

SEOmoz raises 18 million from Ignition and Foundry - Fluxx
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mozs-18-million-venture-financing-our-story-metrics-and-future#companytoday

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TomGullen
This is great. In an ocean of depressingly terrible SEO information, advice
and tools shrouded in secrecy by pompous quacks dressed in fake wizard robes
SEOMoz has always stood out as completely open, ethical, high quality and
useful.

I've also seen Rand talk and he's very passionate about what he does, I
recommend anyone who gets the chance sees him speak. It's hard to not have his
enthusiasm rub off on the audience and leave you re-motivated and full of
ideas again.

There's definitely a huge market for this. Just look at how much absolute crud
and misinformation there is out there. How many people are still being ripped
off by SEO cowboys. I'd really like to see SEOMoz succeed and become more
mainstream and well known.

I'd like to one day to hear small businesses asking about SEOMoz and other
high quality companies/tools/sources of SEO information as supposed to going
along with the first cold calling spammer that phones them up.

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lawrence
Talk about taking transparency to the next level. This post has revenue,
freemium conversion data, cap table breakdown, valuation, vc negotiation
detail, and how Rand and his co-founder / mom amicably decided to part ways.
Amazing. Has there ever been a private company at this scale with this level
of transparency? Go SEOmoz.

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aaronjg
I'm very impressed with their openness and in describing the process. They
share revenue projections, their cap table and pitch deck.

I'm also impressed with their non-standard move: They 'each sacrificed shares
we owned to give back to each active employee at the company so they maintain
their ownership percentage.'

They want to be a 'role model company in Seattle' and I truly hope companies
follow in their footsteps in terms of openness and consideration for their
employees.

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zemaj
I love the transparency. You definitely get the feeling Rand would be an
amazing person to work with.

I love that a funding announcement is so interesting that it will pull in tons
of new customers.

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plehoux
I paid 99$/month for few months, but I end up only using keywords tracking
tool... 99$ was too much only for that feature.

Any saas offering only keywords tracking? For something like 9.99$/month?

~~~
randfish
If you're just looking for rank tracking, there's a few I've heard good things
about (obviously, I like Moz, but I use a lot of the other features too, and
am biased):

\- <http://www.advancedwebranking.com/> \- <http://www.gshiftlabs.com/> \-
<http://authoritylabs.com/>

Hopefully those can help! And eventually, if you get deeper/broader in you
marketing software needs, maybe we'll be worth another shot :-)

~~~
ericabiz
We have one as well (built from the ground up--my co-founder and I started
building it in October 2010!)

<http://whooshtraffic.com/rank-tracker/>

Our rank tracker also has a competition analysis tool attached--so you can get
data like # of backlinks, etc. for the top 10 Google results for any given
keyword.

~~~
Ixiaus
Co-founder weighing in here, for you HN geeks we use Erlang, RabbitMQ, and
Riak for our rank tracker software.

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avichal
Really great writeup. Congrats Rand and the whole team! I'm impressed the VCs
were ok with Rand publishing so much data publicly. I hope more companies are
this transparent with information...it really helps level the playing field
for startups and entrepreneurs to have access to this kind of data.

Congrats again!

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juddlyon
Love it. Their software is pretty damn good, I hope they become the de facto
SEO package and make scads of money.

Rand's writing about marketing and the inner machinations of growing a company
are always worth reading.

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debacle
Not really an SEOmoz fan (nor do I have an opinion on them), but the insight
into their deal was very welcome and it's good to see that they've got big
plans.

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robertp
I have been a paying customer for 6+ months, and I don't think they are the
best service. But when open site explorer has recent data, it is extremely
helpful.

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bhartzer
Congrats to Rand and the SEOmoz team.

I can't wait until SEOmoz eventually re-brands to "Moz", dropping the "SEO"
part of the equation.

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mstank
Rand is also pushing a HN for online marketing - <http://inbound.org/>

I hope it takes off, but the community behind it is currently non-existing.

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krelian
Now that they have their own backlink crawler their information is extremely
valuable to any self respecting SEO. It's expensive, but that's probably
because of lack of competition.

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DocSheldon
mercenary, if you knew Rand at all, you'd realize how dumb such an insinuation
sounds.

Also, Brad Feld is no dummy. He may not have the Midas Touch, but he doesn't
buy into crap, either. I suspect we'll be hearing a lot from Moz in the
future.

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rgrieselhuber
Congrats Rand and team. Very well deserved.

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aresant
There's an infographic in one of the slides about the SEOMoz culture that I
love and reminded me of the originating post that gives a solid overview:

[http://www.seomoz.org/blog/establishing-guiding-
principles-a...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/establishing-guiding-principles-
at-seomoz)

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mercenary
EDITION: stupid brainrashed children say "rite dis" i rite. i say rand good
guy rand good. seomooooooooooooooz i buy. 99 cents onry. i buyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

congo rats ulations rand seomoz good marqeteen jawb. sory end
congrexuleeytions end have nice day.

~~~
robryan
They have built up a large social media following, possibly the best for a
company of their size in a niche their size, with a lot of hard work and great
content.

~~~
mercenary
i rike dem to. i mean say why is cost a lot but people say 99 is cheap coz
seomoz is best of da best onry. i use transrate stupid brainwash children say
me write dis, did no mean. rand good guy i buy rand stufings.

~~~
brntn
I'm curious, how did you find Hacker News?

