SEOmoz Pro Review: Is SEOmoz Tools Worth Paying For?

In this SEOmoz pro review, I’ll try to give you a complete overview of the tool, whether it’s worth the monthly fee and how you can make the best out of it.

What’s SEOmoz?

SEOmoz, as most of you might know, is considered as one of the most reputed SEO firms out there. They had so much popularity that in order to keep project count under control, they charged 1000$/hr.

Now SEOmoz has moved from being a consultancy to a SEO product firm. They have a PRO subscription where you will find

• Pro webinars (Register for upcoming seminars as well as watch old seminars. You can’t download them though. However the PPT will be available for download)
• Pro Tool (The meat of the SEOmoz PRO subscription)
• Private Q&A (You can ask private questions directly to the guys at SEOmoz and get reliable answers directly from the PRO SEO’s)

What SEO Tools Does SEOmoz Pro Have?

There are a number of tools SEOmoz gives you. I personally use very few of them (Probably because I don’t have enterprise clients)

Tool #1: Open Site Explorer

This tool, in my opinion, is why most people have a subscription for SEOmoz.

Open Site Explorer is one of the best tools out there to analyze the competition and find out about their link building strategies. It gives you a host of metrics in a matter of seconds that will probably take you days or even months to figure out manually.

Tool #2: Keyword Analysis Tool

This tool gives a brief idea about the level of competition for the keyword based on the top 10 ranking pages.

While it’s a good tool to get an overall idea about the competition, I wouldn’t rely on any tool to completely predict for me whether I should go after a tool or not.

For e.g. if you see Wikipedia, EzineArticles etc. on the first page, chances are that the tool will report it as competitive based on the domain authority. However, in most cases, the presence of sites like ezinearticles and so on is a signal that the keyword ranking is achievable.

SEOmoz keyword analysis is smart in many cases. It simply does not take into account just the domains authority alone. It also looks at page authority and a host of other metrics to calculate competition.

Tool #3: Rank Tracking Tool

This is another useful tool in the PRO subscription. Their rank tracking tool updates every Tuesday automatically. If you have a lot of keywords to track, then this tool is really great.

Recently Google introduced many changes in the way their engine works which broke many online and offline rank checking tools. It’s also not possible to manually check a lot of keywords from our computer/network since Google will give a temporary ban if they detect scraping behavior.

Tool #4: On Page Optimization Tool

This tool will act as your personal SEO assistant for on-page SEO tasks. Simply give it a URL and keyword and it will grade your on-page SEO based on several factors.

You will then be presented with a page where you can see where you need to improve on in order to be better at on-page SEO.

One thing I really don’t understand is why SEOmoz suggests that we remove the keyword tag if it’s there. Agreed that most search engines that matter does not use meta-keywords for rankings, but why ask to remove if it’s present?

In my opinion, less tech savvy audience might get confused with such suggestions. Overall, the tool is a great addition for your SEO arsenal.

Tool #5: Social Media Monitoring Tool

Monitor blogs, RSS, Twitter, and other social media sites for your keywords and phrases. This is a service similar to Topsy. The main aim of this tool is to get rid of all the clutter generated by social media and bring to you what’s important.

Tool #6: SEO Web Crawler

Crawl your site and see if there are any issues. I don’t really use this tool much since I use Google Webmaster tool and they provide the same service. The advantage of using Webmaster tools is that it helps see how your site appears to Google.

In some cases, you might not be able to use Webmaster tools (Where you may have to do SEO audit of sites). In such cases, you can use this SEO Web Crawler tool to get a general idea about the crawalibilty issues of your site.

Tool #7: Competitive Link Research Tool

You can check and compare your site with your competitor’s site. You can gain insight into which sites are linking to your competitors and whether you have acquired links from those sites to your website and so on.

I tried comparing Google with Blekko and Bing. A sample of the result is given below.

Tool #8: Linkscape Visualization and Comparison

If charts and graphs excite you, you are going to love this tool. What the Linkscape Visualization and Comparison tool does is compare two URL’s and give you some metrics in a graphical format.

Here I tried to compare Google and Bing.

Tool #9: Link Acquisition Assistant

This tool gives you an overview of how to get links by manually searching on Google. Instead of manually typing it out, you can fill in a few details and SEOmoz will generate a list of queries that you can simply click and search Google for possible link partners. Not a lot of fun, but saves you time with all sorts of queries you have to think and type on Google.

Tool #10:  Historic Pagerank Checker

As the name suggests, you can view the Page Rank change of a URL over time.

Tool #11: Term Extractor

This tool is something like a reverse on-page SEO analysis. When we give this tool a URL, it goes to the URL and comes back with terms that it thinks is relevant to the page.

Here is how the Term Extractor tool analyzed SEOmoz home page.

Other Perks of SEOmoz Pro

This SEOmoz review will not just focus on the tools. There is a lot more than just using tools for doing SEO. You also get access to PRO only webinars, private questions and the full access to the directories list.

Here is the list of the most recent PRO Webinars hosted

• Mining Social Data for Fun and Profit
• Understanding Your Audience Using Social Media
• Content for Local Sites & Local Search
• Future-Proofing Your SEO: 2012 Edition
• Everything You Don’t Know About Infographics
• Head-Smacking Content Strategies
• Why and How Startups Should be doing SEO
• Actionable Keyword Research for Motivated Marketers
• The End of Search Without Social
• Gamify it! Using Game Mechanics to Improve Your SEO, Social, and User Engagement

Even after doing SEO for these many years, there are some golden nuggets you’ll get from these webinars.

You can also use the SEOmoz add-ons for your browser and instantly analyze the quality of the site by browsing pages on the website.

The biggest perk is the ability to organize your SEO efforts via helping you group them via campaigns. Each site you work on can be made into separate campaigns and you can automate rank checking, link analysis and so on.

You can expert data and use Excel to work with the data as well.

Who is The SEOmoz Pro Subscription For?

In my opinion, not everyone requires a paid option. They have plenty of free resources available for beginners (Their blog, Q & A section, Beginners SEO Guide, Whiteboard Fridays and more).

Their plans start at 99$ a month. So, if you are on a budget and have to go into credit card debt for paying for a moz subscription, don’t!

You’ll probably make the best use of these tools if

• You can afford to pay 99$ a month without losing sleep over it
• You have basic SEO knowledge and want to go advanced
• You are an analytic geek. You absolutely love numbers and graphs
• You do SEO for multiple sites of yours, or you do SEO for clients or you do SEO for your own business website

If you are just starting out and have no real idea about SEO, save money by first reading their free beginners guide. Then follow their blog for a while and then after 5-6 months, start a PRO subscription.

However if time means money for you or you want some of the best SEO tools to analyze your competition right from the start of your SEO, you’ll simply love SEOmoz pro tools and resources.

Some SEOmoz Pro FAQ’s from A Users Perspective

This section will answer some of the questions you might have before going in for their pro subscription. I am not their sales person. So you can’t expect almost every question you have on your mind. However I will try to list some of the questions that I have before joining and how it got resolved.

What is SEOmoz (come again…)?

SEOmoz is a SEO company that provides tools for SEO professionals to help automate some of the SEO tasks and also save time on competition analysis, organizing campaigns and so on.

What does SEOmoz not have?

SEOmoz does not have a keyword research section found in most SEO tools. However, you can go ahead and use Google Keyword Tool for keyword research which is free.

Is SEOmoz a waste of money?

Looking at the price, you may wonder whether SEOmoz is really worth the money. After all, 99$ starting price is a bit scary to a few people (including me).

But the price is completely justified considering the resource you get. They have to pay for the bandwidth, the server resources they use and so on. If we were to get all the tools from individual providers, we’d probably spend many folds the price we need to pay SEOmoz.

Should I buy SEOmoz PRO?

It depends. Refer to my section “Who is The SEOmoz Pro Subscription For” and you will get a clearer idea.

Is SEOmoz a one-time payment product?

No. They have a monthly pricing plan with 99$ being the lowest plan.

Is there any SEOmoz discount codes?

I am not aware of any such discount codes. However if I get any updated regarding special offers they are running, I’ll update it in this post.

How does SEOmoz compare with SENuke or SENuke X?

Don’t even think about comparing. SEOmoz is a professional SEO tool which will help you get rankings in a legitimate way while SENuke and SENuke X are just spam tools.

Why are you writing this detailed SEOmoz pro review?

1. I love this tool and would like to share this knowledge with others
2. If you sign up via my link, I will be able to save some money off my PRO tools subscription

Is SEOmoz a scam?

No. It does what it is supposed to do. However, there are people who think that this is some magic tool to attain rankings. Fact is, this is just a tool and the usefulness of this tool is only as much as how you decide to use it.

Concluding SEOmoz Pro Review

I hope you gained some valuable insight into how SEOmoz tools work. If you are still not sure whether you want to invest in it or not, why not sign up for a FREE Trial?

You need to use a credit card (they do this to prevent fraud) and they’ll probably charge you 1$ or so for an entire month. If you don’t see value in the tool, go ahead and cancel the pro account and you will never be billed again.

Do you have SEOmoz pro account? Share your story in the comment section.