Why You Should Not Trust SEO Software/Tools!

SEO is in turmoil; notwithstanding there is a high volume of SEO software that continues to thrive on. Neither the demand for nor does the supply of such SEO software ever seem to be declining. They are being sold like hotcakes. One can see their advertisement almost everywhere on the internet. This reminds of many actors whose popularity dim after some time; they turn back to their PR agencies seeking their help in making front page news. Analogously, SEO agencies behave the same at times. They do everything and anything to sell their low valued software/tools, and thereby enhance the number of subscribers. If black hat SEO is illegal, isn’t selling such software/tool illegal too? Perhaps, one of the reasons why dying industry raises over $100 million in 2012! I know, SEJ could not agree any more.  

Sponsored search results on Google

Unfortunately, customers in general believe these software/tools as the handiest for all-in-one SEO audits. Seems anomalous, when someone brags – “Get High Rankings With This Tool.” Moreover, there are companies who don’t make such a tall claim, but they bid high on Google, for they know there is a high demand for key phrases such as ‘SEO Software’.  

May be, such software/tools fetch a report that Google webmaster does not show. However, I’m not a big fan of them unless they audit both like a human and Google. Yes, human, because your audience is human, and Google, because organic search results matter, don’t they? For Google, set up a webmaster account, and for human, use your IQ. 

Strange as it sounds, many of us trust high on the hocus-pocus report pulled from software/tool showing title characters, H1 tags, canonicals, backlink quality, and other SEO fiddle-faddle.  

Making a Google friendly website is indeed a very good practice, but going by over-simplified and unsolicited SEO audits, and fixing all shitty errors is awful tommyrot. Practically, we see -how agencies/firms without understanding a CMS and code complexity of a website export a hokey-pokey report that scares anybody as if their website is fucking crap.  

 A sample audit report of mashable.com from Screaming Frog is pulled. You can check if you use this tool, or see the above screenshot

Unless you go back to the pre-semantic search era a decade back or have no clue how a website is being linked back, pulling information about hundreds and thousands of URLs in a nice graphic pdf/xls using any link checker/link automation tool may not eliminate the core issue inherently present in most of the websites. Unsure, if such report helps anyone deploy fruitful “backlink strategy" in outranking their organic competitors! Frankly speaking, this is all SEO fluff.

Mashable.com backlinks (via ahrefs.com)

As a matter of fact, Google has their algorithm that determines whether backlinks are good quality or poor quality, and whether or not your backlinks are proportional to a website traffic and overall content base.  

Good content is anything which is useful for the audience. Many people mistakenly think that writing unique content which passes Copyscape is good content. Well, it’s irrelevant. That’s not a clear indicator of whether that piece of content is good or not.  

Automation helps a lot in the software industry; however, I’m not a big fan of such automation in SEO. Software/tools scan every bits and pieces of a website from a crawler perspective, and shows tons of errors that don’t sometimes make sense. All that is shown may not be as prominent as many SEO professionals consider. Sometimes, such audits may cause more harm than good in today’s semantic and personalized search environment. Be advised to pick through the fluff to find the Tic-Tac of truth.  

It’s that “invisible algorithmic editing of the web” that is rewriting the rules of SEO. Watch out the video and see how "search" is changing fast, and how personalized search results are rewriting the rules.    

Google has already filed a patent long back that allows a human-review element to their search results. Let optimization (aka SEO) has human elements, for no tool ever replicate the “findings” a human does. The game has changed. Ranking has become irrelevant, and the whole keywords ecosystem is collapsing. So, avoid subscribing to any software/tools as much as you can. 

All you require a human approach more than any SEO software/tool to separate the sheep from the goats. I absolutely agree with +DavidKutcher who says, "Focus your efforts on the people that will be reading your website, leaving comments, sharing your posts, and buying your products. Stop targeting a computer that is governed by algorithms. It will not be reading your website, leaving comments, sharing your posts, or buying your products."