Rand Fishkin Interview at MozCon'17

— First of all, thank you for accepting our interview request, Rent.

— Yes.

— I really appreciate it.

— It's always an honor to speak with you.

— Thanks a lot. And today I have some questions to you, and actually we will also publish this interview with tags on some Turkish magazines, and also publish on Zeeyo's website.

— I'm sorry, my Turkish is so terrible.

— Do you remember some Turkish words like hoş geldin, selam, merhaba? I think we talked something about it.

— Yeah, you taught me how to say "thank you," right?

— Yeah, yeah. Teşekkür. It's "thank you," "teşekkür ederim."

— Teşekkür ederim.

— Yeah, yeah. It's something similar.

— Yeah, yeah.

— Yeah, it's cool. And most of the people loves to hear about your story. How do you start the successful, the most company, and actually how do you create the community? And if you have any story to tell, we really appreciate it.

— Sure. Yeah, so, I mean, my story is pretty random. I dropped out of college. I started working with my mom, Jillian, and, you know, I was doing web design at the time for some of her small business clients. And we went deeply into debt. We weren't really able to make a good go of the business. And then when we stopped being able to pay our SEO subcontractors, I had to do SEO myself. So I was learning SEO. I got very frustrated about the information that was available on the subject. And.

— It's like 2004 or 2005.

— Yeah, this is about, right, 2003. Yep. And so I started this blog called SEOMOS that was sharing just all the things I was learning. And you can go back and read the early days of the blog. I mean, it's just, you know, silly stuff like, "Oh, I saw this guy, Barry Schwartz, write about this thing." You know, that kind of stuff. But eventually the blog started building a business for us. It got a lot of traffic. It got a lot of interest. And so we were able to turn the company into an SEO consulting firm. And then in 2007 we had this idea.

We had built some tools in-house. Many consultants do.

— Yeah, yeah, yeah. First one is our free tools, right?

— Yeah, we had some free tools, but we wanted we had more tools that we wanted to make available to people. I wanted to share them with everyone. But our developer, Matt, he's like, "No, it'll break all our servers. We don't have the bandwidth." I was like, "Okay, what if we charge just a little bit of money every month to people to use it, and then we can use that to pay for the server, the hosting costs?"

— And at this year's software as a service is not that much common business module.

— Yeah, we don't know anything about it, right? Like, we don't we've never heard the term software as a service. I don't know anything about, you know, venture capital or churn or lifetime value. I just want to share my tools. I'm just like, "Matt, I want to share the tools." So we launched the tools, and by six months after we launched, the subscription revenue from the software was doing was as much revenue as we were getting from all our consulting clients. And so that's when we sort of had this, "Oh, wait a minute.

There's a real thing here. Like, this is exciting. We should do something with it." And that's when Michelle Goldberg from Ignition Partners reached out to me, and she said, "Hey, have you thought about, like, maybe raising money and, you know, taking this somewhere else?" And we raised 1.1 million in November of that year and became a software company. And over the next few years, you know, we got rid of the consulting business, and we grew tremendously. And seven years later, in 2014, I stepped down as CEO, and for the last few years have been, you know, contributing in individual kinds of ways.

And Moz is, you know, when I stepped down, Moz was probably doing right around $30 million a year in revenue. Now it's up to $42 million. So, you know.

— It's really tough to get this much money in service business, actually. And it's not also that much scalable. So it's a good business. Congratulations. And when did you shut down the service business?

— 2009. We closed it entirely. Yeah.

— How do you feel about it when you are doing this? Because you start the Moz and you earn your first money, you pay the bills by the service business, and it's like all the agencies right now dreaming about starting a software business. You know, always the neighbor's garden is better than yours.

— Yeah, yeah.

— And so I'm also on this side, and we are also trying to develop some kind of the product using machine learning and stuff, and then saying that, "Okay, service business is great, and we love our clients, but maybe the software business might be more interesting." But how do you feel about when you are shutting down it?

— So I think I felt good about it as far as Moz went, right? Once you're a venture-backed company, service as revenue is just not that valuable to you, and it doesn't get evaluated the same way by investors and the same way by public markets or acquirers. So I think it made sense for us. But I have I've talked to many consultants and agencies over the years, and actually you can build a very exciting business in consulting, and you can generally build it with decent margins. You can build it in such a way that you own everything, right?

You don't have to give away portions of the business. So, you know, you know, I look at I look at friends of mine whose companies are doing 1/40th the revenue that Moz is doing, right? Doing a million dollars a year. They have a lot more money, right? Because personally they can, you know, if they make a million dollars a year, but they're able to, you know, they only have to spend $650,000 on, you know, a couple of other consultants who work with them and maybe a little bit of tools.

— It's still profitable. Yeah.

— It's huge. It can be hugely profitable, right? And so and they get to take those profits in addition to the salary. You know, company software company like Moz, I have a nice salary, but that's it. Right? And so, you know, Geraldine and I rent an apartment. I walk to work. I don't own a car. We have a fine life. We have enough money, absolutely. But, you know, it's a real different thing. So I think you have to decide what you want to do, because the software path and the venture path is a moonshot, right?

You might make it. It might be huge. It might also fall apart. Still a possibility.

— Yeah. Great. And also, you know, I think that you I read some of your answers on Quora. You say that creating marketing nation, which is powered by the community. And actually, I think Moz is a marketing nation, and you are generating lots of leads by just generating a great amount of content, and people love and know the most by just reading your content. And most of us learn SEO by your videos and etc. stuff. And so how do you feel about the community creation? And at this time, you start to create your own community. In 2003, you are writing posts like, "Okay, there is a guy which is called Barry Schwartz."

It's an amazing thing. But at this time, there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no any distractor. And actually, for community creation, what do you feel about creating community in 2017? Is it still possible to create some kind of community and powerful community like Moz by just using the power of content and the blogs, or just maybe we should focus on the other social media channel powered communities?

— Yeah, I mean, I think that nowadays you have many more channels and opportunities. I do think I would say that for every business and every person who's looking to build their community and their marketing machine, different channels are going to work and not work. Right? So this is not a one-size-fits-all type of thing. You need to figure out, you know, are people who care about my topic, are they on Pinterest? Are they on Facebook? Are they on Twitter? Are they on Instagram? Are they on LinkedIn? Do they have forums they participate in?

Are they heavy in these subreddits? Wherever they are. And then you need to use those platforms to drive the traffic back to yours.

— Okay.

— I think the dangerous thing is relying on someone else's platform to build your community.

— Yeah.

— So if you say, you know, "Hey, I'm going to build my community. It's all going to be on my Facebook page." You don't know what Facebook's going to do next week.

— Yes.

— Right? They can change the way, you know, those updates are received. They can change how the notifications come in. They can change the news feed, and maybe you'll lose 20, 50, 60 percent.

— Maybe even government policies can change for the Facebook and actually.

— Absolutely, right? I mean, there's countries where Facebook is not permitted, and China has been cracking down on what is allowed on there and what's not. So it's pretty dangerous to build your platform on someone else's. I think you always have to think of any other platform that exists, social media, forums, whatever, as drivers of traffic back to you.

— Yeah. Okay. It's a great answer. And, you know, you are coming from the 2003 when the SEO is just born in, and then you live all the history, and you also write the history at this field. And according to your own experiences and the industry's growth, how do you feel about the next five years of SEO? And what will happen on our industry, and what is the current SEO analyst or executive will do on the next five years?

— Yeah. I mean, so to my mind, I think that SEO is still extremely Google-centric. I think that there is one potential player in the market that could change that, and that's Amazon. I think for many e-commerce types of transactions, it is possible that Amazon will become a true driver of, you know, a significant amount of search and browser and commerce traffic in such a way that, you know, actually infringes on what Google owns today. That's happening only a tiny amount, right? And we can see that in the data. You know, Amazon drives maybe 2 or 3 percent of all referral traffic on average versus Google's, you know, 58 or 60 percent. So still, you know, they are tiny compared to the behemoth of Google, but I think that could change.

I think that voice search is also something that in the longer-term future, I don't think in two years, maybe not even three, but five years, I could see voice search cannibalizing a lot of what happens with web search now. And the danger with so voice search, no problem at all. Doesn't change anything for us in terms of SEO, really. But voice answers.

— Yes.

— Voice answers change the whole game. Voice answers are not attributed. They don't drive traffic to your site. They don't give you a brand impression. You can't retarget to the people who hear those answers. You don't get to control the user experience. You don't get to capture an email address. Like, everything is gone. Everything's taken from you. I think that's a dangerous game to play.

— Do you have any Alexa or Google Home at your home?

— Google Home, yeah.

— Okay. And just imagine that your interactions and your questions, some of them really lowers your the things you are mentioning on your presentation and the how many queries we are searching on per month.

— Right.

— And it's really decreasing the amount of the searches. And actually, there are searches, but if there is an actual search answer directly from the Google, it means for the marketer that there is nothing searching.

— Yeah, we get.

— It's not our job. So, okay, Google is answering some of the queries. That's all.

— It's pretty tough. And Google's I mean, Google's answering those queries based on content we create.

— Yes.

— They're taking our answers and providing them with no attribution. So it's pretty scary. What I will say, though, you know, I was just presenting on this, the jump shot data, and it was showing that the 2017's total search volume in desktop and mobile typed search, because they don't monitor voice search, and they don't monitor Apple devices. So it's all Android and desktop. But those mobile and desktop, 2017 has more Google searches, about 10 to 15 percent more than 2016 did. So I think we are not yet in a phase where voice search and voice answers are cannibalizing our opportunity, but we might be there in five years.

— Okay. And it's the changes on the search, actually. What about the algorithm changes and all the changes in SEO and actual queries and the not answered by the search engines? And how do you feel about on the future, will we be the content marketers, and what kind of changes in our daily routine as SEO analysts? And it's maybe a tough question for forecasting that much long years.

— I mean, so I think we're seeing a few things in terms of Google's algorithm favoring content that does the best job of answering the searcher's query fully and taking them through searcher task accomplishment. And we're seeing signs of a few search results, even competitive search results, where the guy with the most links is not winning. It's the one that answers the query the best. And so I think that part of SEO's changes over the next few years might be a little bit less worrying about keywords, worrying about links, worrying about metadata, worrying about technical optimizations, and a little bit more worrying about how does my content compare to everyone else's content, and does it do a vastly better job of engaging the searcher, solving their problem, taking them all the way through the task, you know, answering the next query that they have after this one.

— Okay. And actually, you say that we will research the market as SEOs and find the opportunities, find the inspiration by using our tools, and then creating content according to people's needs and because we can reach and we can understand their reach by using all the keyword base and the data and the clickstream data, actually. And we will be maybe the data-driven content marketers.

— Yeah. I think that that is where SEO is heading a little bit right now. That's not to say technical SEO isn't important. It still is. Not to say link building isn't still important. It still is. Or the keyword optimization isn't important. It still is. So these three things that we've always done, we still have to do them. But we also now, in order to compete, often have to do this, yeah, data-driven content optimization. And I think that's a that is going to be the future of a lot of SEO work.

— Yeah. It's amazing. And we will we are going to see the new tools and the new softwares that are focusing on the same business. And what I think about SEOs, and actually, I was talking with my friend at last night, and what you really learned on the last two years at your SEO career. And, okay, the things are getting changed so fast, but the essentials are still same. So what I think is that we need to change ourselves, maybe more data-oriented. We need to understand the essentials of data science to understand the big picture, actually.

And according to your answer, we can use maybe these skills for the content creation and content strategy.

— I think there's also an element of great content for searchers that can't be solved only through data. It's really very human and very empathetic, right? It's about saying, "Can I put myself in the situation that this searcher is in?" Right? You know, I'm a mom. My kid has just come home from Boy Scouts, and he was playing with a dead bat. And I'm worried that he might have rabies. And so now I start doing Google searches, right? And being able to be in that mindset of that searcher and to say, "What do I need?

What do I need to understand quickly? What do I need to understand fully? What are the recommendations?" Like, what's your and by the way, you have to go to the doctor right away and get a shot, even if he doesn't have rabies. Because once you show signs of rabies, you die. But, you know, this type of ability to put yourself in the searcher's shoes and to have great empathy and to serve all of their needs well through your content, I think it's tough to do that purely with data, right? That's a very human, creative, empathetic practice too.

— Yeah. Being empathic plus using data.

— Yeah. Absolutely, right? That's the wonderful part about SEO. It's always been creative and technical.

— Yes. Yes. You're right. Totally right. It's a favorite part of mine as well.

— Yeah, right? You get to exercise both parts of your brain. I love that.

— Yeah. Okay. I think I asked all the questions about SEO, but actually, maybe for our Turkish video viewers, I can ask about the Turkey trip and how do you like Moz and what's your experience actually for Cappadocia, when we couldn't talk with you after that.

— Yeah, that was it was incredible. We really had we had an extraordinary time. I think, you know, we took God knows thousands of photographs, right? And truly got this sense that, you know, it was the people, right? I mean, the setting is lovely, but the people are like many places we travel, just kind and thoughtful.

— You mentioned the people who don't know direct as you as a person.

— Yeah, right. We're just hanging out, you know, in little towns around Cappadocia or, you know, in a market in Istanbul or in the cafe or whatever. And people just treated us wonderfully everywhere we went. You know, it was I think there's this weird idea that there's some sort of tension between, you know, Americans and Turkish people or between, you know, the Western world and Muslim world or something. No, there was none of that. It was just it was friendship everywhere we went. So that was great. And we did see some awesome sites. You know, we had some adventures or we went to some ruins. There was one time I was carrying Rio, Will's little son.

— Yeah, yeah, yeah.

— And I'm like, "Oh, Rio, let's go check that out up there." And we walk up these stairs, and then I suddenly realize, like, Will and Nora are down there, and they're like, "How did you get up there with him? How are you going to get down from there? What are you doing with our son?" You know, I had this "Oh, no. I just put their son's life at risk," you know, carrying around through all these, like, cracked ruins and on top of cliffs. And yeah, but, you know, it was real fun. We had a great time.

— I really appreciate to hear that you enjoy your experience.

— Oh, my God. Amazing. Amazing.

— Hope to see you on the next years as well, right?

— We would love to come back. I mean, Istanbul was just an amazing city, and I feel like we only saw this once.

— I think you just stayed for two or three days at Istanbul right now.

— No, we were there.

— Even less maybe. And you just went to the Cappadocia directly after the conference. So.

— I think we were in Istanbul five days.

— Five days. Really? Okay. It's minus.

— Yeah, pretty good.

— Yeah, it's amazing. Thanks a lot, Rand. And you answered all my questions and.

— My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

— Thank you. Thanks a lot.

— All right. Cheers.

— Bye-bye.