How do you use SEOmoz

[RustyF]

I'm a newbie here. I've got a week left on my free trail. I really like SEOmoz, I might even love it a bit.

I'm trying to justify the cost. I usually don't spend money on my Internet Marketing.  I've done it through finally buying some tools to help me get there. Massive change in the last year. I'm a long ways from getting rich YET though. I've gone from $30 a month to $1000 a month in a year. So I think I'm on my way now.

I'm trying to figure out why I should continue my subscription and actually start paying for it. If I were a developer I can certainly see why but the cost would so go way up. I'm in the lowest level package with only five websites. I have 10 I'm working on. I know that's probably five to many at one time.

I'm having a little trouble justifying the cost at this time.

At my income level $100 a month is significant. I can see the value of seeing where my competition has backlinks. Sometimes my competition is Cnet. haha Well, I can beat them on a specific page at times. Hmm, can I search the URL list for links? Perhaps i can if I export it. That didn't occur to me. Now that could be of use if I can find my keywords. If their link is on Amazon though, I'm going to have trouble getting a link there. Maybe I should work on less competitive links but I made good money last month with one page that was beating them. WAS beating them.

How do you use SEOmoz? How do you justify the cost, that is offset the expense. If its not making me money i don't see the value. I can get a lot of this information for free but it sure is easier to get it here. Which saves me time. And the other tool i use isn't that good and not always reliable and slow.

I've got a week left on my free trail. I had decided to let it go but now I'm reconsidering. $100 is a lot for me and I need to spend more on SEO outsourcing. I wonder if I wouldn't be better off dropping it for a while and then coming back. This certainly isn't mean to be a critical post at all. I'm looking for reasons to stay and make better use of it.

Thanks for the thoughts,

Rusty

[randfish]

Hey Rusty - welcome to Moz! Totally understand that based on your income/focus, an ongoing monthly subscription might not be in the cards forever. That said, I figured I'd link to some resources that might be helpful on learning to use the software to help:

• http://www.seomoz.org/dp/welcome-webinars
• http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/using-open-site-explorer-to-uncover-new-marketing-opportunities
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/30-seo-problems-the-tools-to-solve-them-part-1-of-2
• http://www.johnfdoherty.com/minimum-viable-keyword-research/
• http://ppcblog.com/seomoz-pro-tools-review/
• http://www.quora.com/Any-reviews-of-SEOmoz

Cheers!

[KeriMorgret]

I don't know if it's in the TOS or not, I will look into that. We do hope you stick around!

[RustyF]

Thanks Keri! Nice to have associates answering questions here.

I'm still going back and forth on keeping it. I've changed my mind three times in the last two days.

Is account sharing within ToS? One person suggested that.  Though I don't know of anyone to share it with.  

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Rusty,

With regards to the Q&A community, you are correct -- only pro members can post to the community. With your pro membership, you also get one private Q&A a month. This is a private question that goes to the SEOmoz Associates, which includes employees from SEOmoz, Distilled, and select other contractors. The Associates will answer your question, are under NDA, and that question is not made public anywhere. Even Rand goes in and answers questions. That's another big value of the Pro membership.

[RustyF]

Rob,

Thanks for replying with your thoughts.

I making less per hour than that.

Even as I was writing I was thinking about time.  I can get much of this data through another tool that i use and pay a hefty amount for. I get the mR, pA, and dA.  But I don't get the links that my competition is linking to them. I did go through that a bit last night and posted links where they had links. That's time consuming but at least i have the information now.  I could have got those from the free version but they also have good links past the first five. To go there I need the pro version.

I have a lot of ways of getting the ranking info and in real time. What I don't have with those tools is a history. I don't have good on page information but I found the pages I want to rank well already are optimized. So I'm getting that part mostly right.

I do save time on the ranking information and I learn a lot here. I may stay for the learning. I think I'm at the intermediate level in SEO now and it is hard for me to go beyond that. I'm not going to get it from any of the online courses or membership. I find i often now more than they do when I do try them.

Now what is this "keyword data report" you're referring too? Do you mean the keyword ranking? I'm not following you. i searched MOZ for that term but didn't find it.  I'd like to know more.

I don't use Google's tools for much of anything. I use one tool with an API to SEO Moz that now cost $100 a month that I use for keyword research and it is better for that purpose than anything I've seen here so far. But it provides little information on competition and I'm a competitive creator. I don't like it when someone beats me. With this, like MOZ says, its like I can read their mind. I don't think you can beat this tool for that.  Nothing I've seen does, well on tool might and provides even more link information but it their database is not updated very often so the data can get stale.

I signed up because i had a site in a highly competitive niche. I was beating sites like cNetm DPreview and Amazon.  Then I went from a number one listing to a number 51. That page is recovering and I did get some help here. I don't know if I got the right answer but i got some help, made some changes and that keyword is back to 17 in about a month. Hopefully it will continue its climb.

This community is very helpful and I don't think its open to non pro members?

Thanks again for your time.

[RustyF]

Francisco,

Thanks. I'm not trying to get SEO clients just yet. I'm using it for my own research. Luckily this isn't my only income. I am suppose to be retired but then I found IM. haha

I keep going back on forth on this.  Thanks for your thoughts. There is a value that can't be measured in $$$. Learning. I know a lot about SEO but there's a lot i don't know too.

I've spent most of the day on SEOmoz today.  In part that is because it may be gone in a week.

That cost splitting idea sound very good to me if it is allowed in ToS.  I didn't see any where that I can setup an Sub account. I like it thought, thanks for thinking outside of the box.

I don't know what I"m going top do. I have until Monday to decide.

Again thanks for your time and thoughts.

[RustyF]

I got confused when I was writing this or just a case of not keeping it simple.

The only competitors i care about are on page one of Google. So I can find their links by just putting them into OSE. Duh  However, it does work to export it and do a search.

[Tribe]

Hello Rusty,

You should simply ask yourself the question: what is your time worth?
Compare this to how much time you save using SEOmoz.

You make: $1000,- per month. Lets say you work 40 hours a week, that's 160 per month. So 1000/160 = $6,25. 
SEOmoz costs a hundred dollars a month. 100 / 6,25 = 16 hours. Does SEOmoz save you two days?

I've just signed up two days ago. Keyword data report and ranking factors save me a whole lot of time. 
Doing the research via Google Traffic Estimator: as I used to, will not give me any data about competitors.

Normally in a keyword research, i'd manually find information about competitors. Among other things:

• By searching Google for :intitle
• By checking the top 10 websites on incoming links
• By checking PageRanks
• By checking out internal linking structures
• By manually grading these websites on optimization

This amazing tool tells me how hard it is to score on a specific keyword with the click of a button. The 'full-report' is even better. Literally saved me hours. And that's just one tool. So I think i'll stick around.

[Francisco_Meza]

Rusty! I am glad you are honest about your budget. Here is my honest opinion about why I chose SEOmoz when I did.

Before looking for SEO tool, I didn't know what was working. All I knew at the time was that I was growing my SEO. I really didn't know how to keep track of it. One day I felt that I needed SEO Tools to keep track of my SEO campaigns. I knew Google Analytics was not the answer. So I turned to Aaron Wall's SEObook and I was a subscriber there. After several months I outgrew that community "learning" about SEO. Needless to say, I canceled my monthly subscription there. I had looked at SEOmoz, but I didn't join because I wasn't ready. I thought I was, but my income was too low and I didn't need to add another bill.

There came a point when I really felt that I needed SEO tools, not crappy free ones. I needed a dashboard to tell me what my campaigns were doing AND how I was doing against my competitors. ALSO, I used SEOmoz's ranking reports to land a client. I told them we can "see" if your site is growing or shrinking.

You may be too early in your SEO career to justify the monthly subscription. I would suggest to find someone to split the cost with. You make the payment and have 3 of the 5 campaigns. Also $100/mo can be large for someone. If it was a one-time deal, no biggie. But if a man needs to put food on the table for his wife and children, he shouldn't sign up. If you feel you are redlining your finances, don't sign up. "IF" you do sign up, you better use it as a SOLID excuse to go land some real clients.