As an SEO professional, you will get clients and team members asking if you can do SEO without using paid SEO tools, such as Ahrefs, SEMrush or Moz Pro, plus many more.

Yes, it is possible to do SEO without any tools except for using Google, Bing or an alternate search engine. It is a slower process as you will not access specific competitive insights. Still, you may have an advantage that some SEO professionals will not have. Today, we look at the reasons for and against using paid SEO tools.

There is the conception that people who use paid tools rely on the software to tell them what they need to do with an SEO audit; however, these tools generally only look at the link profile and on-page keyword optimisation. As an SEO professional, you will know that SEO is far more complicated than that, and you keep telling people this again and again. SEO tools are suitable for telling you what links your competitors are getting and the keywords you are ranking for. But it would help if you looked at other less obvious factors too.

If you think about it, SEO is like performing a science experiment: You form a theory “why the competition is outranking your website”, so you perform a test (a Google Search) and document what you see:

• What elements does each page have? 
• What phrases are mentioned? 
• What is the user intent of that page?

Also, search for these companies in online directories and find where they are mentioned. 

Using a “scientific method” and doing SEO for actual sites, you can conclude what works and what doesn’t. This way, you have to look at the hard evidence and draw your conclusion without relying on something software tells you to do.

You can follow all the advice, podcasts, tutorials, blogs that you want. Some of it may work, some of it won’t, but without trying it for yourself, by doing it your way with your research, will you find out how to do SEO or not how to do SEO properly, as well as whether it works or not. People can tell you how they do it; however, they may have heard it from someone who said it “works”.

You hear these familiar questions time and time again “Our Page Speed score is better than our competitors”, “our competitors’ site is not optimised as well as ours”, “We use Schema markup, and they don’t.”

“Their site has low-quality content, our Ours is so much better”, closely followed by “Why have they ranked ahead of us?” – Well, the answer is that there are many SEO factors. Those factors that move you up the rankings are the hardest to do successfully and cannot be fixed in a week as they require sustained effort over time:

• Quality content for search intent
• A robust link profile
• Great UX design
• Creating a quality product that people want
• Building a brand that people seek out

Most people look for a quick fix, but the “easy” option won’t always improve SEO; you need to use your wits and observation skills, not just fancy tools. Look at what comes up on google for a particular search, what makes that company rank, and what the rest of their online profile looks like. Draw your conclusions, and you will have an advantage over people who are just following advice that they “heard”.

Sometimes those things do make a difference, and then again, sometimes they don’t. When you have to step back and work out what’s different about the page(s) that outrank yours and make changes based on the patterns you have found, you can make more considerable changes than people who just follow SEO tools’ recommendations.

In Summary, Paid SEO tools make SEO more effortless, but it’s more important to draw your own conclusions from what happens when you implement SEO and not what people or tools tell you should happen.

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