SEOmoz Pro |
SEOMoz Pro is a community and a set of software tools and resources that are used by small businesses, corporations and marketers to analyze, improve and for better search engine rankings. The company also has a free SEOtoolbar that has been downloaded by millions to get a quick “SEO snapshot” of any site they are visiting.
The technology and community are blended to give you incremental value. Buying and setting up a paid membership with SEOMoz Pro gives you access to web apps, SEO tools, webinars, full access to Open SiteExplorer (their proprietary technology) and the ability to query the staff at the company and get answers back about all things SEO related. And, we should also point out; you get entre to videos, custom reports, White Papers and tutorials as part of your paid membership.
SEOMoz, is located in Seattle, are Venture Capital backed, founded in 2007, has over 15,000 paying subscribers and is used by a large number of Fortune 1K accounts including: Disney, Best Buy, Zillow, Yelp, FedEx, RackSpace, Marriott, USAToday, MailChimp, Live Nation, Citrix and many more.
If you are technical and have a good sense about search engine rankings; or, you want to learn DIIY SEO rankings then this is a great community and platform to utilize. The SEOMoz technology helps you to optimize and manage SEO rankings focusing on three core areas of your online profile and web site: Crawl Diagnostics, On Page Optimization and Rank Tracking.
The SEOMoz technology (we are over simplifying a bit) visits your site weekly and highlights any search rankings related issues in a report and makes suggestions on how to improve your web site (pages) make them more accessible and indexable (findable) to search engines. You get insightful, detailed and tailored suggestions on how to improve your web site search engine rankings, tracking reports on important keywords, notification of any changes in your web site’s keyword rankings and much more.
We like the fact that SEOMos has a 30 day free trial to test the community and platform and then three tiers of Membership Pricing: Pro, ProPlus and Pro Elite, starting at $99. per month. Competing products/services in this space include: SEOBook, Keyword Elite, WordTracker (keyword research), Market Samurai, SpyFu, Google Analytics and WordStream.
Again, as this is a hybrid service for optimizing search engine rankings and integrated technology (Open Site Explorer is part of the mix) platform coupled with reporting modules, community access, larger community of experts (in-house and others in their aggregated community), videos, White Papers, etc.
Accordingly, our assessment is based on a combination of all. Note, you create an account via their web portal and then have the ability to utilize a full suite of services and technology tools. Again, the 30 day free trial incorporates all of their features and capabilities, which underscores their confidence in their brand.
Campaign Manager: Their platform enables you to track your web site rankings, grades pages, monitors traffic, and locates on page or site errors, with more functionality. Think of this as a campaign monitoring service that gives you a holistic snapshot of your web sites “SEO health.”
Link Analysis: This analysis is done using the SEOMoz Open Site Explorer technology, enabling you to analyze the links pointing to your web site and direct competitors, with a report on the types of links that are helping your web site and those that are of little value.
On Page SEO Analysis: Gives you the ability to understand on page issues (how well they are optimized for search engines) for specific and targeted keywords and how to improve these variables.
Rank Tracking: This gives you the ability to track your web site rankings via Google, Bing and Yahoo. Of course you can get this functionality for Google via Google Analytics; one of the advantages of this service is you have an integrated report for all top tier search engines, which will save you time and resources. You are paying for the convenience though.
Crawl Test: This search engine rankings technology checks your actual web site to understand how accessible and useful it is to search engines, which determines your overall search rankings and identifies overall SEO problems that you need to correct.
SEO Toolbar: This is available for free via the web site. If you are a paying customer you get access to broader information as you surf the web, which helps with competitive intelligence and gives you aggregate information across any web site you visit.
Social Media Monitoring: Provides a report which shows Facebook Likes, ReTweets for Twitter, Shares and Google+ and related social media metrics. This service seems to be morphing a bit, as the market is so dynamic and there are lots of tools with much broader features.
SEOMoz Pro is available in three price points: Pro $99. (5 SEO Campaigns and 300 keywords)per month, ProPlus ($199. per month, 12 SEO Campaigns, 1K keywords, unlimited access to Q&A Forums and social media tracking), Pro Elite $499. per month (30 SEO Campaigns, 3.5K keywords and all capabilities and features of ProPlus plan). Note: save 20% by purchasing an annual plan.
We like and recommend SEOMoz Pro search engine rankings technology and community with a few caveats. Probably half of the functionality with regards to their technology is freely available via Google Analytics and a group of free services provided by multiple vendors and/or processes you can do yourself. Although for the latter, this can be time consuming.
But, there is significantly added value with the integration of SEOMoz technology when coupled with their in-house team of experts, portal content, videos, tutorials, White Papers, articles, insightful blog posts, Infographics and more. Although in our experience, it can take 24-48 hours to get a question addressed from a member of their staff; but, we are being a bit picky.
We’d like to see deeper social media analysis tools and expect these will improve over time. There are a host of narrow point solution providers (Sprout Social, HootSuite built in analysis, Radian6/Sales Force) focused on significant social media metrics analysis. But, these have nothing to do with search engine rankings; but, do give you “social signals” for your brand and web site.
But, none of these vendors has SEO Tools or analysis capabilities. All in all, this is a great blend of technology (SEO tools) and community for any small business that has either a dedicated marketing person on staff that is SEO savvy or an individual who wants to learn about SEO. Recommend and we give them a five star review for search engine rankings optimization.