Rand Fishkin, CEO And Co-Founder, SEOmoz
Rand Fishkin has been involved with Internet technologies for almost 15 years. He began working with a company called Marketlink International and eventually moved to a web-development startup firm with Gillian (who happens to be his mother). Since coming together, Gillian and Rand have changed the model of their business, to arrive at the current iteration of SEOmoz.
SEOmoz provides companies around the world with consulting, Internet marketing, and search engine optimization services. Some of its clients include AllBusiness, Benchmark Capital, Drivl, National Public Radio, and Shoe-Store.net. Rand and SEOmoz are well-respected names in the SEO industry. You may have seen Rand at an SEO conference if you’ve attended one in the last few years. Even if you didn’t know his face, you should be able to pick him out. He’s the one wearing yellow Pumas.
Jerri: What do you see as the state of the SEO industry today?
Rand: That pretty broad. From a growth standpoint, I think the industry is positive. It continues to grow at a steady pace.
From a maturity standing, I think we still have a long way to go. There’s been a lot of bad press, bad companies, and snake-oil salesmen that need to be dealt with. And a lot of companies get caught up in bad contracts. The industry is still very young, and we have a long way to go before it becomes mature.
Jerri: What’s the difference between SEO and search marketing?
Rand: Technically speaking, SEO always leans toward the organic side of search marketing-it doesn’t include paid services. Search marketing as a whole is anything that you do to market your web sites through search.
Jerri: So how is social media marketing different from SEO?
Rand: Social media marketing refers to a couple of big techniques. The first is viral-content cre- ation and promotion. There has always been some form of viral content; however, the appearance of portals like NetScape, Spin, and others has enabled social media to spread like never before.
An example of how this has changed would be the linking structure of a blog. A blog post goes out, people link to it, those links are spread and before you know, the post is linking to thousands of other web sites. It’s one of the ways that you can use to grow a link structure very quickly.
The second side of social media marketing is social network marketing and reputation management. There are more ways available now for companies to grow their reputation. You need to have a pres- ence on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. It’s brand marketing-you can build and share your brand over the Web.
Jerri: How can organizations use social media to improve their business?
Rand: First, you have to have a great deal of familiarity with the space. You have to have a deep understanding of the community, and you have to become part of the community, sharing content, creating content, tagging content, and interacting with other people in the community. If you aren’t familiar with this space or you don’t participate in the space, you won’t be successful.
How much time is spent participating in this space depends on your specific needs as an organiza- tion. Some organizations only need to devote a few hours a week. Three or four, because social media isn’t that important to their organization. There are companies, though, like AllBusiness, where social marketing is more important and it’s nothing for them to spend 80 hours a week participating in social marketing. It’s all determined by your business and what your business needs are.
Jerri: What do you see as trends in the SEO space?
Rand: It would be foolish to ignore what Google calls “universal search” and we call “vertical search.” It’s in vertical search that companies find highly qualified traffic, and there’s going to be a significant amount of traffic in these areas. So, vertical search can include:
■ Local search
■ Product search
■ Instant answers (like Ask.com. That’s a rapidly growing area of search.)
■ Image search
■ News search
■ Travel search
And there are many more. All of those are vertical that can lead you closer to the customer that you want to reach.
Jerri: What are your thoughts on what’s being called “human-powered search”?
Rand: Basically, I think it’s a joke-less than useless. A waste of time. It doesn’t scale, results are of considerably worse quality than an algorithmic search, and there is very little hope that it would take off in the next few years. I could be wrong, too, but in my opinion it will never achieve results that have the quality which engineers can put into algorithmic results.
Jerri: Where do you see that organizations are performing poorly in search marketing?
Rand: That’s really a story of two different worlds. Less than 10 percent of small and medium-sized business in the U.S., and less around the world, have paid any attention to search marketing and are deriving any value from it at all. And they don’t really care. Many small and micro business owners don’t know how the Internet can impact their business, and they don’t care.
But then there are a very small number of tiny web-based businesses that have come to it over time that have seen phenomenal results. Etsy.com is an example. But mostly smaller businesses have no interest in search marketing.
It’s in the larger companies where we generally tend to see great hunger for knowledge from users. And even then, a great number of larger businesses have still not begun to focus on search market- ing. These companies usually do one thing, like pay-per-click marketing, and nothing else.
Jerri: Is there anything else about search marketing that you think might be important to mention?
Rand: There are thousands of topics we haven’t touched on. And there are lots of tips that I could give you. But if I had to choose one, I would say that companies should look at widget strategies, and try to design and deploy a high-demand widget that can be plugged into a blog or browser. When done successfully, widgets are really great. You can get phenomenal amounts from traffic and links to your site when you have a good, high-demand widget.
We’re also fond of link-baiting strategies and content strategies as a means of providing relevant information to your site visitors.
