I’ve seen some discussion comparing SEO Elite to the new SEO Book Toolbar and how the new toolbar can replace SEO Elite. I’ve seen some discussion on Griz’s SEO Software post (that should be a solid link heading Griz’s way). So I’ve opened them both up and have done some side by side comparisons. Basically, I’ve concluded that the toolbar is a solid tool that provides quick on the go data to evaluate, but SEO Elite allows you to dig much deeper into a site. The only thing I’ve seen that can compete with SEO Elite is Linkscape by SEOMoz, but I’d rather use SEO Elite over Linkscape, for now at least.
So let’s get started on comparing the different options available to you from each SEO tool.
SEO Book Toolbar
The SEO Book Toolbar is a lot like SEO Quake on steroids. It took the concept of SEO Quake and adds better ways to gain and compare data. The data is still on the level of numbers though. This is great for getting an overview of the site. For example, you can quickly pull in age, link popularity, DMOZ, and PageRank. You can also do this with up to 5 sites at the same time and do a side by side. This is great for quickly comparing your site to competition.
So let’s show a quick in depth look at Griz’s blog from the SEO Toolbar.
As you can see it’s a nice little snapshot of Griz’s site, but this has a little flaw. It is grabbing the information for the blogspot domain. Maybe I’m missing it, but does anyone know a way to set it to the subdomain only? I know it’s not common to be competing against blogspot blogs, but Griz is a fierce SEO.
Next, the toolbar has a nice little page X-Ray feature which highlights header tags and stuff. This lets you get a quick look at the on-site optimization without viewing the source. This is kind of nice.
Next there is a rank checker, which is nice. It can check where you rank in the top 3 search engines quickly and easily. What I don’t see is a place for ranking change (something SEO Elite has). So it’s hard to keep up with going up and down in ranks, especially with many keywords and sites.
Other than that, it just has a couple of useful options for grabbing keywords, checking seo blogs, and stuff like that. It also helps promote the SEO Book site. The tool connects to the SEOBook site through multiple different avenues. (I don’t blame him, we’re all marketers and we’d all do the same thing).
So what do I think?
Pros: It works in your browsers, it allows quick access to data while browsing. It is better than SEO Quake. Firefox is available on multiple platforms, so you can use it on a Mac and nix. It does a great job on quickly comparing sites. Gives many different metrics. It is “free”.
Cons: It requires your browser. You must have browser up and actively browsing to use it. It is not designed as a data mining tool. It requires Firefox. Firefox is great, but only one browser. If you’re in habit of using another browser, it requires you to use Firefox just for data mining. The data is “limited”, because the link data is more about link popularity and less about nofollow/dofollow, topical relation, PR, and anchor text. It may not always be “free”. Aaron says in his intro video for the toolbar that it is free for now, but may not always be. The free part is the huge perk of this addon. Once it cost money, it will lose a lot of its advantage.
SEO Elite
I personally think this is a poor comparison, because these are very different tools. In my opinion, SEO Toolbar is far from being a SEO Elite replacement. The toolbar is a great tool, but they supplement each other instead of competing head to head.
First off, the strength of SEO Elite is its ability to mine the net for data. It is more about crawling the web for data than it is about grabbing quick on demand stats. Here is a quick display from SEO Elite from Griz’s Make Money blog.
You should instantly see the advantage here. Yes, the toolbar gives great data that is very useful, but for link analysis, it just cannot compete. Here I can see what links, how related, how authoritative, and what anchor text. This is the real information needed to understand why a page ranks. It is not that Griz has 20K+ links to his home page, but that he gets solid related links from authorities with good anchor text.
This is the real power of SEO Elite and why it is one of the tools I use almost daily. This SEO tool can show you exactly how someone manages to earn their top spot.
Also, I think the rank checker is better. The setup seems better for multiple sites and many keywords. Also, it tracks daily and weekly changes. It also graphs the performance over time, which can give a quick visual of your performance over time. I’ll stick with this one over the toolbar.
Also, the program can run in the background while you’re away or asleep. You can mine data and perform research while you’re out with the family. (I’d love for SEOElite to have a queue function, so I could set up future evens to run automatically).
So, what do I think?
Pros: Does not require a browser. Firefox can lag badly sometimes when you have too many add-ons. When I use to do design work, I would use multiple browsers for design work. It can run in the background. Gathers in-depth link data. Updates often (haven’t used SEO Toolbar long enough to comment on its updates).
Cons: First, it is Windows only. I am a Mac owner and it is a huge pain to use SEO Elite. I know there are multiple ways to use Windows with a Mac, but it’d be nice to run it natively inside of OS X. Does not provide holistic data, but is focused heavily on links. The toolbar provides a larger set of data points from multiple places. Is not “quick and easy”. Not designed to compare sites easily or review onsite optimization. It costs money and can be a hefty cost for beginners.
Conclusion
In the end, I consider SEO Elite to be a stronger tool, but neither can replace the other. The SEO Toolbar is a great in browser toolbar to grab on demand data from many different sources. Together this snapshot data provides a solid view on the competitiveness of a site. I would use the tool to grab data on niches and sites I was browsing, but this would be for preliminary work. Once I find sites to target, I would use SEO Elite to further investigate the competitiveness of the site. Although SEO is shifting, link data is still the most important data set and SEO Elite fills that role very well. Yes, SEO Elite is a steep price tag for some, but has paid for itself in helping me find niches to dominate. If you cannot afford these tools, than the toolbar is a great tool, but I would eventually invest in SEO Elite.
I use SEO for Firefox and SEO Quake, and they didn’t replace SEO Elite. I may replace SEO Quake with the new SEO Book Toolbar, but it will not replace SEO Elite. The SEO Book Toolbar is a solid product, but far from being a SEO Elite killer. They’re both SEO tools, but serve two different purposes
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{ 12 comments }
Linkscape? God, no.
Now tell me, do you know where SEO Elite gets its link data from? And while you are at it, please tell me how does it enhance the respective data in any way. Because I honestly don’t see it adding any value to it.
Have you used Linkscape?
I have various views on the tool, but it is a pretty solid research tool. The pay aspect isn’t fun and some people have different views on Rand and the Moz team.
Yes, SEO Elite pulls data from freely available link data from search engines that can be obtained by anyone who knows how to check links on a search engine.
And there are free firefox Add-ons that can show you anchor text within Yahoo link search for example, but I still feel SEO Elite adds value on top of that.
Instead of just knowing where the links are, it checks nofollow/dofollow, grabs titles, PR, and anchor text at once. It cross compares data from multiple search engines and allows you to find links from several sources.
And for me, the biggest benefit is the it can do all this in the background and I do not have to actively browse through link data page by page, but can run it in the background and return later to complete and sortable link data. I’m always short on time and I consider time to be my most valuable resource. I could manually run through link data on Yahoo. Or I can run SEO Elite while in class, come back and quickly see a count of how many anchored text links they have. The value in that is huge imo.
If I come back and see the #1 site only has 1 partial anchored link, than I know I can out rank him quickly. I’ve downed a PR 6 site with 30K+ links in a matter of 2 months, just because I knew about their anchor text. If I judged them based off PR and link popularity, I may have given up and moved on.
Can I do what SEO Elite does for free? Yes.
Does it save me a lot of time? Yes
Is it worth the money? To me, yes.
Ah, I’m glad you brought this up. How can you say you analyzed a PR 6 site with 30k links with SEO Elite? You know and I know that SEO Elite can analyze a maximum of 1000 links; 1k out of 30k is really not relevant.
I would say that your knowledge of SEO/link building is what made you pass them in rankings, not the analysis you made with SEO Elite.
But then again, that’s a truism, since it doesn’t really matter what SEO Elite shows you, you still need to get the required anchored links.
Ah, one more thing: you say speed. I say: by the time SEO Elite is done analyzing a site that has more than 1000 links (which takes forever), I am able to manually extract the most important links a site has from Yahoo.
Not to mention bugs like: showing nofollow links even if they are dofollow and viceversa, showing wrong PR for some links, showing that they are not on a page when in fact they are, etc.
All in all, I personally find SEO Elite to be unreliable, and I’d much rather trust myself when analyzing competition.
Yes, the link data is limited at 1000 links, but this is a limitation that applies to all types of analysis and is not just an SEO Elite concern. I’ll run into this same wall even with any other method.
But Yahoo tends to rank links a bit off relevance and authority. It doesn’t give you the full picture, but a nice sample of their authority links, enough to determine if they’re working anchor text.
And for sites with less than 1,000 links, like niche markets, than you can grab the full set.
Yes, for me it does save me time. I know it takes forever to scan for data, but I don’t have to be at the computer to do it. It may take longer, but have it running on another computer or while I’m in class (full time college student).
Can I get a solid idea of link data faster by hand? depends
The opportunity cost of doing it by hand is that I am giving up time that could be spent on something else.
My skill in SEO comes from my ability to do higher level activities, such as communicating with webmasters for link exchanges, which is a skill only a human can do effectively.
Link data mining is a time intensive repetitive task, which is the perfect kind of job for a computer to handle.
But each person has their own methods. I’ve really enjoy the SEO Elite tool, so I recommend it here. Other than my list of links in my footer, I do not push too many affiliate products or ads on this blog. I paid for the tool and use it regularly.
OK, let’s just leave it at that. Everyone has his/her own methods. I personally am not impressed by SEO Elite.
We could go on and on just talking about this subject, so let’s just stop here. :D
=P I agree, we could debate back and forth for days.
I do think SEO Elite is a little overpriced though.
Justin, can you checkout this plugin http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/ and let me know what you think between it and quake?
cheers,
Can I throw another option into the ring – Market Samurai – I just started using it (there is a free 40 day trial) – and I like it a lot – it seems a lot faster than SEOElite (and keyword elite) – has the same 1000 backlink limit. I’d like to hear an experts opinion. For me MS won’t replace seoelite because I love being able to monitor where my sites are in the rankings easily and I think SEOelite is more detailed. But for a beginner as a first tool I am starting to like it a lot – but i’d ilke a real SEO Expert’s opinion on it
I have never used it, but it sounds worth the try. If I can get a trail, I’ll check it out. =)
I’d be really interested in your comments Justin- just go to their website and you get the 40 day trial – they are saying it will be going up in price and its still beta but at $147 its comparable in price to Callen’s stuff
There is no magic tool that does the job, it is about a collection of tools and techniques that get the job done.
I find that SEO Elite useful, but is limited to 1000 links and never really gets to the links I am looking for for most sites.
I’m still waiting for the “magic” tool that will work for some of the specialized niches I work in.
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