I updated this nearly 10-year-old post to add some current thoughts about single-purpose tools.
The original version of this article was a mini rant about my exercise in integrating several small single-purpose SEO tools into an Enterprise SEO toolset that it seemed was not something that most SEOs felt a need for. Doing this update has made me think about a potentially bigger issue: the lack of efficiency in most agencies.
One of these tools was our post-migration redirect checker. All SEOs will do a redirect check post-launch. This typically entails listing the URLs before and ensuring they all redirect. They are specifically looking for 404 errors in pages that are not redirected.
My crazy tool did what I felt was a more definitive test. When you relaunch, there will be wildcard and one-to-one redirects. Our testing process loaded the redirect sheet from old to new and pinged the old URL, capturing the header action and not testing to ensure it redirected but also a single hop to the designated page. Any page that did not work as expected was flagged with the specific error. Using this tool and processing over a dozen migrations, every site had 60% or more failures. This breakout made validating easier identified failures and made creating tickets simple. Also, by checking mission-critical pages immediately after launch, we could identify any deviations or breakages before Search Engines saw the URLs.
After reviewing our process and the tools specific to several SEOs and Dev Team Managers, we got some interesting feedback.
- Many said they could do these actions with other tools (a few later confirmed they would not or not as easy, and no tool did an explicit A to B test)
- A few did not know why I was doing some of these tasks
- Some hoped other tools would add these actions
- Most believed this created more work than needed (despite redirects being a critical fail point in migrations)
- Few would be willing to pay for specialty tools.
I was more convinced that most practitioners wanted a Swiss Army Knife with an easy button and as little friction as possible. Ultimately, I decided not to commercialize these tools but had to ask myself why I built them in the first place. Why was no one else building them? I realized that I am obsessed with efficiency and trying to do things as economically and accurately as possible, which seems to have been hardwired into my DNA through childhood experiences.
When I was a kid, I often went to work with my father, a diesel mechanic who maintained semi-trucks and earth-moving equipment. His toolboxes fascinated me, especially the one someone labeled Dr. Frankenstein’s toolbox full of custom-made single-purpose tools.
One of these tools, he called the “quick change knuckle breaker,” fascinated me not just by its function but by the fact that it solved a unique problem and saved the company a lot of money. Due to the dust in the ship’s hold, his team needed to change filters in the loaders weekly. According to the tech manual, this would take two mechanics over an hour. Time is money when unloading a ship, and an hour of downtime for each of the 20 pieces of equipment is costly. While most mechanics did not care about the downtime, my father did.
For no apparent reason other than poor engineering, the filter had two different-sized bolts that were reachable after removing a 120-pound protective plate. Ironically, this was similar to what was needed for an oil change on my Land Rover Discovery and the why it was so expensive to get it done.
My father realized that he could eliminate the step of removing the protective plate by contorting himself into a yet unnamed yoga pose and using this special wrench. His process requires only one mechanic and saves nearly one hour per loader. This magical wrench was made by welding an extra long-handled socket wrench to a short one, allowing two different socket sizes and magnets to hold the bolts and keep the wrench nearby when removing the filters.
I had similarly created my own Frankenstein Toolbox with a dozen or so specialty applications that match my workflow but not necessarily that of others. In showing these to my peers, many had not found the need for them, as they may use another tool that is not an exact fit but will get the job done with extra work. When I explained the time savings, some did not care; they bill by the hour, so being inefficient was not their problem.