If you’re just getting started with SEO and digital marketing, choosing the right toolset can be overwhelming. Many platforms offer extensive features—most of which you may not need right away. That’s where the Starter Plan comes in. It’s designed to provide essential SEO and marketing capabilities without the complexity or cost of full-scale enterprise tools.
In this guide, you’ll learn exactly what the Starter Plan includes, how it compares with more advanced tiers, and who it’s best suited for.
The Starter Plan is ideal for individual marketers, small business owners, and freelancers who are building their SEO or content marketing foundations. If you’re managing one website or a handful of projects, and your focus is on understanding keywords, monitoring traffic, and researching competitors, this plan includes everything you need.
Use cases include:
– Monitoring rankings for your blog or e-commerce site
– Finding low-hanging keyword opportunities
– Auditing your site for technical issues
– Benchmarking your performance against top competitors
– Tracking backlinks and referring domains
Let’s break down the key tools and limits that the Starter Plan gives you access to:
This is the tool for competitive analysis. It lets you see how any website is performing in search—including your own.
You’ll be able to:
– Analyze organic search traffic and top pages for any domain
– Uncover backlink profiles (referring domains, anchor text, etc.)
– Identify paid search ads, PPC keywords, and landing pages
– Discover lost or broken backlinks that may need attention
If you’re curious how your competitors are ranking, Site Explorer gives you the blueprint.
This is where keyword research happens. Type in a phrase, and get detailed metrics such as:
– Keyword Difficulty (KD): How hard it is to rank in the top 10 results
– Search Volume: Monthly estimated searches for that term
– Traffic Potential: How much traffic the top-ranking page for that keyword gets
– Global Volume: Search demand across different countries
More importantly, you’ll get thousands of keyword suggestions (via filters such as phrase match, questions, newly discovered, etc.), which makes it easier to build a content strategy around topics people actually search for.
Starter Plan limits include a monthly cap on keyword reports, but for a beginner or small business, it’s usually more than enough for solid topical research.
Site Audit scans your website for over 100+ SEO issues and presents them in a clear, actionable report. That includes:
– Broken links
– Redirect chains
– Missing title tags or meta descriptions
– Slow-loading pages
– Mobile-usability problems
The audit tool is extremely visual. You’ll get health scores, issue breakdowns, and trend graphs over time—ideal for basic technical SEO and maintaining site hygiene.
Starter Plan allows scheduled audits, crawl settings configuration, and exportable reports. It may limit overall crawl volume, but for most personal or SMB use cases, this won’t be a bottleneck.
Use this tool to monitor your keyword rankings over time across specific locations and devices. It tracks:
– Position trends (e.g., your keyword rose from #12 to #4 in Google)
– Visibility and average position metrics
– SERP features (are you in the featured snippet, image pack, etc.?)
Essentially, you create a list of target keywords you want to rank for, and the tool tracks them daily, weekly, or on a custom schedule. It’s especially useful for measuring the impact of new content, as well as watching how competitors move in the SERPs.
Starter Plan includes regular updates and allows you to track multiple projects.
Stay updated automatically. This feature notifies you when:
– You gain or lose backlinks
– Your brand or domain is mentioned online
– Competitor ranking changes occur
While alerts might sound like a convenience feature, they’re actually critical for proactive SEO. For example, if you suddenly lose a high-authority backlink, you can try to recover it before it permanently impacts your rankings.
All your core data—backlinks, keyword rankings, traffic, and audit health—lives here. The dashboard gives you a top-level view of your key projects, so you don’t have to jump between tools.
You can also set up widgets and custom view options to prioritize your most important insights, such as:
– Top landing pages ranked by traffic
– Most linked-to pages
– Keyword rankings over time
It’s important to know what’s not part of the Starter Plan, so you can avoid hitting a wall later. Here’s what’s excluded or limited:
– Content Explorer: Not available
– API access: Not included
– Advanced reporting customization: Limited
– Automated integrations or dashboards: Not available
– Historical search data (beyond 6 months): Restricted
These features are more suitable for teams, agencies, or power users managing dozens of clients. If your scope grows, upgrading to a higher tier unlocks additional insights and automation.
Starter Plan pricing is based primarily on:
– Monthly vs annual billing (you save with annual)
– Number of users (1 user included, additional users cost extra)
– Queries and rows (limits on number of reports and data rows per month)
Keep in mind that your usage allocation resets on a rolling basis, not exactly calendar month-end. Tools in the plan use a system of credits, so it’s a good idea to optimize by batching your research sessions.
Eventually, most Starter Plan users outgrow it. That’s normal. As your site grows and SEO matures, these signs will tell you when to consider upgrading:
– You keep hitting limits on keyword or backlink reports
– You need API integrations with internal dashboards
– You manage multiple clients or domains
– You want access to deeper historical or granular data
Think of the Starter Plan as training wheels—it’s lightweight but powerful enough to analyze competitors, research content topics, and grow your organic traffic reliably.
The Starter Plan provides a curated set of essential SEO tools designed to help small teams and individual marketers learn, analyze, and grow without being overwhelmed. With access to competitive research, keyword data, site audits, and performance tracking, it’s a powerful launchpad for entry-level SEO efforts.
If you’re focused on driving organic search growth and looking for a scalable way to build your online presence, this plan sets the foundation. Start by tracking just a few key metrics, get familiar with the tools, and iterate. From there, scaling up becomes much easier.
