SEOMoz Review

SEOMoz is an authority in the area of Search Engine Optimization and I’ve been experimenting with their services for several months now. In todays in depth SEOMoz review I’ll share the pros and cons of using this SEO resource.

Firstly, let me say that using a tool like SEOMoz alone isn’t going to get you top rankings. You need to do the work yourself. SEOMoz is tool that allows you to analyze the current situation to see what needs to be done in order to improve your rankings – that’s where the real power is.

No only does SEOMoz allow you to take a look at your current situation, it also allows you to monitor your results over a period of time – this is something that I find particularly valuable.

After you’ve created a new project with SEOMoz, you can login and navigate to a 6 different pages that give you critical information about your campaign. Below I’ll give a quick insight into each of those pages.

Overview

The overview page summarizes the important aspects of your campaign. On the overview page you’re given the latest Traffic Data (this is only accessible if you’ve linked your website and SEOMoz to Google Analytics), crawl diagnostics, keyword rankings and competitive link analysis.

Each section in the overview can be expanded into more detail at the click of a button but many of the vital stats are available right here.

Rankings

The rankings tab is where you’ll find out all the information about your rankings and how they’ve increased or decreased in the past week. SEOMoz makes it possible to track keyword rankings on a country specific level meaning that the data you get truly is applicable to your campaign (the example website I’m using in this review is CockerSpanielTraining.co.uk and my target market is the UK).

One thing that is a nice addition to the Rankings section is that it’s linked to your Google traffic data if you’ve linked your Google Analytics account to SEOMoz. This allows me to see my latest traffic numbers at a glance.

Crawl Diagnostics

The craw diagnostic tool is great for finding ways you can improve your on page SEO however it’s not a tool I use very often. The SEOMoz robot is great at picking out errors such as duplicate content in page titles and on pages, server errors (5XX), client errors (4XX) and Robot file errors.

In addition to finding on page SEO errors, the crawl diagnostic tool can also give you warnings about potential problems such as the title being tool long, the url being too long, missing tags (like the meta description tag) and 302 errors. By being warned about these kind of things you can eliminate potential problems in advance.

On Page SEO

The On Page Optimization section of SEOMoz analyzes on page SEO aspects and grades your performance. SEOMoz breaks on page SEO into 5 sections:

1. Critical Factors
2. High Importance Factors
3. Moderate Importance Factors
4. Low Importance Factors
5. Optional Factors

I like this approach and it’d be especially useful if you’re new to SEO. If you’ve already got some experience (or are a member of Rank and Pillage, my internet marketing course – www.rankandpillage.com) then it’s likely you’ll already have your on page SEO correct anyway.

Link Analysis

The link analysis section of SEOMoz is my favorite section and what I believe is the most powerful aspect of SEOMoz. Using the Link Analysis tool I can see how my website compares to my competitors on a number of factors such as the total number of links, external “Do Follow” links, the total number of linking Root Domains, the total number of followed linking root domains, the number of different C-Blocks linking to your website, the number and ratio of follow and NoFollow links pointing to your website, and also a rating of MozRank and MozTrust (these are rating SEOMoz spiders give your website based on a number of factors).

In addition to getting an overview of the link profile for your website and your competitors, you can also take a look at what SEOMoz rates as the most powerful links to your website and the most powerful links to your competitors websites.

And on top of all this, if you want to you can download a report showing you every single link going to your competitors website which makes it extremely easy to replicate their off page SEO.

An extension of the Link Analysis section of SEOMoz is the SEOMoz Open Site Explorer. The Open Site Explorer gives you similar information to the Link Analysis section however it allows you to delve deeper and look at better metric comparisons between your website and your competitors websites.

Traffic Data

The last section inside SEOMoz is the Traffic Data section. The information in this part of SEOMoz is fairly basic and it all comes from Google Analytics. I really don’t use this section of SEOMoz at all – I use stats programs like Google Analytics, GetClicky and StatCounter for that.

Price of SEOMoz

SEOMoz isn’t cheap with it starting at $99/month and they offer a 30 day free trial. A $99 account will allow you to set up 5 campaigns (5 websites). For $199/month you can set up 12 campaigns and for $499/month you can set up 30 campaigns.

Conclusion

SEOMoz isn’t a cheap tool. At $99 per month this is a considerable expense but in my case it’s well worth it. While only 5 websites can be tracked and analyzed at any one time, you are able to change your websites as often as you want which allows you to perform analysis on an unlimited number of websites…

The competition comparison and link analysis tools are priceless and the fact that I’m able to see all the links my competitors have gives me a massive SEO edge. The other great thing about the link analysis is that SEOMoz has it’s own robots that get all the data. It doesn’t rely on data from outdated sources such as the Yahoo Site Explorer.

I recommend you sign up for the 30 day free trial period – you can cancel before the 30 days is up and you won’t be billed. If you’re anything like me you’ll probably see that the massive value provided by SEOMoz far outweighs the cost though!