Hi, My Name Radius Arianto, CEO and Co-Founder of Takooni. I have spent more than 11 years working in SEO, and there is one pattern I keep seeing.
SEO professionals buy expensive tools to find problems, they find hundreds of them, and somehow the campaign still does not move.
That sounds ironic, but I think it reveals a bigger problem in SEO:
The hardest part of SEO is often not finding problems. It is deciding what to do about them.
I often hear people say:
“SEO professionals need tools to identify the problems that are holding their campaigns back.”
I agree! SEO tools are incredibly useful.
They help us crawl websites, identify technical issues, analyze competitors, understand search visibility, monitor rankings, and uncover opportunities that would be difficult to find manually.
But after years of working with SEO data, I have realized something:
A tool can tell you what is wrong. It cannot always tell you what deserves your attention.
And that distinction matters.
The Problem Is Not Always the SEO Tool
Imagine running a technical SEO audit and discovering:
- Hundreds of broken links
- Duplicate or near-duplicate pages
- Missing canonical tags
- Slow-loading pages
- Indexation issues
- Redirect chains
- Orphan pages
- JavaScript rendering problems
- Schema warnings
Your SEO platform may happily turn all of these into a long list of issues.
Then comes the uncomfortable question:
“So, what should we fix first?”
This is where many SEO practitioners get stuck, not because they lack data.
They have plenty of data.
The problem is turning that data into decisions.
I have seen this pattern repeatedly through my work in SEO and through discussions within SEO communities such as Ruang Henti Digital and TurnBackLink.com.
I have also had the opportunity to exchange ideas with SEO practitioners and educators, including Ilman Akbar from DailySEO ID.
The more I learn about SEO, the more I believe that technical knowledge and tool proficiency are only part of the job.
The other part is much less talked about:
Having the confidence to make decisions.
You Cannot Communicate With Developers
Sometimes the problem is not that developers refuse to help SEO.
The problem is that SEO professionals speak one language while developers speak another.
An SEO might say:
“We need to fix the crawlability issue because Googlebot is having trouble discovering these URLs.”
That may be technically correct.
But it does not necessarily give a developer enough context to understand what needs to happen.
A more useful conversation might be:
“These 15,000 URLs are being generated through this parameter structure. Search engines are spending resources crawling pages that have little or no search value. If we restrict crawling or clean up the URL structure, we can reduce unnecessary crawl activity and make important pages easier to discover.”
Now we are discussing:
- The problem.
- The mechanism.
- The potential solution.
- The reason for prioritizing it.
That is a very different conversation.
I have learned that technical SEO is not only about understanding technical concepts. It is also about translating those concepts into language other teams can act on.
If I cannot explain an SEO issue to a developer, product manager, or business stakeholder, I have to question whether I understand the issue well enough myself.
You Know the Problem, But You Cannot Defend the Priority
Another common problem is confidence.
You discover an issue.
You know it exists.
You put it in your audit.
Then someone asks:
“What happens to the business if we fix this?”
And suddenly, the confidence disappears.
This is where SEO can become uncomfortable.
Because identifying an issue is relatively easy.
Defending its priority is much harder.
I might know that a website has a technical problem.
But that does not automatically mean fixing it should be the team’s next priority.
There is a difference between:
“This is an SEO issue.”
and:
“This is an SEO issue worth solving now.”
That second statement requires judgment.
I need to understand:
- The affected pages
- Their organic visibility
- Search intent
- Business value
- Conversion potential
- Technical dependencies
- Implementation cost
- The potential impact of fixing—or not fixing—the problem
This is where SEO starts moving beyond optimization.
It becomes decision-making.
SEO Tools Tell You What Is Wrong. They Do Not Always Tell You What Matters.
This is probably the biggest lesson I have learned from using SEO tools.
Most tools are very good at identifying problems.
But the question I care about most is not:
“Is this wrong?”
It is:
“Does fixing this matter?”
Those are completely different questions.
A website can have dozens—or even hundreds—of technical issues.
But not all of them deserve the same level of attention.
A minor issue affecting a handful of low-value pages should not necessarily receive the same priority as an issue affecting thousands of commercially important URLs.
An SEO professional needs to add context that the tool cannot fully understand.
For example:
- How many valuable pages are affected?
- Are those pages receiving organic traffic or impressions?
- What search intent do they serve?
- Do they contribute to conversions or revenue?
- Is the issue preventing discovery, indexing, ranking, or simply creating a theoretical best-practice violation?
- How difficult is the fix?
Once I start asking these questions, SEO audits become very different.
I am no longer simply collecting errors.
I am evaluating opportunities.
The Most Expensive SEO Tool Is the One You Do Not Know How to Use
I do not believe SEO tools are unnecessary.
Quite the opposite.
Tools can dramatically improve how quickly and deeply we can analyze a website.
But I have become increasingly skeptical of the idea that buying better tools automatically makes someone better at SEO.
A $500-per-month tool does not give me better judgment.
A more sophisticated crawler does not automatically make me better at prioritization.
A competitor analysis platform does not automatically teach me how to turn competitive data into a business strategy.
Tools give me information.
SEO expertise determines what I do with that information.
And sometimes, the most expensive tool is not the one with the highest subscription fee.
It is the one that produces thousands of findings that nobody knows how to act on.
SEO Requires More Than Technical Confidence
When I was younger in my SEO career, I thought becoming better at SEO mostly meant learning more.
More technical SEO.
More tools.
More metrics.
More frameworks.
More tactics.
I still believe knowledge matters.
But after more than a decade in the industry, I think there is another layer that matters just as much:
The ability to make and defend decisions.
A strong SEO practitioner should be able to look at a technical issue and ask:
Why does this matter?
Then:
Who needs to care about it?
Then:
What should we do about it?
And finally:
How will we know whether the change actually mattered?
That is a very different skill set from simply running an audit.
SEO Is Not About Finding More Problems
Perhaps this is the mindset shift I wish more SEO professionals would make.
The goal of an SEO audit should not be to produce the longest list of problems.
The goal should be to help the organization make better decisions about organic growth.
Sometimes the answer will be a technical fix.
Sometimes it will be improving content.
Sometimes it will be changing information architecture.
Sometimes it will be building authority.
And sometimes the correct decision may be to do nothing about an issue because its potential impact does not justify the resources required.
That last one can be surprisingly difficult for SEO professionals to accept.
We are often rewarded for finding problems.
But businesses do not grow because we found 237 technical issues.
They grow because we identified the issues that mattered and successfully turned our recommendations into action.
The Real SEO Skill: Turning Data Into Action
This is why I increasingly see SEO as a combination of three abilities:
1. Detection
Finding problems and opportunities through data, research, tools, and observation.
2. Judgment
Understanding which problems actually matter and determining what deserves priority.
3. Influence
Communicating the reasoning clearly enough that developers, content teams, product teams, and business stakeholders are willing and able to act.
SEO tools primarily help with the first one.
The other two are still on us.
And perhaps that explains why two SEO professionals can have access to exactly the same tools, the same website, and the same data—but produce very different outcomes.
The difference is not always the tool.
Sometimes, it is the person making the decision.
After 11+ Years in SEO, This Is What I Ask Now
After more than 11 years in SEO, I have become less interested in asking:
“What else can this tool find?”
And more interested in asking:
“What should we do with what we already know?”
Because ultimately, SEO expertise is not measured by how many problems we can identify.
It is measured by how well we can turn:
Evidence → Decisions → Action → Business Impact
That, to me, is a much more meaningful definition of SEO maturity.
You can have the most expensive SEO stack in the room.
You can have the most sophisticated crawler.
You can produce a 100-page technical audit.
But if nobody knows what to do next, the audit is just another document sitting in someone’s Google Drive.
SEO is not just about finding problems.
It is about knowing which problems matter, why they matter, and how to get people to act on them.
What About You?
I am curious about your experience.
What usually stops you after discovering an SEO problem?
Is it:
- The tool?
- The technical complexity?
- The developer?
- The stakeholder?
- The lack of resources?
- Or the uncertainty about the potential impact?
Or perhaps it is the question that quietly sits in the back of your mind:
“If I fix this, will it actually make a difference?”
That question might be uncomfortable.
But I think it is also one of the most important questions an SEO professional can learn to ask.
