Feedback Needed: On-Site SEO Analysis Tool & Service

Marketing
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[This post is split from another thread so please excuse the short intro - Ted S]

A client of mine recently contracted me to develop a Google scraper. Now before I go any further this is NOT a scraper that violates the Google TOS in that it does not access Google directly. It works off pages that a user has saved to their hard drive. It’s not really a Google scraper as much as an HTML scraper in that it parses HTML files (in this case Google SERP pages) and pulls out links but only those links that are to a give domain.

The script is intended to build a list of URL’s that are indexed at Google for a given site.

So once I obtain the SERP pages saved to a local hard drive for a given site I run the first of several scripts on those pages.

The end result is a Google Doc spreadsheet that has proven to be very useful to my SEO client and that might potentially prove useful enough to others to market it somehow.

I supposed you could call it an On-Site SEO Website Audit

It analysis a web site for On-Site SEO factors like…

  • Is the HTML title present? What is it?
  • Is there a meta description? What is it and is it too long?
  • Are there Alt tags?
  • Is the URL SEO and user friendly?

And other On-Site SEO factors.

Another script goes to each link found and accesses it with a HEAD request to determine what the HTTP access code is (i.e. 200 OK, 301 Redirect, etc.). If a redirect is found it catalogues the initial page being redirected to and adds that to the CSV file that I will use to populate the Google Doc spreadsheet.

Other scripts will pull out every link on each page, their anchor text, whether they are follow or no follow, what the Alt tags are, and other metrics and information that might prove useful.

The whole goal here is to clean up a site and bring it up to Google standards regarding On-Site SEO.

It’s not just all automated. Some of it will entail my personally going to pages and reviewing them and giving input on what could be improved SEO wise.

So that’s the product. A series of scripts that go out and automatically analyze the pages that are indexed in Google along with the addition of my personal analysis in addition to what the scripts find. All conveniently laid out in a Google Doc spreadsheet or provided in CSV format to allow for easy importation into Excel, Open Office, etc.

Now I can market this as a service and never give up the script’s source code (which will prevent the code from being reworked and stolen) or I can market the scripts themselves and make them available to others either for their own internal use in servicing their own clients or to sell the output to others themselves.

How I market this is still up in the air but I am leaning toward keeping the scripts private and just marketing the end reports and spreadsheets myself.

800 links takes me about 4 hours to analysis and do. Given that I want to make a minimum of $25 per hour that’s $100 that I must make to make this worthwhile for me to do as a service. I don’t know if that is doable, if there is enough value in this product to charge that much but…well…that’s why I am trying to get input. Some input that I did get on another forum has led me to believe that I am way underpricing this…which is possible I supposed though it’s tough for me to see paying even $100 for this kind of detailed analysis. I mean $100 IS peanuts if the detailed analysis actually helps a website owner clean up their site and improve their rankings I guess which I think it will but again psychologically I have to get over the fact that I would not pay that myself…I would just write the code and do it for free LOL.

Any and all input is most welcome if anyone has anything to say about all this.

Still investigating whether this is even doable and profitable to market outside the boundaries of using this to provide useful information to my own, very limited set of clients.

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Thanks very much for posting it anew Ted. Yeah…I have had trouble getting input anywhere and am really in need of some from experienced internet marketers regarding not just what I described alone but also whether this is a viable product that might have some potential.

I don’t want to waste my time developing this for a more general audience (outside my immediate clients) only to realize many hours in that it just wasn’t a viable product to market in general.

If the $100 seems a bit much I may be able to leave out the personalized analysis bit that I normally do on these things and just sell the script generated output which is plenty by itself. Selling that for something along the lines of $25 or so since it only takes about half an hour to generate (if I don’t have to visit links personally myself).

Carlos

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In four hours time I feel like I learned most everything about on-page SEO, and was able to apply it myself. If you could make your tool run quicker - maybe you coulkd charge less and it would be more appealing.

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Perhaps charging less is the way to go.

By the way the four hours that I spend on the output for my clients using this took is not about learning anything it is spent analyzing each page found in the Google SERP’s and adding my personal evaluation of what could be improved on each such page from an SEO perspective.

But I am working to automate much of what I have done in person and can cut back a great deal of the personal time I take to do that.

So simply running the scripts I have developed and letting the output of these scripts speak for itself is definitely doable. I mean the output produced won’t be exactly what any output + my personal analysis would be but pretty close.

You can know all about On-Site SEO principles but it’s very time consuming to go to each page listed in the Google SERP’s to determine if said pages are missing anything that they should have. That’s where my scripts come into play. Doing that determination for you.

Carlos

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From what I know about SEO, I feel like analyzing each page would take maybe five to ten minutes most. For example I already have a tool in my toolbar that will show me backlinks, and <h> tags. Your tool is capable of reading title and meta keywords as well? With the tool I already have I feel like it’s rather quick already. Does this mean each client has thirty or more pages they need analyzed?

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Most times that I have used this tool…we are talking hundreds of pages. The last one I did had 835 pages in Google’s index. If you were to spend an average of 7 minutes visiting and analyzing each such page to determine if any On-Site SEO was missing or broken it would take you 97 hours, that’s 97 HOURS to visit each page linked to and analyze it.

That doesn’t even count the amount of time it would take you to build a list of URL’s in Google’s SERP’s even if you could do it manually. How would you extricate the links from inside the Google SERP pages? Have you ever looked at the source code from a Google SERP page? It’s an absolute mess. I mean really. Like super gibberish. Almost impossible to tell what is what in there.

My tool extricates all links automatically using regular expressions and it does a complete analysis (like of the 835 pages mentioned above) in about 15 to 30 minutes! That’s an analysis that returns results for every single one of those 835 pages!

It evaluates HTML titles, meta descriptions, anchor texts, URL’s as to whether they are SEO/user friendly, headings (as to whether H1 and H2’s are in use and what the headings are, HTTP status codes, and a whole host of other On-Site SEO factors.

And the output is saved to a CSV file that can easily be imported into a spreadsheet.

Currently I use Google Doc’s. Oh and when imported I alphabetize the list of URL’s which also helps me uncover any duplicate URL’s that are simply misspellings or case differences that all point to the same page on site (you can’t do that on a simple reading of the SERP results as not all such URL’s pointing to the same pages are listed one after another in those results).

There is no question that the output of this tool is useful and that it saves a HUGE amount of time.

The questions that I am trying to answer are whether the output produced is useful enough to sell and if so for how much? And how I should market this? Whether to offer it as a service where I sell the output but not the source code (preventing anyone from stealing the code which WILL happen if I release it) or sell the scripts as a product in itself?

And what kind of data analysis anyone here might find useful to include in such a tool that I have not thought about (aside from the obvious like HTML titles, meta descriptions, etc.).

Tentatively it seems best for me to offer the output as a service to SEO professionals who might see real value in the output more readily in connection with servicing their client base. To price the output at somewhere around $49 per domain of a thousand total pages indexed in Google.

That’s not to say that regular website owners might not get value from said output (a website audit if you will) but only that SEO professionals will more easily see the value in what my software produces such that it will be easier to convince SEO professionals to part with $49 for the output from my scripts.

Carlos

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What should I call this thing?

On-Site Website Auditor?
On-Site SEO Analyzer (or OSSA)?
On-Site SEO Automator?
On-Site SEO Manager?

SEO On-Site Auditor (or SOSA)

Anybody like any of the above?

Any suggestions?

I like On-Site SEO Auditor myself. Sounds too much like accounting though so maybe On-Site SEO Analyzer might be better.

Carlos