You’re right – checking one’s competitors backlinks is an essential step. Whether you use the backlinker checker in WebCEO or SEOelite or SEO Spyglass, you have to use one regularly. All three of the above do a good job. Something which I like about SEO Spyglass which sets it a bit apart from SEO Elite WebCEO iss that it is cross-platform so I can run it on my Mac as well. But for Windows use, the WebCEO backlink checker is one of the best and very fast.

Cheers, Alec

Firstly I do believe the concept to use such a service is great. Finding out what my competitors are doing is really a good idea. Unfortunately the way KeywordSpy go about it just doesn’t cut it for me.

Firstly what made me signup was the fact that I could see all the keywords my competitors were using. This is great in theory, but after I signed up I found that most of the keywords many of my competitors were using were rubbish. It seems that all my competitors were using keywords that were not working for them. After I signed up I found that over 2/3 of the keywords I received from my competitors were useless.

Secondly I decided to signup was to find the keywords with little competition.
Sure they supply these but out of the few that were actually related to my industry, the analysis was way out of date. All the keywords that Keywordspy said only had 1 competitor really had at least four.

And the final reason for never touching Keywordspy, is they recurring charges. As a merchant I feel it is the customer’s choice weather to stay, this does not apply for Keywordspy. I only wanted to test it for the first month, so three weeks later I logged on to cancel my account. THERE IS NOT AUTOMATED WAY TO DO THIS!

Here is the email I received..

Dear xxxxxx,

We regret to hear that you want to cancel your account with us.

To cancel your subscription, please click the link below and follow the KeywordSpy Subscription Cancellation procedures:

We will process your cancellation upon receipt of the Subscription Cancellation Form. Please note that cancellation request cycle normally takes 3-5 working days to complete.

We wish to join you again in the near future as we continue to include and integrate more features in our system.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any additional questions.

Sincerely,

KeywordSpy Support

I have to fax them a copy of a form which is available on their website. The issue with this, it has to be faxed and can take 2-5 working days. Even if I was to fax my application across I would run out of time and be billed for next month. I am unsure of the law on this but shouldn’t the consumer have the right to email KeywordSpy and ask to have their billing authority revoked?

After all this I declined to fax the form and contacted my bank. They told me to send an email to KeywordSpy stating that they no longer have any authority to bill my card. If they bill me again my bank will create an investigation causing a chargeback to Keywordspy,

I am very disappointed with this and believe that the consumer has the right to choose, not to be forced into a silly scheme intended to cost even more.

I must be honest I don’t care what things cost, everyone is in business to make money and if that is what they think their service is worth than so be it.

I am looking for benefits for my clients, enough value were they are happy to pay us for the services that we offer.

Currently I was looking at purchasing, AWR Server, and now I am interested in WEB CEO.

With software it is not the monies to purchase its the learning of the new software, training staff and ensuring that they use the softwares tools correctly, countless hours of staff’s time is worth thousands of dollars.

As I type this post I have more then 10 tabs open waiting to go and try out all the different tools that you have recommended on this post.

If I chose to have the best selection of software, no matter the cost, of all the software on the market, which covers all aspect of web marketing, SEO, PPC, SEM etc what would you tell me to do. Taken that this is my first time here, I hold you in high regard with Aaron Wall, SEOMoz, Marketing Pilgrim, Matt Cutts and the other sites that I visit regularly.

Thank you again, a new devoted reader of your site.

Have an exseollent 2008

Goran

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ANSWER:

Arupa that’s not a comment that’s an ad. After a quick visit tool doesn’t make any particular sense to me and it costs $89.95/month.

Thanks for stopping by. I’m glad that Marina finally gave an answer from WebCEO. I do wish Marina had gotten back to me a little faster and also wish – for WebCEO’s own sake – that they had a less aggressive maintenance strategy.

I agree that generally the Angels do get back quickly and are very pleasant. As I mentioned, I’ve found more use in Brad Callen’s documentation of SEO techniques (short and to the point) and training teleseminars than in SEOelite itself. But remember SEOelite was a welcome replacement for the very bizarre and overpriced Optilink – and the link tools in SEOelite predatd the link tools in WebCEO (ironically whose link tools I prefer overall).

My point is not that WebCEO is bad software. It’s not. The website audit feature and the link tools and ranking checker are first rate and useful to the most advanced SEO shop. But it’s a pity that the pricing and maintenance model is not more transparent as I’ve noted above.

WebCEO licensing is extremely byzantine. Odessa was part of the Byzantine empire so no surprise. But WebCEO is selling to a modern internet and primarily Western public. It would be better for all concerned if they would just simplify the pricing model and include maintenance for a year with the purchase.

I’m convinced that the byzantine pricing and maintenance model is a major handicap to the adoption of the paid edition WebCEO. WebCEO are front loading the billing too much.

very interesting discussion and it is nice to see the representative of WebCEO participating in it.

I think it’s high time to add my 2 cents into the conversation as I went through the long way of testing different SEO softwares before choosing one.

IBP – probably it is really not bad for newcomers, but what to do when you outgrow its approach to SEO? Throw it away and buy something more suitable?
Also to use IBP’s full set of features you are to purchase WordTracker license – $274.75 for a year and AxROI – $99.95

SEO Elite – since the purchase of SEO Elite (trial was not possible those days) complaints about it and its support have replaced my morning exercises. Can anyone say that the answer “Hi, We feel really bad, but neither Brad nor the programmer have any other ideas for you to try over and above what I have given you.” is a good care for the customers???

and WebPosition doesn’t even deserve mentioning.

WebCEO – you say about prices, but I bought my SmallBiz edition for so little as $129 + $99 for Knowledge Base. I do not think it’s a tidy sum for functionality I’ve got. I am not going to name all the benefits I have with my WebCEO, but I am really sure I would pay those $228 just for ability to provide my boss with wonderful and clear reports.
By the way you can have unlimited number of websites with any edition. I can imagine how awful it is to decide what site to delete in case you need to add a new one when you are limited just to 5.

Oh, practically forgot to say about Web CEO support – I do not know why you got no responses from Angels, because my requests were answered as quickly as if they were looking forward for my letter

Probably tastes and needs differ but my favour goes to WebCEO

I should let my weblog readers know that I contacted WebCEO many times by email (no response) and several times by telephone to finally elicit a response to Tyler Barker’s and Nicole Simon’s concerns about surcharges for support.

I concur with both Tyler and Nicole that it is outlandish to charge people $149 within 3 months to be able to continue to use software for which they have just paid hundreds of dollars.

I don’t buy into Marina’s arguments at all about the 668 search engines. There are less than a hundred search engines in the world worth keeping up with – including regional ones. Moreover most of the checks on changes can (or at least should) be automated.

I cannot recommend WebCEO wholeheartedly as long as they are sticking up their customers within 90 days of purchase for more money.

Just for fun, let’s have a look at what does the competition offer in terms of support?

So WebCEO and Marina, you are the odd man out. Everyone else offers 1 year or unlimited support. While I really like some of your tools (the ranking checker and the site auditor and the link tools come to mind) I cannot condone the bait-and-switch with sending a second bill out in 90 days.

I suggest you move to at least six months or better yet a year of support. I suggest you introduce more transparency in your pricing model. In the meantime, readers be aware that you will have to pony up $149 within 3 months (600 days of support – what happened to two years?) or $99 (300 days of support – what happened to one year?). Moreover, I don’t like the nickel and diming of 300 and 600 days instead of one year and two years of support. What’s wrong with the simplicity of annual renewal?

At this point, until pricing transparency is addressed I can only make a cautious recommendation of WebCEO to my readers. Go in with your eyes open. Check out the competition before you leap.

Hello Alec and all uncoy.com readers interested in SEO software,

It’s been a long time since I promised Alec to drop in and add my two cents as a comment to your review. You mention Web CEO’s paid Knowledge Base Support fee asked for after 90 days included in the purchase price as the main problem with our software. Well, I’ll try to explain why our KB support is paid after 90 days.

At this point, in the Ranking tool only we support 668 search engines, their regional and language versions. However, the Ranking checker is not the only tool that requires support. In general, we check more than 1000 URLs daily. You may understand that this requires efforts of quite a few full time programmers. Please compare this kind of KB support to any of the existing providers of SEO software – I have no doubt you will find none who comes close to these numbers.

On the other hand, most US-based marketers will tell: ‘I only check rankings on a handful of the major SEs, so I don’t care about the number’ OK, they don’t provide the software, they don’t have 340,000 users, they are not asked every day of adding a new search engine, so why should they care about the regional search engines being important for local businesses only. However, we should care. Otherwise, we won’t have 340,000 users.

Besides, we never take money for the version upgrades and our support is free regardless of time you purchased Web CEO.

Well, another point. Alec says that our prices are too high if we take into account the fact that only 90 days of KB support are included. We sell many more copies at special prices being lower than the full prices. Every person who considers the regular prices too high can purchase Web CEO at a discounted price during the promo actions we run once in a while. And we don’t spam our users so often as some of our competitors do (we counted 15 mails in less than a month and a half!). It may be a great selling idea, but there’s no need to abuse it and irritate customers.