I think the subscription fee is well worth it if you are looking to draw more traffic to your website via SEO. It's the combination of the tools and the community.
Disclaimer: Rand Fishkin's a friend (but I would have been a customer regardless).
I'm surprised that they were unprofitable. How does a consulting business with great brand recognition, in an industry that's still growing fast, not make boatloads of money? They should be like all those Whateverilents of the late 90's, paying people $50/hour and billing them to companies at $200/hour. (At least, I know of plenty of companies that would pay that much, and plenty of SEOs who would make that much -- and having a middleman with the best brand name in the business could definitely make it happen).
byrne - I think you might have misread the piece; we were profitable when we took investment the first time and are profitable again now. The "dip" was during a period when we burned the investment capital to grow faster.
And yeah - our rates are $1,000 per hour, which helps moderate demand, but we rarely outsource anything (and even when we do, it's to other very high priced vendors). Strategic SEO (vs. the tactical keyword research, link building, site editing, etc.) requires lots of deep knowledge.
Interesting. I figured the most likely explanation was that you were investing in growth. I just assumed you were more like McKinsey, less like Amazon.
$1,000 an hour! Definitely gives me something to shoot for! I've noticed that in my SEO work, too: the first 10% of the work (planning and strategy) seems to have many times the value of the next 90% (the research and implementation). It's just tough to charge wildly different amounts for the same person's time. I guess doing just that first 10% is a solid solution.
I think your perception of value is going to be heavily influenced by your level of SEO expertise and what your SEO workflow looks like. Aaron Wall has a great pyramid for expertise in an arbitrary market -- the beginners always outnumber the intermediates who outnumber... SEOMoz Pro is targeted at, if I don't miss my guess, high beginning/low intermediate. If you can't look at the SERP for [bingo cards] and say "This is competitive but not nearly as competitive as [student credit cards]" then they have a tool which will tell you exactly that and that provides value. For businesses who are in that sweet spot it is totally a no-brainer.
With regards to the workflow bit: SEO is primarily a game of link acquisition at the competitive levels. One common strategy for acquiring them is to identify pages on the Internet that would be good links and then email the people in charge of them to ask for the link. A lot of the SEOMoz tools are designed to make this process more efficient. I have deep misgivings about it (from both a it-is-a-nuisance and the-ROI-is-inferior-to-less-annoying-alternatives perspectives) and don't practice it myself, so those aren't so useful for me.
I would like to flatter myself and say I'm a wee bit above low-intermediate in SEO. I mostly use the Rank Tracker, and the other tools have not frequently given me actionable information. That said, I am not displeased with my $80 a month or whatever it was. If there is ONE thing I wish everyone at HN understood in their bones about SEO, it is that the ROI on it is just freaking amazing. Pick a number beyond your wildest dreams, no, it is better than that. In that context, I often spend speculatively on it, and ~100 a month is easy to justify even if it only results in positive decisions once a year.
(Edited to add: Don't let the Internet Marketing crowd fleece you, though.)
"If there is ONE thing I wish everyone at HN understood in their bones about SEO, it is that the ROI on it is just freaking amazing."
I couldn't agree more. I am frustrated and humbled to see so many intelligent people in this community that I respect be so utterly against SEO. The worst part for me is seeing so many entrepreneurs simply disregard it as an option.
I don't care if you use SEOmoz's products or our competitors, SEO is a legitimate marketing tool and I truly believe it can help everyone here build better businesses.
The aside about Internet Marketing -- if you ever look up the terms Internet Marketing or Make Money Online you'll find a wealth of squeeze pages with long copy attempting to convince you that $79.95 or $500 is all you need to make millions on Google. These places are little better than scams targeting the desperate and ignorant. So when I give advice like "Hey, don't sweat the small stuff, speculative spending on SEO is smart even if it doesn't immediately result in sales this time" I wanted to add a disclaimer "But don't get suckered, because exactly those words get repeated by people looking for suckers".
I am. Whether its worth the money depends on whether or not you're doing a lot of SEO work now. Their tools address pain points that are specific to the industry, so if you do professional SEO work they are great, but if you're still learning I would stick with the free options.
Here's where we've gotten value out of their tools:
- Providing a quote to a new client: Before we can give a fair quote, we need to perform a quick analysis of the client's current SEO efforts (if any), their competition, and their niche. We need this process to be both quick and accurate, and the SEOmoz tools help immensely.
- Competitive analysis: A smart, defensive SEO will fill their Y!SE profile with hundreds of garbage links, creating noise that makes it harder to find paid links and free authority links. SEOmoz's Linkscape tool will do the leg work of sifting through the pile to reveal the links which are actually helping the site rank. This alone can save hours of work (plus it has an API you can use to augment your private toolset).
- Tracking progress: They've got great tools for tracking a site's position for a given keyword in SERPs over time. Simple, but essential.
The other feature we like a lot is the Q & A. Each Pro member gets to ask 3 questions a month about anything under the sun, which will be answered in a timely manner by their staff. They do a good job of triaging these requests, to the point that their CEO will handle tougher questions. Although we don't use the Q&A service frequently, its invaluable to have a source that can answer truly obscure questions a client might ask.
Bottom line: the product is well worth the money, if you need it.
I am as well. My agency has an account. They're tools don't do much that you can't do on your own for free, but they do put it all in one place which saves us enough time when doing market research that it justifies the cost.
If you haven't already, you should check out the labs stuff - http://www.seomoz.org/labs - which do things no other tools (that I'm aware of at least) can do :-)
And yeah, I know I'm biased, but I'm also very excited to have an article of mine posted to one of my favorite sites.
I worked for an SEO firm prior to my current job, and as such we had access to the pro tools. I do not have a private pro membership, though if someone wishes to bless me with one I certainly can use it.
If you are determined to improve your site's ranking, the pro membership tools are more than worth it IMHO. They provide some solid analysis, and LinkScape is amazing also as a reference. The danger is that this sort of analysis can lead to navel gazing and obsessively reloading the tools.
SEO rankings are like tracking your weight, if you do it everyday the fluctuations can drive you mad.
The company I work for has an account. I use it about once every couple of months.
The results are sometimes interesting, but it's really targeted at hard-core search marketers. As a casual user I find the reports hard to get my head around and not directly useful in improving my websites.
I think the subscription fee is well worth it if you are looking to draw more traffic to your website via SEO. It's the combination of the tools and the community.
Disclaimer: Rand Fishkin's a friend (but I would have been a customer regardless).