The workbench
One tool at a time, with the price it publishes
Each note takes a single tool or a single kind of tool, says which of the six jobs it is built for, and prints what the vendor publishes with the day it was read. Where a tool leaves a number off its own pricing page, the note says so instead of filling the gap.
Every note on the bench
AI SEO tools: three different products wearing one label
"AI SEO tool" now covers writing assistants, assistant-visibility trackers and ordinary tools with a chat box bolted on. They are not substitutes for each other.
Enterprise SEO tools: what the tier actually buys
Almost every enterprise SEO tier hides behind a sales call. One vendor prints its price. Here is what the tier really changes, and when it is genuinely needed.
Etsy SEO tools, and why the usual SEO tools do not apply
Almost nothing on the standard SEO wall works on an Etsy shop. You do not own the domain, cannot verify the pages, and are ranking inside somebody else's search engine.
On-page SEO tools: what they measure, and what that is worth
An on-page tool reads the pages already ranking and tells you what your draft lacks. That is a real job — and a narrower one than the score it hands you suggests.
Rank Math review: the plugin that prices by person, not by site
Rank Math's paid tier covers unlimited personal websites at one price and prints its renewal figure next to the discounted one. Both of those are unusual.
The free Screaming Frog crawler, and the 500-URL line
The free tier is the same crawler with a cap, not a demo. Here is what it does, exactly where it stops, and why recommending it earns this site nothing.
SEO tools for an online store, and the two that matter most
A store has thousands of near-identical pages, a search engine with a crawl budget, and one free tool that sees all of it. Start there, not with a subscription.
SEO tools for a small business, in the order you should buy them
Two free accounts, one crawler, and then — only if a specific question keeps going unanswered — one subscription. The order matters more than the brand.
Surfer review: a good tool with an unusual billing page
Surfer does one of the six SEO jobs well. Its pricing page is the thing to read twice — every plan on it is yearly-billed, and no monthly rate is published at all.
What the four WordPress SEO plugins really cost in year two
Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress and Yoast all look cheap on the way in. Three of them publish what happens at renewal, and the three answers are completely different.