I have looked at more than 50 SEO tools in the last two days, trying to get my arms around the capability cloud that is available. And I have been deadly confused.

Not because I'm stupid (my children aren't teenagers, yet, so I am still smart at home) but because this stuff is all over the place and I can't place stuff in some simple categories.

Sophistication Requirement

No, really, it ranges from stuff you can understand in 30 seconds (ex: SEOmeter) to things that have me scratching my rapidly balding head after two days (ex: Google Landing Page Optimizer).

And while I am not an SEO guru, I've done a fair bit of this stuff and understand how all the pieces work. So if it is baffling me, what the heck is the guy running a $500K/year Yahoo!Store going to do with it?

Variable Actionability

Even better, some of the information you get is easily actionable (ex: Hubspot's Free SEO Report) and others are more purely theoretical or fall under the general rubric of strategy (ex: SEOMoz's Keyword Difficulty Tool).

If you need tactical stuff you can execute on, then it's a waste of your time to run reports that are going to give you answers that are purely strategic. The reverse is also true.

So, of the two examples above, the Hubspot report is very useful to a 'got up' situation where you are tweaking and improving an ongoing site. The SEOmoz tool is probably more useful when deciding what kind of site to put up.

I'd hasten to say that neither is either 'bad' or 'good' - they're just useful to different people at different points in the business cycle.

ROI Estimation

I'm not talking about ROI as in: run the tool and become John Chow, but I have been having trouble looking at these tools and figuring out if we took action on the results of the tool, would we get a return from our actions?

For example, the Hubsport report told us we had missing image tags and our domain was expiring rather closer than google liked. So we had someone fix the tags and got the cheapest-CFO-on-earth to buy us a four year extension on this domain. So our Hubspot grade went up.

Did we come up in the SERP's somewhere? Is our ad-supported side of the business going to get better ads? How would I tell? In other words, we spent an hour fixing image tags and buying domain stuff, so figure I spent $200 on the results of this report. Am I somehow gonna get $201 or more back?

Results

In the end I fell back on what I know: scotch. No, really, I did grab a drink and start drawing stuff all over my post-it flip charts. (My CFO hates those things - they cost a dollar a page and I use 'em up like Altoids!) And I decided that I needed to put my high-ticket consultant tag on and come up with a capability grid.

I am proposing to put "SEO ROI" and "Sophistication/Actionability" on the X/Y axis respectively.

I'll pull together some of the better known tools and start placing them on the grid over the next few days - let's see how this goes.