Revealing SEO Tools' Secrets with Fakhir Ali

Let's start with the obvious question. Why do you think so many people use SEO tools incorrectly?

Because they treat the tool as the strategy. An SEO tool can tell you that a keyword has 10,000 searches, that a competitor has thousands of backlinks, or that your website has a technical issue. But none of those numbers tell you what to do next.

The real skill is interpretation.

Two websites can have the same Domain Rating, the same number of backlinks, and similar traffic. Still, one can completely outperform the other because its links, content structure, topical relevance, and internal linking are better.

So I always tell people: don't ask the tool what happened. Ask why it happened.

As an SEO specialist, what's one metric people care about way too much?

Domain Rating, or any third-party authority metric, is a score a tool calculates to estimate the strength of a domain's backlinks.

It's useful, but people sometimes treat it like Google's own score, and it isn't. A high DR doesn't guarantee rankings, and a low DR doesn't automatically mean a website is worthless. I've seen websites with modest authority outperform much stronger domains because they have the right topical relevance and match the search intent.

The mistake is looking at one number instead of the entire backlink profile.

So when you're analysing a competitor's backlinks, what are you actually looking for?

I look beyond the headline number. I want to know:

• Who is linking to them?

• Why are they linking?

• Which pages are receiving those links?

• What type of content attracted those links?

• Are those referring domains actually relevant to the industry?

• Can I reproduce the reason they earned that link?

That's where SEO tools become really powerful. You aren't just looking at your competitor's backlinks; you're reverse-engineering how they got them.

That's interesting, because most people just sort backlinks by DR and start emailing websites.

Exactly, and that's where a lot of time gets wasted. A backlink from a relevant website with a real audience can be worth more than a link from a high-metric website that has nothing to do with your niche.

People see a big metric and think, "I need this link." I ask a different question: "Does this link make sense?" If the answer is no, the metric matters much less than people think.

Let's talk about something almost every SEO struggles with: link building. What's the biggest misconception about backlinks?

That link building is simply about getting as many links as possible. It isn't. Modern link building is much closer to digital PR, relationship building, and content distribution. You need a reason for another website to mention you.

Maybe you have original research, a useful resource or a unique tool, or you're an expert with something valuable to say. The best backlinks usually have a story behind them.

But even when you know that, building backlinks can become incredibly repetitive. Researching websites, finding contacts, organising prospects, tracking outreach: it can become a job on its own.

You're right, Elia, and that's exactly where automation can help. I'm a big believer in automating repetitive SEO work, but I don't believe you should automate the thinking. Finding and organising backlink opportunities is something technology can streamline.

Deciding whether an opportunity is actually valuable is where the SEO's judgement comes in.

Do you use any specific tool for this? Maybe readers can adopt it too.

Yes, absolutely. In full disclosure, it's one we built ourselves, TaskGlaze, because at our agency the problem was never finding one website. It was managing everything around it. We had Ahrefs in one tab, a contact finder in another, a Google Sheet as our CRM, Gmail for outreach, and no easy way to know whether a link was still live a month later.

TaskGlaze turns that into one workflow:

Find the opportunity. Track a keyword, see which domains rank above you, and open their backlinks, filtered by authority, spam score, and dofollow.

Evaluate it. Every site is classified by the kind of link it gives, whether a guest post, niche edit, resource page, or something else, so you can see how a competitor earned the link.

Organise it. Good prospects go into a built-in CRM, which finds the site's contact email and checks it's deliverable before you send anything.

Work on the outreach. Emails go out from your own mailbox, and follow-ups stop the moment someone replies.

Track what happens. Once a link is live, TaskGlaze keeps re-checking it and alerts you if it's removed or switched to nofollow.

Doing it as one process is much easier to scale than hundreds of disconnected tasks.

So you wouldn't say TaskGlaze replaces an SEO?

No, and I don't think any serious SEO tool should be positioned that way. I strongly believe tools should remove friction, not judgment. It's built that way, too. When a site owner replies with a price, the AI in TaskGlaze can draft a counter-offer within your budget, but it never sends anything on its own. You review every email.

If a tool saves me two hours of repetitive work, that's valuable. But I still need to decide whether a backlink is relevant, whether the website is trustworthy, whether the placement makes sense, and whether the link contributes to the overall strategy.

Automation should make an SEO specialist faster, not less thoughtful.

Let's move to keyword research. What do people misunderstand about keyword difficulty?

Keyword difficulty is an estimate, not a law of physics. Different tools calculate it differently. So if one tool tells you a keyword is "easy" and another says it's "hard", don't panic. Look at the actual search results:

• Who is ranking?

• What kind of pages are ranking?

• How strong are those pages?

• What is the search intent?

• Can you create something meaningfully better?

The results page often matters more than the number inside the tool.

What about search volume?

It's another metric people obsess over. A keyword with 500 monthly searches can be more valuable than one with 50,000.

Why? Intent. If those 500 searches come from people ready to buy, subscribe, book, or hire, they can be incredibly valuable. SEO isn't a competition for the biggest traffic number. It's about attracting the right traffic.

What's one thing you wish SEO beginners would stop doing immediately?

I'm glad you asked that, Elia, because I think it's genuinely harmful to the SEO industry. Stop copying competitors blindly. I see people put a competitor's domain into an SEO tool, export their keywords and backlinks, and essentially try to rebuild the same website. That's not a strategy.

Competitor analysis should reveal opportunities, not give you a blueprint for becoming a clone. Look at what competitors do well, then ask: what are they missing? That's where your advantage comes from.

If they should stop copying competitors, what should they start doing instead?

They need to start connecting the data. Don't look at keywords separately from content, backlinks separately from pages, or traffic separately from conversions.

For example, if you discover that a competitor's article has attracted hundreds of referring domains, that's not simply a backlink opportunity. It's a content opportunity. You need to understand why that page earned those links.

AI has obviously changed SEO. Are SEO tools becoming more important because of AI search?

Absolutely, but the definition of an "SEO tool" is changing. We're moving toward a world where brands need to understand not only where they rank in traditional search, but also how they appear in AI-driven search.

That means brand mentions, authority, topical relevance, structured information, content quality, and digital PR become increasingly important.

The old mindset was: "How do I rank this page?"

The new mindset is: "How do I make my brand the obvious source to mention?"

That's a much bigger question.

It is, and that's why I don't think SEO is disappearing because of AI. Low-effort SEO is what's becoming less valuable. Google's John Mueller has said there's nothing special you need to do for generative AI responses in search.

That matches our motto at the agency: "AEO and GEO are nothing but good SEO."

If your entire strategy is publishing generic articles and collecting random backlinks, AI will make that strategy even harder to defend. But if you're building expertise, authority, useful resources, and genuine mentions, you're building something far more durable.

Final question. If you could give someone just three rules for using SEO tools, what would they be?

There are three rules every beginner should follow.

• First: never worship the metric. A number is only useful when you understand what it represents.

• Second: always investigate the reason behind the data. Don't just see that a competitor has backlinks; find out why they earned them.

• Third: automate the repetitive work, not the strategy. Use tools to save time, organise information and build repeatable workflows.

Your biggest advantage as an SEO isn't knowing which button to click. It's knowing which button is worth clicking in the first place.

So perhaps the biggest secret isn't hidden inside an SEO tool at all.

Exactly, Elia. The tool gives you the information. The SEO decides what it means.

And that's the part nobody can completely automate.