Does anybody really think that SEOMoz provides much value?

[amadomon]

Crawl results lag so far behind as to be of questionable value for corrective purposes, and in the fast-paced world of SEO, the service seems right out of the horse-and-buggy era..  I corrected crawl errors two weeks ago, and yet SEOMoz' crawls are still not reflecting this.  Furthermore, SEOMoz' idea of where my keywords rank has little to no bearing on reality.  I am really disenchanted, and thinking of cancelling my subscription.

[Inevo]

I wish Seomoz would focus more on improving the current tools, rather than add new ones. It's been a while since any value was added to the campaign manager set.

[MeganSingley]

It sounds like you've had some bad experiences and I'm really sorry about this!  Our intention is definitely not to close threads that haven't been resolved.  If you have an issue that hasn't been addressed to your satisfaction, please let us know by responding to the ticket.  If it's something we that's within our power to fix, it's something that we should be able to help with!

[alsvik]

I've done just that a couple of times now? You guys tend to give me the "everything is great"-reply and that just doesn't do it for me. I have, at time of typing, 5 unsolved issues with seomoz: 1) I can't add more than one twitter account to compare against. 2) Seomoz is not reading/understanding my robots.txt 3) Seomoz is crawling pages with "nofollow noindex"-tags. 4) The last two weeks ranking report is identical. If I gain +6 on a term two weeks in a row, I cannot keep being #32 on that term, right? 5) crawling of my campaigns are inaccurate and sometimes it returns with just 1 page crawled. I think I had the "perhaps your site was down"-email a couple of times now. 6) Video-results not showing correctly Could you guys stop guessing and tell me what is wrong? You think my server was down? You think I can add more twitter accounts? You think my robots.txt might be corrupted ... Try proving something. Show me! Send me a screenshot, a snippet from your log. I'm running out of excuses to keep paying for faulty seomoz.org. And it is sad, because I love the tools if they work like they are supposed to. But you guys are so busy closing threads with questions about your faulty product , that you don't have time to fix the issues you should be focusing on.

[MeganSingley]

Hey everyone!  This is Megan from the SEOmoz Help Team.  I really like the discussion that's happening here.  There are some great points coming from all sides!  I thought I'd just chime in with a couple of quick things.    First off, if you're ever seeing any discrepancies with our tools, please PLEASE send your information with examples over to help[at]seomoz.org so we can look in to it.  We definitely want to see what's going on and make sure it's not a bug that could potentially be affecting a lot of customers.  Secondly, it sounds like everyone is getting a different benefit out of PRO, which is great to see because there are a lot of different tools and it can be hard to focus on all areas at once.  The important part is that you feel you are getting some benefit out of your subscription.  Learning to get the most out of our tools can be tricky, and we're working on making these benefits more clear.  One way is through our new Wednesday Webinars, which is a weekly 30 minute webinar with an in depth focus on an individual tool.  We just posted the last 3 recorded sessions today, so check them out if you have time:  http://www.seomoz.org/dp/wednesday-webinar.  We've also been working hard on creating content for our help hub:  http://www.seomoz.org/help.  You can watch quick videos on how to use our tools, read about their features, and find out some PRO tips.

I hope this is helpful!  Thanks everyone for your contributions.  

[RyanKent]

**If social media marketing is so important, how come we beat Walmart in our sector while still doing ZERO social marketing? **

In order to properly respond I would need to see exactly the keyword(s) for which you outrank Walmart. Are they even trying to rank for the term?

I'm just frustrated with the speed and accuracy of SEOMoz' crawls.

Understood. Have you spoken with the help desk regarding the problem? They may be able to address the issue.

[amadomon]

If social media marketing is so important, how come we beat Walmart in our sector while still doing ZERO social marketing?  I don't wish to get into an argument here, and I'm not trolling; I was asking a serious question, and I do appreciate the responses.  Furthermore, I pay close attention to our search engine results and am constantly refining my site to maintain our high ranking, so clearly I must think that SEO has some value.  Perhaps I overstated my question.  I'm just frustrated with the speed and accuracy of SEOMoz' crawls.

[CMC-SD]

Social media is absolutely not useless to B2B companies. It is pretty useless in some "boring" niche industries, but if you're able to create compelling content around your subject of expertise, social media can be a great platform for publicizing that content and attracting links to it.

But yeah, if your competitors aren't aggressive with SEO and you find it easy to maintain your rankings without using the SEOmoz tools, then you probably don't need to spend money on those tools. You're doing just fine without them.

[RyanKent]

** mine is a purely B2B site, so Twitter and Followerwonk (and social media generally) are of little to no use to me**

I think we have discovered the root issue. You clearly do not appreciate the value of the tools such as Followerwonk. SEOmoz is a b2b site, right? It's audience is website owners, SEOs, etc. Their 150k+ twitter followers is just one example of how social media is exceptionally valuable to b2b sites. I have clients who participate in even more pure b2b niches such as bulk electronic parts and they benefit from social media.

I believe a great deal of SEO is just snake oil

In the past, low quality link building offered incredibly boosts in search rankings. Accordingly, anyone who could build a link called themselves an SEO. The industry was flooded with low quality providers. As Google and Bing evolve, many of the low quality providers are leaving for other industries. The reality is quality SEO is and will remain dominant for many years to come.

If you continue to hold on to your beliefs, I would recommend you cancel your subscription as you are wasting your money. Spending money on a service where you do not recognize the value and think of it as "snake oil" is clearly a waste. But don't expect to hold your rankings. Over time, some of your competitors will recognize the value of SEO and overtake your position in SERPs.

[matbennett]

ha ha - wondering whether you are just trolling now.

Followerwonk is actually more useful on b2b stuff! I would agree though that there is way too much snakeoil in SEO.  However that is down to the individuals not the principals.

if you offer relevant, high-quality content, and people can already find you, then that's most of the battle.

It's one small battle, yes. It's not the war though.

If you honestly believe you have every customer that the internet can offer you then congratulations. I hope that you don't mind me saying that it is starting to sound like the reason you are not getting value is that you're understanding of SEO isn't that great.

That isn't a dig. One of my gripes with seomoz is that it doesn't give enough obvious help to non-industry folks in how to get value from the tools.  That results in people really focusing on weird areas here sometimes.

I can understand the argument that SEOmoz might not bring your value, but to seo that SEO can't is a really weird point of view that I suspect the numbers don't support.

[alsvik]

Well - i'm not really sure. Seomoz is at the moment so faulty that i cant trust the data i see.

Domain authority is off with 10-15%

Crawls show 0 errors or extremly high amount of errors, and doesnt read robots.txt

Data dissappear all the time. Im reconsidering my membership.

With the data fluctuation you see here, you dont know if something went wrong with your site or with seomoz. So once or twice a month i need to go through everything - and so far the problem has been seomoz ...

[amadomon]

I guess I am in a somewhat unusual position, in that mine is a purely B2B site, so Twitter and Followerwonk (and social media generally) are of little to no use to me.  I'm trying to keep my rank, not improve it (with some exceptions, of course).  Mostly, my problem is that I believe a great deal of SEO is just snake oil, and if you offer relevant, high-quality content, and people can already find you, then that's most of the battle.

[GeorgeAndrews]

Before you cancel read the above. Ryan is exactly right about the Q&A forums. $99/month to have your questions answered by peers in the know? That's cheap!

Another thing I will be keeping in mind is, as a Pro member, I get $600 off MozCon 2013. That's like getting the Pro membership for a year at 1/2 price.

This is a good question though and I think you're going to see a lot of people answering, "Yes! It does provide value."

[amadomon]

I thoroughly depersonalize myself when testing SERPs.  And yes, I clear any caches, including server caches, when ensuring that I truly have corrected the error.

Open Site Explorer is a good tool, but I am already ranked in the top 3 for all my most important keywords of which, in my industry, there is a fairly small, countable number, so I am not discovering new keywords in so doing.  I have good backlinks.  This is a mature site.

[MarkScully]

I couldn't disagree more. I think you need to look beyond a few things and realize what you have to use.

If keywords ranking is incorrect, are you sure you're checking against the correct country?

Yes, SEOmoz can't crawl as well as some dedicated tools and it can sometimes be a little outdated. However, you have to realize that it's still great to have it.

From OSE, Followerwonk, keyword difficulty checking, on-page optimization, discounted services, this community etc...I think $99 really is very little.

[matbennett]

The value I get comes from OSE.  I already have access to the same data + majestic data through my raventools subscription, but the ability to quickly assess competitor profiles is still useful .  I access this through a bookmarklet, which is particularly convenient.

At the moment that justifies the price to me.  That may well change in the future - particularly as disavowing links becomes more common and public link profile data therefore becomes less accurate.

I don't rate the campaign tools particularly highly.  I like the feature that shows you universal results in the SERPs, but overall the campaign tools don't help me much.  I tend not to even look at the results - particularly as it would get so expensive to run them on all sites I want to monitor.

Interestingly, I am starting to get some value from the bundles followerwonk access.  Not using it a great deal, but it's useful when I do.

The value of seomoz to me is in time I save. At the moment that makes it a good investment for me.  Unfortunately I spend twice as much time as I save in the Q&A forum answering questions, so who knows!?!

[RyanKent]

Does anybody really think that SEOMoz provides much value?

When measuring the value of anything, it is important to align metrics. More specifically, how do YOU measure value?

For some users, access to the Q&A alone is easily worth $99/month. The ability to ask a specific question and receive fast, custom feedback easily exceeds the subscription price. Furthermore, you have the ability to ask one question per month directly to the SEOmoz staff. Many SEOs are subscribers and use that feature when they are stuck on a problem.

You seem to be measuring the value of SEOmoz based on two factors: crawl tool and keyword reporting. I would first share there are many other tools SEOmoz offers such as access to Followerwonk, Open Site Explorer and the SEO toolbar. Personally, I subscribe to AHREFs solely for their backlink reporting and their lowest plan is currently $79/month. SEOmoz offers a suite of tools and other valuable assets worth hundreds of dollars easily justifying the monthly price if you benefit from even a small portion of their toolset.

With respect to the keyword rank, how exactly are you measuring your keyword rank? The SEOmoz toolbar has a function which allows you to depersonalize your search results. If you are not doing such, any rankings you see are skewed by your personal data. A few examples: your search history on that browser (cache), your search history with Google (if you are logged into Google), your search location, your +1s, etc. Also, search results vary by physical location as well.

With respect to the crawl tool, are you sure you have truly corrected the error? I am sure you took action to correct the error, but the question is whether you truly fixed the issue. Are you using a CMS such as WordPress? If so, many site owners who lack professional training in web development lose control of their site URLs which causes crawl issues.

In summary, you brought up two specific issues. My first suggestion is to assume the issue is with your work rather then the tool. Ask for help with each issue in the Q&A to better understand the problem. If there is indeed a problem with the SEOmoz tools, report it to the help desk. In the upper-right corner of your screen, use the Help drop down. The team is available every weekday. http://www.seomoz.org/help