What the tool does
It gives an overview of a market: which searches your competitors appear on, which pages bring them people, what they buy advertising on. It is the most effective starting point for a content plan, because it shows the subjects that carry weight and those nobody handles properly.
It also serves for technical site checks, rank tracking and monitoring inbound links. That functional breadth is its main argument: one subscription replaces three tools.
How to read its figures
This is the point we insist on setting out at once, because it is a source of disappointment. Search volumes and estimated traffic are models, not measurements. They rest on samples and extrapolations, and the gap with reality can be large, in either direction.
In practice: a competitor’s estimated traffic is not their traffic. A monthly search volume is not a number of promised visits. Those figures serve to compare and to rank, which they do very well. They do not serve to build a revenue forecast, which people nonetheless do.
For your own data, Search Console is free and tells the truth. That is always where to start.
On the cost
The subscription is one of the most expensive on the market and is justified by regular use, not by a quarterly look. For a one-off need, better to entrust the analysis to a supplier who already holds the licence than to subscribe for a month.
