SEO tools don’t do SEO

The average software company has 1.5 more SEO tools than they use. Obviously a completely fictitious and ridiculous statistic, but when it comes to SEO, it’s become fashionable to talk utter crap.

Last week I had a call with a company interested in our SEO services. We discussed the problem that they’re facing, and they offered to send me data from their SEO tools. The email contained exported data from five different tools and services – not including the exports from Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.

I won’t get into which tools and services they used, and I’ll resist the urge to highlight the discrepancies between the data. The point is that there was a reason for them using a total of seven different services. Because of the impact of (not provided) – click here to see how to deal with (not provided) – they decided that they needed more actionable data.

Now most SEO tools excel when it comes to generating data, but with a diminishing scale that goes from quantity to quality:

This, in a nutshell, is the problem with most SEO tools. They all provide lots of data, a few of them provide useful data, and a very small number provide actionable data. I won’t even get into their accuracy here.

The one thing that SEOs are not short of is data.

Two or three years ago, anyone with an Analytics account could easily see which keywords were sending visitors, how many of them, and to which pages. Now that the keywords are gone, Analytics provides us with little more than how many visitors come from the engines, and to which pages.

And so we turn to tools. And with many costing less than a cup of Starbucks “coffee” a day, before you know it, you’re swimming in data.

A lot of data.

Quantity of visitors, keyword guesstimates, pages viewed, organic ranking in different geographic zones, domain authority, page authority, historical rank, trends, domain authority, link authority, authority authority and much more.

Eugh.

Yet none of these tools will provide you with anything more than data. In the right hands, this data can be invaluable. In the wrong hands, at best it is rendered meaningless, at worst it could be damaging.

One example to illustrate the point: We use the excellent ahrefs backlink checker. In the last month I’ve spoken with two people who both demonstrated the same roller-coaster cycle of SEO terror & calm:

PANIC: 

Look at what’s happening to our links! They’ve gone! It must be negative SEO!

CALM:

Oh – that was for pages. The graph for actual domains linking to us is much better:

PANIC:

But look! Look at the main anchor phrases for our links! That’s an SEO disaster!

CALM:

Ah but wait! Our CTLDs Distribution and Top Referring TLDs paint a far healthier picture:

PANIC:

And so on.

SEO tools are only as useful as the work that they are used for. They are as unlikely to produce results as any other set of professional tools left to gather dust, or used clumsily in the hands of an amateur.

One last example. I recently decided that I wanted to work a little on my lack of creativity.

80 days ago I bought a book called “You can draw in 30 days“. I can’t. Probably because I haven’t started to read it.

I also bought a book called “Star Wars Origami“, but so far no origami adorn my office, for the same reason.

SEO tools are a very poor and highly ineffective substitute for real SEO.

Update:

I should mention that this is not in any way an attack on most SEO tools. We are currently using Moz, Raven Tools, ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Wordtracker, Google Webmaster Tools, agencymetrics and more. They are all excellent tools – in the right hands.