, you’ll need to manually bring your insights together to have a cohesive report.
Niche and Free Point Solutions for Specific Tasks
Let's say you don't have a team to leverage a platform or the cost of an SEO platform doesn't fit your budget.
Luckily, there's likely a niche point solution out there for you to assist you with traffic improvement and conversions! Different from platforms, these are the more specific or specialized SEO tools, like:
- rank trackers
- technical audit tools
- backlink analysis tools to support your link building strategy
The Best Enterprise SEO Tools
If you’re looking for a specific SEO tool, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best to get your tasks done:
- 14 Best SEO Keyword Research Tools
- 10 Best Content Analysis Tools to Check the Quality of Your Content
- 12 Best Keyword Rank Trackers to Monitor SEO Performance
- 13 Best Website Crawler and Audit Tools
- 8 Best SEO Tools to Monitor Page Changes
- 15 Best Tools for Local SEO
They start from as little as $99 a month and could make sense for your business if you don’t have an SEO budget or you don’t have a team to act on the insights from an SEO roadmap.
Does this sound like you? Consider the following brands to fit your business needs:
- Semrush - includes a lot of different features within digital marketing, from search to social media. This works well for experienced digital marketers who can turn the data into insights for themselves.
- Ahrefs - best known for their ability to analyze backlinks, they’ve also added a range of other features to their platform including a rank checker, other link building capabilities, and competitive analysis.
- Moz/STAT - this recent merger provides a tool that combines STAT’s daily, localized rankings and SERP analytics with Moz’s local SEO expertise and their keyword and link research tools.
Recommended Reading: Compare Rank tracking Abilities between seoClarity and STAT - Authority Labs - has a more limited list of features than some other niche tools and plans are priced by number of keywords per month. This could fit smaller businesses or those with limited SEO needs. If you want more included in your plan, you can scale up to over 5,000 keywords for $450 per month.
- Screaming Frog - an SEO website crawling and auditing tool that can be combined with custom filters to provide additional insights.
- DeepCrawl - a little more expensive than some of its competitors, DeepCrawl goes further into your site and provides you with recommendations to help you prioritize your technical SEO website issues.
There are some important considerations to make if you choose to go this route, however.
While these tools all have a starting price that is less than the all-inclusive platforms, the trade-off is that you might need multiple tools to get exactly what you want, and with that comes more time and effort to provide a unified view of the data you desire.
If you do not have the budget to invest in SEO technology or you don't have the team in place to leverage all aspects of a platform solution, you could opt for free SEO tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics and Keyword Planner.
We provide the greater SEO community with a collection of free SEO tools and templates to simplify their approach to organic search.
Here, you can access to our free keyword research tool, content planning templates, our schema builder, and so much more!
Recommended Reading: Compare Multiple SEO Tools to One SEO Platform
Next Steps to Find the Best SEO Platform for Your Business
If you’re ready to truly scale your business and your SEO with a comprehensive, all-in-one platform, use our evaluation template to compare and contrast the different vendors to help you reach an informed decision.
As a quick reminder, we've laid out some key differentiators between us and other top SEO software companies:
- Compare seoClarity to BrightEdge
- Compare seoClarity to Conductor
- Compare seoClarity to Searchmetrics (recently acquired by Conductor)
Once you gather all your research and are ready to see the power of the only all-in-one SEO platform built to scale for organic success, dive into a platform tour to see how seoClarity can work for you.
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