Decide where your attention goes before choosing a tool

The decision this area turns on is where to spend limited attention: search, content, ads or social. A small team may not have the time to do all four well, and a tool cannot fix a strategy that spreads effort too thin. Choose the channel first, then the tool that serves it.

A useful test is to ask where your best customers came from so far. If people find you by searching for what you sell, search and content deserve attention. If your customers gather on a particular social platform, that is where to show up. If you need results this month and have budget, paid ads buy speed — at a price that continues for as long as you pay it.

What to decide before you compare tools

• What single outcome are you trying to increase: enquiries, bookings, sales, signups?
• How do customers find you today, and do you know that from data or from memory?
• How many hours a week can you actually give to marketing?
• Is there a budget for advertising separate from the cost of tools?
• Who will read the reports, and what decision will they make from them?

Start with what is free

Before paying for any SEO tool, set up the search engines' own free tools for site owners, such as Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. They report how your site actually appears in their results — the searches you were shown for, how often, and how often people clicked. No third-party tool has that data about your site at first hand.

Paid SEO suites earn their place for research: what people search for, what competitors appear for, which pages link to whom. Figures such as search volumes and a competitor's traffic are estimates: no outside tool can see another site's analytics. They are useful for comparing options and spotting opportunities, but they are not measurements, and two tools can disagree about the same site.

Four ways to judge a marketing tool

• Whether it reports outcomes or only activity. Posts published, keywords tracked and visibility scores are activity. Enquiries and sales are outcomes. A tool that cannot connect its numbers to an outcome you care about will keep you busy without telling you whether it is working.
• Time to a first meaningful result. Search and content can take months to show results; ads can show something within days. Judge a tool against the timescale of the channel it serves, and decide in advance when you will review it.
• Quality of the underlying data, not the dashboard. A polished dashboard over estimated data is still estimated data. Ask where each number comes from, and prefer first-hand data about your own site and customers.
• Cost as your traffic grows. Marketing tools are often priced by usage: tracked keywords, projects, social profiles, contacts or users. Check what happens to the price when that number doubles.

What these tools really cost

• The subscription, and whether it is priced per user.
• Usage limits — keywords, projects, reports, profiles — and the price of the next tier when you reach them.
• Advertising spend, which is separate from the cost of any tool that manages it.
• The time it takes to act on what the tool tells you. A report nobody acts on has no value.
• The billing period, and whether cancelling a yearly plan early is possible.

How to split limited effort and budget

• One suite or several single-purpose tools. A suite keeps data and billing in one place but may be broader than you need. Separate tools can each be the best fit for one job, at the cost of more logins and data that does not join up.
• Organic or paid. Organic search and content cost time and compound slowly. Paid ads cost money and stop when you stop paying. One way to combine them is to spend a small ad budget learning which messages work, then put that learning into content.
• Doing it yourself or hiring help. A tool does not do the marketing. If nobody has the time to act on its reports, the money may be better spent on a few hours of someone else's time.

How to tell whether a tool is working

• Write down the one outcome it should improve and its current level before you start.
• Connect the tool to your own site or accounts during the trial, not to a demo project.
• Compare its figures for your site with your own first-hand data, such as your search engine console or your analytics, and note where they differ.
• Set a review date that suits the channel — weeks for ads, months for search.
• At the review, keep the tool only if the outcome moved or you learned something you acted on.

Signs a tool is selling activity, not results

• The main number on the dashboard is a proprietary score with no link to enquiries or sales.
• The price rises with a usage measure that grows every month whether or not you get results.
• A yearly commitment is required before you can try the tool on your own site.