Software specifically designed to help boost the ranking of your adult websites, and subsequently increase your traffic and revenue, should not be ignored. SEO software used to be synonymous with black hat link building, scraping and automated content generation.
Those tools are still hanging around, but they’ve all become near worthless after the endless barrage of Google updates, which have effectively closed the loopholes those old school tools used to exploit.
The worst thing you can do is work on your SEO blind. Well, actually, that’s not true. The worst thing you can do is rely on SEO articles or act blindly on advice given by others who are struggling to dominate search themselves.
The software I’m reviewing in this article are the tools that provide valuable insight into what’s working and what’s not, for both your own site and for those of your competitors. The worst thing you can do is work on your SEO blind. Well, actually, that’s not true. The worst thing you can do is rely on SEO articles or act blindly on advice given by others who are struggling to dominate search themselves.
Don’t ignore these sources, just compare their advice along with your own strategy with the data provided by these tools. Using a data-driven approach is always the best strategy and the tools below are those we at Adult SEO Partners have found to be the most accurate and reliable.
Ahrefs
One of the best web crawlers out there, Ahrefs possesses a huge backlink index, based on the over 6 billion web pages it crawls per day. This SEO tool can do more than just crawl the web: it offers other functionality such as SEO monitoring, SERP tracking and keyword research. The tool can also be used for competitive domain analysis purposes.
While Ahrefs doesn’t have the extensive keyword management and detailed SEP reporting capabilities that some other tools offer, it nevertheless is more than adequate in this regard and has taken steps to improve its user experience (UX) by boosting its GUI recently, making it more user-friendly.
Ahrefs shines when it comes to the tool’s ability to crawl both individual sites and the web as a whole. It also offers robust on demand keyword capability, along with the ability to actively monitor and compare domains. Its link-building capability is solid, along with its SERP analysis functionality. The keyword research capacity of the tool is not as comprehensive when compared with some of its competitors, and the user interface is fairly basic as well, but overall Ahrefs does an exceptional job incorporating all necessary SEO functions in its toolset.
Majestic
Majestic focuses on web crawling as its claim to fame. The tool’s web crawling engine is robust and is combined with a variety of domain search and backlink tools. Similar to Ahrefs, Majestic falls into the crawling category of SEO tools (the other main categories are SERP position monitoring and on demand keyword research). The software offers powerful backlink functionality, which makes it especially suitable for sites basing their SEO strategy on acquiring links of this type. Sites with a high quality backlink profile typically rate highly in the SERP.
When it comes to crawling the web and tracking backlinks, Majestic is a very powerful application. Its web tracking engine has been in existence from 2004, having crawled over 1.3 trillion separate URLs in that time. The solution offers a variety of tools you can use to take this information and transform it into actionable SEO data. Majestic additionally produces custom metrics that judge the influence and trust rankings of URLs. While the solution doesn’t have quite the all-around feature set of an SEO tool like Moz Pro, it is not too shabby in that regard and is among the best solutions for web crawling and backlink tracking.
Unlike Ahrefs, the Majestic user interface (UI) offers a recency filter that enables you to access its Fresh Index of links crawled in just the last 90 days. The tool allows you to set up the Dashboard as your home page for the solution, enabling you to quickly access your campaigns. The wide range of functionality offered by the tool can make it difficult to easily access the functionality you want until you get to know the tool better. Majestic recently added a Quick Links dropdown near each URL to take you directly from there to frequently used features such as checking backlinks or creating reports or Site Explorer.
The broad range of tools Majestic offers for indexing backlinks and analyzing domains is quite impressive, as is its ability to perform deep crawling of multiple websites. The tool’s integration with BuzzSumo is also a plus, as is the additional campaign add-ons it offers and browser plugins. On the debit side is the lack of difficulty rankings for keywords. Additionally, the site doesn’t offer SERP results or the ability to perform landing page alignment or cover CPC/PPC data. However, the tool’s powerful crawling capability and ability to monitor backlinks and analyze domains makes it a highly useful solution for those seeking this type of capability.
SEMrush
The SEMrush SEO package offers a comprehensive suite of SEO functionality, including on demand keyword research, web crawling and SERP position tracking. The tool is best suited for small and medium-sized businesses looking for a single source to help them in their SEO efforts. While SEMrush’s feature set is not quite as extensive as that of industry leader Moz Pro, it does offer a excellent platform for designing and running your SEO campaigns, making it a worthy competitor to Moz and other similar SEO tools.
SEMrush provides you with access to a dashboard that is quite intuitive to use. As with competitors such as Moz and Ahrefs, it integrates with social media platforms and offers tracking of brand mentions, but SEMrush goes a step further by also being able to function as a platform to conduct social listening. SEMrush also has an offering not commonly found among SEO tools in that it enables you to switch between filtering desktop and mobile search traffic.
SEMrush offers extensive keyword research capacity, but this is counteracted somewhat by requiring that you perform keyword management in a different application as opposed to offering this functionality within the tool itself. Nevertheless, there are a number of reports included within the platform you can use for help in organizing your SEO campaigns. Many of these are in the Projects section. One of the most helpful features the tool offers is its SEO Ideas feature, which offers suggestions for optimizing your SEO campaigns. Another helpful tool is Keyword Magic, which presents as many as three million ideas for keywords from a main keyword that you are looking to target.
SEMrush serves as a solid SEO platform selection. Its ability to perform a multitude of SEO tasks makes it a decent all-in-one choice. The software’s SEO Ideas feature for suggesting changes to boost your SEO efforts is a ground-breaking tool. SEMrush’s ability to offer campaigns that are structured on a project basis is a useful feature of the tool, as are its robust keyword search capabilities and the ability to perform either desktop or mobile-oriented searches. A downside of the software is the absence of keyword list management functionality. However, all-in-all SEMrush is a strong performer in the comprehensive SEO tool category.
SimilarWeb
The competitive intelligence tool SimilarWeb offers analysis of traffic and marketing for websites. It enables you to get a quick overview showing a site’s scope, ranking in the SERP and engagement levels with users. The tool’s search function allows you to look at specific websites using a URL or to search by categories such as industry or geographical location. SimilarWeb operates by turning raw data into actionable website metrics such as sources of traffic, paid or organic search, etc. Traffic on a site over the last six months is displayed by geographic region in terms of source as well as by category rank.
The tool’s dashboard provides a wide spectrum of metrics including General Overview and the following eight categories:
- Geography
- Referring Sites
- Search Traffic
- Social
- Display Advertising
- Audience
- Similar Sites
- Mobile Apps
SimilarWeb features a cutting-edge UI and features a dashboard that makes it easy to find what you want when you want it. It responds quickly to requests and its free version offers solid functionality. The tool’s overview feature is quite useful, as is its ability to provide organic keywords and export reports. A negative of the software is that its estimates are aimed at just desktop traffic, not laptops and tablets. Another disappointment is that the tool doesn’t provide the number of unique visitors to a site.
Overall, SimilarWeb is an excellent tool for gathering intelligence on your industry competitors and comparing the performance of their sites against yours. The software is also an excellent source of tracking worldwide traffic and gauging the amount of traffic you are receiving from different visitor categories. Marketing agencies doing high volumes of SEO work are likely to particularly benefit from the tool’s capabilities.
SEOProfiler
The SEOProfiler tool contains various features enabling you to boost your SEO practices. The software uses Google’s guidelines in analyzing data and offering recommendations, so it does not provide insight into improving your SERP on search engines such as Yahoo or Bing. This SEO monitoring tool offers functionality that helps in optimizing web pages, researching keywords and auditing websites, all of which can help you identify ways to improve your Google search ranking position. The service also offers tools for analyzing and building links, helping to improve the link structure of your website for the purpose of bringing in new visitors and bumping up your SERP.
SEOProfiler provides competitive intelligence, equipping you with information relating to SEO campaigns run by your competitors. It also enables you to monitor your social media accounts to see who is discussing your products on social media and to find ways to link your social accounts to your website. The tool also offers client reports that marketers and SEO firms can send to their clients to demonstrate the work they are doing. Its website auditing feature is a handy tool for finding internal errors on your site that could hurt its search engine ranking.
SEOProfiler’s keyword tool can generate long-tail keywords as well as standard ones, which is helpful if you are looking to rank for keywords with less competition. Another useful feature the tool provides is a keyword difficulty rating, which helps you determine how hard it will be to rank for a particular keyword. The software also shines when it comes to generating backlinks by displaying bad backlinks which can negatively affect your SERP position. It also shows top ranking domains which point to your site and allows you to find backlinks by category. In addition, it shows you which keywords your site is ranking for and tracks your keyword position daily. The tool can also track conversations which mention your company on social media.
Adrian “Yo Adrian” DeGus is a 15-year adult industry veteran and founder of AdultSEOPartners.com, a professional adult SEO agency catering to large established adult sites. DeGus, who has provided advanced consulting services to many leading sites in the adult industry, also operates Adult SEO Training, a popular service that helps webmasters, program operators and affiliate managers to learn in-house SEO.
