Ask HN: Why people pay SEO tools?

1 points by fjcero 6 years ago | 3 comments

I've been in a project that they need to improve the website and keep coming with the SEO importance.

Beyond I believe advertising is broken right now, I am a developer that feels confident with tools like Lighthouse and passing the basic checks will do the trick.

But it seems there is more behind. One of the major existential doubts I have is: Why are so many companies doing paid backlink checks and stealing money to the customers?

Do exist an Open Source initiative to give some clarity to this problem and reduce unnecessary costs and break the spending flywheel for normal users/companies?

bobblywobbles 6 years ago |

Backlinks are one of the stronger ways to improve SEO, and there's a million things you can talk about but I've been out of the website space for about a year but a good resource to go to is Google pagespeed insights.

Beyond backlinks, you would do good to implement fast load times and cache the resources that you can. Once you max out technically, focus on being honest and get honest people talking about your product.

fjcero 6 years ago | |

Agree completely with this. This is what I’m trying to understand, and perhaps put some extra effort on creating something that can debunk the fallacy of SEO.

As a developer I feel we have reached a point where this shouldn’t be considered a service anymore.

But the “why” remains

bobblywobbles 6 years ago | | |

Well, part of the reason why I feel there are so many companies is because no one can _prove_ what's actually going on. So they spend a few months doing research and selling their knowledge as a service to clients - it would be the same thing you would do if you pursue this path. I don't see an issue with it, people sell what they know to others in all professions (now that I think about it more).