Pro tip: That $400 SEO audit tool I was sure was a scam actually found 3 things I'd missed for 6 months

I ignored it for two months because the free trial gave me nothing useful, but after my site dropped 50% in traffic I caved and the crawl data pointed out a redirect loop I swear I fixed back in March, so has anyone else had a tool they hated turn out to be the answer?

3 comments

3 Comments

elliot_harris251mo ago

@the_richard's buddy James story is exactly why I think these tools are overhyped. One missed redirect or broken link and people act like the software saved their business, when really they just got lucky it caught one thing they could've found with a free Screaming Frog crawl. Half the time these audits flag a bunch of minor junk that doesn't matter, and you waste more time chasing false alarms than you would fixing the actual problem yourself.

the_richard2mo ago

Bought a similar tool and my buddy James said it was a waste of cash so I almost refunded it. Then his ecom site tanked overnight and he spent a whole weekend digging through the crawl logs himself before giving in. Turned out the tool flagged a broken image link that was causing his entire product page to hang on mobile. He called me at 2am to say I owed him an apology for convincing him not to refund it.

thompson.xena12d ago

elliot_harris25 I get what you mean about the minor junk thing. I had a similar problem once where a tool kept flagging some "missing alt text" on like 200 thumbnails. Spent a whole afternoon fixing it, and my traffic didn't move a single point. But then my wife's little recipe blog got hit by a bad update from a plugin she used. The same tool caught a weird 302 redirect that was sending all her traffic to a 404 page. She was about to delete the whole site out of frustration. That one alert saved her weekend of crying into her laptop. So yeah, sometimes its mostly noise, but that one real catch can make all the little false alarms worth it. Ever had a tool catch something tiny that turned into a huge mess?