SEO Tools Are Selling You Your Own Data
You pay $400/month for data Google gives you for free. Ahrefs and Semrush are brilliant businesses. That doesn't mean you need them.
The SEO tool industry is worth billions. Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, Similarweb - they've built empires.
And their core product? Data Google gives away for free, repackaged with a better UI.
What You're Actually Paying For
Keyword data: Google Keyword Planner is free. It's Google's own data. Yes, the paid tools have more features, but the source data is the same.
Ranking data: Google Search Console shows your actual rankings. Free. From Google itself. More accurate than any third-party tool.
Backlink data: Search Console shows who links to you. For competitor backlinks, you're paying for scraped data of varying accuracy.
Traffic estimates: These are guesses. Educated guesses, but guesses. Ask anyone who's compared Semrush traffic estimates to actual Analytics data. They're wildly off.
You're paying $400/month for prettier graphs and third-party estimates of data you could get for free.
The Competitor Analysis Trap
"But I need to analyze competitors!"
Do you? What are you going to do with that analysis?
You'll see they rank for keywords you don't. You'll see their backlinks. You'll see their traffic estimates.
Then what? You already knew they were competing with you. You already knew you needed better content and more authority.
The tool doesn't change the strategy. It just lets you procrastinate by "researching" instead of executing.
The Accuracy Problem
Third-party SEO tools don't have access to Google's data. They scrape. They estimate. They extrapolate.
Keyword volumes: Based on clickstream data and sampling. Often wildly wrong for niche terms.
Difficulty scores: Proprietary formulas that vary by tool. "Difficulty 45" means nothing consistent. (Same problem as Domain Authority.)
Traffic estimates: Off by 2-10x in my experience. Sometimes more.
Backlink counts: Every tool shows different numbers for the same site. Because none of them actually know.
You're making decisions based on data that's confidently wrong.
When Tools Make Sense
I'm not saying burn your subscriptions. Tools have legitimate uses:
Enterprise sites with thousands of pages: Crawling tools help manage scale.
Agency work: Clients expect reports. Tools generate reports. That's the game.
Competitive intelligence at scale: If you're tracking dozens of competitors systematically, automation helps.
But for a normal business doing SEO? You can do 90% of what matters with free tools.
The Free Stack
Google Search Console: Your actual rankings, clicks, and impressions. Straight from Google.
Google Analytics: Your actual traffic. What people actually do on your site.
Google Keyword Planner: Keyword ideas and search volume ranges. Free with an Ads account.
Screaming Frog (free tier): Crawl up to 500 URLs. Enough for most sites.
That's it. That's enough to do real SEO.
SEO tools are selling you the feeling of control. The data is secondary. Most of it is free elsewhere - or made up anyway.