Part II:

Transcript

Brett Tabke: We are back here live in Silicon Valley, recording live in the Silicon Valley and today we have Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz. Thanks for taking time to be with us Rand.

Rand Fishkin: It is my pleasure to be here.

Brett Tabke: We have a big seomoz.org on the screen behind us we were just talking before we started here about you have a new section premium content section?

Rand: Yeah, well, we launched, so we launched premium content in February of this year and it was kind of slow on the uptake for the first few months and now we are at all of a sudden over the summer it is kind of gone wild. We have about 1200 members in there and it's you know tools, it is a few guides, there is a question and answer service, which is kind of you know people ask us questions. It is like Yahoo Q&A only instead of idiots you have experts. I am just kidding Yahoo. I am sure you have very good people helping out there. Then you know there is a few other things in there, there is like some premium tips. There is some, I think they are about to launch this week like discounts on all sorts of paid services in the search industry. Yeah, so it has been fun and interesting well, you know the content model. It is interesting.

Brett Tabke: So the subscription model it is kind of new, seems like me and you were the only ones doing it in the space.

Rand: It is so weird. Like everyone inside the web 2.0 space is thinking oh, no you have to put everything out there for free and then monetize it with advertising. I just, I think yeah you and I, I never liked the model of using ads. You know the ad market goes up and down the value that you provide with free content to people is always viewed as well if it is free then it must not be worth that much, right. So this has been interesting for us and exciting and it is nice to be our own client for once right.

Brett Tabke: Right. So the site has been doing great from all appearances, outward appearances.

Rand: So one of the things, I mean the only thing that we are not really hitting on all cylinders, this is embarrassing but it is search, right? So I think we get about 10,000 visits a day at this point, which is up from maybe around 6,000 or 7,000 a day at the beginning of this year, and I think less than a third of that is search traffic. So in some ways that is good, right? It is a lot of type-in traffic, a lot of referral traffic, lot of branded traffic you know people are engaged with a brand and that is nice, but it also means our SEO strategy was not, we have been doing work for clients real well. You know Faircast is doing great, NPR is doing great. We are not doing so great. So we need to spend some time there.

Brett Tabke: But you know that is everybody's goal is to be able to get to a point where you don't rely on the search engines, that traffic from search engines you know I look at it as bonus points.

Rand: Look at us two SEOs talking about how we don't need traffic from search engines. The irony.

Brett Tabke: But it is true you know you get to the point it gets so good the stuff that you get the traffic that you get the repeat visitors and realize hey, it is all about the users, it is all about the users.

Rand: And that branded traffic is so valuable. You know people who are engaged with your brand are so much more likely to view all of the things that you are kind of looking for in a user and I think that when you build up search strategy for someone else it is kind of like yes, we are going to get a lot of search traffic so that we can build up the space so people will keep coming back again and again and again because you don't want to rely on search engines for everything. It is a dangerous, dangerous move.

Brett Tabke: It is an addiction and we all know the first time is free.

Rand: It is organic.

Brett Tabke: So other things going on with Seomoz you guys are starting trainings too.

Rand: That is right, yeah. We are doing, well so it is interesting we are doing one training session and of course you know I tell Scott who is kind of our biz development guy and he does setting up this thing, like okay, I want you to pick a date when nobody else is doing anything. Yeah, well that didn't go so well. So October 1st is actually you know Danny doing SMX local in Denver, travel. So of course he asked me if I want to speak and then I suddenly look at this and go, ha, crap. What happened? But yeah, it is not really for the training and I do not want to run seminars, but this one time we figured we could do it, set up like a professional DVD crew, camera crew and film it, and then put it in premium content. So we are going to do it one time maybe like one time a year, maybe one time every two years.

Brett Tabke: Oh, really.

Rand: Really there are a lot of good conferences, there is a lot of good training stuff out there and I am not a huge fan of it. So I was convinced this one time, but I am not a huge fan of it in terms of us doing it. I kind of would have preferred to participate in other types of stuff. So we will see.

Brett Tabke: You have got your core competencies.

Rand: Exactly, we know what we are doing. We know what we are doing online in terms of this event thing I think you know we were hoping for like a 150 folks we got about 50 signups so far.

Brett Tabke: So you have got ways to go.

Rand: Yeah, we have got way to go.

Brett Tabke: Time wise I mean you have got a way to go time wise. You have plenty of time. So what else? Off record you want to talk about my super proposal at all, or is that off the table?

Rand: No, no, I mean I am happy to talk about it. One of the funny things is the original super bowl advertisement that was filmed with the unnamed sponsor, unnamed because I still have the threat of lawsuit.

Brett Tabke: He who shall not be named, yes.

Rand Fishkin: Despite the fact that I never signed anything so I think supposedly I should be safe. Anyway so I sent him an email and I am like hey, how about Geraldine and I fly out to the city that you are in and maybe we can swing by your offices and you can just show her the videos, you know 100 people put tons and tons of work into this. I think I might be the only guy who has ever proposed about 800 times in front of a camera, you know. Okay, let's do another take, lets do another take. So yeah, you know them. They said, "We are not comfortable even" I do not get that. I mean to me the Fortune 500s are a mystery in that respect.

Brett Tabke: They got their master plan with their brand though. Anything transgresses that master plan even remotely. Well it was an interesting marketing experiment though.

Rand Fishkin: I think you know Joe and I were talking last night and he was saying, I have never learned as much about major media as in those you know four weeks between the AdAge article launching and super bowl. You know and talking to CEOs, CMOs at huge companies and directors of the advertisement agencies, fascinating experience, really like a look into this world that I think you would never get a glimpse of otherwise. This is just, it is just incredible. The security, the control that goes around super bowl advertising incredible, just incredible. The people you have to know just to make things happen, amazing.

Brett Tabke: Well interesting I kind of talk to Joe a lot about what was going on.

Rand Fishkin: I think, I think Joe has got his new company Storybids and it is definitely going to help him on that road because he has all these connections now.

Brett Tabke: Probably would not be doing this video now if it was not for you and your Super Proposal.

Rand Fishkin: Oh.

Brett Tabke: Joe is working on me everyday. You got to get in to video.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, and you know you have to test my camera friendliness, right, so.

Brett Tabke: Ha, ha, ha.

Rand Fishkin: Our sponsor is well, let's fill this guy out let's see how he does?

Brett Tabke: True they have got to see something on tape first. All right let's get back to some of the industry stuff. What is your whole take on social media these days? You have played a little bit in it.

Rand Fishkin: I would say I played way more than a little, you know we have at SEOmoz there is seven of us with the exception of Gillian who is my mom and the president cofounder of the company. I would say that all of us are on most of the social media websites every day. Jane is kind of our social media expert and spends the heaviest chunk of time in there probably. You know a good three or four hours a day, Reddit, Digg, stumbleupon, netscape you know playing around on all these things LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace. We see a lot of value out of it. I mean there is an incredible amount because it is this kind of new field I think that while folks in SEO over the last year have started to see the potential there. There is still a lot of unfulfilled equity that you can get out of spending time in those spaces and we certainly are seeing a lot of benefits with our clients.

Brett Tabke: So have you seen more benefits out of social than out of search on seomoz.org?

Rand Fishkin: Well, on seomoz absolutely, oh, god, yes, yes, anytime you are playing in that technology and blogging world I mean the thing about search is that it is not used as a discovery mechanism, right. It is used as an intent based system and because of that you don't reach people who don't know that they need you through search, but you do through social media so that has been really exciting for us. I mean I think you know when you look at the feed subscriber numbers seomoz blog you are talking about I think we are at like 7000 beginning of the year and now we are 15,000 which puts us top 20, top 30 blogs on the web. That is incredible. You know that is wild to me and that is I think that is 90% social. I do not think much of that is search at all. So that has been really, really interesting and it feeds back to search. That is the biggest thing, right. For the clients it is kind of like we invest time in social we invest money in social and we get out of it this great, I think the biggest thing is the number and quality of links that you really, you know your competitors are going to have such a hard time replicating and figuring out how the hell did they get links from you know TechCrunch, or from the front page of TechMeme or whatever it is. You know I am playing in these spaces and you do not have a way to compete there. That is exciting.

Brett Tabke: Excellent. Well, it is interesting to note how much emphasis you guys are placing on social over search.

Rand Fishkin: I think, I mean from our personal perspective it is yeah, absolutely social over search. From a client perspective it is social equals search. You know we do not really do a whole lot of manual link building. It is just too time-intensive we don't have a staff for it. We do not have the attention for it frankly. So social is the way that we do link building basically and the nice part about it is it builds a very defensible link structure. So that is exciting.

Brett Tabke: I can really completely agree but it is interesting, not more companies are getting that in the search space.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, there is kind of few.

Brett Tabke: Kind of slow uptake.

Rand Fishkin: Right. I mean, people ask me who else can do social media. Maybe there is half a dozen names I can give them. That is a really tiny number. So we will see. Over time probably, it will take a little while. I think people are starting to get into it. Well, we are doing, you know we are doing sessions at you know, we are doing sessions at PubCon on social media.

Brett Tabke: Right.

Rand Fishkin: I think those types of things will see more SEOs going oh, right I should be playing this game.

Brett Tabke: So you are coming down to Vegas for two three days.

Rand Fishkin: I am going to be there the whole time I suspect and I am actually bringing my entire crew. So you know Jane will be there Jeff, Matt, Scott, Rebecca.

Brett Tabke: Are you guys going to blog it too?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah. Cover everything.

Brett Tabke: Excellent.

Rand Fishkin: You know we were kind of deciding this year between certain other conferences and PubCon.

Brett Tabke: SES Chicago.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, no sorry, so I am not flying to Chicago in the winter. That was not a decision, right. I do not think that was not a call because what was a call was like where should we go with the whole staff? Right, so either we were going to do San Jose in August or we are going to do PubCon in December and so we kind of put it to a vote at the office and everyone said, Yeah.

Brett Tabke: So you are using the conferences a lot like we do here to company meetings and..

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah. Connect with people trying to figure out you know where can we add value to other companies or another companies add value to us, do all sorts of networking stuff.

Brett: Do you ever get afraid though some of these conferences bringing your people here that you know you have got the entire industry here. It is

Rand Fishkin: So last time when we came back from London Rebecca and Scott, okay Scott who had been in the industry for maybe six months total at that point, right had like two job offers you know at higher salaries than we offered and Rebecca you know of course has job offers sitting on the table all the time, but.

Brett Tabke: We were going to have a job career day.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, great. Yeah. I will just bring my whole crew to that. Thanks Brett.

Brett Tabke: Everybody is all excited about you know this will be brilliant. Everybody is always asking about jobs and we ran it by a few exhibitors and they say we will see you next year.

Rand Fishkin: Ha, ha, ha. No, I mean it is tough right because you know you are going to get really, really smart talented people coming to these things and then you know you cannot help it. I mean companies even like us are looking around at people and going, oh, seems like a good place to do recruiting, right. So that has been frustrating, but luckily I mean we have benefited from a really good atmosphere and surprisingly we have benefited from geography a lot. The whole staff wants to, they love Seattle, they want to stay in Seattle and that has helped and we have.

Brett Tabke: Do you have any remote employees at all.

Rand Fishkin: We don't, oh I lied, my grandfather does a lot of work for us and he lives in New Jersey. So I actually when I go to the East coast though you know he and I do work on patent applications together I actually do biz dev meetings at his house up in New Jersey.

Brett Tabke: It is funny how much we have changed. At first everybody was remote and now it has starting coming back in-house for everybody. I think you know I look at an organization like you know like Third Door, like Danny's organization and it is I think the same size as us they are seven or eight people, but they are spread out you know all across the country and Danny is in UK of course. I think maybe it takes a greater level of maturity or greater level of commitment to say, I can work from home you know with my family here kind of do that. I was, my fiance and I were in Oregon we just went to Bend where Marshall Simmonds who does work for New York Times and About.com and he is like you know it is really tough because my two kids are in the other room, but I know that I have to stay in here and work. I do not know if I have the discipline for that. So yeah, it is an interesting take.

Brett Tabke: Well, speaking of business moves, last year you were one of the charter members of the transparency club by posting your financials online in depth and there was a collective what was he thinking of? And a collective cheer from half of the

Rand: Right

Rand: So we are and this is news to the rest of the industry I am sure, but we are considering taking some extra investment for the first time and right before we do that if we do that it will probably be the last time that I will be able to post that. So in the next few months look for another kind of update on you know where our financials are sitting.

Brett Tabke: How did that effect you? What did you get out of that? So I got a lot of people calling up and saying what the hell is wrong with you why aren't you charging more, taking more clients and doing more work? To which I explained well, we got this kind of long-term strategy and besides that you know I think maybe there were a lot of folks who if you didn't read the post carefully you know, we were three years ago, two and a half, three years ago we were in little over half a million dollars in debt, which was, that sucks, that is no fun and now we don't have. So you know, yeah, you look at the profit numbers and you are trying to go that is not that great, but from my perspective I am feeling great, right. Just fantastic knowing that you know this whole thing that I have been lugging on my shoulder for years is gone and now there is so much opportunity and certainly since then I think we have already done better this year than we have done all of last year so, yes.

Brett Tabke: Excellent. Congrats, it was quiet timely because Wired came out with their, did you read the transparency article on Wired?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brett Tabke: It was all about that same time.

Rand Fishkin: I should mention we just did, so we just did a long free contract for a reporter at Wired who runs the site filmcritic.com and now in October I think, September, October that article is going to be published in Wired. So that will be very interesting.

Brett Tabke: Congrats, congrats.

Rand Fishkin: And it is all around like the Linkbait stuff because basically and duplicate content problems that he had and content licensing issues. So interesting stuff, but, yeah, it was

Brett Tabke: Congrats. I will look for that.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, that should be some fun stuff.

Brett Tabke: That will be the second kind of SEO

Rand Fishkin: Right, right because there was a Newsweek one.

Brett Tabke: Well, in Wired Bruce Clay was another one.

Rand Fishkin: That is right Bruce Clay was that was

Brett Tabke: Two years.

Rand Fishkin: Three or four years, was it only two years?

Brett Tabke: Two, yeah. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, it could be.

Brett Tabke: Well, we are about out of time. I appreciate taking time to be with us.

Rand Fishkin: My pleasure Brett.

Brett Tabke: Thanks Rand. Well, see you in Vegas.