Digital Marketing chap here!

I see this time and time again. Not just with tools, but with agencies and consultants -- supposed experts in SEO.

What frustrates me is the incessant cloak-and-daggers.

"I optimised your site" -- for what? Why? How?

A lot of them seem to ride of the presumption that people don't know, and then only when the site doesn't grow to they say: "oh, it's a technical problem that you/your developers are responsible for"

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If it's any small help, I've been getting a tremendous amount of value out of Search Atlas at the moment. It's cheaper than SEMrush, Ahrefs and alike -- and has a plugin that you can install, which implements a lot of the changes without need to edit the site yourself. I've been rinsing the 14 day trial to get some immediate direction for client sites.

Biggest change I noticed was firstly when Google went hard on 'Core Web Vitals'; slow and poorly optimised sites were hit hard. And unattributed blog content, particularly on sensitive subjects, where there were no author profiles.