Hey, check it out, our very own Greg Gifford is on his soapbox again over at Search Engine Land. The topic of the rant? Letting online SEO tools do all the work for you, instead of using them to help you do SEO work.
It’s time to rage against the machine, folks. The computer machine, that is, because the simple truth is that you can’t get computers to think like a real person. Yeah, we know, we’ve seen Spielberg’s A.I., too, but that’s not the same thing. We’re talking about problem-solving skills that require external reasoning and logic that an online SEO tool just isn’t designed to handle.
Most SEO tools are web-based, and they gather data & numbers…which then need to be interpreted. For example, Trust Flow is a popular tool that estimates the quality of your website’s link score based on all the links from other sites, but it doesn’t know how to factor for local SEO. So you might get a low Trust Flow score if you have a lot of links from hyper-local sites, but the seasoned local SEO pro knows better. A hyper-local site (with a low domain authority) is actually GREAT for local visibility.
See what we mean? Gotta stay one step ahead of those machines, which means you can’t rely on them to do SEO for you.
Check out the rest of the article here.
