I’ve been in the digital marketing space in some way or another since the late 1990s. In 2010, I dove into learning the art of search engine optimization (SEO).
Over the years the industry has changed quite a bit. Tools, aiming to help with the optimization efforts, come and go. But the real tool is the mind.
I’ve found that many tools find some crazy inane stuff that doesn’t really matter to the optimization. But because they are built in a certain way, they pick up everything. It’s up to the website owner or optimizer to evaluate what these tools are outputting and decide if it makes send to incorporate.
Not All Tools Are Created Equal
I’ve tried so many different tools over the past 10+ years doing SEO. Some are good, but others are terrible.
Every tool likes to bill itself as the be-all-end-all for a particular application in SEO, but you know what? I don’t care how good it is, it’s the complete answer to every project.
I recently signed up for SEMrush, which is an SEO tool that has its own crawled index of web pages. It’s expensive, but it’s full featured. Though even SEMrush isn’t the end of the road for tools, in my opinion.
I also use a tool called NightWatch, that does similar rank tracking and auditing that SEMrush does, but it’s easier to use. It’s also much less expensive.
I like both these tools for several reasons, but the main one is that they aren’t tied to a suite of business applications, which they are trying to push.
Enter All-In-One, We Can Do Everything For You, Tools
Companies like HubSpot, are great business intelligence apps. They have a great amount of value, but they also try to be everything for their customers. Because of this, some of their tools are lacking. One of them is their SEO auditing too.
I’ve run tests against the HubSpot SEO tool in SEMrush and NightWatch and have found that many of the issues that it points out are either minor issues (they claim are much more drastic) or non-issues all together, based on what the SEO community has discussed.
I’m not a big fan of tools that have vested interests in more than one area. I find them disingenuous and highly suspect.
So What Is A Person To Do?
The most important thing to do is not trust one tool solely for your online business decisions. Also, utilize the free trials and freemium features that most of these advanced tools have to your advantage and cross-check what you are seeing in one tool with another.
Work with an SEO agency, if your budget allows for it, and have them use their licenses to these advance tools to help you parse what you need to do to rank higher and get more click-throughs on the search engines.
If you’re in the market for a Digital Marketing/SEO agency give Goldstein Media a call. Click here to setup a 30 minute FREE consultation.
Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash
