An Ahrefs alternative when the job is ranking your own site
Draft for Thomas. Written by an agent from the pricing doc and the code, not yet checked by a human. No competitor price is quoted anywhere on purpose. Read it, fix anything that is wrong, delete this line, then publish.
The short answer
Ahrefs sells an index: a crawl of the web, the links in it, and the keywords that lead to each page. Rank tracking and a site audit sit on top of that index, and the index is most of what the subscription pays for.
SolSEO sells the two things on top, without the index underneath. If you are trying to rank your own site rather than study somebody else's, those two are most of the job.
What you keep
- Daily checks to position 20 on every paid plan, and every position ever recorded is kept.
- A crawl graded out of 100 across technical, content, speed and WooCommerce, from 41 checks. Each finding says why it matters, what to change and how many points fixing it is worth.
- Search Console data beside each keyword: the clicks, and how many people Google showed you to, next to the position that earned them.
- Competitor tracking, from one domain a site on the free plan and three on Starter up to twenty on Studio. You see who is above you on the phrases you track, how often and by how many places.
What you give up
The index. SolSEO has no backlink explorer, no list of the links pointing at a page, no link intersect and no search across other sites' content.
It does carry three figures about a site, in the Keyword Explorer: a strength score out of 100, a count of links and a count of linking sites, for the page that ranks for a phrase you look up. They are bought from a data supplier in one overnight batch, each carries the date it was read, and a site the batch has not reached shows as not measured rather than as zero. That is enough to judge whether a result looks beatable. It is not enough to plan a link building campaign.
The links SolSEO does check are the ones between your own pages. A link that lands on an address that does not serve becomes a job in the audit, with its points and the fix written out.
If a slide in your client pitch has a link graph on it, this is the wrong tool.
Where the two differ
| SolSEO | A link index | |
|---|---|---|
| Built around | your own positions and site health | a crawl of the web's links and pages |
| Link data | three dated figures per ranking site | the links themselves, which is the reason to buy one |
| Position history | every check, on every paid plan | check their plan |
| Extra users | unlimited from A$139.99 a month | commonly a charge per seat |
| Fixes | made in wp-admin and re-read on your site | exported as a to-do list |
We have no backlink index and we are not building one. If link data is what you are buying, buy the index.
What you gain
Fixes made on the site. An audit that ends in a list leaves the work to you. On a paid plan, pair a WordPress site and install SolSEO Pro, and the site health list appears in wp-admin. A fix made there re-reads the page and reports what it read, the score counts it straight away, and the next crawl confirms it against the live page.
WooCommerce checks, and fixes for them. Six of the 41 checks are for shops: variation schema, filter URLs, out-of-stock products left indexed, category pages with no description, product photos with no alt text, and products sharing one title. The free SolSEO plugin publishes one offer per variation inside an AggregateOffer and runs 34 checks on a product against 28 on a post. The Shop pack for SolSEO Pro adds a controller for filter URLs, which on a shop with a few filters multiply one category into thousands of addresses nobody searched for.
Unlimited users from A$139.99 a month, on Agency and Studio. Adding a person to the team costs nothing.
Price shape, not price
Index products are priced on access to the index: rows returned, reports run, seats. A tracker is priced on keywords and how often they are checked. SolSEO is A$0 for 10 keywords checked weekly, A$24.99 a month for 125 checked daily on one site, A$59.99 for 450 across five sites, A$139.99 for 1,100 across fifteen, and A$199 for 2,000 across as many sites as you like. Divide what you pay now by the keywords you track and compare the two per keyword per month. That comparison survives either company changing its prices.