I've tried most of the SEO tools and - meh

Quick, Semrush is distracted being bought by Adobe, let's launch a competitor! Announcing my newest project yourwebsiteranker.com.

I've focused on SEO in my projects for several years with varying levels of success, and I've spent far too much time and money on all the big SEO tools, but I've never found one that fits the way I like to think about my SEO projects, nor one that lends itself particularly well to a cohesive workflow.

They are useful, very useful, and I don't have a particular beef with any of them. I never found any of them to provide me with what I wanted - a simple and clear understanding of the URLs in my sitemap, including what is working, what isn't working, and how these can be improved.

Whenever I use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, I can see how much value is available to be had, but I always get the feeling that 90% of the value was only being found by big teams, with enough resources to spend the required amount of amount of hours to set these tools up properly.

These feel like enterprise tools when you use them, and I'm not an enterprise. I am a small business with limited hours and resources.

These tools have been around a long time, they have done very well to see many different iterations of the SEO landscape as they've evolved to suit. But just like evolution, adaptation is messy. To me, the features of these tools aren't connected as well as I would like - there's no clear throughline which helps me take an SEO idea all the way from script to schema to sitemap and SERPS.

Not only are the features of these tools disjointed, but absolutely everything is at additional cost.

Keyword research, extra cost.

SERP analysis, extra cost.

Content optimisation, extra cost.

URL tracking, extra cost.

It becomes so expensive, so quickly. And I just never feel like I'm seeing the value.

The other issue I tend to have with these tools is that I find the experience is too heavily focused on the general SERP results for my site. The dashboards for these tools is always a graph which shows the total number of keywords or traffic that my site is achieving. Which is useful, but not the main thing. I've already gone to the trouble of creating my website structure, and I know what I want to rank for so what I want to know is what is working on the specific URLs in the sitemap for the specific keywords and traffic I'm targeting, not a general search results for my site. Of course, I appreciate that I can rank my specific URLs for specific keywords in these tools (for a price), but my point is that that should be the main UX.

So for a few years now, I’ve had a vision in my mind of the website ranking software that would really help me rank my site - a tool that helps me build a cohesive workflow and helps me manage a large number of URLS and ranking factors at once.

I’ve been very busy over the last few years building Pilla App, so I didn’t really think I would realistically ever get the time to build this, but I was inspired yesterday by the SEO news that shook the world yesterday and I thought to myself - Why not, I really need this tool; let’s see if anybody does too.

In case you missed the news yesterday, Adobe agreed to acquire Semrush for lots of money, meaning ... SEO is not dead, yay!

Who knows what direction Adobe will take Semrush into, but one thing is true and will always be true as far as I can see the world - SEO will never die.

SEO by definition, will only die when humans stop searching for things. SEO is about improving the performance of search results for humans, wherever they are searching. So the way people search is definitely changing - people are using ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other tools more and more, but that is still search, so that is still SEO - and all businesses will need to get to grips with it if they still want to be found in the future.

So I broadly have three objectives for yourwebsiteranker.com

Make a clear SEO UX
Make it affordable to everybody
Make it effective for all search channels

I’ll do a separate post (or two) about the objectives as I progress with the project.

In the meantime, follow me on Reddit and where I'll be building in public.

Liam