I recently WON a free premium membership from the team over at SEOmoz and it motivated me to write up this quick rating and review of the services and tools that are offered through their premium membership program. If you are interested in giving them your feedback feel free to comment on this article or fill out the survey form at SEOmoz (you must be logged in as a premium member to access the premium members survey).

SEOmoz Premium Membership Overview:

Premium membership at SEOmoz gives you 24/7 access to unique industry guides, tools, tips, tricks, answers, videos and exclusive events. The membership features provide Internet professionals of all skill levels with a suite of beneficial educational resources designed to improve the processes needed to properly analyze, setup and market sites of all sizes.

Quite simply, these features and tools make it easier to understand the inner workings of web sites, search engines and other forms of Online marketing that Webmasters constantly use within their business advertising and branding strategies.

Premium Features Rated & Reviewed:

To gather third-party feedback I emailed a list of the following services with detailed rating and review instructions to several current premium members. The data I received back from these members was compiled and used, along with my own feedback, to analyze, rate and review the individual premium services offered by SEOmoz. This article will be updated as I continue to get feedback and they continue releasing features.

SEO Q&A - Current Rating Based On Knowledge Base Of 646 Available Q&A’s

Overall Rating: Ease of Use: Functionality: Usefulness:

Member Comments, Reviews & Feedback:

Wellwrittenwords (SEO Copywriter) – This is a really amazing service: to-the-point answers to any question you care to ask. What more could anyone ask?

Willcritchlow (Media Monitoring) – The Q&A area is worth the premium membership all on its own in my opinion. Bespoke consulting value for the price of a few magazines.

eCopt (eCommerce Consulting) – I like that you can receive multiple answers from other staff members and readers. The time it takes to get your answer posted is fast and I have noticed that the SEOmoz “level of quality” is very much present within answers to user questions. The public or private question feature is probably my favorite part since there is sometimes a need to keep questions from displaying.

SEO Tips & Tricks - Current Rating Based On 63 Available Tips & Tricks

Overall Rating: Ease of Use: Functionality: Usefulness:

Member Comments, Reviews & Feedback:

Wellwrittenwords (SEO Copywriter) – Very informative: superb resource for anyone who wants to get up-to-speed on all aspects of the business in a hurry.

Willcritchlow (Media Monitoring) – I really like the tips and tricks section. They’re fun and useful.

eCopt (eCommerce Consulting) – It must be very difficult for the staff to keep posting quality tips and tricks often that aren’t already posted in the regular blog area. I have a feeling that most readers have been used to getting that kind of content for free from Mozzers in the past. So far there have been some great ones posted and I notice there are always a few fresh ones each week covering a variety of topics.

SEO Guides - Current Rating Based On 4 Available Guides

Overall Rating: Ease of Use: Functionality: Usefulness:

Member Comments, Reviews & Feedback

Wellwrittenwords (SEO Copywriter) – If you’re new to SEO and you’d like a starting point—this is it. These guides are also good for the rest of us to fill in any gaps in our knowledge.

Willcritchlow (Media Monitoring) – Mainly useful to improve our processes rather than tell us things we don’t already know.

eCopt (eCommerce Consulting) – This has got to be my favorite feature currently offered to premium members. I have always enjoyed reading the advanced and intermediate articles on SEOmoz and these guides take it one step further. They are very detailed, really useful and certainly provide insight into the world of search and the area surrounding this industry. Out of the three guides, I got the most out of the link building article and loved the images on the search-friendly website article. Can’t wait for viral marketing and linkbait one.

Premium Member Guides Currently Available

• Social Media Optimization Strategies
• Illustrated Guide to Building a Search-Friendly Website
• The Professional’s Keyword Research Guide
• The Professional’s Guide to Link Building

Individual Guide Comments & Reviews (both members and non-members)

The SEOmoz Keyword Research document has already been put to use in our office as we look for extra keywords in those very niche markets. The plethora of research resources out there are all nicely encapsulated into this SEOmoz document, which makes it a great resource as we look for new avenues to dig up important keywords. (via e-Marketing Performance)

Link Building is a resource worthy of placement on the office bookshelf. Anyone engaged in link building for themselves or others will find themselves referring to this frequently as they try various strategies and avenues to generate links. (via e-Marketing Performance)

SEO Tools - Current Rating Based On 10 Available Premium Tools

Overall Rating: Ease of Use: Functionality: Usefulness:

Member Comments, Reviews & Feedback:

Wellwrittenwords (SEO Copywriter) – It’s fun and informative to make use of these tools to see exactly how a website is performing.

Willcritchlow (Media Monitoring) – Huge time-saving vs either building the tools or doing lots of manual stuff. Again, probably worth the cost of membership.

eCopt (eCommerce Consulting) – Many of the tools are unique and can’t be found anywhere else, so it’s cool to have access to exclusive tools not many others know about. My favorite is the Page Strength tool, I use it all the time as a checks and balances system. Also, the Rank Checker is top notch and saves me a bunch of time checking standings (I added the browser toolbar button for quick checks).

Premium Member Tools Currently Available

• Geo-Targeting Detection
• Backlink Anchor Text Analysis
• Popular Searches List
• Term Extractor
• Juicy Link Finder Tool
• Rank Checker Tool
• Term Targeting SEO Tool
• Crawl Test Tool
• Keyword Difficulty Tool
• Page Strength Tool

Individual Tool Comments & Reviews (both members and non-members)

So in the end I have to give the Crawl Test tool an average rating. It doesn’t do anything that other tools don’t and it doesn’t do those things any better. (via SearchGrit)

In conclusion I give this tool a thumbs up for providing data that I haven’t seen any other tool provide. If there was only some way to do a mashup of Term Target and TextAlyzer I’d be all set. And I’d have some good linkbait to boot! (via SearchGrit)

Rand & Matt have put together a really nice tool with Page Strength, one that I recommend adding to your “tool chest”, especially since they are offering it for free. (via Search Marketing Gurus)

Link Directory - Current Rating Based On 125 Available Link Sources

Overall Rating: Ease of Use: Functionality: Usefulness:

Member Comments, Reviews & Feedback:

Randfish (SEOmoz) – Link building is a challenging, often frustrating exercise, and finding good, solid, relevant directories can be one of the more challenging parts of that process.

Discount Store - Current Rating Based On 13 Available Service Providers

Overall Rating: Ease of Use: Functionality: Usefulness:

Member Comments, Reviews & Feedback:

Randfish (SEOmoz) – We won’t list everyone who offers a discount (we need to do some quality control), but there’s certainly a lot of companies out there that we’d love to put in front of our members (and get you some great marketing, too).

Member Events - Current Rating Based On 1 Available Member Event

Overall Rating: Ease of Use: Functionality: Usefulness:

Member Comments, Reviews & Feedback:

eCopt (eCommerce Consulting) – Didn’t get to go unfortunately, but everyone who did really seemed to like it a lot. Not to mention the hard to see guests and some of the brightest folks in the industry all attended. I won’t miss the next one, that’s for sure.

Training Seminars - Current Rating Based On 1 Available Training Seminar

Overall Rating: Ease of Use: Functionality: Usefulness:

Member Comments, Reviews & Feedback:

eCopt (eCommerce Consulting) – My favorite part of the event was, of course, the AFTERPARTY. SEOmoz held the afterparty at Jillians, a fun bar, game room and restaurant. They offered drinks, unlimited video games and great food, including a burger bar, nachos, wings and all the trimmings.

Premium Member Pricing & Cost Per Month:

Cost per month is $49.00 or save by purchasing for multiple months at a time …

6 months = $249.00 (save 85%)

12 months = $399.99 (save 68%)

Conclusion & Final Thoughts:

In short, the premium membership is well liked by most of the industry no matter what specific field they happen to be in. Whether you are a novice site owner looking to improve your own exposure or a seasoned Webmaster with a decade of experience you can and will get something out of the premium service offerings at SEOmoz.

As I continue to get some more emails back from the premium members I asked for feedback from I will keep adding their reviews and average in their ratings so check back later to see what others are saying about the super cool SEOmoz Premium Membership. Hopefully publishing this post will motivate the ones who haven’t returned feedback to get theirs in and get a link to their profile AND site/blog.

Thanks to Rand and the rest of the Superhuman SEOmoz Staff (SSS) for working so hard to make all of these helpful features and tools available to the SEM/Webmaster community. I am really looking forward to seeing their next round of features and will certainly provide updates to this article as new ones are released in the future.

Feel free to take the poll below and tell us what you think!