SEO tools can be invaluable for optimizing your site – but if you blindly follow every recommendation they spit out, you may be doing more harm than good.
Let’s explore the biggest pitfalls of SEO tools and how to use them to genuinely benefit your site.
SEO tools are a double-edged sword for anyone involved in content creation or digital marketing.
On the one hand, they offer valuable insights that can guide your strategy, from keyword opportunities to technical optimizations. On the other hand, blindly following their recommendations can lead to serious problems.
Overoptimized content, cosmetic reporting metrics and incorrect technical advice are just some pitfalls of overreliance on SEO tools.
Worse yet, when site owners mistakenly try to optimize for these tool-specific metrics. This is something Google’s John Mueller specifically commented on recently when urging bloggers not to take shortcuts with their SEO:
“Many SEO tools have their own metrics that are tempting to optimize for (because you see a number), but ultimately, there’s no shortcut.”
I’ve worked with thousands of sites and have seen firsthand the damage that can be done when SEO tools are misused. My goal is to prevent that same damage from befalling you!
This article details some of the worst recommendations from these tools based on my own experience – recommendations that not only contradict SEO best practices but can also harm your site’s performance.
The discussion will cover more than just popular tool deficiencies. We’ll also explore how to use these tools correctly, making them a complement to your overall strategy rather than a crutch.
Finally, I’ll break down the common traps to avoid – like over-relying on automated suggestions or using data without proper context – so you can stay clear of the issues that often derail SEO efforts.
By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to get the most out of your SEO tools without falling victim to their limitations.
SEO tools never provide the full picture to bloggers
Without fail, I receive at least one panicked email a week from a blogger reporting a traffic drop. The conversation usually goes something like this:
Blogger: “Casey, my traffic is down 25% and I’m panicking here.”
Me: “Sorry to hear this. Can you tell me where you saw the drop? Are you looking in Google Search Console? Google Analytics? A blog analytics dashboard? Where do you see the drop?”
Blogger: “Uh, no. I’m looking at the Visibility Graph in [Insert SEO Tool Name here] and it’s showing a noticeable decline!”
This is a common response. I’ve gotten the same email from both novice and experienced bloggers.
The issue is one of education. Visibility tools, in general, are horribly unreliable.
These tools track a subset of keyword rankings as an aggregate, using best-guess traffic volume numbers, third-party clickstream data and their own proprietary algorithms.
The result: these tools tend to conflate all keyword rankings into one visibility number!
That’s a problem if you suddenly lose a ton of keywords in, for example, positions 50-100, which lowers the overall visibility number for the entire domain.
It’s likely those 50-100+ position keywords were not sending quality traffic in the first place. But because the blogger lost them, the visibility index has decreased, and boom, it looks like they suffered a noticeable traffic drop!
Plenty of visibility tools and metrics exist in the SEO space, and many have value. They can and should be deployed quickly to pinpoint where actual SEO research should come into play when diagnosing problems.
But as SEOs, we educate clients that these same tools should never be the final authority on matters as important as traffic drops or troubleshooting possible SEO issues.
When forming solid hypotheses and recommended action items, always prioritize first-party data in Google Analytics, Google Search Console, etc.
It’s not just these “visibility metrics” that give tools a bad name.
Many of the most popular tools available in the niche provide outdated metrics that have been debunked as a waste of time for SEO priority purposes.
One of those metrics is the popular text-to-HTML ratio metric.
Briefly defined, the metric compares the amount of text on the page to the HTML code required to display it.
This is usually expressed as a percentage, with a “higher” percentage being preferred, as that signifies more text in relation to the code.
Even though this has been repeatedly denied as a ranking factor this is still a reported audit finding on most crawling programs and popular SEO tool suites.
The same can also be said when discussing the topic of toxic links and disavow files.
Yet, Google has publicly communicated multiple times that toxic links are great for selling tools and that you would be wise to ignore such reports as they do nothing for you.
I can only speak to my experience, but I’ve only ever improved sites by removing disavow files.
Unless you actually have a links-based manual penalty that requires you to disavow links (you shouldn’t have gotten them in the first place), you should stay away from these files as well.
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Finally, another great “tool recommendation” to ignore is the purposeful non-pagination of comments.