Not Sold on Solo SEO
Solo SEO, an online project management software program, was released today for all the world to try. They are currently letting customers try the software out with a trial offer, but the software does have a monthly fee of $29.00 a month.
I will note that this is an introductory price so expect the software to cost more as new features are added in the future.I must say that it is very hard to sell me on any software that claims to assist those in managing their internet marketing campaigns, simple because there is so much involved and I have yet to see a software program that handles all of them. Solo SEO provides assistance in managing some elements of search engine optimization, link building, & content development in an easy to use interface that very closely resembles the dashboard used by Wordpress. Okay I’m kidding, it’s completely ripped off from Wordpress, but that’s fine because it gives you that familiar feeling, which is probably a good thing for a new software program to do.
Upon my first 10 seconds of using Solo SEO, I was informed that Solo SEO does not incorporate analytics as one of its features. Some other project management programs feature their own analytics which help track campaigns. With Solo SEO, your analytics are going to have to be separate. It gives you one link to a third-party analytic program, Google Analytic program, and then suggests to “search” for “web analytics” if you want to find another program.
Thanks for the advice, because I never would have thought of searching myself. I guess a requirement for using this program is that you never have ever been on the internet before, let alone tried to run an SEO campaign. Yeesh.
In the link building section, they offer a link search tool. The tool is based on a blog post by SEOMOZ’s own Rand Fishkin called “Long List of Link Searches”. You can actually use this feature for free on their website, which makes little sense to me. (maybe to help promote the software a little bit ?).
I went ahead and ran a “Competitive Report” for a keyword. It showed me some simple stats like the top ten sites that ranked for that keyword in each of the major search engines, incoming links, the number of sites that included the keyword in the title, H1, and body, Alexa rankings, DMOZ listing, and that’s it.
Not as exhaustive as say the Axandra software and not a far cry from the free seo tools at SEOMoz.Now while I’ve bashed this software so far, I will say that I have only spent a couple of hours with it and haven’t seen it’s long term potential, not yet. I am trying to get a free trial to test the software out for some campaigns, ‘cause down the road it may save me time, which we all know means saving money.
I just don’t know if the software justifies its price just yet. I will go ahead and plug the Charlie Robot software, a more-analytics based internet marketing project management platform. However, even this software is not perfect in itself and I am still working with them to make the software better. So, if you’d like to try it out for yourself, I’m sure the staff over at Solo SEO would appreciate any feedback you have to make their software better. I’ll be keeping an eye on it as well
