SEO PowerSuite vs. SEOmoz: Who Wins the Battle?

Here we are again with the test drive of two major SEO packs: SEOmoz vs. SEO PowerSuite. If you're reading this article, you probably do SEO not just for fun, but to move your website right to the top of the search results and to get a solid cash flow in return.

No doubt, you need a great tool for that! But how does one find the best SEO tool that saves time, cuts down expenses and still brings amazing results? In most cases, the dilemma comes down to choosing between:

• web-based SEOmoz
• desktop-based SEO PowerSuite.

There are probably more SEO PowerSuite vs. SEOmoz reviews across the Web than needed, but you can't evaluate something until you hold it in your hands and give it a try. That's exactly what we did, and here are the results.

Free trial

It seems that you can try both SEO tools at zero cost, since both SEO software providers offer a free trial.

However, what we've discovered with SEOmoz is that its free trial is only for 1 month and you have to provide a credit card to sign up. And (be careful!), the subscription to SEOmoz free trial is auto-renewable. If you forget to unsubscribe after one month, you will continue to get charged $99/mo until you opt out.

SEO PowerSuite free version lets you use the software without any time limitation (it is a bit limited in functionality, though), absolutely free of charge and with no credit card required.

SEOmoz	SEO PowerSuite
1 month	Unlimited
Credit card payment required	-

For our SEO PowerSuite vs SEOmoz review, we've used Professional versions of both software tools, SEOmoz PRO ($99/month) and SEO PowerSuite Professional ($249 one-time payment).

To run our comparison in the most objective way, we've split the typical SEO campaign workflow into 5 must-do stages both tools will assist us at:

1. Any SEO campaign starts with keyword research. It lies in finding profitable keywords to optimize your site for, thus getting maximum traffic with minimum effort;
2. Another must-do SEO task is on-page SEO audit that consists in checking your site's HTML coding and structure;
3. Then it's time to optimize your site's content for the search engines, make it keyword-rich and appealing to the search engines as well as to human users;
4. Another absolute must-do is smart and effective link building, because quality backlinks from related websites are indispensible if you want to hit search engines' tops.
5. And, finally, throughout your SEO campaign, you have to measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts by keeping track of your site's rankings for the keywords you target in the search engines that matter to you.

OK, let's start the party! Now we are going to check SEOmoz Pro vs. SEO PowerSuite Professional far and wide!

1. Keyword research

So, we start with keyword research. Both SEO PowerSuite and SEOmoz have a Rank Tracker module for this SEO task.

First, let's see how Rank Tracker by SEOmoz can help us with keyword research.

Well, all you can get here is a maximum of 200 keywords per website. And those are only the keywords already bringing traffic to your website. Which means SEOmoz is of totally no help in spotting new keyword opportunities – you end up with the keywords you already rank for, and, (taking into account the 300 keywords per 5 campaign limitation) you even can’t use all 200 of them if you’re running SEO campaign for a number of websites.

More to that, the keywords are taken from Google Analytics, which means that, if you don't have Google Analytics set up for your site yet, you won't get any keyword suggestions.

With the list of keywords, you also get:

• Your current Google rank for each keyword
• The number of visits your website gets via each keyword

Ok, let's move on to Rank Tracker from SEO PowerSuite. Right away, it offers
19 different mechanisms of keyword suggestion. You can simply use them one by one to get the biggest possible number of keyword ideas, as Rank Tracker lets you add unlimited keywords to the project.

And, you don't have to worry about duplicates from different sources - SEO PowerSuite's tool will exclude all duplicates automatically. After you compile a keyword list, you can check the following metrics for the terms you've got:

• Your current search engine rankings;
• The number of visits you site gets via each search term;
• The number of searches each keyword gets per month;
• Estimated visits - the number of visits your website can potentially get if it ranked #1 for the keyword;
• Competition for these keywords in different search engines;
• Keyword efficiency index (KEI) – competition to the number of searches ratio. KEI is about the most reliable criteria used to identify how SEO-lucrative a keyword is.

So, in short, here's the difference between the two tools:

SEOmoz	SEO PowerSuite
Lets you create 5 active campaigns	Lets you create unlimited number of projects
Allows you to monitor up to 300 keywords per 5 campaigns	Allows you to monitor an unlimited number of keywords
Lets you research only the keywords your site already ranks for	Provides new keyword ideas for your SEO campaign
Lets you get keyword suggestions from 1 source only	You can tap into 19 different sources for keyword suggestions
Allows you to analyze keywords against Keyword difficulty	Allows you to analyze keywords against The number of searches Competition KEI Estimated Visits
Lets you check the number of visits each keyword brings to your site	Lets you check the number of visits each keyword brings to your site
Provides a keyword research report once a week	Offers unlimited keyword research reports
Has keyword research reports in PDF	Has keyword research reports in HTML and/or PDF
Lets you receive reports via email	Lets you save reports to your computer, auto-email them to a client or auto-publish them to the Web (Enterprise license)

Impressed with SEO PowerSuite's keyword research capabilities? Try it for Free right now!

2. On-page optimization

Let’s move on! Now you need to check your website, which means your on-page optimization starts here. The first thing you do is scan the whole website to find any errors in its code, all the tiny invisible things that may prevent your website from high rankings.

SEOmoz on-page tool crawls your site and reports 3 types of issues:

• Errors
• Warnings
• Notices

(The importance of each issue is is defined using SEOmoz-developed scale. So, it doesn't necessarily mean that, to the search engines, a missing page title is more of an issue than an overly-dynamic URL, as SEOmoz states.)

NOTE: If you have a big website with over 10k pages, do not expect to get crawl stats for all of your webpages, as with SEOmoz PRO ($99 a month) you can get the crawl statistics for max 10k pages only… The updates are available only once a week, so if you make some changes and want to see results of the job, sorry, but you have to wait a week!

Besides, the information is updated only once a week, so, if you make changes to your site, you'll have to wait for at least one week for the results to surface during a site analysis.

Now, back to SEO PowerSuite. The SEO toolbox offers a tool for on-page SEO called WebSite Auditor. It analyzes your entire website first and then lets you tackle individual pages to see how well they are optimized for your target keywords.

WebSite Auditor checks a site against a whole variety of SEO factors:

• Structure and coding;
• Indexation and links;
• Social media factors;
• And more!

Do not be afraid of such a huge amount of data, as it gives you the key to top sarch engine positions. Besides, WebSite Auditor lets you fully control what you see on screen: you can edit existing workspaces or create your own tabs, easily hop between workspaces, etc.

Among the different SEO factors that WebSite Auditor reports are:

• HTML and CSS validation errors;
• Server response status codes of your webpages,
• Broken links found on your website,
• The total number of links on the page,
• A list of pages with duplicate content and/or empty HTML elements,
• Webpages with redirects and canonical tags.

As a rule, these are pretty easy to fix, which is likely to have a positive impact on the way search engines crawl and rank your website.

Again, for your convenience, here is a summary of how both SEO tools take care of on-page:

SEOmoz	SEO PowerSuite
Lets you analyze up to 10k webpages	Lets you analyze ANY number of your site's pages
Only provides the summary of the crawl	Provides detailed information on the webpages under analysis
Updates provided data once a week	Updates SEO data in real time
Does not offer branded on-page reports	Offers 2 branded site structure audit reports

3. Content optimization

Ok, now when you are done with the formal elements of your website, it’s high-time to have a dig at its content. No wonder you are not eager to waste your time on guesswork, but want to write the content that makes your website appealing not only to visitors, but to crawlers as well. The only thing we can say – you are a fortunate soul because you are not left alone facing this task!

First, let's see what SEOmoz onpage tool can do to help you with content optimization. It:

• Calculates the optimization rate of the pages that rank in the top 50;
• Lets you analyze content of any webpage for 1 keyword at a time;
• Gives recommendations on fixing the issues if there are any.

And here is what you can do with WebSite Auditor's (SEO PowerSuite) content optimization tool:

• Check the overall optimization rate of any webpage on the site;
• Check the optimization rate of each separate page element (title, description, etc.);
• Get a winning keyword density for each page element;
• Spot the best amount of key terms to use on the webpage;
• Create a clear-cut Page Optimization report and brand it with your logo;
• See any webpage through Google's eyes with a Search Engine View report.

The recommendations that WebSite Auditor provides are based on competition analysis. The on-page SEO tool runs a real-time scan of the top 10 sites ranking for the keywords you specify, which ensures that the content strategy it puts forth really helps you rank higher under the latest search engine ranking algorithms.

Content optimization in SEOmoz vs. content optimization in SEO PowerSuite, distilled:

SEOmoz	SEO PowerSuite
Lets you analyze site content for 1 keyword at a time	Lets you analyze site content for many keywords at once
Reports the optimization rate of a page only if it ranks in the top 50	Reports the optimization rate of any page on the site, irrespective of its rank
Provides content optimization tips based on in-house standards	Provides content optimization tips based on the standards used by top-ranking competitors

Willing to start content optimization right now? Let WebSite Auditor give you a hand – get yourself a Free copy!

4. Link building – creating a backlink strategy

Links from related websites are a must if you want to hit search engines' tops. When other sites link to you, this sends the search engines a message that your online resource sparks interest and deserves to be ranked higher.

But how can an SEO find appropriate websites to get backlinks from? Surely, the safest way is to follow a battle-tested path, that is, the path of your top-ranking competitors. Hence, in order to create a backlink strategy, an SEO would normally see sources their most successful competitors have got their backlink from.

SEOmoz offers its service Open Site Explorer (unfortunately we encountered a problem while switching from SEOmoz to Open Site Explorer using Google Chrome and Safari web browsers, in Mozilla Firefox there were no problems) - the data base of backlinks which you can use being a Pro subscriber. Using this resource you can see:

• The number of links a site has (internal/external, dofollow/nofollow);
• Each linking page's title;
• Each linking page's URL;
• Links' anchor texts;
• Each linking domain's authority;
• Each linking page's authority, etc.

The main inconvenience is that SEOmoz mixes external inbound links together with internal inbound links and lists them ALL under “inbound links”. So, there is no way for you to see the actual number of backlinks to a site. However, you can see the number of linking domains.

Also, if you wish to export data in CSV, you get to export only 10k links max.

Now, SEO PowerSuite's backlink checker is called SEO SpyGlass.

Unlike Open Site Explorer, SEO SpyGlass uses a mixed set of backlink databases to collect backlink intelligence from. These include (1) SEO SpyGlass's own multi-million database, (2) 161 search engine databanks (Google, Blekko, Alexa, etc.) and (3) Google Analytics. Thus gibing you the fullest picture of backlinks pointing to any site.

Here's what you get to know with SEO SpyGlass:

• A full list of backlinks pointing to a site (there's no cap on the number of backlinks reported);
• Each linking page's title;
• Each linking page's URL;
• Links' anchor texts;
• Each linking page's Google PR;
• Each linking domain's Google PR;
• Each linking domain's IP address;
• Each linking domain's age;
• Each linking site's Alexa and Compete ranks;
• Each linking page's indexation information;
• Each linking page's social media popularity;
• Each backlink's SEO value, etc.

To sum it up,

SEOmoz (Open Site Explorer)	SEO PowerSuite (SEO SpyGlass)
The backlink data is retrieved only from one source	The backlink data is retrieved from multiple sources (an own base, search engine databanks, Google Analytics)
No list of backlinks pointing from a specific domain	A full list of backlinks pointing to a site from each domain
Separate stats on linking domains	Separate stats on linking domains
Only basic information about each linking site is provided	Plenty of SEO metrics on each linking site are collected
No social media popularity of the linking site is reported	Social media metrics for each linking site are provided
You can compare up to 5 websites	You can compare up to 5 websites
You can export data in CSV only (no more than 10k links)	You can export data in CSV, HTML, SQL or XML (no limit on the number of links)

5. Rank Tracking

Now that you've gone through all the stages of the SEO process, you need to see how fruitful your efforts have been. For that, you have to see where your site ranks in the search engines of your choice for the keywords you target.

Rank tracking is an integral part of any SEO campaign, as it helps you make sure you are headed in the right direction at each step of the process. If your SEO campaign consists only of a dozen of keywords, you can probably check website rankings by hand. However, if we're talking about hundreds of keywords, a good keyword tracking tool would be required.

As I said earlier, both SEOmoz and SEO PowerSuite have a Rank Tracker in their arsenal. And, there are some similarities in the information they provide. For example, both SEO tools:

• Tell you where your site ranks for your target keywords;
• Tell you the exact URLs that appear in the search results;
• Let you track Universal Search rankings (Videos, Images, etc.);
• Record rankings history and build progress graphs;
• Offer rankings reports.

But, of course, there are certain differences, too:

SEOmoz	SEO PowerSuite
Lets you create 5 active campaigns*	Lets you create an unlimited number of projects*
Lets you track up to 300 keywords per 5 campaigns	Lets you track an unlimited number of keywords
Supports only 3 search engines	Supports 350 local and international search engines
Goes only 50 positions deep in a rank check	Goes up to 1000 positions deep in a rank check
Tracks rankings once a week	Tracks rankings as often as you need it
Allows you to add only 3 competitors	Allows you to add up to 5 competitors (10 with the Enterprise license)
Lets you compare your current ranks only to your previous results	Lets you compare your current ranks to your previous/last week/last month/best/worst results, and so on.
You get only one SEO report per week, which is sent to your email	You can run an SEO report any time (and save it or email/upload it with the Enterprise license)
Can track rankings only in personalization-agnostic manner	Offers half a dozen search personalization settings (such as one's language, city, region, country, Safe Search settings, etc.)

*SEOmoz's campaign is equal to SEO PowerSuite's project; both are created for one website.

So, which SEO tool wins the battle?

Now, after we have seen how both SEO packs perform at each stage of the SEO cycle, SEOmoz tools appear to be rather limiting compared to the SEO PowerSuite toolkit. In the course of our review, SEO PowerSuite has repeatedly beaten SEOmoz in terms of features, flexibility and even the price!

But don't take our word for it. If you still have doubt, try it out!

Download SEO PowerSuite power pack for Free and set on an exciting journey all the way to Google's top — click Download FREE Edition now!