Transcript - SEO Q&As with Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz).
Dave Cain (Angel SEO) gets the chance to grill Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz) about SEO including some fun SEO questions at the end.
Dave: Hi, welcome to another SEO video today from Angel SEO. An absolute fantastic opportunity came up, we've got Rand Fishkin in, SEO guru, CEO of SEOmoz and an all round fantastic guy, Rand thanks for coming today.
Rand: Thanks for having me!
Dave: Basically, what we're going to do is a few Q & As with Rand, we've got some funny stuff lined up at the very end, but we haven't told him yet what that's going to be, so hopefully we'll catch him off guard a little bit! So we'll go on to the questions. So, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said that when it comes to online retail, clients want... well customers want, three things and they are: more range, quicker delivery and a cheaper price. So, in the same vein, what are the most important things that people want now and always from an SEO company?
Rand: Whoo hoo. Let's see. So! The short answer is they want results. But the longer answer is that results don't always make clients as happy as one might expect. In our consulting experience - we're here in Distilled's offices right - in their experience as well, it's true time and again that communication is absolutely key. Whenever you have a consulting relationship, staying on top of communication - responding to emails, to phone calls quickly, checking in, giving them progress and metrics, even if sometimes the results don't happen, they can't implement things, it doesn't go as planned, their competitors are just too tough to beat - all this kind of thing. Sometimes you'll have a great consulting relationship if you can maintain those lines of communication. And on the other side, on the reverse side, sometimes we'll have had campaigns which just kick butt, right - numbers look awesome, referrals are going up, and they're just not happy because they're not feeling good about the emotional connection and the communication right, it's sort of... [Rand laughs] it's a lot like dating!
Dave: [Laughs] Have you got some experience you can tell us about, Rand?
Rand: With one exception all my experiences are bad! Luckily the one that worked out, did work out. So yeah... I think communication is key. Results, obviously, I mean, companies very much like to see results. And then, the other thing I think people are seeking in a consulting relationship, particularly around SEO, is assurances that they're doing things the right way. There's just so much - in our industry in particular - there's so many problems with deliverability, quality... with the quality of advice that you get...
Dave: ...or unethical companies, companies that are using black hat, is that what you mean?
Rand: Not just that but, companies who think they are doing white hat things but... alright “we've got to get this many keywords in, we've got to use this keyword density”... right they just... it's just junk, it's not that it's black hat, it's just useless, it hasn't been good since the 1980s.
Dave: It was good years ago!
Rand: Exactly so, having those three pieces together, results, communication and the promise of high quality advice, correct advice.
[03:32]
Dave: Okay fantastic! Great stuff. Question 2: do you ever see there being a Google beater and if so, could it be Facebook?
Rand: So, I think if history is going to be any guide for this, yes... there has to be a Google... someone who could potentially compete or win against Google. But I actually don't think it will be in the way we suspect it. So I'll put out a caveat which is that rather than Google being beaten by someone with a web search where you type in keywords in a box, better than Google does, it seems more likely or possible to me that future generations of web users, probably not our generations who are just super comfortable with Google, like, that interface, but future generations could have different methodologies that they prefer for finding information. I think there will always be a use for the search box, just like, there is always a use for, how far the cloud has come in computing on the web has come. They're still used for Microsoft Windows, they're still used for Office, they're still used for all these things. But I think you definitely wouldn't say, well, installed software is the future. Right, you'd say, web based software and all this kind of stuff, so yeah there'll be a Google beater, I guess it could be Facebook if they sort of align... I don't quite think so, like the one thing I really don't buy, I don't buy this “Oh I hate searching on Google because it just gives me things that SEOs have ranked there”, versus “I love asking my friends on Twitter / my friends on Facebook for recommendations”, to which I reply - yeah, you love that, 1 out of 500 times, the other 499 times, Google's faster, it's better, the results are what you're looking for - your friends don't have the time and energy to answer all the queries you have every day that you ask Google.
[05:37]
Dave: Okay. Fantastic! Next one, this is kind of a bit more for kind of, our clients, some of them really do want to do things in house, so what are the advantages of using twitter and blog's, in particular, Wordpress for SEO.
Rand: So, Wordpress is a great CMS platform for SEO because it does, like Matt Cutts likes to say, it gets 90% of the on page SEO optimisation done for you - I don't think it's quite that high, at least not the default installation, but there are lots of plug ins and ways you can mess with it and mock it up so it does do things very correctly. The thing that I don't like about Wordpress, is it doesn't do, unless you do a lot of layers of customisation, and do essentially all of the work you would to build your own platform.
Dave: Like, strip a template down...
Rand: Strip it down and rebuild it from the ground up, do lots of great design things, blah blah blah, just the standard kind of content or Wordpress in the standard form, the content in there looks very normal, plain and not very linkworthy, and so I like customisation.
[6:50]
Rand: Let's go into the Twitter one. So it's unclear whether Twitter directly influences SEO all the time. It probably... almost certainly does when it comes to QDF, query deserves freshness types of algorithms and fresh results, obviously it powers a lot of real time results.
Dave: Yeah, if you do a search for SEOmoz, you see straight away, the third or fourth entry down, rolling around, new Moz posts.
Rand: So it's interesting because that will show up maybe half the time, and it only shows up when sort of new fresh things are happening on SEOmoz. If you do a search on Saturday you'll never see it.
Dave: Why don't you work on Saturday?
Rand: Yeah... “Get to work... get your lazy bum in Seattle” I tell you.
[Both laugh]
Rand: But you can do lots of great things with Twitter for SEO, and those include, connecting with people who might potentially link to you, connecting with people who could be community members for you, tweeting back at people with links that will gets visited, that might earn links or get them to contribute content, and there's good things that you can do too, so I think that building a good following on twitter is a great way to release a launch, viral kinds of content.
[08:17]
Dave: Fantastic, okay, great stuff. Moving on, what can small companies do right now to help their online presence. What would be the one key factor?
Rand: One key factor. Hmm...
Dave: So would it be the social media side?
Rand: Yeah it's a tough... I don't know that there's one that's going to be right for everybody, the chances are pretty good that there won't be. But if we take it down a layer, if you don't say all small businesses but say all small local businesses, I'd say one of the simplest easiest things you can do is to have a decent web presence and to register with Google Local and get into all the Google maps listings because there's just so much search traffic around those kinds of things that happen today and those maps results are just so down on it, that being included in there can really, it can turbo charge a local business, and send you a lot more patriots.
[9:18]
Dave: Okay fantastic, great stuff. And what's the most exciting project you have worked on and why? So you know, the whole SEOmoz...
Rand: Erm... the most exciting... so I'll definitely say that when we were developing Linkscape and we were sort of like, you know, keeping it a secret internally and working on it for like a year and we were taking venture capital money, that was really exciting. I mean there were just a few of us, I think there were five of us when we took, maybe six of us, and we scaled up to like twelve people pretty quickly. I worked in a room with two top notch engineer guys. Every day was building the web more scalable and what kind of links should we value and how do we build a good trust rank set and what modifications would we make on the page rank paper so we didn't infringe on the patented application but we still get close to what we think the current algorithm would be and we tested, we tested whether links higher up would pass more juice or bold things were better so we could... that was super fun, crazy exciting.
Dave: Was that one of the best points then, do you think, of SEOmoz for you.
Rand: It was, it was crazy exciting. And I mean, we get to do that a lot now, we do iterations, you know, we roll on things like open site explorer and Moz bar and we have a big launch that's been going on for like a year now, it's coming out this summer, and that's an exciting process too. But that one was really exciting because it was the first time I'd ever been a part of anything like that. It was like, suddenly, oh my God! I've never had $10,000 in my bank account, and suddenly there's a million dollars, I'm like going, oh my God! Maybe, we've got to make this happen, we've got to do incredible things, we've got to launch it, and then you know, we launched it the day the stock market crashed, October 2008, right like, the day that Bear Stearns fell apart and you know, the market lost like, 30% of its value and everyone's just panicking and I was downstairs in a hotel in New York eating breakfast going, I wonder if this launch is going to work, I wonder if anyone is going to pay attention to this after what's going on here. And yeah it did work you know, and we've been sort of spending down on it and we were profitable again in December that year so it worked great.
[11:47]
Dave: Great, fantastic! How do you see Google evolving in the next five years? Obviously there was talk a couple of years ago that they were looking to invest into Facebook but that didn't quite work.
Rand: Well, but remember Microsoft got to invest in Facebook at like some ludicrous valuation a couple of years ago that doesn't look so ludicrous now. But you know I think the interesting thing is, no one knows what's in those deal terms and whether it precludes Google from getting Facebook data out and whether they might be able to get Facebook data, those kind of things. I would say Google has clearly shown some intent with the launch of things like Google Buzz and with the data deal they did with Twitter that they care a lot more about signals other than just raw HTML links on the web, and they really care about what do people share, how do they share and where can we get that data from. I think if they could they'd love to spider and index and use everyone's G mail, right, to like... and I guess we don't know that they don't right, in some ways.
Dave: Well there's obviously that whole talk of Google Analytics, you know, how they're taking data from that.
Rand: Right, right, well I'm sure, I mean there's no doubt about it, they're taking data from it, the question is, is it being used and applied in individual kinds of ways or is it being applied in a macro kind of way that then says, oh okay, you know, web traffic tends to look like this, this is oddities, this is, you know, good areas, we should focus on these things, or try and get, you know, spider this kind of stuff because it looks like there's lots of traffic going here and we don't have any content from that place.
So I would say that the future of Google is to expand the signals that they look for in terms of relevancy and popularity as well as, you know, when they showed this off with their move to the new interface recently, what was that, a couple of weeks ago...
Dave: Two or three weeks ago...
Rand: Yeah... but you know, I think that really is around saying that people care about more than just ten blue links, which is interesting because Google was the classic kind of like win with 10 blue links even though Ask and Yahoo and Microsoft were coming out with all this crazy stuff...
Dave: “Have you tried this search, this is the most popular search today... ”
Rand: Yeah 3D search, Ask 3D, and now Google's looking more and more like their competitors did 4 or 5 years ago, it's funny.
Dave: There's still... for me, Google is still a million miles apart, and I think a lot of it is down to simplicity. If you look at the home page...
Rand: But they're definitely getting away from that simplicity a little right? Like
Dave: The first initial landing page, the search box with the two buttons...
Rand: Oh yeah yeah
Dave: That will always be there, I can never see that changing. To be honest. I don't know. What do you think, do you think they could start putting news, change it to iGoogle?
Rand: I wouldn't completely rule it out right, so, if search becomes more saturated and Google feels like they're on the defensive around... let's say that Carol Bartz has a lot of success at Yahoo and Zuckerberg has lots of success with Facebook like dominating the advertising sphere and display advertising and brand advertising on the web takes significant leaps forwards because of personalisation, Google might feel threatened enough and yeah, maybe make some efforts.
Dave: We'll have to see, we'll have to see...
Rand: I can see it. I can see it.
Dave: We'll see what happens later.
Rand: Yeah we'll do this interview again in five years!
[15:11]
Dave: The big buzzword at the moment is conversion rate optimisation. And I know that it's something you talked about it at the beginning of this year.
Rand: Yeah.
Dave: I get a lot of people asking about it and I think it'd be great to get your interpretation of what it really is and the kind of process that it involves.
Rand: Yeah, I think the sad thing is that it's a buzz word this year and it should have been a buzz word since the Internet started...
Dave: Yeah, web design really kicked off, you know, ten years ago...
Rand: Yeah it's crazy to think we would not have thought about the Internet the same way we think about anything else, right, people are doing packaging design, and doing store design, and layout optimisation, and TV commercial optimisation, and all these guys who sell on QVC, and late night channels, they all work on how can I sell more of these products, and if I demo it this way will I sell more, and yet, conversion rate optimisation, CRO, has been around, yeah, a good decade on the Internet, but its just getting buzz in the marketing field, and that's weird. Essentially, it's that same process applied to the web. It's saying what psychologies can I leverage, what can I change, what can I make better, that will improve the number of people who, or will improve the percentage of people, who come and buy from me, or come and take some action on my site. Right, website's are not, unless you're just selling display advertising, that's your whole model, they're not just meant to be visited, website's want people to take action, even sites that sell display advertising want you to sign up for their email list, they want you to click on their ad.
Dave: Right, so the whole journey through a website basically.
Rand: Right yeah and you want actions to take place. I think when we all go on the web and we want to find answers to questions, unless it's just finding an answer to this one thing and all I needed was that piece of knowledge, we all want to take action on the web too right, when I go on a site, I want to find a great email list I can sign up for, I want to find great blog posts that I can share around, I want to find cool info graphics that I can tweet about, so, there's an inherent value in optimising the process. So I'd urge everyone... anyone and everyone, to go and read about conversion rate optimisation, there's lots of good posts out there.
[17:37]
Dave: Do you think that the gap between web design and SEO will be brought further together? With that? Because obviously you design a website, you don't really focus on the SEO, you know, there's a conference going on at the moment just across the road in London, they were talking about web designers should learn SEO because there's too much of a gap. So they design a website and it's just not SEO friendly for example.
Rand: Yeah. Well I think there's also that same gap with SEO and conversion rate optimisation right. We need to make sure that we're not just focused on driving the traffic but on getting the traffic to do that thing that the customer wants it to do.
Dave: Yeah so it's... if you rank number one, you're still not going to get the orders. You'll get the traffic but you still won't get the orders.
Rand: I would so rather be rank number 5 and converting 5 or 10 percent than ranked number one and converting one out of every 2 or 300 visitors. Because it's just, every visitor you're missing out on is a lost opportunity.
Dave: Exactly. Okay, fantastic.
[18:40]
Dave: Okay, so moving on, last question and then we're going to move on to the funny stuff. Well hopefully funny, anyway. What's your vision for the SEO industry in five or ten years, fifteen years down the line, how do you see it going. What do you want to do. Because obviously, in my eyes, you've pioneered it, you've made it what it is, everything that you've done on SEOmoz, you know, all the information you've given away, all the white board Fridays that you've done. How do you see it going now.
Rand: When I started doing SEO I didn't know what the hell I was doing, right, I sucked at it. I seriously sucked at it! Horribly! Like I didn't even understand that links were important. I just thought it was on page spam, junk links.
But sure enough I started going to blog's, the forums, I went to places like SEO Chad and Search Engine Strategies, Search Engine Watch, Danny Sullivan got me like a free pass for my first SES back in like 2003 or something right, and that whole experience of having so many people who were good to me, and sort of showed me the ropes and stuff, made me really want to give back and that's what SEOmoz was, for the first couple of years, that's why it's on a .org because it was just trying to give back to the community in the ways that everyone had always helped me. So I feel like, so two things, number one, it's a big opportunity, right, as a venture backed start up, you have an obligation to your investors to go towards the big exit. In my mind, SEO is a huge, huge market that's untapped for lots of reasons. Like, there's no reason that paid search, which gets 18 billion dollars on spend last year and gets 12% of all clicks should be ten times more invested in than SEO which got like 1.5 billion spend and gets 90%. Like come on, that's crazy. So you solve that, I think, in two big ways, one is through education and obviously we do lots of things around that, and most of it's free, we provide that as a free service to the community. And the second one is software. Right, like, when email marketing was starting out, it sucked, we all had to build our own lists, we had to like, work through all these deliverability issues, and get list marketing going and manage software jump on our servers. And then we got Exact Target and Custom Contact and Eye contact and mail champ and vertical measure and responses, 100 million dollars plus revenue per year companies and the software providing a great experience around email marketing. Anyone with a wordpress blog can set up their own email marketing. Why is SEO still so untapped, so hard, because there's no software.
Dave: Is it still classed as like a fake science, is it still not as well known as you think it is?
Rand: It's not, and we know it, like you and I know it, it's just everyone out there doesn't yet know it. And I think that email was the same way, like guys like you and I would have been in email marketing early on and it's like, why does nowhere understand this, why is it taking so long, and it's really because you need standardisation, you need education, and you need software. You need a software base that makes it accessible to someone who frankly doesn't have the time to go to a conference and learn SEO, they just want a model that says, oh okay, I want rank for this, on this page, I have to do these things, oh crap, you know, 500 of my pages are 404ing, and oh I'm 302ing, oh 302 doesn't pass link juice? Crap! Right I can fix that. Oh I shouldn't block things with robot.txt? Damn. Wait, you're saying that IP addresses in Mountain View shouldn't be on my excluded list? Oh nuts! Dumb dumb stuff that happens all over the web, all the time, and sites I think need software that solves these problems for them.
Dave: Right, fantastic.
[22:37]
Dave: So okay, now we're going to move on to the funny stuff, Rand doesn't have a clue what we're going to ask and he's probably looking now at my list...
Rand: No, no, I didn't...
Dave: So, if SEO was a colour, what would it be and why, and you're not allowed to say yellow because of your puma's, which you've not gone on today...
Rand: No, no I don't. Errrr... if SEO were a colour...
Dave: I'll give you one pass...
Rand: Alright I got it, it would be green because it's jealous, it's envious of all these other marketing pursuits that have so many dollars invested in them, when it knows that it's better than all of those marketing pursuits. Right, SEO gets 10 times the traffic of PPC, gets way more traffic than display, and yet gets no respect.
Dave: Fantastic.
Rand: It don't get no respect.
Dave: I love that. So if it was an animal, what would it be and why?
Rand: Oooo. Animal. Errrrr...
Dave: See we've caught Rand now!
Rand: I know, I only know the factual stuff! Maybe it'd be like a, a... what shall we call it? A wolverine, right.
Dave: A fox?
Rand: No. You have wolverines? You don't have wolverines here right. You've got the X men comic book here right?
Dave: Oh yeah yeah.
Rand: Okay so wolverine's like a smallish animal but it's super ferocious and fierce, it's in the Canadian woods, and yeah, it's got the most fight in it, per pound, of any animal out there. So yeah, I like to think of SEOs, like the most fight in us per pound.
Dave: Right. I like that...
Rand: At least. The most beer in us per pound...
Dave: I'm not going to comment on that!!
Rand: Oh I was at London SEO last night, I can tell you all about it!
Dave: Okay. Now, this is kind of, a bit of an insider's joke. Most people should get this. If you had to choose one website, would it be SEOmoz or The Everywhereist?
Rand: Oh jeez.
Dave: Be careful how you answer that!
Rand: I can only keep one?
Dave: You can only keep one. Don't forget that your wife's not with you this week...
Rand: I think that even she would agree that we should probably keep SEOmoz, a better long term investment there. We can always start another travel blog. Plus, oh God, but I'd be so sad to lose all her posts. I'm sure we could get them out of Google's cache somehow. Someone's probably scraped it. So yeah, we'll keep SEOmoz.
Dave: Okay. And the last question. If you weren't pioneering the SEO industry at the moment, what would you be doing?
Rand: Ooo that's a good one. So there's one thing that really interests me actually. I think that starting a. . or running a start up company like a start up technology company is way harder than it should be and I'd like to find a way to fix that. I think that people like... that there should be way more people like me trying to start and run and develop technology companies. It's not that expensive these days, with cloud hosting and you know, cloud computing, right, with the commodisation of CMSs, of payment systems, of online bookkeeping and accounting, like there's not a tonne that you always need to invest to build the next drop box or zombie or whatever it is but it's tremendously challenging like, hiring is hard, legal is hard, corporate structure is hard, taxes are hard, accounting's hard, hr's hard, all these layers and layers of junk that sits on top of, it's essentially a tax on, a friction on, building a business, a scalable business, and I think that friction needs to be removed so around the world there can be more and more and more entrepreneurs entering technology, entering science and marketing fields, I'd just love to see that, I'd love to see more wealth creation through entrepreneurship and less, you know, I'll be slightly cheeky, but, all these guys back here, but, we need the banks.
They're just, it's like, making a bunch of money on derivative trading, that's not value to add to an economy, right, that's friction adding generally speaking so I'd like to see all removed friction, that's what I would do.
Dave: Fantastic. That wraps up today's video, a big thank you to rand for dropping by.
Rand: Cheers. Yeah, just don't ask me any more colour or animal questions.
Dave: Just wait till next time. So that wraps up today, thanks for watching and we'll see you soon.