I canceled my SEMrush subscription this week. If you don't know what that is, it's an SEO tool that tells you what keywords your website ranks for, what your competitors are doing, how your site is performing in Google, etc. If you want to get good Google rankings, it's great. It's also expensive. I was on the lowest plan + local (local search is my priority), and I was paying $208/mo.
"It's a business expense," I told myself. "I need the data." And I did need the data. But I didn't need $208/mo worth of data.
Then I found DataForSEO.
DataForSEO is a pay-per-use API. Instead of paying a flat monthly fee for a crap ton of features you don't actually use, you just pay for the specific data you actually need. Keyword rankings? A fraction of a cent per query. Search volumes? Same thing. SERP tracking? Pennies.
I had my AI bot Fred build me a custom SEO dashboard that pulls from DataForSEO. It tracks my keywords, monitors my competitors, and shows me everything I actually care about. The stuff I was paying SEMrush $208/mo to see? I'm getting it now for under $10/mo.
That's not a typo. Ten. One-zero.
Now, is it better than SEMrush at everything? No. SEMrush has 800 employees and 15 years of data. Their backlink database is massive. If you're a massive corporation doing serious link building, you might need something like that.
But I'm a small business owner who needs to know if I'm showing up in local search and what my competitors are doing. DataForSEO gives me that for 5% of the cost.
The trick is you need something to actually use the API. It's not a slick UI you log into. It's raw data. That's where having an AI agent comes in handy. Fred built the whole thing for me in a few hours.
The chances of me being able to do any of this without my bot are zero. I'm not technical. I didn't even know what an API call was. I've never written a line of code. I didn't even know what the terminal on my Mac was until a few months ago. Just talk to the AI like you're brainstorming with a really smart friend and it'll tell you exactly what to do. I tell mine this all the time: "Explain it to me like I'm dumb. Go step by step and tell me exactly what to do. Assume I know nothing."
Also, if you're using OpenClaw, it'll just do it all for you without you having to sit there and babysit it. But I highly recommend putting OpenClaw on another computer that is not connected to any of your personal stuff. I have mine running on a cheap old $200 ThinkPad.
But man, $208/mo to under ten bucks a month? I'm still in shock.
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