DIY SEO Review

by Patrick Altoft on May 13, 2010 / 16 responses

Although we use a number of tools here at Branded3 I’ve never been a big fan of most of the SEO software available today. The market seems to be always slightly behind the times and although companies such as SEOmoz, Majestic, Raven, Enquisite (who are funded to the tune of $17m) and a multitude of keyword research and keyword spy tools have made great strides in the last 2 years it sometimes feels like we should have been here in 2008 rather than 2010.

Having said that, the sort of software that excites me isn’t the sort of software that small businesses need to perform mass market SEO, and that’s where solutions like DIY SEO (a recent recipient of $1m in funding) come in.

Whenever we get approached by smaller clients my first comment is always that they shouldn’t use an agency unless they are willing to spend a decent amount per month – for smaller budgets an agency just isn’t going to deliver results due to all their overheads.

As a rule we split budgets into the following camps:

• Up to £100/month – learn it yourself
• £100-£500/month – hire a freelance SEO
• £500-£1000/month – hire a sole trader type SEO company
• Over £1000/month – hire an agency

DIY SEO fits into the first bracket nicely at $49/month or $499/year and in my opinion, if you want a step by step way to learn SEO and optimise your site then it’s money very well spent. Yes you could try to learn everything from forums but the thing DIY SEO does very well is to list all the tasks so you simply can’t avoid doing them. The biggest thing that prevents people from succeeding at SEO is procrastinating and not putting in the hard work, especially people new to the industry.

I signed up with the service and entered a clients site and all the suggestions were sensible and useful. The link acquisition methods are never going to get the site ranking for really major keywords but even agencies struggle with that sometimes.

In the future I would like to see more advanced link acquisition strategies and also some integration with something like Majestic or SEOmoz to do competitor link analysis but that’s probably a bit beyond what most people who are new to SEO can manage anyway.

Verdict: Thoroughly worthwhile for the target market of people new to SEO

Post category: Search Engine Optimisation Tweet

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.