SEOmoz raises 18 million from Ignition and Foundry
seomoz.orgThis is great. In an ocean of depressingly terrible SEO information, advice and tools shrouded in secrecy by pompous quacks dressed in fake wizard robes SEOMoz has always stood out as completely open, ethical, high quality and useful.
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.
Talk about taking transparency to the next level. This post has revenue, freemium conversion data, cap table breakdown, valuation, vc negotiation detail, and how Rand and his co-founder / mom amicably decided to part ways. Amazing. Has there ever been a private company at this scale with this level of transparency? Go SEOmoz.
I'm very impressed with their openness and in describing the process. They share revenue projections, their cap table and pitch deck.
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 the transparency. You definitely get the feeling Rand would be an amazing person to work with.
I love that a funding announcement is so interesting that it will pull in tons of new customers.
I paid 99$/month for few months, but I end up only using keywords tracking tool... 99$ was too much only for that feature.
Any saas offering only keywords tracking? For something like 9.99$/month?
If you're just looking for rank tracking, there's a few I've heard good things about (obviously, I like Moz, but I use a lot of the other features too, and am biased):
- 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 :-)
We have one as well (built from the ground up--my co-founder and I started building it in October 2010!)
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.
Co-founder weighing in here, for you HN geeks we use Erlang, RabbitMQ, and Riak for our rank tracker software.
Interesting, I will give this a try tomorrow when I have company CC #
I currently use the $100 plan on Authority Labs and their delayed reporting is incredibly frustrating. When it works it great to get detailed and exact ranking stats on keywords. When I can't get reports and keyword data is delayed 1+ days, it sucks.
I will give those other services a try.
Any keyword suggestion tools you would recommend before a site gets a lot of traffic? (other than Google's Keyword Tool)
Tks for your time and suggestions. I will look into them.
You might find something in this list: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2164037/40-SEO-Tools-of...
you can also check out micrositemasters.com
I hear they tracked rank for some big brands at one point.
Quite a few WF members here
www.wordtracker.com is $59/month
I just woke up but here we go:
- 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.
Really great writeup. Congrats Rand and the whole team! I'm impressed the VCs were ok with Rand publishing so much data publicly. I hope more companies are this transparent with information...it really helps level the playing field for startups and entrepreneurs to have access to this kind of data.
Congrats again!
Love it. Their software is pretty damn good, I hope they become the de facto SEO package and make scads of money.
Rand's writing about marketing and the inner machinations of growing a company are always worth reading.
Not really an SEOmoz fan (nor do I have an opinion on them), but the insight into their deal was very welcome and it's good to see that they've got big plans.
I have been a paying customer for 6+ months, and I don't think they are the best service. But when open site explorer has recent data, it is extremely helpful.
Congrats to Rand and the SEOmoz team.
I can't wait until SEOmoz eventually re-brands to "Moz", dropping the "SEO" part of the equation.
Rand is also pushing a HN for online marketing - http://inbound.org/
I hope it takes off, but the community behind it is currently non-existing.
Now that they have their own backlink crawler their information is extremely valuable to any self respecting SEO. It's expensive, but that's probably because of lack of competition.
mercenary, if you knew Rand at all, you'd realize how dumb such an insinuation sounds.
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.
Congrats Rand and team. Very well deserved.
There's an infographic in one of the slides about the SEOMoz culture that I love and reminded me of the originating post that gives a solid overview:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/establishing-guiding-principles-a...
EDITION: stupid brainrashed children say "rite dis" i rite. i say rand good guy rand good. seomooooooooooooooz i buy. 99 cents onry. i buyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.
congo rats ulations rand seomoz good marqeteen jawb. sory end congrexuleeytions end have nice day.
Burden of proof is on you to show they are paying for positive reviews
They have built up a large social media following, possibly the best for a company of their size in a niche their size, with a lot of hard work and great content.
i rike dem to. i mean say why is cost a lot but people say 99 is cheap coz seomoz is best of da best onry. i use transrate stupid brainwash children say me write dis, did no mean. rand good guy i buy rand stufings.
I'm curious, how did you find Hacker News?