

Ask HN: Feedback on a friend's SEO tool - paulsingh

I've been advising the guys at Pear Analytics and helped convince them to throw away the 1.0 product because it was simply too complicated.<p>They've gone back to a simple SEO tool that gives you actionable items to resolve. Feedback?<p>www.pearanalytics.com
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jolan
\- Make it clear that an email address is optional for a report. I almost left
the page right away before deciding to try it out with the email field blank.

\- Merge "Things you need to work on" and "full report". Put
errors/suggestions on top.

\- Auto-expand the top most report field or make it more obvious that those
are links.

\- Add re-analyze site button. Typing the URL in over and over again is
tedious.

\- "You have too many meta keywords." It says I have more than 10 phrases but
I only have 9. Off by 1 in the code?

\- Change "domain is too new" to yellow instead of red since there's nothing
that can be done about it.

\- "Good! You your page has a meta description." has a broken img link in the
report text. Ditto with "This page has a title tag."

\- "The CSS on this page isn't valid." The only invalid part is foo-border-
radius. I think that's typical.

Pretty useful. Caught that my HTML wasn't valid anymore due to some changes I
made recently.

It also convinced me to add a sitemap to my site even though it's only a 1
page weather webapp.

~~~
zippykid
Thanks a ton for the feedback Jolan, I've deployed some of your suggestions.

We've marked the reason why we need the email address, if it let you see the
report without an email address, it's a bug :).. we'll fix it.

I've merged the work on and full reports together.

We're looking into the too many meta keywords issue, I'll fix that soon it's
not a off by one issue, but I'm calculating words, instead of phrases.

We're working on display issues :). I'm a former sysadmin who's now doing UI
:)

I need to get the images to show up in the copy better.

We're running your CSS against Jigsaw and just outputting the result.

One of the things that's on the way is "importance", so that the list of
things to fix is displayed in order of importance. This would mean the css
errors would be fairly low on the list.

~~~
jolan
> We've marked the reason why we need the email address, if it let you see the
> report without an email address, it's a bug :).. we'll fix it.

I really wouldn't do that but it's not my choice to make :)

> I've merged the work on and full reports together.

I saw that. Makes it a ton better.

> We're running your CSS against Jigsaw and just outputting the result.

I figured as much. Not a big deal. It might be nice to include the link in the
report.

One thing you might want to consider is building the report in real time
rather than doing the status bar and then asking the user to click for the
report.

You can do something like the following w/jQuery:

    
    
      $.ajax({
        url: '/api/v1/',
        data: { cmd: "report_getdata", id: reportid },
        timeout: 5000,
        success: function(data) {
          // remove everything but the table header
          $("#reportinfo").find("tr:gt(0)").remove();
          var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(data);
          jQuery.each(obj, function(i, ddata) {
              $("#reportinfo").last().append("<tr><td colspan=7>JSON report data row</td></tr>");
          });
        }
      });

~~~
zippykid
You're reading my mind :).

On each report item I'm going to have a "re-check" button so you can make a
change and just analyze that one part. Shouldn't be too hard to make the
report in real time.

------
carbocation
1) I know they don't _need_ my email in order to analyze my site, so I am
immediately suspicious. There is no checkbox for agreement with a privacy
policy, nor is there language stating I will never be spammed, etc. Thus, I
did not try the demo.

2) If they really do demand my email address to try their service, they should
let me see a screenshot, at least, so I can get a sense of whether or not I
want to risk giving them my email address.

I think that this errs on the side of giving too little information to make an
informed choice about wanting to use their service. There are many sites that
will, without requiring an email address, do some basic SEO analysis for me.
Without knowing what their site does, I was not enthusiastic enough to
actually try their product.

~~~
zippykid
Hi Carbocation, Great feedback, I really appreciate it. We're using the email
address so you can come back later and view reports you've run in the past.
I've changed the copy a little to make that clear.

I'm still new to layout/jquery etc so I'll have the screenshot up in a few
hours based on the feedback of other posters.

~~~
carbocation
Great! Also, I didn't mean for my negativity to be personally directed, but I
did want to give you the full 'benefit' of my as-negative-as-possible
interpretation of uncertainty. It's great that you're iterating so quickly, by
the way!

~~~
zippykid
I didn't take it personally :). We're small and don't have a proper QA /
userbase to test against. I really appreciate it :)

------
stoney
Seems to come up with an error if you accidentally put white space in front of
the URL. Otherwise looks like a useful tool.

~~~
zippykid
Hey Stoney, Just fixed that bug :). Wasn't trimming properly :)

~~~
stoney
That was quick!

Was it a deliberate design decision to make it easy to access other people's
reports (by just changing the number in the URL)? Obviously anybody could run
any website through the tool, so there's not really anything private about it,
but it still feels kind of weird. I've just had a fun 5 minutes seeing what
everyone else has been running through it, which I'm not sure they'd all be
happy about.

Possibly you could use a long random string instead?

~~~
zippykid
MVP FTW! :)

But, seriously I did think about using some hash or form of uuid, but long
term plan is to let people make accounts.. for trending, and alerts..

but first, we're working on accuracy, then speed, and then usability.

~~~
axe
Is it the final product? what's your revenue model? the new version is too
simplistic to charge money for, I think. have u considered making an academic
version of your tool and selling it to schools and universities (can be used
in classes dealing with web design/programming, rest is up to your
imagination) An online social network, revolving around your tool is also an
option. And I am missing the overall page score; good that you did away with
the rest.

