Show HN: I’ve made a cheaper SEO research tool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I’ve made a cheaper SEO research tool

withtelescope.com

273 pointskulhavy129 comments

In the last 13 months I've spent total $1297 for Ahrefs subscription. Sounds like a little too much so I've build my own Keywords Research tool - Telescope.

While building it my total bill was $51 for 2 months and 41k+ keywords found. Every page of keywords costs $0.03 - $0.05. 2 payment options - usage-based subscription or just top up your balance with the amount you'd like to.

Telescope includes a couple of things:

- Keywords Explorer - finding keywords based on seed phrase and filters

- Keywords Ideas - keywords on interception on provided keywords

- Ranked Keywords - keywords a domain you specified with their positions and change since last DB update

- Saved Keywords - to store found keywords and plan the SEO strategy

I've put a lot of love into it and would love to get some feedback. IMPORTANT: every new account gets some free balance to start with. Appreciate it!

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How important do you think this kind of tool is in the age of massive amounts of LLM generated text everywhere?

While content mills that could crank out any keyword optimized content very cheaply existed for a long time it is now basically free. Whereas producing deep and well researched articles maybe doesn't need that razor sharp focus on specific keywords?

Since you made this tool, you probably think otherwise, but I would like to hear your opinion.

> the age of massive amounts of LLM generated text everywhere

I would say that meaningless, soulless inputs had already inundated the WWW thanks to the economics of Search Engine Optimisation.

It doesn’t matter what the reality is, it matters what every idea person, small business, and enterprise believes

They believe they need to buy SEO services, this service can be offered cheaper than competitors

This is super cool and I would love to try it out. We use SEMrush and they are basically charging us +$1000 dollar for the basic plan, with every other feature as an add-on for addition $200 - $400.

Question: Do you have (or plan to provide) features like -

-- Questions around the seed keywords

-- Keyword exports for external analysis with details like volume, difficulty, etc,

-- Can I tag keywords if I save them in a particular list?

In my work, I do SEO research almost every day and have a very extensive keyword strategy. So above features are what's keeping me stick to SEMrush.

Hey, Thank you!

We're planning to add premade filters for "Questions" and "Long tail" and a couple of others filtersets.

Keywords Export is coming for sure.

You can't tag just yet, but we will add this to backlog and implement according to our roadmap.

what would it take to build a SEMRush alternative?

Quite some time but we'll get there one day

What I learned recently was that all the SEO tool basically query the same back end provider.

So I guess it makes sense that there is innovation on the pricing model side of things.

We use ubersuggest which has a lifetime pricing, quite neat.

Please enlighten us about the backend provider, I'm interested. It seems the OP of this thread is using the same backend as he's not willing to tell it.

edit: Ubersuggest mentioned by someone says in dev blog

https://neilpatel.com/blog/ubersuggest-update/

> My data feed from SEO Power Suite, Data For SEO, and Shared Count totaled $75,253 for January.

Is this the backend mentioned?

Some direct links for others interested in this

https://www.link-assistant.com/backlink-api.html

https://dataforseo.com/

https://www.sharedcount.com/

At first glance these look like sources for backlink data to me, which is the easy part.

I think the real value of a keyword tool like ahrefs lies in the estimated search volume which comes from different sources than the backlinks.

Is this about a monopolistic provider of backlink data or search volume estimates?

The search volume estimates come from creating massive amounts of accounts that scrape Google Keyword Tool.

Ahrefs says "and other third party data sources to find keywords" [0]

Pretty sure they buy data from software tools like free anti-virus scanners, toolbars, chrome extensions, VPNs, etc that resell their user's web browsing history. This is called "click stream data".

[0] https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/78119-where-do-you-get-t...

This would be funny, because the sales pitch of some prominent keyword tools is, that Google Keyword Tool can't be trusted.

I casually read it on twitter, I can't find it anymore. Bummer. I should have bookmarked it

I fortunately found some details myself too (edited the parent), thanks anyway

Great, thanks for sharing!

Interesting! I always thought, this kind of data was collected from a plethora of borderline shady browser plugins (SEO plugins amongst them, ironically), toolbars and alt-browsers.

This is also, why I think the data must be heavily biased. For example the HN demographic must be severely underrepresented, because most of us are careful what we install.

> why I think the data must be heavily biased.

This is correct, but you can estimate the bias.

B2B keywords typically have 2-5x higher search volume/month than the popular tools estimate, for exactly the reason you provided. More sophisticated searchers aren't installing random anti-virus, VPNs, and plugins the SEO tools rely on to calculate keyword search volume.

Would that happen to be Majestic by chance?

what’s the name of the backend provider?

Majestic

I can say it's not that one, if it's that important to know - DataForSEO is our provider for every aspect at the moment.

What's the rough pricing if you don't mind my asking? Their pricing is buried behind contact forms.

It depends. ~$0.01-$0.03 per query

I'd prefer not to tell, thank you for understanding!

I am confused.

I always thought keyword tools use both: backlink data and estimated search volumes.

For example ahrefs has, to the best of my knowledge, its own crawler for backlink data but mostly buys search volume estimates.

Does your tool offer search volume estimates at all and does it come from the same provider as the backlink data?

That just confirmed that you're using "the same backend provider."

Buy itself that's not bad. The problem is that if you're doing what everyone else is doing, then you're probably not realizing any efficiencies. That means your prices will eventually mirror everyone elses.

I'm pretty sure, that tier-5 services are investing in their own data collectors and buying only small part of data.

You're right, that's exactly what out though process was. Thank you!

From your landing:

Keywords Page 450 x $0.05

Keyword Details 150 x $0.04 Your estimated bill

$29

> Semrush. Save up to 71% of your current bill

While using semrush, you pay 4 times more, but it provides DAILY 3k requests. Your tool provides overall(not daily) 3k requests for the bigger price

For OP: Would you say this is a drop-in replacement from ahref's lite plan ?

What would I miss from ahref ?

For sure you win in pricing using Telescope, but here are the things to consider:

There are quite a few limits in Ahrefs's Starter plan, but on the other hand you have access to Site Explorer and Site Audit which we don't have just yet. For Keyword Research it's almost 1:1.

Thank you!

whoever is wondering about the website home page design, it looks direct copy paste from here: https://tailwindui.com/components/marketing/elements/headers...

This is funny to me because it also looks just like Plausible Analytics' design. (They also used Tailwind). I guess both took heavy inspiration from the tailwind example design

https://plausible.io

There was a bootstrap era, where everything looked the same. Then there was a materialUI'ish era, this was weaker in dominance because the design is more controversial and often downright bad in UX. Now we are in tailwind era.

Not hating, it looks and works ok and I understand spending time on custom design is not something you should optimize for as an early stage era startup.

But I do miss the times of mid noughts where people were playing with styles (css zen garden anyone?)

I hate that, on the linked page, most of the good ones are paid templates. :( Is there a repository of high quality but free templates. I hate to use bait and switch websites/frameworks.

Let me know if you find one. You can design your website yourself by taking inspiration from other different websites but as a person who is not a web designer gaining consistency in your design is tough. Usually a template is not enough, it may help you with some scaffolding (such as setting a theme or fonts) but you need to have some knowledge about web design to at least make it look consistent.

On popular mid-sized websites spiders/bots traffic is about 50%. On less popular - up to 90%. Every new SEO tool adds to it. Vercel, Cloudflare et al will happily charge their customers for that parasite load. Web search engines will become worse because of it. Seems like we will be better off blocking it altogether.

Awesome!! Congrats on the value prop and landing!! Very clear.

I run a marketplace in Brazil (kwara.com.br) and we happen to be focusing on SEO at the moment! What's your coverage in Portuguese / Brazilian market keywords? Or is it US only at the moment?

(Ps, I don't mind the tool itself being in english)

Thank you!

We have 150M+ keywords for Brazil (PT) and 30M+ for Portugal (PT) and tons of other countries/languages too

I hate SEO, it ruined the Internet

How do these tools source data for alternative keywords, visits per site, visitor breakdowns, etc, competitor rankings, etc

The only thing I can imagine is buying it from chrome plugins. How else would you scrape Google at that rate?

I'm not someone who has ever worked with SEO but I'd like to use this tool for other research purposes. Can you make a guide for someone who's entirely new to SEO but is experienced in the field of web and CS.

The guide could cover jargon and how the tool can be used to get started, it would really offer me a huge reason to start using this. Right now all I know is I need to have SEO incorporated into my website but I have no idea how.

I think the best place to learn is Afrefs Academy

looks really cool, i've often through there should be an alternative like this, especially for just getting started

my first feedback is i'm not totally sure on the difference between "keyword explorer" and "keyword ideas" on the home page

it would be nice to add those names as meta titles too. I have both open in separate tabs, but it's not easy to tell which is which (page title is all "Telescope - Keywords Research Tool")

it might be nice to explain somewhere how the billing works too. my first thought is "am i billed again if i go to page 2 of the results? or add a new filter?"

Thanks for feedback! We'll try to make it as clear as possible.

To your question: you're getting billed every time request happens - second page and new filters produce a new request to get data from the provider

This isn't clear though, because under the search it tells you the number of results, so you think you've paid for all those results, but you haven't. You've only paid for the first page. And how can I export multiple pages?

These are the products that are being used to destroy the internet. It's like selling meth at a school playground to applause. Nice UI execution I guess.

Looks to be just a basic UI to your data provider. What makes you better than all the others doing the same and selling it or open sourcing theirs?

your pricing for kw tracking seems nonsensical to me.

eg i have a site where pages rank for 1,000+ keywords it has many pages like this..

tracking for just this ONE SITE would still cost me hundreds of dollars with your plan.

add more sites, and we are paying thousands of bucks. seems like we should just roll our own serp scrapers + use proxies when pricing is out of hand like this ...

[an ex ahrefs user. ditched it after ~ 4.5 years fwiw]

I'm not sure you got the idea. You wan't be charged for "tracking", but will be for getting keywords your site ranks for. So one page (50) of keywords your site ranks for would cost around $0.05. You can do it twice a week, resulting in 8 requests/month, $0.4 total bill.

I don’t understand why people track keywords for their own sites with third party data, when Google Search Console hands over the real data for free.

Do you offer an API? My issue with most keyword tools is that their APIs suck, with tight limits that force you to only request data in bulk, and so on.

Hey!

No, and we don't plan to have an API yet. Thank you!

That's unfortunate! I would immediately pitch this tool to my SEO colleagues if it had a (fairly priced) API :)

Your logo is very similar to https://insomnia.rest/

Both are similar to the Lua programming language logo, which is probably the oldest of the three:

https://www.lua.org/

Haha you're right. Wasn't thinking about Insomnia while making a logo. Thanks for the reference!

Hi, congrats on the launch!

Are searches cached locally in my account?

I accidentally reload a page, it seems to run the search again and charge the (free and provided) balance.

Thanks

Hi. Your searches cached locally for some time, reloading the page clears the cache

Thanks. I don't want it to take away from the accomplishment this is and look forward to the tweak - it seemed to further charge me if I reloaded an existing search page.

agreed on this, caching would be very nice. i don't care if results are even a week+ out of date

It makes sense, I agree. We'll try to adjust this

What is the difference between this and Google Keyword Planner? I am asking this as someone with minimum experience in SEO

Telescope comes with more details on the data - Keyword Difficulty, Historic Search Volume, Ability to preview google results for different countries, Keywords for your specific domains and your position.

Soon we'll have backlink data and it'll open up even more details on Keywords, SERP Preview, Domain Overview

It's a much needed tool!

I saw one more project do this with a credit based system, I read in this article: https://saasgodfathers.com/article/seo-tools-without-subscri...

Thanks for the link

Looks interesting- good luck with the launch! I noticed that some keywords that I tried out in the overview page returned results, but the high level overview stated `search results : 0` - just wanted you to know :-)

This is super nice

Keyword research should absolutely be a pay per use thing instead of a SaaS. So many marketers I know use Ahrefs literally for 2 days for keyword research for a new project and cancel right after. But they still have to pay for the full month.

Exactly! I've been using Ahrefs for a couple times a months and the price is sill the same

How does the keyword data in telescope compare to the data in Ahrefs? (monthly global volume, keyword difficulty, etc)?

It's extremely close to real data just like in Ahrefs

one thing to be aware of - is SEO is a kind of a losing game. Cheap in terms of organic traffic since organic traffic costs 0.

but then once you rank higher - google will have your competitors bid on your domain / keywords. then again you will pay the google tax on your domain.

if you run a business that generates revenue from millions of low CPC's - e.g aggregation engines that sell clicks - and have millions of pages to spread traffic then SEO might be worth it.

but then adept competitors - pursue mobile apps. hardly any tax there. -- that's why many sites push you to download their app.

source - worked on an internal linking engine for an aggregator and was able to see the impact of SEO

Seems nice but going from a keyword search to my account and back, there was another charge on the credit as if a new search was done. This was I fear the charges will rise up with very minimal use.

Double checked, your search is cached for 5 minutes (that's the timeframe when new request would not happen)

It was like 30 secs the back-n-forth The same happened when the tab was left opened for a long time and chrome auto-refreshed it or something to that effect. Again, it was counted as new search. This doesn’t seem like a good use of resources or how one would expect to spend « credits » It’s like being charged for a page view

We're investigating it deeper, thanks for the feedback!

Update is live. The same request should not happen during the same session (while browser tab is open)

The background-color and content is missing when pressing the little question mark next to keyword details on the pricing page.

Also thank you for sharing and congratulations on shipping. Will definitely try this out in the coming days!

Thank you for feedback!

We'll fix this asap

Could you enlighten us what is new here?

Your marketing is quite misleading. The value of Ahrefs and SemRush is not in the research but in the representation the clickstream data and backlinks. The data you provide is available also for free in the Keyword Planner Tool, except that it isn’t visualized on fancy shadow-cdn tables. There are dozens of extensions that do all this for free.

Nightwatch.io recently launched a free keyword research and everything else this seem to do, and much more powerful suite for a fraction of the price.

It doesn’t have 3rd party data providers, and the most accurate ranking data, and I would personally not pay for anything that relies on the providers you mentioned (you can fact check how outdated their data is).

I’m affiliated with Nightwatch and the SERP Simulator Chrome Extension.

Definitely mention your relation to Nightwatch.io.

which part is free or available for a fraction of the price?

the minimum i see on the pricing page is $39/month

Click “research” in the top navigation

I don't know that much about SEO. Are you planning on adding a blog section maybe with a few article about how someone might use a tool like this to optimise their own SEO?

search SEMRush or Ahrefs on YouTube. I assume usage of this tool is comparable to other established SEO tools.

Yes, usage is comparable with other SEO tools that does Keyword Research

Very nice! Awesome landing page!

FYI, the `www` version of your domain doesn't resolve. You might want to add a redirect.

Thank you!

Oh, you're right! We'll fix this one asap

Just FYI your logo is almost identical to that of Inoreader (apart from the color).

This is something I've been looking for for a while !! What about keywords for France? and in Arabic?

Thank you!

18M+ keywords for France. Arabic is supported, but not for France

Instantly bookmarked! Great landing page, will definitely check this out. Keep up the great work :)

Thank you!

We're working right now on adding On Page + Backlinks into the app so Telescope becomes go-to solution for SEO

Do you provide keyword popularity and is it based on Google Keyword Tool data or clickstream data?

Hey!

It comes from Google Ads (different tools)

The question mark on the "KEYWORD DETAILS" on the pricing page... says... HEY ..... lol

Hi! I forgot to update it, will fix soon, thank you!

this is so cool! Much simpler than all the other tools and even I know how to use it. Awesome work!

Thank you! This is great.

Do you happen to know keyword tools that specialize on app store and play store search?

Hey!

Our data provider has data from these marketplaces and if you stick for long enough with us we will add them for sure as current solutions are sooooo expensive.

Thanks for sharing! There’s so much opportunity to build lower cost tools here. Very cool.

Thank you!

Our main goal is to make it affordable for makers like us. Paying $140\m doesn't seem like a good idea and not many has such a budged, so here is our solution

FYI - Your FAQ at the bottom of each use-case page does not expand

Thank you!

We'll try to fix this asap.

Where do you get volume and CPC data? keyword planner API?

It does come from multiple tools inside Google Ads

Awesome. All those tools are so freaking expensive.

Thank you!

How to understand the meaning of what I'm seeing on screen. I'm not versed into SEO but I'd like to. Your tool is very nice to use.

Email sign-up would be nice.

Hey! Yes, you're right. We plan to add magic link sign up and a couple of other providers

clicking FAQ from your hamburger menu button is busted fyi. good luck!

Thank you!

Hi - is there an API?

Hi, no and not planned yet

>Base your SEO strategy on higly precice and detailed data

>higly precice

looks cool do you have a trial version?

There is no trial version, but there is a "trial" balance you get after a sign up to try the application. Feel free to contact me on X (Twitter) @ilyakulhavy if you need a little more, thank you!

Are you also on LinkedIn? I stopped using X a while back and I have a bunch of questions on keywords and the site.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/keksonov/ here I'm too

@kulhavy in telegram

You don't have DMs open on Twitter, I think. I have some questions!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/keksonov/ here I'm too

@kulhavy in telegram

Dropped you a note.

awesome design!

- No option to download as excel sheet

- No option to sort by columns

Yes, you're right, it's not available just yet, but on our roadmap

Thank you for feedback!

Hey again. We've been working late hours and now columns sorting and csv export are available, thank you for your feedback!

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