Seth & Rand Fishkin: SEO Journey Lessons Learned

BluShark Digital

Welcome to the SEO Insider with your host, Seth Price founder of BluShark taking you Inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.

Seth Price

Welcome. Welcome, everybody. We are honored and humbled to have Rand Fishkin here, an icon in the SEO space. Welcome, man.

Rand Fishkin

Thanks for having me Seth.

Seth Price

You know, for somebody who built his law firm, and then digital agency, listening to Whiteboard Fridays, and, you know, SEO Moz, and then Moz, you know, reading your books, you know. You sort of at the center of all things SEO. And I'd love for our listeners, just to hear, you know, you've you've pivoted beyond Moz. But talk to us about that journey, and some of the highlights along the way.

Rand Fishkin

Sure, yeah. So I obviously got into the SEO field, relatively early, I don't think right at the beginning, the first folks were probably in there, '95 '96. And I joined around 2000, 2001. And my, you know, my experience was basically entering a field that was very secretive, where consultants and agencies to the extent that they even existed, believe that their secret sauce was their knowledge. And so they kept that very close to the vest. Google, Microsoft, Ask Jeeves, you know, AltaVista, Yahoo, all the all the search engines at the time that I entered the space were competing very heavily. And I believe that they thought they should be incredibly secretive, for competitive reasons. And so this, you know, the field of SEO today, in 2020, there is a lot more transparency, there's a lot more information. There's a ton of SEO software companies like Moz, who basically provide information about how to do SEO for free. There's tons and tons of people who earn their living by providing free education, knowledge, resources, testing experiments, all this wonderful stuff that makes the field so rich. Almost under that existed 19 years ago when I started. And so Moz was really one of the first places aside from a couple other blogs, maybe Aaron Walls SEO book is one of the better known ones, where you could go and everyday read information about how SEO really worked. And Seth, it sounds like you did pretty early on.

Seth Price

No, I mean, that was it. There was, I would go to legal conferences, and you get spoon fed by people that may or may not have known what they were doing. Instead, I got to Vegas and found people like yourself who were, you know, basically showing you what was going on. And if you did this, this would happen.

Rand Fishkin

Vegas? Oh, that must have been the Pubcon Conference. Yeah, okay. I remember that back in the day. Oh, man. I always. Yeah, look, Las Vegas is one of my least favorite destinations.

Seth Price

And then, of course, your Seattle conferences became. You didn't have to travel, you just walk out the door and speak.

Rand Fishkin

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Seattle is beautiful for about six days in the summer. And if you can time it just right, you can get a really lovely, lovely event going. I say that but even today, in December, we're having we're having a surprisingly beautiful early December. So that's all I shouldn't complain, I'll bring back the rain.

Seth Price

So you know, you as you built this. And you started to basically help people understand what was going on, broke it down. And at the same time, one of the things that I know is going on is Google, through Matt Cutts and through their messaging, which sort of give you droplets of information. And I felt that you were like one of the one voices of sanity, because as an SEO, or as a business owner, where you're trying to make decisions as to how to allocate resources, you very often are told one thing. And whether or not that's in your best interest may or may not be the case. I'd love to just get your thoughts because that that cat mouse game was one that I think really brought SEO Moz back in the day to prominence in the sense that you were looking for direction and how to read the tea leaves that were being left out there.

Rand Fishkin

Yeah, so I think, look, early in my tenure, I felt that I felt that my ethics and business shared a lot of goals with Google's. And so you know, I had a reasonably close relationship with a lot of people at Google. And I don't know about a lot, maybe maybe a half a dozen, a dozen, something like that. But you know, that there was discussions about you know, I went to their campus and delivered some talks for them, and I, you know, occasionally with email with folks there and that sort of thing. I made Moz a place that was very, back in the old days of SEO, you sort of had this spectrum of white hat and black hat which largely doesn't exist today all that much. But, you know, in the early years of SEO is very much you know, manipulative links and manipulative tactics versus, you know, what were considered white hat tactics sort of outreach and press and PR. All the things that fall into SEO today doing technical things, markup things, creating good content, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, basically my position was I wanted to encourage more of that good white hat stuff. I thought that was the way the industry should go. I felt that SEO, well, SEO at the time, I don't know if you remember Seth, but extremely disrespected, it was treated worse than any used car salesman. You know, if you talk to someone who worked in software engineering, or web design and development or any other field of marketing, SEO was viewed as, you know, not the Wild West, not the new kids, but the evil, dark, terrible people who manipulate and spam and hurt you.

Seth Price

And to be fair, there was an entire half of the industry that that was based on until Google shut it down. Yeah, I

Rand Fishkin

Yeah, I mean, I think two things really happened, right, as businesses became more serious about SEO, as more of them started to invest, a lot of those tactics didn't work as well, because you couldn't manipulate your way past the algorithmic signals of the actually, you know, big brands who are willing to make the investment. So there's less opportunity. Certainly, Google themselves got better and better over time, do did Bing. At well, at the time MSN search, right? They got better and better at filtering out spam, at recognizing spam techniques and manipulation. But during this period, I would say during that period, I was very much on Google's side and then around, I don't know, 2009 10, 11, 12, somewhere in there. I started noticing more and more that while the industry was maturing, and getting better. And a lot of these folks were upgrading their practices, tons of agencies like yourself, right, were coming along, who were really helping people do this type of stuff. Google continued to be somewhere between cagey and misleading along all these different vectors of information about how their search engine worked. And I, I found that very frustrating, you know, I thought as you Google are making progress, the way to earn people's trust and respect is to be transparent, to be authentic, to tell not just the truth, but as much of the whole truth as you possibly can. And when you can't speak the whole truth, just say so. Right in it. In my opinion, it's totally fine to be a representative for Google and to be asked a question on stage or on Twitter or over email, or whatever it is in some forum, and to say, I'm sorry, we don't disclose that information. And they never say that, instead, they come up with some malarkey bullcrap. And, frankly, you know, because so many people in the search engine optimization world, try to read the tea leaves, as you put it, there's just a huge industry of 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of people who every little comment made by someone who works at Google is interpreted, interpreted and interpreted, and that that frustrates the hell out of me. Especially when you see things like, you know, last summer, for example, Congress interviewed the tech CEOs, right. Sundar Pichai, from Google, for example, was, you know, he was giving testimony. And as part of that testimony, David Cellini, the Senator from Rhode Island, who I think is leading the Committee on antitrust for the Senate, you know, he subpoenaed a bunch of information with Google. He said, "Hey, you need to provide all these documents," right? So his team does that. And sure enough, in the trove of documents, there's all this information, all these emails between executives at Google about how things are working, and you go and look at those. And there's just example after example, I sent a Twitter thread, I remember some time earlier this year, about it that was just like, oh, look at look at all these, you know, 15, 20 different examples. And I didn't even read through the documents, all that carefully, of things that were clearly in Google's internal documents that conflicted with things that they said publicly.

Seth Price

And that's sort of that's what I was coming. My next set of questions for you is exactly that. What were some of those ones when you reflect back? Because that was always the the pull and tug between what you're being told, and you're sort of manipulating an industry versus your luck, you had better access than just about anybody. Were there times who were like, Hey, this is nonsense. But if they're saying it, I have to give it some credence.

Rand Fishkin

Let's see, I would say, when I thought something was nonsense, I would try to do what I thought a good journalist should do. Right? Which is essentially do some investigation work, talk to some people in the field, run experiments on my own, if I possibly could, and then share, here's what Google says. And here's what appears to be the case, right? And if what Google's saying is true, it's possible that we still got these results through some other way. And maybe here's how, but it doesn't seem likely. Right? And so, you know, then And then, in a lot of these cases, it would be years before you could truly prove that what Google said about whatever, you know, oh, well, we don't count no follow links or something, then you're like, "Hey, you have been counting no follow links." You know, from certain places, in certain ways. Not as much as follow blah, blah whatever, right? Or, oh, no, we don't look at any user and usage data in calculus. That's what your whole machine learning algorithm is based on you lying liars. You know, it gets pretty frustrating to see. Example, after example of that, it gets especially frustrating, in my opinion, Seth, and look at we mentioned, at the start of this, I'm a couple years out from the SEO field. So a lot of my complaints are sort of that leftover, you know, anger at the systems and structures, and especially at Google, who's become one of if not the most powerful company on earth. And they are still playing these silly games, which hurt, primarily hurt small and medium businesses. And I look, I think we all know, right, we can all look at economy, economist data and see that one of the worst things for income inequality and political instability is a bad distribution of power in the economy to a few monopolies overall, a lot of small and medium businesses, right? Well, what you want, what Americans want in their economy is lots of small and medium businesses, that makes everything you know, that makes America great, right? That makes our economy great, and healthy and able to survive and strong and all these things. And what we're getting is Google and Facebook, Microsoft and Apple and a few others, taking a larger and larger share. And that is a really bad thing. And so when I see Google, who I know, the people at Google, I know that they know this, I know that they know that they should not be playing these games and doing these things when I see them, you know, violating antitrust law.

Seth Price

Well, look, we're historically matched for most of our audience. You know, it takes a lot to go above the Fortune 500 companies that own some of the major directory brands. So they want the best possible result but the directories are up there. Now with LSA's. I know this is post your time at Moz. But the LSA is there now, you know, a second bite at the apple where Google's trying to control more of the market, the GMB's. So talk to me a little bit about that. That's sort of the hot button topic in our space right now. The LSA is you have any thoughts on that?

Rand Fishkin

Yeah, I mean, I think that, broadly speaking, Google is essentially recognizing that they have they have a challenge, a worldwide global growth challenge, right? So Wall Street, their investors, their stockholders, expect them to grow at certain rates. And this is this is one of the problems right? Once you get to be, you know, $100 Billion plus company, and you already own your market, you have, you know, Google has, outside of China, 95% of the global search market, around the world. And China is not really a market, they can enter because the government in China, sort of, at least when I was there, I don't know if this is still the case, Seth, but when I was in China, if you if you performed a search on Google, you get redirected to the Baidu results at the ISP level. So it's tough for Google to compete there, right? But the reality is that since they have this global stranglehold on the Internet, they they can't create more users, right? They can't create more people who are searching all the time. So they're yes, they're trying to increase the number of searches, they're trying to increase the searcher satisfaction. They're trying to get people, you know, more and more addicted to doing more Google searches, which is fine. But in order to get the growth Wall Street wants, Google has to start entering all these other fields. So they see, Oh, well go. Okay, what are the biggest parts of the economy? Alright. The financial field? Well, let's make Google finance and Google credit cards and Google accounts. So let's work with all these banks. And hey, let's have a Google mortgage calculator. Oh, travel. All right. We're gonna have Google flights and Google hotels, and oh, telecommunications and phones. All right, we're gonna have Google Fi. And some of these products are great. I think Google Fi is one of Google's best innovations. I think it is one of their best products. I love it to death. Fantastic, wonderful. I think in a lot of these other cases, what they're doing is essentially saying, Hey, there used to be lots of opportunity for lots of people in the search results. Let's take that away. That's ours. Now. Video is a great example of this. You know, for years with Moz and Whiteboard Friday, we hosted with Vimeo, right, we put we put our videos on our site they ranked in Google, you got the little video snippet. What is it today, 90 plus percent of all videos that show up in Google's top 10 are YouTube. YouTube alone. And that was a change, one day change, one day in 2014, you know, July something or other in 2014, suddenly it went from, you know, 50%, 40% YouTube to 90 plus percent. That's not an algorithm change. Right? That's a, that's a corporate practice of, "Hey, we want more money engineers make it all YouTube."

Seth Price

Did you know like the LSA, we didn't get enough out of the ads at the top? I mean, there are reasons and like the crazy part about law, you have a license. So the idea that you're verified, like, you know, if you're barred, it's going to be a verified user. You know, it's not like a locksmith where they put the locations in the middle of intersections? You know, there's plenty of spam. Look, that pivots me to a question because I've asked this to a number of guests on the show, and I haven't gotten a good answer, maybe you'll have one. You know, Google did a pretty good job of combating spam in organic search. But in local, they really haven't. Particularly in the legal space, it is rampant, What gives? What's going on here? They could do it.

Rand Fishkin

Yeah, it's an interesting question, right? I think there's a there's a certain amount of, I think, reasonable doubt that I have about the ability of Google's machine learning techniques to be incredibly pinpoint accurate at only filtering spam, and nothing else. And that's because most of the spam and manipulation that happens in local world is much more difficult to detect and pull the threads away from versus the spam and manipulation that happens in organic world of, you know, sort of link spam and comment spam and, and these types of things, right, and paid links and all that kind of stuff. Why that is a little bit tough to answer. If I had to guess what I would say is because the spam in maps and local is written by real people, right? It's you know, reviews, and it's coverage. And it's, you know, businesses that are created in a location where they don't actually exist. And Google's verification process is pretty good, but not perfect enough. And every time it gets a little bit better, spammers can still figure out ways to work around it. Right? I think you are, in the local world, a lot like where we were before Google's or right around Google's Panda update for organic, right in 2012, where essentially, the, the spam fighting systems and the search quality team have not caught up to all of the ways that one can manipulate. And so there's enough incentive and there's enough manipulation. And law is one area where, because there's enough money per client, it pays right, there's a return on investment, to go through, to jump through a ton of hoops, even if it only earns you, whatever, two or three new business, new clients a month. Right? As opposed to, for example, like a restaurant.

Seth Price

Right, it's not worth putting a stamp on it.

Rand Fishkin

Yeah, it doesn't make sense, you've got to have a very high ticket item. And so the law is one of those few places.

Seth Price

Gotcha. Taking you through today. And what we'll get to what you're up to now. But I wanted to get you there talking about today, from the point of view of SEO, you know, with Bert and the future of content, love to just thought, you know, your advice to our viewers and listeners on just where you see content today. And any words of wisdom for those of us who are curating content for SEO friendly sites?

Rand Fishkin

Yeah, my sense is, so Google is getting much, much better at first off weighing content more heavily in their algorithm. I think we can we can all sort of feel this that the content quality, and not quality alone. But the combination of quality and solves my problem, solves the searchers intent as comprehensively as possible. Those two things have risen in the ranking algorithms weighting systems substantially. And I think that happens because Google has these deep learning systems where they can essentially, you know, machine learn off of tons and tons of searcher data, right. So you and I go to Google, we search for something where we click some result, we're unhappy, we click back to the search result, we choose something else, Google knows, that was not the thing to rank, maybe they should rank the thing that clearly solved our problem instead of the one that didn't. And And over time, right? They get billions and billions these data points every day. They're able to, you know, segment that in every sort of way possible, and now they can provide these great results. So as a result of that, you as a content creator have to be inside your searchers head right you have to be able to answer their query better than anyone else you have to. And one of the ways, right one of the ways to do that is with content quality. One of the ways to do that is by predicting intent, what are they trying to accomplish? How can I help them accomplish that better? One of the ways to do that is to build a brand that people associate with having positively solved their problem. Right? So if you are a recognizable brand in the search results, you are going to get far more clicks and people are going to feel like you did a better job than if you are an unrecognizable brand. So you know, whatever, Seth and Rand's candybar.com might get, you know, maybe we go out there, and we create a great candy bar, and it tastes great. And people love it. But, and we get tons and tons of links to our website. But how many people have heard of Seth and Rand's candy bar versus Snickers or M&Ms or whatever, right? And so instead, you know, we're always hovering below them, and even if we like, but our our candy bar tastes better, you know, the brand association over the last 100 years, sorry, friends, it's gonna take you a while, right. So brand is a huge way to stand out from the crowd as well. Those are the pieces of advice that I would be thinking about as a as a marketer, or a content creator and strategist today.

Seth Price

You know, you've been pretty critical, and certainly some speeches over time about links in general. But you know, love them or hate them in our world, they are still huge. Your thoughts on the state of it today? We know for most people in our space, we're looking at, you know, authoritative links, the days of spam links, or God at the same time, the local links to be able to signal authority within a local community to sort of get that local love, any words of wisdom that from your perspective, looking at it today from a link acquisition point of view?

Rand Fishkin

Let's see the smartest and wisest people that I follow in the local space, are telling me that links continue to fall in importance, in local and that brand mentions, clarity of brand mentions are still on the rise. And that makes a lot of sense to me. Right? I don't I don't see any reason why was the suit. There's a Japanese as a guy that I want to try here in Seattle. Well for delivery, obviously. But since we're all in quarantine, but oh, Tanuki that's what it is. It's called to new key. So, you know, if I am Google, and I see a bunch of whatever it is, you know, the Seattle Times and The PI and The Stranger and you know, Rand and Seth's Seattle blog, writing about Tanuki is akaia. And they don't link to the website. So what, is that any less of an endorsement? Is that any less of a reason...

Seth Price

We've been saying that for a decade.

Rand Fishkin

Exactly, exactly. And so what happens over time, when you have a machine learning system is that rather than right? It's not a team of engineers who sit around a table and say, well, let's make links 24% of the rankings this week. That doesn't happen anymore. Not that, you know, that's a gross oversimplification of what happened in, you know, from the 1998 to 2012 period. But in the machine learning era, what happens instead, as engineers feed data, right? Incurres data in and this is the result I want out. So Google ranking system, what I want you to do, is do your deep learning and figure out which results we should show at the top that will engage the highest number of searchers in the most problem solving way. For most, you know, for most queries, that's that's how they think about it. In some cases, they're like, screw everyone's happiness, put Google things at the top. But regardless of that, in local especially, right, it's, hey, put Tanuki up at the top, if that's the thing that will solve the most searchers queries. And so, in the case of a learning system, you get algorithmic inputs that over time are better correlated with solving searchers problems, and ones that are worse correlated, links over time have become a little bit worse correlated. Brand mentions especially from what I'd call sort of, you know, reputable news and media and listing sources. And Google gets better and better at figuring out which ones are reputable and not that really means something. You get written up in Eater. You get written up in Bon Appetit. The New York Times food section says this is Seattle's new hot place. You start to rise there and a lot of us can see this right if you follow for example, you know food world very closely. I've done this in like Portland, Oregon, and suddenly there's some hot you know, hot new restaurant, you know, new celebrity chef or whatever it is right, like making something and the New York Times writes about them and then a bunch of places in Portland, write about that. Not a lot of link activity. But suddenly lots more people are searching for that restaurant.

Seth Price

Direct traffic coming through.

Rand Fishkin

Direct traffic is coming in, the branded searches coming in, the mentions are coming in. And all of those signals tell Google that that's the one when someone searches for steak restaurant Portland, we should put, you know, Ox up there.

Seth Price

And not surprising. We're seeing that in the legal space, the recent updates, what we've seen is people who have a TV presence will end up with a bump that happened on the last one, which would fit to this, at the same time for some of the micro terms. And that's one of those areas, if you go back to the spammy or days, the anchor text, you know, one of those things that many of us went as clean as we could be to make sure we didn't get near the bad world. But some of this stuff still is working. And it's one of those balancing tests where you want to do right by your client, and you want to make sure that you're getting them every possible advantage without going over the line. Because there's a certain amount that you're not going to be in Bon Appetit every day. And so...

Rand Fishkin

This is, you know, I think this is the question, right? For a lot of digital agencies, and in house marketers and firms broadly, they have to think about it from a strategy perspective, right? So you play, you can play it both ways. You can play the, hey, let's go right up to the line, but not walk over it on links and anchor text and all that. And simultaneously, let's do a bunch of digital PR. Let's have a reason why all the podcasts want me to be a guest on there. Let's do some pro bono legal work, that'll get us a ton of coverage. Right? In the right press and publication. Hey, no one is talking about this particular area of law. How do we make that sexy and interesting to people who would write about that on the web and talk about it and share it? Okay, I got it. We're going to whatever, make this a political, you know, talking point so that all the press that's covering the politics world, which is obsessed, right? They're going to start mentioning us, right, we're going to put out a report that blah, blah, blah, we have a new white paper, we did some research, we're going to contract with a, you know, statistician, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, you can play both of those.

Seth Price

Right. And I just smile because it's like, that's SEO, it's not surprising that the wizard of SEO is my you know...

Rand Fishkin

My stepping back from the field means that I see it from a broader perspective these days, right, SEO, SEO can still drive great traffic, right? Tons of people are still using Google. Is it the only place that you should be getting your traffic? Should you be putting all of your eggs in that one basket? I don't think so. Absolutely. I think that's a good, I don't think that's a safe way to play anymore. I think, you know, 10 years ago, you could put all your eggs in the SEO basket, and probably be totally fine. Because Google didn't look outside of their little world for that many signals. Nowadays, the better you do in social media and digital PR, and email marketing, and content marketing, and podcast, marketing, and video marketing, and all these other places, right, all these other spaces. The more Google wants to rank you as well. And so you could be doing all the SEO things, right. And one of your competitors is sort of not paying that much attention, but they're doing a lot of digital PR, and they win. And you go, wait a minute, they're not doing the SEO stuff. Sorry. They're winning, because Google wants to pay attention to a lot of stuff that is not what we consider classic SEO.

Seth Price

Right. Well, along those lines, and you talk about this sort of combines the different elements you talked about, what do you see the search results looking like in the future you have any thoughts on? We've seen the LSA is layered in but where, you know, you're talking about don't put all your eggs in the SEO basket? Where do you see this going?

Rand Fishkin

So I think Google has very clearly signaled that they want to solve searchers problems as quickly as possible. With data that they show that does not necessarily lead to a click. And so I think what you're going to see, right what Google's trying to play, they're kind of on the knife edge of this right now. They are trying to play this game of let's grow the number of searches, by having more and more people search more and more, because they get their answers faster and faster. And so they, they sort of, you know, get into this habit of coming back to Google again and again and again. And we're gonna make that as easy as possible for them. And at the same time, we are going to siphon clicks away from anyone who is not an alphabet owned company. Right? So if you're not Google Maps, and YouTube, and Google Finance, and Google Travel, and Google Flights and Google Trips, and Gmail, and Google Calendar, and Google Drive, and we could go on for the whole rest of the hour, listing Google's properties. But if you're not in that group, Google is essentially siphoning clicks away from you that they don't want to show your stuff as much as At the top of the results, and so, you know, you can see this, I wrote about this on the on the Spark Tutorial Blog, of course, the that less than half of all Google searches now results in a click and it is continued to drop on mobile. What's crazy is it stayed stable on desktop and because of the pandemic and everybody quarantining, not everybody, many people responsively quarantining this year, you see that desktop growth. For the first time, right? For the first time in 10 years, desktop is growing, again, mobile is shrinking. And so the click through rate has actually risen on Google this year. Next year, it's gonna fall pretty precipitously. Again, right? We're all going to go back to these devices.

Seth Price

God willing yes. And that like that, sort of before we pivot to your current venture. Looking at that, what you know, that is one significant COVID trend, any other trends that you're seeing COVID related that people should either adjust for take advantage of?

Rand Fishkin

Yeah, I mean, gosh, so so so many in digital marketing field, I think, you know, one to be aware of is certainly that there's a huge increase in what I call that. Infotainment consumption. Right? So today, it was just announced, Reddit is now getting 52 million daily users. 52 million daily. Just Raddit. Right. And Reddit, supposedly, I thought they only had about 300, 350 million users total. So the fact that they are now getting comparable, or maybe even greater than I think maybe Twitter is 60 or 65 million, but comparable to Twitter, Reddit is is growing like crazy. We are all sitting on our phones, browsing through news and information and entertainment, right? Instagram, same thing, Facebook, same thing, Twitter, same thing. LinkedIn has risen right tons more LinkedIn, content consumption. Tons more pocket content consumption, Hacker News is up. SparkToro trending is up. I don't know, if you follow, if you're in the marketing space, we have this SparkToro trending page, which is kind of like Hacker News, but for marketers. And, you know, we don't do any marketing or promotion of it. And yet it's risen from a few 100 people visiting everyday to 1000 plus 1500 plus. now it drives a lot of traffic if you get on there. Yeah so that that trend, in my opinion, is indicative of behavior shift, right of millions and millions of people around the world paying more and more attention to infotainment types of content because of that, if you're a digital marketer, and you can be in that sector, right, get into Google Discover, which is driving, you know, huge amounts of traffic and Google News and and get on all these other platforms, you can drive a lot of traffic and brand recognition and email signups. And then, you know, as I think, hopefully, fingers crossed, right, this, COVID situation, gets much better with, you know, sort of vaccines and new administration, all those kinds of things, we should expect a recovery in a lot of these sectors that have been very harmed. And when that happens, if you have the email addresses of your customers, if you have their attention, if you build brand with them. You're gonna have a pretty good 2021.

Seth Price

That's awesome. Well, look, that brings us right back to what your current project, I want to hear more about it. And, you know, we've been following it since you announced and want to hear where it is now.

Rand Fishkin

Oh, cool. Yeah. I appreciate that, Seth. Yeah, so when I so I left Moz, was that February 28, of 2018. And I, responsibly I waited a whole month, I didn't start SparkToro until March 1. Gave myself a lot of time off there. So yeah, started Spark Toro, that was two and a half years ago now almost. And the idea behind it, right, the core of the idea was that I wanted to be able to research audiences behaviors, right? Our customers, you know, a group of people that were interested in research, there's behaviors without having to survey them. Right? Essentially, there's all this public data, there's always people using Twitter and Reddit and LinkedIn, and Facebook and Instagram, and YouTube, etc. And all of their data is out there, right? You can go find, oh, well, here's Seth Price on Twitter, and here's his YouTube account. And here's his Reddit account, and here's his Facebook account, and here's his Instagram account. And, and he's got his bio in there and his job title and all the places that he's worked, and he's got, you know, his interests and he's following all these sources. And you can, you can go do that, right. If you want to learn more about you or me all our public data is out there, right. Go wild. But doing that at scale is pretty ridiculous. So we saw in the early days of SmartDraw, we saw some genius marketing firms, and an in house marketing company specifically. And what they did is they got an a list of all their customers emails, right? And they took those emails, uploaded them to Clearbit or Full Contact, got a list of all their, the social accounts of all their customers, and then built crawlers to go crawl that information, extract it and put it into a giant database. And then, you know, munge it and send their marketers data like, okay, our customers follow these Facebook pages, these Twitter accounts, these people on LinkedIn, this on Instagram, here's the websites they share, here's the podcasts they listen to, here's the YouTube channels, they subscribe to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that data. Amazing. You know how much work that is? That's like, you know, you take two or three engineers out of your engineering team, and you take a marketer, and you take a product person and a growth team. And you put them all together and you're like, Okay, you have six months to go get me the answer to this. Casey and I went, well, that's dumb, we should just build that for the whole Internet. Like, let's just build that for everybody so that you can go to SparkToro. And say, I want to find an audience that's interested in antitrust law, or I want to find someone who describes themselves as an orthodontist, or I want to find chemical engineers in the UK, or people who play the board game, Dungeons and Dragons, or you know, whatever it is. And I want to learn about what they pay attention to, so that I can go do marketing to them in all those places, and build my brand with them. And that's what SparkToro is. It's, it's a super simple search, right? You go there and you say, you know, there's a, there's a few different drop downs, but you can say, oh, my audience uses the hashtag "clean energy." And you can find what media they read and what YouTube channels they subscribe to, and podcasts, they listen to...

Seth Price

You're you do what you said. You're essentially somebody in house team, but done, you know, so that you don't need to have your own 20 person team doing this.

Rand Fishkin

Exactly, exactly. And now you can bring data to those conversations that I mean, Seth, I'm sure you've been part of these, especially on the agency side, right? Where you go in, you know, and there's a a CEO, right, or a board of executives, whatever the partners at a legal firm, and they're like, I want you to get us in the Wall Street Journal. And you look at them and you're like, really? Is that? Is that how you're going to get new customers? "I golf with our customers every Sunday, and they read the Wall Street Journal" I don't know why they sound like Richard Nixon. But regardless, that conversation is really hard to have, because you don't have in your back pocket a, Alright, well, let's see here. Oh, yes. You said, you know, you want to reach whatever folks were interested in, in this particular topic? Or this subject or this area of the law? Oh, well, good news, you know, 7% of them, read, watch, follow, engage with the Wall Street Journal online. But I have better news, this niche publication over here 28% of them engaged with that, do you think we should put four times the effort into that one, maybe.

Seth Price

That's awesome. And, but much more likelihood of happening, you know, you can probably buy your way into that one. Whereas, you know, you'd have to network for years to get the other one.

Rand Fishkin

That's exactly right. You know, the PR game to play on Wall Street Journal incredibly, versus you'll find a podcast right? You find a podcast that resonates with with an audience. Amazing, right? You pitch a guest you pitch to sponsor you, you get an introduction, right, you network your way in. So much easier, such a, such a more affinity likely audience for the kind of marketing you want to do.

Seth Price

That's awesome. You know, like any brings it back, you're saying, hey, there's traffic outside of search, you're saying, you know, figure out those places. That's awesome.

Rand Fishkin

Right. And when you figure out those places, the awesome thing is, being a guest on that podcast or sponsoring it. You know, getting into that niche publication being in that white paper being covered by that market research firm, getting into that blog, being covered by that, you know, local journalism publication. Those things don't just drive direct traffic and branded search which are great on their own. They also boost your Google rankings. Some of them many of them will link to you, you'll get a link. Many of them, all of them will mention your brand you get a brand mention. Almost all of them will drive some people to search for your company plus keyword, which will boost your rankings in the machine learning system. This is a win win.

Seth Price

That's awesome. Let me take you back because when you built Moz. You started off one day said, I'm doing this, and you produce great content. But as you did it you built you're not like this to the face, you were one guy out there doing the Whiteboard. But you at the same time built a team, built software, created all this different stuff. Talk to me as a business owner. That's some of the lessons learned in building what you eventually sold.

Rand Fishkin

Yeah. So sad news is I, we did not sell it. So I still own 17, 18% of Mazda's outstanding shares. But hopefully someday, fingers crossed knock on wood, they'll be some sort of an exit there. But Moz is one of those frustrating sort of stuck in the middle of venture backed stories, right? So we because we raise venture capital, which is a very particular asset class, until there's a, you know, sale for a very large number, or manages to get growth up enough to go public or something like that. All that capital, all that stock is is illiquid, right? So I I personally have, I don't know, maybe $500,000 in savings and, you know, a decent income from SparkToro, I think I'm probably in the top 20%, 25% of American earners, but not, you know, not top 10%, or five, or one, which I'm very grateful for. Like I don't, you know, I don't begrudge anything. But if you think building a $50 million dollar a year revenue company, will get you will make you rich, the answer is not if it's venture backed my friend. So you know, you just have to be aware of that. One of the things I discovered, in addition to, you know, sort of that challenging outcome and the, you know, venture backed companies are essentially in this. Either you go bust or you become a unicorn, and anything in the middle doesn't really work for the model. Right? So this time with SparkToro, we raised money, but in a very different way from individual investors. In fact, a lot of folks like yourself, Seth, agency owners, other entrepreneurs, you know, people who had built small businesses, small, medium businesses of their own, and generated a significant amount of wealth from that, you know, several millions of dollars, all of our investors are accredited, which means that they have more than a million dollars in net worth. And then they basically said, you have the SparkToro idea sounds awesome. We'd love to put, you know, anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000 in. We raised 1.3 million, which we spent almost two thirds of we just got profitable in September, we launched in April. And so had a very lucky year given COVID and all that, but yeah, that structure, I found it, I'm really excited to hopefully inspire more business owners to do that. Like, for example, your your your business is probably an LLC. Yeah, so we're an LLC as well, we can pay dividends to our investors. If SparkToro never sells, and never gets bigger than a few million dollars in revenue year, it doesn't matter, it can still be a huge success for our investors. Say you put in Seth, $100,000, right. So essentially, the first $1.3 Million that SparkToro makes we pay back to investors like you. We, you know, we'd say like, hey, Seth, good news. Over the last couple years, you know, we made some money, here's your money back. And now you keep owning the percent that you put in. And every year, you get dividends off of the profits, right, to the degree that we pay them out. And then if we ever sell, you get that money, too. So it's sort of a win win, and you don't have to be a unicorn, you know, we don't have to become Uber or Tesla or whatever in order to be a success. We can be a success at a small phase. That is probably the biggest takeaway for me is that the structure and the incentives of how the business is started and capitalized, influence everything about the company's behavior.

Seth Price

So take me back, what would you have done in hindsight with with Moz?

Rand Fishkin

I think I wouldn't, I wouldn't have raised venture. I think Moz in my opinion, could have been an extremely successful, focused SEO software company, for the long term. We probably needed that first round. We raised $1.1 Million in 2007. If we hadn't raised that, I don't think we could have gotten our software to where we wanted it to be. But after that, you know, I raised $18 Million more and then $10 Million more after that. It's just frankly dumb. We mostly wasted that money. It made us inefficient and we tried to expand way beyond SEO and I talked about it in Lawston founder, in the book and I blogged about it too. Just a lot of mistakes that we made that came from money and you can see right that Moz, you know, Moz today, as compared to Moz like five years ago, you know. You go back five years and if you asked 1000 people in the SEO world, what software what SEO Software they used and recommended? probably get 55 to 60%. Who would have said Moz. Today? Maybe it's 20%, 25%.

Seth Price

It's part of the Mosaic. But it's not the It's not like that or nothing.

Rand Fishkin

That's exactly I think, I think Moz is, you know, number of customers has gone from a in the 25,000 range to the 30,000 range, but the industry has tripled, quadrupled in size, right. And that is mostly SEM rush, and Ahrefs, and Sistrix. And, you know, other companies.

Seth Price

You were in the right direction. I mean, your local product was early to market well priced, meeting you at some conference and was coming out. And I was like, you know, giddy, I wanted to be like the first guy to try it. And it seemed like it should be a market maker. And yet Yext seems to have sort of own that.

Rand Fishkin

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think Yext focused exclusively on that product. And that space, they were very aggressive on the sales side. Moz was always very self service. And I think, frankly, the local product, like Moz, tried to build an enterprise sales team, it's spent a ton of the money that it made from the other parts of the business on the enterprise sales team, which never took off and failed. I think Moz is finally shutting that down now. But you know, it's like a five year experiment, to do enterprise sales that never worked. And there's just a lot of bad, bad, bad moves all around.

Seth Price

Well, I'm going to take you, try to stay away from the negative of that. But when you were building a team, because you did have resources. So the good news is, you had some you had some, you know, capital, which not everybody has behind you. What are the some of the things you think you did particularly well, as far as structuring a team to build it? It may not like the exit, or the whatever it is, the purgatory, but what, you know, what are some of the things you sort of think you did, particularly right, as far as using that venture money strategically.

Rand Fishkin

So I think the 2007 round was used incredibly efficiently, like it was just and maybe part of that is it was a smaller sum. And so we were just smarter with it. And and more responsible, as opposed to you know, you get $18 million, and you're like, sure, throw $50k at that sure throw $100K at that. When when we raise the $1.1, just like with SparkToro is $1.3. We have been very, very capital efficient, very, very conservative in our investment. The SparkToro team, Seth is only two people. The Moz team back in 2007, I think we grew it to maybe eight or nine people kept it very tiny, right? We essentially had, I had two software engineers, eventually, three that I recruited, there were two of them were friends of my wife's, who she trusted, and she has a better read for people than I do. But by a longshot, especially when we were younger. I think maybe I'd become a little more cynical, judgey as I got older. But regardless, we recruited these engineers, they, you know, built a product very efficiently on cloud services in the early days of cloud with Amazon Web Services, right? This was this was just as AWS was coming out and emerging. And we were able to build a product that people thought would cost 100 times as much as it did, you know, when I pitched investors, they were like, you can't crawl the web and build a link index for a million dollars. And I found a couple engineers who were like, okay, if we do this, and this and this, and this, I think we can do it. Right? And we were very, very strategic in terms of testing, and experimenting before we got there, right? We validated the market. We knew that Yahoo Site Explorer and the Google link command. This is before Google Search Console and Webmaster Tools existed. We knew that that data was hugely important to marketers, we had seen, you know, we could see the data. We talked to people at Yahoo, who were like, oh, yeah, we, you know, 10 million people a day are using Yahoo Site Explorer. Like okay, so if we build a better one of those, we can get we can really get something. And link Explorer, I think it was originally called Linkscape at Moz when we launched that, it was the day Lehman Brothers collapsed. Literally the day. I was in New York for a conference, I went downstairs from a hotel room. I'm like looking around every you know, all the people in the hotel lobby are glued to these screens. And it was real creepy. I had no idea what was going on. But despite the financial crisis, SEO Moz which is what was called at the time, like it really took off because we had validated the product, we had a huge marketing engine for our size, right? We had tons of people, like yourself, who were reading the blog and watching what we were doing and paying attention. We knew what they needed, because we had built that audience and the product they wanted. When we got it to market. We were able to turn the corner to profitability, literally, I think was a month and a half after launch by November of 2008. After launching in early October, late September, yeah.

Seth Price

Well, that is quite a journey. You know, and, you know, I'll bring it back to the positive. You know, what you did for many of us? You know, I got to sit next to your dad watching you present at the SEO Church in Philadelphia, a number of years back.

Rand Fishkin

That's my grandfather, Seymour, yes.

Seth Price

And that, you know, to watch your journey, and you helped so many of us to get to where we are so much gratitude, both for that and for coming on today.

Rand Fishkin

Seth, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed our chat.

Seth Price

Very good. Thank you so much.

Rand Fishkin

You bet.

BluShark Digital

Thank you for tuning in to the SEO Insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand's online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital's website.