KVR Webtech in Conversation with SEO Superstar- Rand Fishkin of Moz

Rand: I’m sure there’s a lot, despite my attempts to be transparent. One thing that often surprises folks to learn is that my position in the company doesn’t give me free reign or control over most of what the company does. It’s a very different role from CEO, and there seems to still exist a perception that I’m in charge, when that’s really not the case. That said, I think Sarah Bird, who is our CEO, is doing a great job — I just wish she’d get the credit!

Rand: Definitely not! I strongly dislike and distrust Wikipedia. The content there, particularly about people, is massively biased and incomplete. I actually did have a Wikipedia page, but used Wikipedia’s removal request protocol to get it taken down. Let’s hope it never returns 🙂

Rand: I actually don’t consider myself a success at all. An entrepreneur who raises money from investors has the obligation to get the returns those investors are seeking in a sale or IPO of the company. Moz has not accomplished that (at least, not yet). While I have hope that someday we will, I consider myself and Moz “striving to achieve success,” not “successful.”That said, biggest challenges are definitely around building a great product and maintaining it over time (especially in a dynamic field where we need to keep up with the search engines’ changes) and managing people (which is a nightmarishly tough and complex problem).

Biggest accomplishments… That one’s hard. Our revenue and customer growth have been big accomplishments, but very incremental ones over time. Fundraising is very hard, but not necessarily an indication of success or accomplishment. Maybe I’d put a few products that I’m particularly proud of into the “accomplishments” list: Mozbar, Moz Local, and Keyword Explorer are among my particular favorites.

Rand: Well, TAGFEE isn’t really related to Roger 🙂 He’s just a cartoon character that started as a representation of Moz’s web crawler and became a sort of company mascot.

Rand: That’s a tough one. If Google’s ruled against your client on a DMCA action, it’s very hard and very rare to see them reverse that. I might suggest doing whatever possible to work around — recreate a different page or even consider redirecting the website.

Rand: I hate sales and selling, and consulting requires a very sales-focused relationship. I also never felt like we found a path to scale consulting — all our clients always wanted my personal input, rather than the small team we were building. Maybe, if we’d grown bigger, that could have been helped, but instead we pursued the software path. I did enjoy the actual work of consulting – helping people find problems on their sites and fix them/improve has continued to be a passion of mine, and I do a lot of pro bono consulting still.

Rand: There were lots of little controversies in my early career at Moz, especially around sharing certain types of content. Some of Google’s reps have, over the years, been pretty annoyed with some of the experiments we’ve run and how we’ve shared information about Google’s ranking systems. That said, I don’t think I’d change any of those. Moz’s mission is to make search engines more transparent, and we need to stick to that even if it causes problems.

Rand: I don’t actually accept fees to speak, but I do ask events to make a charitable donation (usually $5K to Give Directly). I typically speak about startup entrepreneurship, SEO, and/or web marketing. You can see a collection of most of my presentations here.

Rand: It’s different in lots of ways. Whereas SEMRush focuses on showing keywords that a particular domain or page appears for, KW Explorer’s suggestions are much broader and include ideas from Google Suggest/Related, from AdWords, from topic modeling-based results, question-type queries, as well as those for which similar pages rank. SEMRush is much broader in what it offers (not just keyword suggestions, but competitive intel, search traffic estimates, etc), so the two products aren’t necessarily competitive. We overlap with SEMRush on one feature, but that’s it.We do try to compete more directly with Google KW Planner, and there I think we have a lot of advantages. Our volume data is more accurate, especially in this new world of Google combining keyword volumes for related terms (Moz keeps them separate using a process that includes getting clickstream data and segmenting data from AdWords, too). We have additional metrics that are critical to the SEO process – difficulty (how hard it is to rank), opportunity (what CTR you can expect to the organic results based on what SERP features appear for a keyword), and importance (which you can control to set how valuable a keyword is to you).

Keyword Lists are probably our most outstanding and unique feature, and enable SEOs to save hours of work compiling metrics in Excel and trying to prioritize keywords. All the metrics that we found folks grabbing from various tools and putting together in Excel or Google Spreadsheets are now automatically compiled and sortable inside KW Explorer’s Lists. You can export them, import keywords to get metrics, and even add your own custom Important scores to express more or less interest in a particular term/phrase.

Rand: We’ve moved over to a model of A) landing pages and B) a system that predicts keyword traffic to pages based on rankings + search traffic to those ranking pages. It’s a feature inside Moz Pro Campaigns that estimates the keyword traffic and various keywords for given pages, and we’ve found it’s a pretty reasonable substitute for most marketing/SEO activities.

Rand: I put together a slide deck on this topic here. Basically, I think AI and machine/deep learning are going to mean that there’s less focus on singular algorithmic features and a greater ability from engines to discern when sites provide a truly great experience based on the combination of signals they uncover. That could mean a more complex set of algorithmic inputs that are much harder to reverse engineer, while simultaneously a simpler focus on user experience and searcher satisfaction can take sites to the top of the results in many types of queries.

Rand: I think Google is going to continue to make critical data harder and harder to access, and third party tools and providers will have to step up. I also see more and more domination of search by big brands, with increasing difficulty for new entrants and small companies. Google’s also going to test a lot more features and enhancements in search results — hard to know exactly how much more searchers will take before they have visual exhaustion though.

Rand: Two keys for me in digital marketing success have been A) to be willing to be an early adopter – try new things when they come out, see how they work, and experiment ceaselessly and B) focus on my personal strengths rather than trying to compete in every arena or every type of marketing channel/tactic.