DIYSEO: 7 Months In, We’re About to Enter Closed Beta!

Posted January 20, 2010 by Andy (15 comments)

It has been over seven months since Pat came to me with the idea to develop a SaaS (software as a service) SEO solution for small businesses. Of course, I was very excited when he first outlined the idea. As our software has become more tangible in the last several months, and we move closer to a product that is ready for the public, I’m even more excited.

We’ve received a few questions about how DIYSEO is coming along, so I made a short Q&A type blog post to address where we are, where we’re going, and what that means for you!

When will DIYSEO launch?

We’ve completed our initial round of alpha testing. DIYSEO is now prepared to enter a closed beta test next week. We will probably complete some further beta-testing in the next six weeks. (We’re following the principle of RERO — which means “release early, release often” – for our user tests, and we plan to iterate our software according to user feedback.) After we complete a few rounds of beta testing, we’ll officially launch DIYSEO to the public, probably in the early spring season.

What will DIYSEO be like? What will it do?

DIYSEO will be an online solution for small business SEO, customized to each user’s own website, industry and goals. A majority of DIYSEO’s features live under three major umbrellas: the customized action plan (gets you to “do” your SEO), the members-only forum (work with experts and fellow small business owners) and intuitive reporting (track the success of your SEO actions).

As far as what the site will look and feel like, the interface has some unique aspects. However, you’ll also be able to see where our team gathered inspiration from web apps we use and love:

• Basecamp
• Clickable
• Mint

Who will want to use DIYSEO?

DIYSEO will be an online SEO solution for small businesses. Advanced SEOs, medium size e-commerce businesses and entreprise size offline businesses will probably not want to use DIYSEO. The “top 5%” most competitive and complex SEO campaigns will always need expert help from a consultant or in-house expert (or sometimes an entire full-time team). Instead, our goal is to help entrepreneurs, service businesses, and local businesses on limited budgets succeed at SEO (at a price point much lower than the cost to hire a qualified SEO consultant).

Why is it taking you so long to develop DIYSEO?

The below bullet points indicate why it is taking several months to get to the point where we can publicly release DIYSEO. The reasons include:

• SEO is hard, so making it “easy”, is, well, hard. Many people consider SEO to be complex and inaccessible. Our goal for DIYSEO is to make the process of SEO simpler and more accessible. Then, we have to wrap it all in a user interface that doesn’t stink. This process takes a lot of designing, writing, testing and revising.
• Good SEO involves using many tools, which means we have to build some tools and connect with the best the net has to offer. As a longtime professional SEO, I can tell you there are many tools that are needed to execute successful SEO campaigns. Given the unique nature of this product, we have needed to build a number of proprietary tools, but we have also incorporated a number of great SEO tools that are already available. The key is to make all of these tools work together, in order to create a comprehensive and seamless experience for our users. This initiative takes a lot of development time.
• We’re perfectionists. Everyone on the DIYSEO team — Dan, Julie, the development team — is focused on building a perfect product. Of course perfection is impossible, but our pride is commensurate with the amount of value we’ll be providing for users. In other words, when you use DIYSEO, we want you to rank your site, get lots of relevant traffic and make more money. We could have shipped a less useful version of DIYSEO earlier, but we decided not to.

That’s all for now. As we move closer to publicly launching DIYSEO, we’ll be posting on the blog more frequently. Thanks for reading our blog, and yes, we’ll continue to post awesome infographics!

Categories: DIYSEO