Overall I really like the idea, for anybody that's done serious SEO, it's very nice to have this kind of service. My major issue is that the pricing system makes me extremely nervous. We're one of those sites that has a "gazillion" keywords and when I see the price jumping from $50-$1000/month with just an increase of a few thousand keywords it makes me think that a few hundred thousand keywords will cost substantially more than my entire monthly revenue.
I think you created the pricing schedule based on your costs. The more keywords being tracked the more "crawlers" necessary, meaning the more servers you need and thus more cost. However, I think you need to establish a pricing schedule based on the customer's math. i.e. something that's directly related to revenue (most likely traffic, or maybe number of pages) so that the ROI calculation is easier.
Right now maybe I have a few hundred thousand keywords, is that going to cost me $100K/month? Even though 95% of them generate a small amount of traffic? So now I'm doing a blind ROI calculation. Essentially I have to use your system (and pay for it) before I know how much I'm going to be spending.
If you make your pricing based on something I know (# pages, monthly uniques, pageviews, etc) I have an actual idea on how much I'm going to be paying and I can make an intelligent decision accordingly.
I guess I could use the "personal" free service to see just how many keywords your system will find and be able to do a better calculation, but that seems a little obtuse.
So I think the goal is to come up with a pricing structure that is easier to calculate, and on your end not have people crush your system with too many keywords. This can be done pretty easily I think: bucket keywords in priority (refreshed daily, once a week, once a month, etc).
Priority is based off of a few factors: traffic and historical volatility.
In this way you can intelligently and efficiently monitor hundreds of thousands, even millions of keywords with 1 cheap server (maybe $100/month) and charge out 500-1000/month. In that way you're still seeing fantastic margins, I'm getting great use out of the system, and everybody's happy.
I think you created the pricing schedule based on your costs. The more keywords being tracked the more "crawlers" necessary, meaning the more servers you need and thus more cost.
Customers don't care about your costs, though. If I buy a first-class plane ticket to fly a can of Coke from Belize to Boise, it's still worth as much as a regular can of coke.
They're pricing what they think their customers will value, especially what they think their richest customers will value.
If you have a few thousand keywords, what you probably have is about a hundred 'stem'-ish keywords whose fluctuations will tell you 90% of what you need to know. If you're selling a ton of products, you will probably need more, but if you're doing that, why not track keywords at the category level (instead of "Aluminum Widget," "Cast Iron Widget," "Plastic Widget," just "Widget")?
my guess on the pricing jump is because culling keyword suggestions from the Google API get's real expensive (if that's where they are getting them from). Going to get the rankings from the SE's is a free API call, but suggestions cost money.
But the idea of adding incremental cost is also a good idea, but it has to be engineered into the merchant system and upgrade page, plus it really gives nobody an incentive to jump up to the next pay level. But I see your point.
I think your pricing and plans need work. To my mind, there are roughly 4 kinds of people that would pay for your service. First is that lone amateur, maybe thinking about building something great, who you want to get in at the ground floor. Then there's the slightly more serious person or team running a startup website/blog, or something of that nature. Then there are the bigger companies who run a number of media properties, and finally, the SEO consultant/maven/spammer who is managing many sites at once.
This pricing doesn't seem attractive to anyone except the first group, who, incidentally, would probably sign up for only the free version. Even a small (serious) startup is going to be interested in more than 100 or even 500 keywords, and probably has more than one site (personal blogs, company blogs, product landing pages, other projects leading to the startup, etc.). And then when you talk about a bigger project running multiple websites or an SEO consultant/agency, the idea of paying per site & per month & being capped on keywords would scare them away.
I think you've sort of copied the standard SaaS pricing model without really considering your audience. Get "out of the building" and find out who your customer is (surely I'm off base with my 4 groups, its a blind shot). Then price according to what the market will bear.
My sense is that you'll want a free version, a version for people running a small company (a few sites, a bunch 'o keywords), and people running many media properties (many sites, an astronomical number of keywords).
The current caps on keywords make me think an engineer picked the limits, not someone who had done SEO before.
Edit: I realized I failed to mention I think this is a great service at first glance. Didn't mean to go instantly negative, just trying to give constructive feedback.
Thanks for checking it out and also for your great feedback. I'm sure I will be able to arrive at the ideal pricing model for customers and myself over time, and this gives me some good things to think about.
For the record, I've actually spent quite a bit of time outside the building. :) I've worked on large SEO projects both as a consultant and as an engineer for dozens of companies and have spoken with hundreds more in the process of building Ginzametrics. I'll continue to pay attention to feedback like yours and others as I grow.
I'm excited (as an owner of an agency) to see more and more high quality software in the SEO market.
One thing I don't see it doing though is replacing agencies (as mentioned in the article); knowing what to do and doing it are two different things. Software has a place in both but can't do either completely.
It sounds from other comments here like you know that (you said agencies are your best customers)-so I'm curious: where did that turn of phrase come from? It sounds like something TC might say but they implied you said it...
As others have said, great job-especially as a lone co-founder. I'll go sign up for a beta invite now (look for Distilled).
Thanks, Will. Distilled is very well-known and respected so I look forward to your feedback.
The agency question is tough to answer in a single soundbite. So here goes a long-winded response. :)
It is true that there are many companies trying to bring their SEO operations in-house (but not everybody, of course). I have helped quite a few do this successfully myself and this experience was one of the primary motivators for building Ginzametrics.
But the point is not to merely replace people (agencies or otherwise) with tools but to let talented people do their job better with more automation. We both know that there are still far too many Excel-jockeys in this industry doing work that should be automated. That's one of the things I'm focused on fixing.
Agencies are some my best customers because the agencies that I work with are bringing value to their customers above and beyond what those customers could do in-house due to their expertise, experience and local presence (in the case of global / local SEO projects). The fact that they are investing in tools such as Ginzametrics further shows their instinct to innovate and become more efficient.
Looks good so far, I signed up for a beta invite. One thing I noticed, you have radio buttons for what I'm using for analytics, I would suggest you make them checkboxes, so I could've selected Google and Clicky.
Very nice software, although I would cut down the feature list on a light version.
I think the tracking of keyword alone is a company of its own. Sometimes I want to go back and see what our rankings were on particular keywords exactly XYZ days ago.
I don't think they're that mutually exclusive. "SEO" is mostly just a matter of figuring out some basic things, and if you're actually being professional about it, doing some testing.
After all, that's why he's able to automate it.
I'm much more impressed with people that do two things that are relatively further apart, such as someone who can hack kernel code and also has good design skills.
That's not to take anything away from what he's done, mind you - any startup is something to be proud of. I just don't think it's miraculous that a good developer is also able to get a good grasp on "SEO".
This looks good to me. You've got a beta request from Voltage Creative as well. We're a marketing agency that actually offers SEO services, but we're always looking for ways to fill gaps for the clients that fall through the cracks. IE, the ones that are big enough to need SEO, but too small for an agency. It would be great to have some software to point them toward.
Agencies are some of my best customers, and they seem to love it because it helps them with the workload of their existing clients, so they can bring in more business.
I think you created the pricing schedule based on your costs. The more keywords being tracked the more "crawlers" necessary, meaning the more servers you need and thus more cost. However, I think you need to establish a pricing schedule based on the customer's math. i.e. something that's directly related to revenue (most likely traffic, or maybe number of pages) so that the ROI calculation is easier.
Right now maybe I have a few hundred thousand keywords, is that going to cost me $100K/month? Even though 95% of them generate a small amount of traffic? So now I'm doing a blind ROI calculation. Essentially I have to use your system (and pay for it) before I know how much I'm going to be spending.
If you make your pricing based on something I know (# pages, monthly uniques, pageviews, etc) I have an actual idea on how much I'm going to be paying and I can make an intelligent decision accordingly.
I guess I could use the "personal" free service to see just how many keywords your system will find and be able to do a better calculation, but that seems a little obtuse.
So I think the goal is to come up with a pricing structure that is easier to calculate, and on your end not have people crush your system with too many keywords. This can be done pretty easily I think: bucket keywords in priority (refreshed daily, once a week, once a month, etc).
Priority is based off of a few factors: traffic and historical volatility.
In this way you can intelligently and efficiently monitor hundreds of thousands, even millions of keywords with 1 cheap server (maybe $100/month) and charge out 500-1000/month. In that way you're still seeing fantastic margins, I'm getting great use out of the system, and everybody's happy.