I've also seen Rand talk and he's very passionate about what he does, I recommend anyone who gets the chance sees him speak. It's hard to not have his enthusiasm rub off on the audience and leave you re-motivated and full of ideas again.
There's definitely a huge market for this. Just look at how much absolute crud and misinformation there is out there. How many people are still being ripped off by SEO cowboys. I'd really like to see SEOMoz succeed and become more mainstream and well known.
I'd like to one day to hear small businesses asking about SEOMoz and other high quality companies/tools/sources of SEO information as supposed to going along with the first cold calling spammer that phones them up.
I'm also impressed with their non-standard move: They 'each sacrificed shares we owned to give back to each active employee at the company so they maintain their ownership percentage.'
They want to be a 'role model company in Seattle' and I truly hope companies follow in their footsteps in terms of openness and consideration for their employees.
I love that a funding announcement is so interesting that it will pull in tons of new customers.
Any saas offering only keywords tracking? For something like 9.99$/month?
- http://www.advancedwebranking.com/ - http://www.gshiftlabs.com/ - http://authoritylabs.com/
Hopefully those can help! And eventually, if you get deeper/broader in you marketing software needs, maybe we'll be worth another shot :-)
http://whooshtraffic.com/rank-tracker/
Our rank tracker also has a competition analysis tool attached--so you can get data like # of backlinks, etc. for the top 10 Google results for any given keyword.
I will give those other services a try.
- There is a version of Traffic Travis that is free (haven't used it in awhile though, and you'll see why further down the list): http://traffictravis.com
- SEO Rank Monitor is better priced at less than $20/mnth: http://seorankmonitor.com/
- The solution I use everyday is less than a one time purchase of $5. It's the Rank-O-Meter app for the iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rankometer-4google/id35903250...
You can even export white label rank reports from it!
- Allow me one more SEO tool recommendation: although it's not a rank tracker per se, check out real time analytics service called Hit Sniffer: http://hitsniffer.com
I've been using it for almost two years now, and whatever it may not have in eye candy makes up in it's very robust reporting.
Personally, I think $99 /mnth is so overpriced it's delusional, and I suspect SEOmoz's churn rate tells a similar story.
Congrats again!
Rand's writing about marketing and the inner machinations of growing a company are always worth reading.
I can't wait until SEOmoz eventually re-brands to "Moz", dropping the "SEO" part of the equation.
I hope it takes off, but the community behind it is currently non-existing.
Also, Brad Feld is no dummy. He may not have the Midas Touch, but he doesn't buy into crap, either. I suspect we'll be hearing a lot from Moz in the future.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/establishing-guiding-principles-a...
congo rats ulations rand seomoz good marqeteen jawb. sory end congrexuleeytions end have nice day.