One of the things that drives me up a wall and back as an SEO professional is to have both potential and existing customers solely focus on the number of backlinks their competitors have achieved based on SEO tools.

I love SEO tools and I do use my fair share of SEO tools, but I realize that SEO tools cannot replace the hard work and effort that I must put into achieving and sustaining my rankings.

I use SEO tools as a gauge to monitor what SEO tactics are and are not working, but these SEO tools are not the end all, be all for how my website ranks across major search engines.

In most cases, people that are benchmarking using SEO tools are clearly wasting their time.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to benchmark and use SEO tools such as Advanced Web Ranking, Ahrefs.com, Moz, and OpenSiteExplorer.org to measure one’s website or compare one’s website to their competition.

The problem I have with customers using SEO tools is that most potential customers and customers are headed down the wrong or deceptive SEO path and proclaim SEO tools as the holy grail of SEO.

And why is this so bad, you ask? Well, any little discrepancy in the numbers or data shown by their desired SEO tool of choice causes such potential and existing customers to participate in reactive SEO, chasing things that don’t matter while neglecting to focus and stay the course executing sound SEO principles.

We all must remember that SEO is as fickle as the wind in general and especially can become a slippery slope when we start trying to use tools to reactively benchmark link building strategies.

That said, I wish most potential and existing customers would really take to heart and understand wholeheartedly what about about to say in the next paragraph.