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The $40 SEO tool I stopped using after a client caught me
Three years ago I pitched a Dallas bakery on a $1,200 monthly retainer using a fancy rank tracker that promised perfect local maps data. Last week I realized the tool had been pulling stale search results since February, and the owner pulled up a screenshot showing our reports didn't match her actual phone clicks. Has anyone else had a trusted software update quietly break their reporting, or am I the only one who didn't check the raw data for 6 weeks?
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victor_robinson2mo ago
There was a thread over on r/SEO last month about how a bunch of these tracking tools quietly switched to estimated data during the Google API change in February. Some guy tested three different paid tools against manual searches and all three were off by double digits on local results. The scary part is nobody would have caught it if they didn't check by hand. Your client pulling up that screenshot is actually a wake up call for a lot of people in this space. We all get lazy and trust the dashboard too much, but these companies will ship broken updates without telling anyone. Good on you for owning it publicly, most folks would just ghost the client and move on.
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