What am I not understanding when it comes to using SEO/keyword tools?

I have a few dozen sites that all rank well for their keywords.

I do everything by hand. I go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find the amount of searches, average cost per click, and related keywords. I go to google.com to find the amount of competition (with and without quotes).

To evaluate competition I look at Google's results page with Firefox SEO addon turned on.

And if I care how many backlinks a competitor has, I use Yahoo Site Explorer.

It takes me like 2 minutes to determine if a niche is worthwhile or not.

I hear about all these programs like Market Samurai, Matt's Keyword Tool, etc., but I don't understand what those tools do that I'm not doing by hand already?

I used a few of them about a year ago and found that the results I got from a few of those tools were less accurate than what I got doing it manually, so I said "F it" and deleted them and went back to doing it manually. It's possible that in the last year or so they've improved.

So is there anything I am missing out on by not using these tools? If so, what am I missing out on and what tool will do that for me?

It's not even like it takes a lot of time to do it by hand. It takes like 2 minutes, sometimes 5 minutes if I get distracted by youtube or porn in the meantime. So it's not like it's some huge automation feature that reduces hours of work down to seconds or anything.

I'm not trying to be a dick or say that SEO tools are worthless, I just feel like I'm missing a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding how they are used.

Can someone help explain to me what I am missing out on?

Thanks!

No, I completely agree with you. Your methods are correct, and not everyone knows how to do that. Some of us are SEO newbs, remember that! Market Samurai does a bit more than that (of what I am not sure, go read their page if interested), but not that much more than what you do.

Cool, I'm just curious if there's any aspect of SEO that I'm missing out on doing it all manually.

So are all these programs just code that basically says "go to Google Adwords too and extract data for [keywords]. Go to site explorer and extract data for ," etc?

These tools are mostly for automating things.
You can leave this tool to check hundreds of niches and keywords over night which can save you some time + help finding niches worth looking at.

Automation is the big key. I use market Samurai and traffic travis. The main idea behind using these is to generate all of the information I need in a matter of minutes vs hours.

Doing things manually is definitely a great idea but having tools to automate these same repetitive motions allows you to focus your time on other tasks

I'm still not understanding. It takes me 2 minutes to get all the info I need to determine if a niche is profitable or not. Why do I need a program to do that for me?

mollah said:

I'm still not understanding. It takes me 2 minutes to get all the info I need to determine if a niche is profitable or not. Why do I need a program to do that for me?

Click to expand...

You don't. Some people are just lazy and need a program for that.