SEOmoz is one of the best known brands when it comes to SEO. Started by Rand Fishkin, it has become the premier membership site for learning SEO. Not only that, but they have developed an impressive set of online SEO tools that are some of the best in the business.
What’s nice about SEOmoz, is the amount of free SEO information they give you access to. Both the SEOmoz and YOUmoz blogs are both in my RSS reader, and I’m always finding cool SEO tips and case studies on there, with Whiteboard Friday being one of my favorite series of course.
SEOmoz offers a paid membership option called SEOmoz Pro. The PRO membership gives you full access to the SEOmoz suite of tools, plus all their advanced SEO training as well.
Since they offer a full free 30 day trial of SEOmoz PRO, I decided to sign up, play around with it and write a review.
What Is SEOmoz Pro?
The tagline on the SEOmoz homepage is, “Effectively Manage Your SEO”. To manage your SEO, it allows you to create campaigns for the different sites you own. With a PRO account, you can create up to 5 campaigns.
Let me highlight some of the ways creating a campaign will help your SEO.
Rank Tracking
To improve your search engine rankings, you need to know where your pages rank for your various keywords. And by tracking your rankings over time, you can see how your various SEO efforts affect your keyword rankings.
SEOmoz Pro gives you the ability to track your keyword rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing and view your rankings over time with some nice looking charts.
Once nice feature of SEOmoz Pro is that you can hook up your Google Analytics account to it. This allows you to get traffic stats for your different keywords. I use this feature to identify keywords I don’t necessarily rank high for, but still get some traffic. Then by focusing my SEO efforts, I can really boost my traffic quite a bit once I improve my rankings for these keywords.
The only downside is your rankings are only updated once a week. Personally, I would prefer daily rank updates.
On Page SEO Reports
The On-Page SEO Reports are really quite useful, especially if you are new to SEO. Essentially, you can run a report and see how well optimized your pages are for a particular keyword. The report gives you a letter grade from A to F, plus it displays all the factors it uses to determine your grade.
These factors are categorized by importance, and if fixing the most egregious errors will no doubt help improve your search engine rankings.
Crawl Diagnostics
When you setup a campaign for your site, the SEOmoz crawler (Rogerbot) will crawl your site and look for different SEO related issues. It then displays the issues it finds, by grouping them into 3 categories: Errors, Warnings, and Notices.
Some of the things it finds are quite important to fix, like duplicate content issues, broken links and more. When Rogerbot first crawled JoshKotsay.com, it was able to identify 6 broken affiliate link redirects on the site which I was immediately able to fix. That’s potential lost revenue that I had been missing out on for a long time!
Link Analysis
One of the tools I played around with a lot was the Link Analysis feature. This is also available as a standalone tool via OpenSiteExplorer and it is powered by SEOmoz’s impressive Linkscape database of crawled urls which has over 1.2 trillion urls in its database!
The Link Analysis tool allows you to compare your own domain with up to 3 different competitors using a variety of metrics. It displays SEOmoz’s proprietary metrics like Domain Authority, Page Authority, MozRank, and MozTrust.
It also displays some other important metrics like how many total links you have, number of linking root domains, and number of class C blocks that are linking to you.
Not only that, but you also check the backlinks to your site and your competitor’s sites. By studying the external links you can do a comprehensive competitive analysis on your competitor’s linking profile. This will allow you to see where your competitors are getting links from, and find sources of links that you can use as well.
For example, different linking strategies have a distinct profile. If I see someone with tons of Web 2.0 links and social bookmarking sites, I can tell they are probably using some software like SENuke X.
If they’re getting links back from a lot of different generic blogs, then they are probably using a blog network like Unique Article Wizard. By identifying the link strategies that work best for your own site (or your competitors), you can make changes and adapt your link building strategy accordingly.
What Else Does SEOmoz Pro Offer?
I actually just touched on just the surface of what SEOmoz Pro offers. But that’s just a small sampling of the tools that you have access to.
There’s also a SEOmoz PRO Q&A forum where you can get answers to your questions. The best thing about SEOmoz is that it has an extremely large and active community full of SEO professionals.
You can either ask your own questions, or just search through the forum and read what others have asked in the past. The forums are packed with info so you are definitely going to learn a lot here.
Another nice feature are the SEOmoz Pro webinars. They usually host a couple of PRO webinars each month about a specific SEO or marketing topic. Webinars are usually 90 minutes long with Q&A at the end. And if you can’t make the webinars live, they are archived on the site for later viewing.
SEOmoz Final Thoughts
So is SEOmoz Pro worth it? The tools are definitely high quality, but whether the membership is worth it really depends on how often you are going to be using the tools.
If you provide SEO services or consulting, then I definitely think that SEOmoz Pro has the potential to provide you with a ton of value as you’re going to be getting a lot of use out of it. If you are a growing or established brand, I am sure you will find SEOmoz to be very helpful as well.
So will I continue my SEOmoz Pro free trial into a monthly membership? Probably not. I just don’t think I personally would use the tools often enough to justify the cost of a monthly subscription.
Especially since I already own several products that do many of the same things. For rank tracking, I’m already using a tool like Rank Tracker and for SEO Competition analysis I already use Market Samurai, which is quite good in its own right.
But the good thing is, SEOmoz Pro has a free 30 day trial of it’s services. So really, just try out the membership for yourself, and see if it provides enough value for your business.
