Hike SEO Review: Ranking On Google Made Simple

What Is Hike SEO?

One of Hike’s propositions is that it’s the SEO solution for non-SEO workers. You can assign anyone in your organization to work with Hike and get the same results as you would when you hire an SEO expert. 

Or at least, that’s what the company claims.

If the product lives up to its promise, this would be the ideal solution for small- to medium-sized businesses that don’t have the resources to work with SEO professionals. 

Hike SEO is a relatively new company. The idea for the company only came to its founders, Kieran Headley and Andrew Allen, back in 2018.

Hike SEO Features

Before we discuss Hike SEO’s features, it’s worth noting that there are four products under the Hike banner. There’s Hike SEO and Hike Local SEO which come bundled. 

Then there’s Hike Agency, a software that lets you build, sell, and deliver SEO packages to clients without the need for experienced staff.

Finally, you have Hike Done for You, where you basically hire the Hike team to manage your SEO.

Much of our focus throughout this post will be on Hike SEO.

So what features can you expect from Hike SEO?

Hike SEO is divided into five sections with each one addressing a specific SEO need.

Strategy

The strategy section contains four essential SEO tools. This is where you could discover new keywords, build a sitemap, optimize your content, and research your competition.

Keyword Ideas

The Keyword Ideas tool lets you enter any seed term (your niche or target keyword). It will then provide a list of suggestions you could use to optimize your pages.

Sitemap

Adding a page to a sitemap can be daunting especially if you’ve never done it before. With the Sitemap tool, however, you can add a page to your sitemap in just a few clicks.

Content

The Content tool helps you find new topics for your content. It grabs inspiration from three sources: Google long-tail keywords, Twitter, and YouTube. So you can expect to find a diverse set of topics for your next post.

Competition

Here you can check your competition’s ranking keywords, traffic stats, backlinks, and content ideas. This tool also shows you metrics that make it easier to understand how well they’re performing.

Action

The Action section is what makes Hike SEO amazing for rookie online marketers. Here, you can set how many hours you can commit to improving your SEO. 

Hike SEO will then create a task list along with instructions on how you could accomplish them. 

There’s also an estimate on how long each task will take to finish. More on this feature later.

Local SEO

We mentioned earlier that there’s another tool bundled with Hike SEO and that’s Local SEO.

This is a section where you could manage your Google My Business account from within Hike SEO. You’ll need to connect your account for this to work.

From here, you can check your reviews and posts. The Directories feature lets you add your location so Hike SEO can properly optimize your site for the city or country that you set.

There’s also a feature called Rankings where you can add local keywords that you plan to target.

Note: Hike SEO only does local SEO for the UK, US, and Canada. But they will add more locations soon.

Backlinks

There are four backlink research tools available for users. And just like all the tools that come with Hike SEO, they are really easy to use.

Your Backlinks

As the name implies, Your Backlinks show you all links that point to your site. It even tells you the domain authority of the referring domain. You can also see disavowed links and links lost.

Journalistic Outreach

This is a link building tool that helps you find opportunities from journalists. It uses HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Twitter to find leads. Just enter your keyword and Hike SEO will find interview requests related to it.

Link Opportunities

Hike SEO will continue searching the web to find backlinks opportunities for your domain. Once it finds them, it will display then under Link Opportunities.

Note: As of this writing, Hike SEO did not find opportunities for the domain we entered. Maybe you will fare better.

Backlink Healthcheck

Backlink Healthcheck is a new feature that will help you audit your backlinks. It shows you backlinks that are potentially dangerous based on their SEO score. You can then decide if you want to keep the backlinks or disavow them. 

When you’re done going through the list, you can export the disavow file and upload it to Google.

Reporting

You can generate two types of reports: Traffic and Keywords. Traffic is where you could see how many views you’re getting. It uses Google Analytics data so you’ll need to connect yours for it to work.

Keywords will tell you where your pages rank in the SERPs for your target keyword. It will also compare it to your previous positions (Last Week and Last Month) so you know if your position improved over time. 

It will also give you the search volume of every keyword you’re tracking.

How to Use Hike SEO

Here is an image of Hike SEO’s main dashboard. From here, you’ll be able to see all your options and possible starting points.

We suggest that you use the guide under Get Started Here. It will walk you through the process of setting up your Hike SEO account.

But you can also use the sidebar to access all the features we mentioned earlier. You can update your account from there too.

Step 1: Add a Website

Access the Settings menu located in the sidebar. 

Under Account Settings, click Website Settings.

You will then be redirected to a page where you can add your domain.

Step 2: Find Keywords

Open the sidebar and click Strategy to reveal its subcategories. Click Keyword Ideas. Use the empty field to enter a seed keyword and click Get Suggestions.

Once the results are in, you can go through the list of keyword suggestions. There are filters you could use to narrow down the results. Clicking the plus icon on the right-hand side of the results will add the selected keyword to your list.

Step 3: Check Actions

Now that you’ve set your keywords, Hike SEO can now recommend actions that will help you optimize your site. So head on over to Actions to find tasks you need to accomplish.

Clicking a specific task will expand the selection and reveal explanations on what you need to do, why it’s important, and how to make the needed changes.

Just read the instructions given and click the call-to-action button. This will bring you to another page where you can apply the changes.

You can use the filter options to arrange the list by priority so you tackle the most important updates first.

Hike SEO does a great job of walking you through every task so almost anyone can do it regardless of whether they know SEO or not.

Step 4: Backlinks

After you’re through with Actions, you might want to check your backlinks — just so you know that you’re not getting spammy ones. You can also use this opportunity to get high-quality backlinks from reputable sources.

Open Your Backlinks from the sidebar. You should see a list of domains with links going to your pages.

If you’ve used other backlink checkers in the past, you’ll notice that Hike SEO’s layout is anything like them. It’s much cleaner and user-friendly. You’ll see 

There are several options in the upper-right hand side of the tool. Clicking any one of them will reveal more data. 

Domain Authority gives you a closer look at your current Trust Flow and Citation Flow. The field will continue to populate as time goes by.

The Disavowed Links is where you go to look at all the links you placed on your disavowed list. At the moment, though, this role is being fulfilled by Backlink Healthcheck.

The View Lost button will open a page that looks similar to the Your Backlinks dashboard. Only this time, you’ll find a list of backlinks that no longer point to your domain.

Next, you’d want to check Journalist Outreach. Add a keyword that you want to track. Once you’re finished, you should see the tool populate with requests from HARO and Twitter. 

It’s a great way of consolidating requests from these two sources. But to be honest, in trying the feature, we found that the results can be hit-or-miss. It will all depend on the keyword you entered. 

Link Opportunities is where you go if you want to find other domains that could link back to you. As with Journalist Outreach, though, your mileage may vary depending on what your target keywords are.

Backlink Healthcheck is where you go to inspect the quality of the backlinks you’ve received. Here’s how it works.

Right next to every domain is a number. These numbers are the authority score. You want the domains to have a high score. But keep in mind that just because a score is low doesn’t automatically mean that the source is bad. So Hike SEO encourages you to check each domain and see if they’re spammy or not.

After that, you can choose to keep the page or disavow it.

After you’ve gone through the list, you can export the list and upload it yourself to Google or you could use the Upload Disavow button.

Step 5: Create a Report

Creating a report is so easy. Just go to Reports and select Traffic or Keywords. 

From there, click Export to open the drop-down menu. Specify if you want the report to be in PDF or CSV format. 

It’s that easy.

Your report would look something like this:

Just to the side, you’ll find additional buttons. 

The graph (purple button) lets you check the historical data of the keyword. The rocket (yellow button) lets you check the top ten websites for the keyword.

Clicking Settings lets you manage your keywords.

Step 6: Configure the Rest of Your Campaign

From here on out, you could go and update the rest of your campaigns. We suggest that you start connecting your Google accounts (Analytics and My Business) to get the most data out of Hike SEO.

You can also use Sitemap to create, well, a sitemap for your domain. However, we suggest only doing so after you managed to publish enough pages to make it worthwhile.

This would also be a good time to research your competitors or come up with blog post ideas. 

Hike SEO Pricing

As you may have realized by now that Hike loves keeping things simple. And that is also the case with their pricing.

They only have one plan. And therefore, Hike SEO only has one price.

A month-long subscription will cost $59.99 but if you subscribe to an annual plan, it will go down to $44.99 ($540 billed every 12 months).

There is no free trial but they do offer a 7-day money-back guarantee.

If you’re curious, the Hike SEO Agency software (one of Hike’s other products) costs $44.99/month.

Hike SEO Review: Pros and Cons

While there are lots of things to like about Hike SEO, it’s definitely not for everybody. And the only way you’ll know if this product is right for you is by looking at all the pros and cons of Hike SEO.

Let’s take a closer look at its advantages and disadvantages, shall we?

If this is your first time using an SEO tool, then there’s no need for anxiety. Hike SEO does a pretty good job of making SEO accessible for those with little to no experience.

There are clear instructions on how to accomplish all the tasks needed to optimize your site for Google and other search engines.

If you’re data-driven, you might find Hike’s keyword tool a bit lacking. There aren’t a lot of entries in the results and the metrics are as basic as they come. It has search volume and priority — that’s about it.

Compared to other tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush, you’re not getting the same data quality which is a bummer.

Navigating through the site shouldn’t be a problem for anyone. To be honest, there’s nothing in there that would confuse users. Everything is and presented in a way that’s easy to understand.

It’s a refreshing take on the cluttered mess that some SEO tools have become.

We know — we’ve praised Hike SEO earlier for keeping their pricing simple. And for most of you, that actually works. But we know SEOs work with different budgets.

For those willing to sacrifice features for a less expensive plan, you’re out of luck. The same goes for those who would pay more for additional features.

The Hike team really wants you to succeed using their tool. And so they go out of their way to make themselves available to you.

Not only do they have a live chat feature, but you also have the company’s co-founders manning the lines. And yes, you can message them at any time.

There’s also a 30-minute onboarding process where a Hike representative would walk you through all of the product’s features.

Well, maybe “unnecessary” is a bit rough of a term to use. But they just don’t add that much value. Take Journalist Outreach as an example.

It compiles interview requests in exchange for backlinks from HARO and Twitter. And while it’s cool that you get to access them from within Hike, HARO and Twitter are free to use.

So if you’re subscribing to Hike for this specific feature, then you’re paying for something that you can access for free.