The Cheat Code to Rank #1 on Google with SEO Mozart – Rand Fishkin

I was technically born in New Jersey, but we moved here when I was three months old. So yeah, I’ve basically been in Seattle for 40 years.

Not very big. It depends on which side. My mom has four brothers and sisters, so I’ve got cousins there. My dad had only one brother, who passed away a couple years before I was born—just before starting college—so it’s a pretty tight little family. I have a brother and a sister.

Well, let’s see. My dad was a very thrifty person—he still is. We’re not super close now, but back then he was obsessed with coupons and getting the best deals. He had a whole system at the meat departments in various grocery stores around our rural part of King County, which is the county Seattle’s in. It was about 45 minutes outside the city, and he’d drive around to different grocery stores on the day they’d mark their meat down for sale. And Shane, I can’t stress enough: if you’re gonna buy fresh meat, you want it to be fresh, right? Because for all those years, I had bowel trouble, which I never understood. I’d just think, “This is me, this is my body, I’m always sick.” Then I moved out, started buying non-expired meat, and I’m great. Perfect health.

I’ll have to take advantage of that someday.

No, no—my grandparents were, but my dad was not. My grandparents weren’t especially poor. My grandfather was a chemical engineer; he grew up extremely poor, and my grandmother did too. But they had that classic 1950s middle-class American lifestyle, which I think is pretty remarkable. All of my ancestors are Jewish, and they all came over before and during World War II, so basically refugees. The ones who made it here ended up being my grandparents on both sides, but they were okay, I guess. There was a lot more class mobility in the United States back then, right? You could be super poor in New York, like my grandfather was—his dad was a tailor—and he managed to get into a good public high school, then a good public college, and when he graduated he got a job in his field, making decent money. That’s a lot harder today, right? There’s much less economic mobility now than there used to be. But yeah, they made it happen.

I agree. I’ve had the same behavior myself, and I think this is a good reminder for SaaS products that maybe you shouldn’t just show the discount code field for everyone—maybe make it URL-dependent—because I agree, that can lower conversion rates if it’s just on the checkout page. And I don’t think a lot of SaaS product designers realize that correlation. I don’t go to Ross very often, but TJ Maxx is pretty much where everything in our house is from. That’s awesome. I saw a report—TJ Maxx is finally investing in their website. It’s 2019, TJ Maxx, which has done extraordinarily well the past 20 years, providing a sort of experiential store. Going to TJ Maxx, for me, doesn’t make much sense compared to going to, say, Amazon. But maybe that’s their formula for thriving, even with Amazon dominating e-commerce and Google dominating search. I’m a big believer in TJ Maxx—if I bought stocks, I’d stack them.

My understanding is they get overstock from various places, and they do buy in bulk, but they save a ton because they don’t have much, if any, warehousing. Whatever they have goes straight into the stores. Unlike Nordstrom or Amazon, which might have big back stocks or warehousing issues, TJ Maxx sits at the end of that chain. They might not care whether they have X or Y or Z in stock, since they don’t have a fixed product set. I think that’s pretty genius.

Yeah, I think that’s one of the challenges. I remember the early days of Home Depot: people wanted these big, bulky items delivered, so you had to figure out logistics on your own—like setting your own ZIP code. Another hurdle was dealing with IP addresses. For example, I tried to help my grandparents buy a new washer and dryer. I’m in Seattle, they’re in New Jersey, so I couldn’t just shop for them. I had to VPN into their house because Home Depot’s site automatically detected location without letting you reset the ZIP. These online-to-offline issues are a big deal. I’m basically a fan of anyone who can compete against the giants—Amazon, Facebook—any competition is welcome in my mind.

I’m shocked Marriott worries more about Amazon entering their market than Google, which is already there. That blows my mind. I mean, Google is going to squeeze every penny of margin out of the travel sector. The big hotels and big chains are the ones who should be most afraid, right? Google can just bleed that stone dry.

Exactly. Google has trained consumers not to visit hotel websites directly or individual OTAs. If I were in that space, I’d be losing my mind over Google. The idea of Amazon building hotels is even more speculative and seems pretty unlikely, though.

I’ll give you the story in brief. I dropped out of college in 2001 and started working with my mom, Jillian, who’d been running a one-woman graphic design and marketing shop in the Seattle area. We moved into web design because her clients started needing that, and I was passionate about the field. We ended up running a failing, money-losing business for a few years. Eventually, we couldn’t afford to pay our subcontractors, including the folks who were doing SEO for the websites we built, so I had to learn SEO myself to fulfill those contracts. I found I really liked SEO, but was also frustrated by the secrecy around how it worked—especially the lack of transparency from Google and other search engines.

I believed (and still do) that Google could open-source its algorithm without losing anything, and that it would help a lot of smaller businesses. So I started a site called “SEOmoz,” specifically built to share what I was learning about SEO and help others do it better. The blog took off, I got invitations to speak at conferences, we landed consulting contracts, and we managed to save the business. Then, in 2007, we built a handful of small SEO tools—six or seven—and put them behind a PayPal paywall because we couldn’t afford the server costs to make them free. Six months later, our subscription revenue matched our consulting revenue. Some local investors approached us about raising money to grow the software side, so we did. I became CEO, and over the next seven years we scaled from a few hundred thousand dollars to about $30 million in revenue.

In 2014, I stepped down from the CEO role during a bout with depression and promoted our longtime COO to take over. She’s been CEO for the last five years. I left Moz about 18 months ago—early 2018—on not-great terms, unfortunately. I’m still on the board of directors, and I still hold shares, so I’m rooting for them to do well, but it wasn’t the best departure.

The book came out about a year ago…

I think the evidence speaks for itself, right? The more educated people are about how Google’s algorithm works and how to do SEO correctly, the better the web gets for Google because they can index more content, and more people create better stuff. It infuriates me that they’ve kept up this attitude of secrecy and misleading statements. For example, their congressional testimony in July—where they cited some of my research—was just blatantly false. Then Google’s representative in front of Congress told obvious lies, and it’s so clear, but nobody who watches it seems to realize, “Wow, you could be the biggest Google fan in the world and still go, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you could lie to Congress like that.’ I thought you had to tell them the truth!” I guess our government doesn’t work the way I thought it did. You’d think if you get suspended by Congress and then lie, you’d be in contempt—but maybe you just pay a fine, so they don’t care? Because they can afford to brush it off. It’s infuriating to me how deceptive and misleading that company is. And I know personally dozens, if not hundreds, of folks who work there who are good, honest, thoughtful people, but when they’re confronted with this stuff, they’re just like, “Wow, that’s how it goes at a big company.” But in my mind, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Why not? I don’t understand that at all. The whole idea is to create a market, right? On the advertising side, you bid more, you make more relevant content, and then you get better conversion rates—customers are happier—so Google ranks you higher in ads. And they’re very transparent about that. But in organic results, if you serve searchers better, your content does a better job, and you get more clicks, fewer pogo-sticking, more links, better reputation online and off—your brand improves—and then Google will rank you higher there too, right? So the fact that they’re unwilling to be transparent about what those things are, and misleading so often about different elements—like “We’re not going to tell you about subdomains,” “We’re not really going to tell you how big of a deal mobile friendliness or site speed is,” or those tiny ranking factors… Are they really big or are they tiny? And they say, “Oh, they’re small,” but there’s a million other examples. Every day I see their representatives who can be very helpful—maybe 70–80% of the time, what they say looks pretty good, but sometimes it’s not the whole truth. Then 20–30% of the time you see it, shake your head, and think, “I hope that person does their research and doesn’t listen to that,” because it’s provably bad advice, and it’s easy to show that it’s bad. Why are they doing that to poor business owners? I don’t understand.

I think this is one of those cultural things—companies inherit the strengths and weaknesses of their founders. I think Larry and Sergey are brilliant engineers, and the secrecy around how the search engine operates is an attitude that’s lasted through two decades of Google’s life.

I was supposed to. This was maybe 2008, something like that—Sergey was launching Space X, and they said, “We want someone to do the SEO and marketing side.” I was like, “Holy crap, one of Google’s founders wants to talk to me about SEO for their big project—wow.” This was going to be amazing. But I missed the call. After that, I started looking for a personal assistant and a better calendar system, because it was such an awful day. I felt like crap. Of course I emailed, I’ll show you. I never got a reply from him or his office again. I guess they said, “Screw all American business owners worldwide.” That was me flaking on a phone call. That was probably me.

Because of that day? Having an assistant isn’t everything. I think I just realized I was a little, yeah, overwhelmed…

Yeah. Consider the tens of thousands of people who’ve left Google over the last 20 years. Maybe three or four of them are in the SEO world now. Just working at Google doesn’t necessarily mean you know SEO. If you’re an engineer on something like a neural network or machine learning system, you’re dealing with data, but that doesn’t mean you understand how to build a brand online, or how to reach out so people link to you, or what resonates with searchers to create the content they want to read. It’s a totally different skill set.

I guess it depends on your definition of success. I find it funny when people say, “Oh, Moz was a huge success,” because I think it depends, right? If it were a non-institutionally funded business, then yes, you’d call Moz a great success. It grew very fast and built a strong reputation in the field—at least up until a few years ago—and had a positive impact on many people learning about Google and SEO. I’m proud of that. But the job of a CEO, and a company like Moz, is to return capital to the fund that invested in it, in the amounts expected. Realistically, Moz raised $29 million, so it needs to figure out how to return $290 million. From that viewpoint, Moz is stuck in the middle—it’s growing, but not very fast; maybe it’ll do $55 or $60 million in revenue this year with decent margins, it’s profitable, but it’s not going to sell tomorrow for $800 million or $700 million, returning $300 million to investors.

Let’s see, I did 52 a year since it was weekly. Occasionally we had guests, maybe five a year weren’t me. So there must be 300-plus. Probably more, because it started in ’09 and ran until… I was even filming some earlier this year.

I think it’s “magical” in the sense of non-intuitive, but once you think about it, it’s that a lot of people create content and brands to serve their customers, right? Essentially, if you and I set up a store to sell soccer jerseys, we figure soccer players and fans will buy from us—so let’s make stuff for them. The big failure is, that’s not going to get you rankings in Google, compared to people who figure out how to build a brand, a message, a product that influential folks likely to share and amplify will link to. So if you make stuff for your customers but not for those amplifiers, you lose out to those who do.

In a way, absolutely. SparkToro is designed to help you figure out who’s influential, which publications and people a particular audience follows. At Moz, that was key to link building—figuring out, “Okay, who might want to link to me, and how do I get them to do that?” I think it’s one of those frustrating truths for entrepreneurs and engineers: marketing can win over a good product, right? A subpar product beats a superior one because that’s how capitalism works, my friends.

Yes. And ideally, the best scenario is when a great product is paired with great marketing. A great marketing effort with a bad product can still lead to problems because, over time, your reputation suffers and people learn not to buy from you. But great marketing can overcome a lot of product challenges, at least temporarily.

Right—if you’re doing content marketing as part of your content strategy to reach a new audience, rank higher in Google, get social shares and traffic, diversify your traffic sources, and build brand awareness, then creating content for your customers (the end users) alone probably won’t get you there—unless your customers are the people in media, social amplification, or writing.

Yeah, not quite about a year and a half ago.

Sure. So I left Moz in February 2018 and basically started SparkToro the next morning. My cofounder, Casey Henry, also worked at Moz a few years back, then was at Wistia and HubSpot and Barcha. The last 18 months, we’ve been developing this product based on the theory that if we crawl web and social profiles and combine that data into a big database, we can query it and find out how an audience is influenced. For example, I could type in “electrical engineers in Canada,” see which publications they read, which YouTube channels they subscribe to, which podcasts they listen to, which sites they visit, which social accounts they follow—stuff like that.

Our focus so far is outside the so-called “influencer marketing” domain—because that field often means half-naked people on Instagram posing with your product. We’re not going there. We actually ignore Instagram for now, which is intentional. We want to avoid that side of influencer marketing in our initial product. Instead, we’re focusing on “audience intelligence.” I can search any given audience, see the words and phrases they frequently use in their bio, see what words and phrases they use in their content when sharing things, see who they link to, which YouTube channels they subscribe to, which podcasts they listen to, which sites they visit. It’s all inferred data from the link graph of the social and classic web.

We are in beta right now, so we’ve been in beta since the end of July, and I expect the beta period will be another maybe two to six weeks, and then we are hoping to have a launch sometime in October or November.

Yes, and this is really, very nice because there’s a lot of complexity on the back end, but the front end is super simple. You search for how your audience describes themselves or what they talk about, or which social accounts they follow, or which websites they visit and share, or which hashtags they use. Then, based on your search, you get back a simple list with tabs. One tab is social profiles they pay attention to, one is websites they visit, read, and share, another is podcasts they listen to, another is YouTube channels, and so on. You also get data about their profiles and that kind of stuff. It’s very straightforward—just lists, and they’re ordered by, say, the percentage of people in that audience who follow a particular publication or account. The feedback on the interface has been great: people say it’s super simple and intuitive. That’s a huge credit to Don Shepherd and Christine Ryu, our UX/UI designers. They did an amazing job in their spare time—they both have full-time gigs but worked nights and weekends for us, and it’s turned out really well.

Sure. I think you might still find it on YouTube. Just prepare yourself for 2007 Rand, though. I bought a local TV commercial—back when watching television with commercials was still a thing—and it aired during Geraldine’s favorite show, Veronica Mars, which is back on Hulu now, magically. Hello, hello. And I highly recommend the fourth season they did on Hulu; it’s some excellent noir detective fun. Anyway, I hid a camera in the room so you can see her reaction when the ad came on. Then I pulled out the ring. It was a lot of fun.

No, no, I was inspired by a guy in the SEO world who had a blog about proposing to his girlfriend during the Super Bowl. I can’t remember his name now—he was from Tennessee, I think. Anyway, it turned into a whole thing. So yes, that was the proposal. Looking back, it seems a bit silly, but it was really fun at the time.

I mean, the only impact I care about is: Geraldine said “Yes,” so now we have a fun story to tell our friends. I think it worked out great.

Oh, Shane, it was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

You too. Bye.