Many companies now use different tools to build SEO content. But you shouldn't rely heavily on those tools.
There are many reasons for that. Keep reading to discover why.
What Are SEO Tools?
SEO tools are what webmasters use to measure how SEO-friendly your website and content are. They provide data and signals to inform you about your website's overall health and success.
Some shared metrics in most SEO tools include Domain Authority (DA), backlinks, and keyword density. These criteria help assess technical SEO and on-page SEO (readability), respectively. For example, Yoast SEO requires sentence length, passive voice, or character numbers in SEO titles to make a blog post optimized or readable.
There are many free and paid SEO tools, such as Semrush, Ahrefs, Yoast SEO, Frase, and more.
The Importance of SEO Tools
SEO tools are essential for any website owner. Their main goal is to assess and alert your site health in SEO terms. In other words, they help search engine bots to determine whether your site is easy to read, high-quality and trusted.
And because SEO is still a vital part of content marketing, companies who wish to go online need to include SEO tools in their strategy. Those tools will let you know the rankings of your site, individual pages, and keywords. You can then measure whether your SEO strategy works well in technical and non-technical SEO terms.
Without valuing SEO and monitoring SEO factors through tools, your site will fail to get high authority on search engines. Your brand may become less competitive, find it hard to attract new leads, and even face poor online sales. Worse, search engines can devalue your site's quality and penalize it.
Why Shouldn't You Depend Too Much on SEO Tools?
We can't ignore the importance of SEO tools in content marketing. But you shouldn't depend too much on them in SEO and readability analysis. Here are some reasons:
No One Knows How the Search Engine Algorithm Works
Search engines have algorithms that retrieve data from their indexes, and deliver the best possible outcomes for a query.
Just imagine search engines as human beings and algorithms as acquired knowledge. Like humans, search engines must update algorithms to provide higher-quality results and avoid toxic content.
But even when SEO tools are upgraded accordingly, nothing ensures they can meet new requirements. It's because the search engine algorithm is a complex system that outside of Google's inner circle, no one really understands.
Search Engines Don't Define Parameters for SEO Factors as SEO Tools Did
Search engines use many ranking factors like domain or backlinks to assess your site's trust and authority. In other words, such factors directly impact your website's ranking on their search engine results pages (SERPs).
However, search engines don't define parameters for SEO criteria as SEO tools did. What does it mean? Let's look at an example to understand this case better.
According to Google Search Central, Google doesn't use keyword meta tags as a ranking signal. But in Yoast SEO analysis, this is one of the key factors to decide whether your site is SEO friendly.
Similarly, Google doesn't define a keyphrase's optimal length, the frequency of passive voice, or more. But some SEO tools include such factors in their SEO and readability analysis. Also, they set certain parameters for SEO factors.
Here's an example of how to evaluate those criteria in an SEO tool:
Source: Yoast SEO
However, when your blog posts reach SEO and readability criteria, it doesn't mean your content can stay on the top of Google or other search engines. In fact, many blog posts (e.g., from Hubspot) still stay high even when they got alerts from SEO tools.
You Can Cheat SEO Tools, Not Human
As already said, SEO tools have different criteria to measure whether your content is optimized and readable. In other words, you can win their evaluation if you understand their "game" rules and meet all requirements, regardless of your low-quality content.
But SEO tools are instruments to help search engines know your blog posts better based on SEO factors and algorithms. That is, SEO can help you attract leads. But it can fail to hold their attention and turn them to your customers if your content is poor and even fraudulent.
When detecting unusual signals in your content, visitors can report your website to Google. Besides, they can tell others about bad experiences with your site through word-of-mouth and reviews. This negatively impacts your brand.
In Closing
SEO tools are helpful as they can help your website improve SERP ranking and boost massive traffic. But please remember your ultimate goal of building SEO content: to attract and attain visitors (I mean, humans).
Meanwhile, SEO tools cannot assess whether the content is useful and educational for visitors. So, the optimized and readable content doesn't translate to good-quality content.
That's why you shouldn't depend too much on SEO tools. Instead, write for target customers first, then consider SEO factors.