Hello, this is John Locke, and today I'm answering a great question that I saw in an SEO forum,
and this question said, "Can you do SEO without paid SEO tools?"
What this person is referring to are tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz Pro, Majestic.
It could be any of a number of these or different ones as well.
I think and I believe that you can do SEO without any tools except for Google itself,
and I think in some ways you're going to have a bigger advantage over people that do use
paid tools, and let me explain exactly what I mean.
As I've explained in videos before, I think that a lot of people that use paid tools rely
on them to the extent to tell them what to do, because a lot of these tools like SEMrush,
like Ahrefs, they have what is called an SEO Audit, but I don't think it's really like
in-depth SEO Audit in that.
What it will look at are things like broken links.
It will look at things like what ... If a page has a title tag or a meta description,
and you can get information about the backlink profile of a site.
Primarily that's what these tools are for, or to look at the backlink profiles of the
competing sites.
Now, some paid tools are a little bit more in depth.
I know Moz when I used it last year, they kind of give some descriptive suggestions
of what to do on content for a page.
I don't know if it's still like that because I haven't used that particular tool in a little
while and I know that they just redid it, but your original question, can you do SEO
with no tools at all?
I think that it's going to make you do something that a lot of people don't do when they're
trying to do SEO or they're looking at audits, and it's going to make you slow down and look
at all of the evidence before you look at all of the data before you, what Google is
actually showing you, and make you come to your own conclusions.
You're going to have to get your own deductions about what is happening.
What a lot of people will do when they go to do SEO is they figure ... I see these comments
seriously every week in SEO forums ... "My site speed is faster than my competitors.
They're ... I ran it through Gtmetrix and my site is faster than theirs."
Or, "I ran it through Google Page Lightspeed or Google Lighthouse, and mine is faster than
theirs but they're outranking me."
Or the other one, "I wrote like a 5,000-word piece of content and theirs was only 2500
words.
What's the next person going to do?
Write a 10,000-word piece of content?
A 20,000-word piece of content?"
This is all doing things that we've been told will affect SEO and we're blindly doing things
because we think that they're going to have an effect.
What you're going to do, by looking at the Google results is take a longer-term look
at this.
If you open ... Let's say you're trying to rank first for a specific term and you just
Google it and you look at what the top 10 results are.
Look at each page.
Write down exactly what you see on each page.
Is there images?
Is there videos?
If there is an image or a video, what's it of?
What kind of phrases, what kind of words are mentioned?
What questions are answered in this page?
Does the design of each page suck?
Or is it good?
What sorts of things are there?
Write down each little thing that you see on each of those 10 results on page one.
Then what you're going to do is you're going to examine each of the companies, each of
the businesses that are on those top 10 pages.
Go and do research.
Google them.
Find out what the rest of their online profile looks like.
What do the rest of their representations of their business online look like?
Like their Facebook, their Twitter, their Yelp, whatever else you find out there.
Everything else that you find out there, write down everything you see.
Look for the patterns.
This is what a lot of people don't do, and I think if you only have Google, you're forced
to use your wits, and look for these patterns.
By looking for these patterns, you're going to have an advantage over people who are just
following advice that they heard, like, "Do Skyscraper content.
Make the page faster.
Do all these things.
Add Schema."
By doing these things, by altering the content of the page based on the patterns that you
are observing and writing down or making changes to the entire business site, how their online
footprint is represented overall, you might make bigger changes than people who are only
following the SEO tools and not putting more analytical thought into it.
I did a video yesterday about AI for SEO and how it is probably more than likely BS, and
I think if you only have Google, if you can't afford SEO tools, you can absolutely do SEO.
Will it take you a little bit longer?
Might take you a little bit longer, but you are going to see things that other people
are not seeing because they're relying strictly on the software.
You are looking at the actual results and drawing your own conclusions like a detective,
and that is what SEO is a lot of the time is you are playing detective.
You are trying to figure out why Google ranks something higher than something else.
I hope that answers that question.
I do have a lot of faith in you.
I think that you can do it.
My name's John Locke.
My name is Lockedown Design & SEO.
We help manufacturers get more RFQs and we're here every single day publishing.
I'd love to see you subscribe.
That's all I have for now.
Until next time, peace.