should i use seo tools, are they necessary & worth it?

Hi, I am Praneeth.

In this blog, you will learn whether are SEO tools worth it or not after knowing the 7 pros and cons of SEO tools.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Here is a 30000-foot view of the blog.

7 Pros and Cons of SEO tools.

Here are 4 pros and 3 cons of SEO tools you should know about SEO tools in general.

4 pros.

Here is a quick overview of the pros of SEO tools.

1. Seo tools save time and effort.
2. Analyze and find amazing keyword ideas and opportunities.
3. Nail competition and find new opportunities and strategies.
4. Track growth of the site.

Let’s learn each pro or advantage in detail.

• Seo tools save time and effort with finding issues in content and website.

The number one great thing about SEO tools save you a good amount of time and effort in finding the issues on your website.

What issues you might be wondering?

Well, I am talking about,

1. Missing title and meta descriptions issues.
2. Duplicate pages.
3. Slow loading pages.
4. Small text or low content pages.
5. Broken links.
6. Spammy links.
7. Bad site structure.
8. Keyword cannibalization.
9. On-page SEO.

There are a lot of SEO tools that can come in handy for you with these works.

If you don’t want to use SEO tools then it’s going to be hard to get these things done for you.

With running a website it is common to have these issues on your website but if they are not treated and corrected on your website it might lead to a bad user experience on your website which can hurt your rankings.

So the number 1 advantage of SEO tool is that it saves a lot of your time and effort in finding and fixing the issues on your website.

• Analyze and find amazing keyword ideas & opportunities.

Another benefit of SEO tools is that you can find excellent keyword ideas.

Let’s take an example of the SEO tool Ubersuggest & Answer the public [my favorite keyword tool].

Anyways,

By using these keyword tools you can find excellent keyword ideas for your niche keyword.

Let’s say, For example,

Graphic design is your niche keyword

When you search for this term in the tools I mentioned earlier.

In Ubersuggest. You can find excellent keyword ideas of the terms,

1. You can find keyword trends.
2. You can find the CPC and clicks value.
3. You can find questions.
4. You can find Prepositions.
5. You can find similar terms.
6. You can find comparisons.

Here is a screenshot.

It’s just endless,

The same with keyword tool AnswerThePublic.

This tool helps you find questions people are asking and searching for on forums and on google for the term you type.

Let’s take the example of the graphic design keywords in the tool.

You get lots of ideas.

This is another great benefit of SEO tools that you can find amazing keyword ideas for your blog.

You never know which keyword of your blog might turn into a golden keyword for your online business.

• Nail competition/competitors, strategies, and techniques.

With SEO tools you can use to direct your competition websites.

The interesting thing about most keyword tools is that you can find some excellent data about your competition and competition websites through SEO tools,

You can find,

1. Their backlink data.
2. Their top pages.
3. Their most shared pages.
4. The keywords they are ranking for on google.
5. The kind of content they publish targeting the keywords types.
6. Their traffic sources.
7. Their strategies and techniques.

It is just overwhelming to see the data you can get from these SEO tools by inserting your competition into the tools.

You can find some amazing insights about your competition in your niche through these tools.

You can know what terms your competitors are ranking for, include those terms along with terms they have not included in their content which you can include, and with better content outrank them.

You can use their backlinks data report to find opportunities where you can get a link to your content by sending email messages to people.

It is just awesome as to what you can do with the data of the competition.

You can also target totally different types of keywords by finding content gaps in your niche which your competition has not figured out yet by doing different research and be the first one to enjoy the fruit.

• You can track the growth of your website.

This one is again another advantage of SEO tools.

You can find and keep an eye on your website’s growth in search engines.

Mainly tools like,

1. Google analytics.
2. Google search console.
3. Seo tools.

You can keep an eye on and track the growth of your website.

You can keep an eye on your backlink profile.

You can keep an eye on keywords and queries you rank for on google, where you rank for, which country you are ranking for.

You can obviously also keep eye on the health of your website internal links and external links.

You can regularly find and fix important errors on your website.

It is just another great way to know and keep an eye on your handwork,

You can also track the growth of your competition websites knowing their rankings, traffic sources, and backlinks profile.

It’s nice.

With that let’s see and understand the 3 cons of SEO tools.

3 Cons.

Here is an overview of the 3 cons or disadvantages of SEO tools.

1. They are demotivating for beginners.
2. They are inaccurate.
3. They are really expensive.

Let’s learn about the cons or disadvantages of using SEO tools in detail.

• They are demotivating for beginners.

With SEO tools the problem is that.

If you are a newbie in the SEO industry.

It’s going to be a lot confusing and demotivating for beginners in this SEO industry.

If they have subscribed to these SEO tools and SEO gurus, the standards which every toolset for themselves.

It is going to be hard for beginners to survive.

Well, I am talking about,

• Seo metrics these tools use like Domain, Page authority or Domain rating or URL rating, etc.

What you should know that these are all made-up things these tools created to analyze the website’s backlink profile and ability to rank in google.

Google clearly stated that these metrics do not influence ranking in search engines.

For example,

Here is a screenshot of 2 blogs one with high domain authority which Moz SEO tool created and how they are performing on search engines.

Screenshot.

If the definition of the domain authority is the higher the number the higher the rankings in google.

It is not reflecting the same here.

So being a beginner in the SEO industry.

People don’t understand that these SEO metrics that these tools created as benchmarks for the websites are not at all worth it.

They don’t influence rankings in search engines.

Rather they influence new bloggers and SEO’s get demotivated looking at their SEO metrics and cause people to go mad in looking at increasing their SEO metrics which is simply useless and waste a lot of people’s time.

It is my personal story, in the initial days when I started blogging I got access to this Ubersuggest and it was showing their tool’s score which was 3 out of 100.

I was terrified, even after working on the blog for a month with posting content regularly.

I went crazy in doing those bad SEO practices for more links to my website and increase my Ubersuggest SEO metric.

Later I realized that these metrics are all made up and they don’t influence your rankings in google rather doing those shady SEO practices like,

1. Building backlinks in comments.
2. Building backlinks in the directory.
3. Building backlinks in forums.

It was really stupid and hurt my blog more.

So, don’t focus on these metrics.

• They are inaccurate.

Another big disadvantage of SEO tools mainly keyword research tools is that they are simply inaccurate.

If they were accurate they should be giving information from the data on google but they don’t.

Google doesn’t share its rankings data, keywords data with anyone.

The problem with these SEO tools is that it is all made up by the company of the tool.

With inaccuracy, I am referring to things like,

1. Search volume of keywords.
2. Search traffic of keywords to blogs.
3. Keyword difficulty.
4. Backlinks profile.
5. Things that are not a problem on the website but appear as a big problem in tools.

Let’s talk about keyword search volume and difficulty first.

Remember I have only mentioned that SEO tools help you with knowing and giving you amazing keyword ideas and opportunities.

But most people use SEO tools many keyword tools and decide which keywords to target and go after.

It is simply a disaster.

These SEO tools are all made up.

The keywords that these tools generate are scraped from search engines, forums, and other places.

But the metrics are stupid.

They just suck.

Many people think and target keywords in SEO tools by filtering on keyword difficulty and volume basis which both are screwed up metrics.

The real data of the search volume of keywords is with google and google does not share it with third party companies like these SEO tools.

Because people are searching on google so google keeps the data with itself.

Another big problem with keyword tools is the difficulty scores.

The SEO tools especially keyword tools give you a rough value of difficulty.

Most of these tools base their keyword difficulty metric on factors only,

1. Backlinks.
2. Authority of the websites.

Look, google uses 200 different ranking factors and backlinks are just one of them.

Obviously, you know the authority of the websites means the metrics these tools created as benchmarks to compare different websites like Ahrefs has Domain rating and Moz have Domain authority.

The tools do not consider other important factors of the keywords such as,

1. Search intent.
2. User experience.
3. Content quality.

There are over 200 different ranking factors Google uses to rank websites in google, click here to learn them all.

Learn more about keyword research and search intent here.

Another problem with SEO tools, in general, is that in the backlink profile of the website,

They only give you an estimate of the backlinks of the website.

1. They don’t consider whether the backlinks are spammy or natural.
2. They don’t consider whether the backlinks are indexed in Google or not.

The problem with this thing is that you will end up asking for links to other websites that your competitors built from without knowing whether the links are indexed in google or not or without knowing the quality of the link.

It is not just about links actually.

Backlinks are just a way to let google know that people like your content like a vote.

They are just a way to give a signal to Google that people are liking this content, lets rank it higher so that people can find it easier.

If you build this artificially, you might end up having a penalty from google like a panda or penguin.

These SEO tools overly emphasize the importance of backlinks.

Another last problem with tools is that while content audits of the website, tools are built in a strict way to find out the websites on different factors and give you a number as a health of your website without understanding the context.

If you have a blog on a keyword which you are written only 1000 words as it is a small topic and nothing to answer much in that,

The tool might say that the particular page has less content and ask you to fix it.

This is quite frustrating for people when you see something as good not a big problem using common sense but these tools irritate you by letting you know that they are problems because they are designed in such a way.

The tools don’t understand the context.

• SEO tools are very expensive.

These SEO tools like,

1. Ahrefs.
2. Semrush.
3. Moz.

These industry-standard tools cost around 100 USD a month.

Considering its ROI it might seem like they are really very costly, as they are actually very costly.

The sad thing about this is the whole industry goes after these tools naming the best in the business.

This creates social pressure for bloggers and SEOs to purchase these tools as their gurus and other people in the business are using it and recommending it.

So with that said, lets finally understand the thing,

Are SEO tools worth it, should you use them?

It is a tricky question.

There are various factors involved.

Because you are dealing with something called SEO which is a slow long term game.

I feel that SEO tools are worth it.

But you must be very careful about using the tools.

Seo tools will help you in many ways if used correctly,

Seo tools are great opportunities to help you succeed in blogging and your online business.

There are many SEO tools that offer free trails like,

1. SEMrush.
2. Moz.
3. Mangools.

You can sign up for their free trials and see how it is with your SEO strategy.

Because SEO is a long-term game it might feel to be not worth it to keep on subscribing to these tools at some point in time in your SEO campaign as you can feel it is not adding any additional value to your business.

So be very practical and use only keywords you feel are worth it after trying different tools for free trials.

SEO tools can give you a direction but cannot get you to reach the destination, you need to do a lot of things even after buying the tools.

You need to do these competition analyses, backlink analysis, and keep on looking for new opportunities in these tools all by yourself.

SEO tools are not something you invest and the SEO of your website is done, SEO is a lot more than tools.

• Read, is SEO worth it?
• Read, advantages and disadvantages of google.
• Read, Pros, and cons of keyword research.
• Read, SEO tools complete list you need.

Ending remarks.

There you go I have answered the most important question in the SEO industry.

Are SEO tools worth it?

Comment down what you think about SEO tools below.

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Read my other blogs,

• Advantages and disadvantages of blogging.
• Advantages and disadvantages of Tumblr.
• Pros and cons of keyword research.

I will catch you next time,

Till then, keep learning and keep growing.