I have been using SEOmoz tools now for a while so I thought it would be nice to do a review of some of the SEO tools they offer. There are many free tools but I will be focusing mainly on the PRO membership.
Knowledge Resources & Guides
One of the best things that a Pro membership offers is actually not the tools at all but resources. One of the best sections is the SEOmoz Q&A. This gives you the ability to connect with the SEOmoz staff directly. You can either ask them a question in private, or post in the public section. This great feature allows you to learn from other members questions as well as your own. It’s like having your own private SEO specialist available to you at all times. Questions are generally answered within a couple of days or less.
Your membership also includes access to a ton of reports & guides on various aspects of SEO with titles like “The Professional’s Guide to Link Building” and “The Beginner’s Checklist for Small Business SEO (Local Search)”etc. These guides are very instructive and are updated pretty frequently.
You will also have access to a ton of video and audio cast all aimed at teaching the latest SEO techniques. This can be a great way to supplement SEO training for a new staff member.
SEO Tools
Along with the Guides and Q&A sections, your pro membership will also give you access to the SEO toolbox. The SEOmoz Toolbox functions very well, and is very reliable.
The mozBar for firefox is extremely valuable. When you are logged into it as a pro member it gives you even more valuable data. One of the huge advantages of this toolbar is that it won’t get your IP banned by Google. Most toolbars scrape link data and PR from Google so this can result in a temporary ban on your IP address. The mozBar pulls internal data so you can use it without fear of being banned.
The mozBar also connects to arguably the best tool seoMoz has to offer. Open site explorer – will let you see up to 10k links pointing to a specific URL. You get the data in an easy to use tabbed format and can download it to excel. The data loads almost instantly too which for SEO research this is truly a gold mine!
The two features I use all the time are how many unique Root Domains are linking to a URL and the anchor text breakdown of links pointing to the site. I find these both to be very telling stats. It doesn’t matter much that you have tons of links, it matters that you have tons of unique root domains linking to your site. Also, anchor text density for specific keywords can be too high and too low. Check your site vs. the top 10 to find out what is working in your niche.
When you are doing your on page analysis, the SEOmoz toolbox will also come in handy. You have access to a Term Target tool that helps you decide whether your pages are doing a good job of targeting your relevant keyword phrases. The crawl test tool will help you fix any internal server errors, and helps you fix any duplicate title/meta tags.
Previously the best tool SEOmoz had to offer was Linkscape. However, open site explorer really has replaced it and IMO it’s really not needed anymore. The company is now recommending pretty much the same thing.
Problems
In general there have been few issues to date but I will list out a couple because no service is perfect. Initially the Keyword Difficulty tool was basically not reliable. It has since gone through a major overhaul and is much better. However, I do find the % score they give out can be confusing to a client at first. The % is from 1 to 100 but they start saying things in the 50% range are “highly competitive” and it goes up from there to extremely competitive etc. The issue is a person not familiar with their score is going to see a batch of keywords and think oh look this keyword is only 56% that’s not too bad and it gets a ton of traffic etc. Anyhow, my advice is to not look at the % just look at the description bellow it, such as “extremely competitive” to get the real feel for it.
Open site explorer is truly amazing but one thing that is very annoying is that when you look at the anchor text used in links pointing to your URL it separates upper and lower case keywords that are the same word. So..”Widgets” and “widgets” are considered two separate keywords. I have seen sites with like 6 keywords listed that were all really the same exact keyword just with different capitalization. I realize some may want to see that but I should be given the option to standardize the data. This would make it much faster to see the true anchor text density.
The Crawl Test Tool is really neat but is no match for the IIS SEO Toolkit which is also free. However, it is super-fast and nice for quick hits…and again its free so no big deal.
To be honest the problems we have had are very minimal and we have seen seoMoz actively improving its tools all the time.
Conclusion
Overall it is well worth your money to buy a pro membership. I did not have the time to cover all of the tools SEOmoz has to offer. These are just a few that I find the most useful. Head over the SEOmoz website to learn more about the membership packages they have available.
What is your take on their services?
