jun 30 2017

A Case Study in Google’s Use of Visit & Click Data

Date / jun 30, 2017 / Category / Marketing

There’s still a weirdly large percent of the SEO and web marketing worlds that, despite overwhelming evidence, don’t believe that Google is collecting or using visit, engagement, click-through or clickstream data. This week, we stumbled across a superb example of the search giant doing just that, so I had to share.

_{Something funny happens when you Google from the Mozplex}

First off, it’s important to know that at the Mozplex in Seattle (our offices on 2nd & Seneca), we’ve got a sizable team of customer success and help professionals who assist Moz’s subscribers over chat, email, and phone calls. ~25 of the 150 Mozzers in Seattle are on this team. Part of that assistance means our help+success folks are often visiting the help content for Moz’s tools and sending those URLs on to our customers and free trialers.

21 Comments

sep 14 2016

Moz Returns to SEO

Date / sep 14, 2016 / Category / Moz, Startups, Team

Preface: This is a hard post to write, and one that’s taken far longer than I hoped to publish. Never before have I been so challenged to walk the line between empathy and transparency. Never before have I had to get a blog post approved by my boss, board, and legal team. And so I ask, humbly, that you read this knowing that unlike most of my “insider-baseball” posts, this one takes a step back from my usual, all-cards-on-the-table approach in order to be respectful of people who’ve left Moz and those who are still there.

On August 10th, I attended a board meeting during which it was decided that the company I co-founded and used to run, would change the strategy we’d been pursuing over the prior 2.5 years, refocus on our core SEO software business, prioritize making the business profitable, and lay off just over a quarter of our employees. Many, many companies and founders share openly about how they pursued a risky strategy and it brought great success. Almost no one writes about the reverse — when a path you’ve chosen to double-down on goes sideways with painful costs. To the best of my ability, I’m going to try to do that in this post.

_(source)

I was in Edinburgh, Scotland (speaking at the Turing Festival) the Wednesday following that board meeting, when our CEO, Sarah Bird, announced the decisions to the team and published her post about the changes. It was heartbreaking. I got choked up. But Sarah did a good job on a day she later described to me as “the single lowest point of my professional life.”

101 Comments

aug 28 2016

What Are the Most Powerful, Mind-Expanding Ads You’ve Seen?

Date / aug 28, 2016 / Category / Events, Marketing

This year at Mozcon, we’re doing something new — featuring some of the most unique, creative, and mind-expanding advertisements of the last few years during the breaks (just before we introduce the next speakers).

_{e.g. this praise-garnering Deutsche LA Volkswagen ad from 2011}

But rather than just editorially select the ads, we’d love to have your contributions and +1s on which ads resonated and which you think marketers should see.

121 Comments

may 19 2016

What I’d Change, Keep the Same, & Don’t Yet Know

Date / may 19, 2016 / Category / Events, Moz, Startups

The older I get, the less sure of myself I become. Certainty, it seems, diminishes with age. Hopefully, that’s part of the “wisdom of the aging brain” as Nautilus described it. This week, at Business of Software Europe, I was asked to give a talk on this topic, and created a short, visual set of slides. Typically, I put those on my Slideshare and have enough detail in them to be useful, but this presentation is an exception and, as such, I’ve instead opted to turn the talk into a blog post.

what-id-change-slide-1

First — some critical caveats. This topic, more so than most others I share, is very specific to a point in time (May, 2016). I often revisit questions like these while tossing and turning in bed or on my daily walks from home to the office and back. Every few months, one or a few of my opinions on these issues change as I have more data, more experience, more input from across the industry, and (hopefully) greater perspective.

34 Comments

feb 26 2016

SEO Consultant/Agency Pricing, Structure, & Services (US & Canada Survey Results)

Date / feb 26, 2016 / Category / Data, Marketing

In late November/early December of 2015, I ran a survey of consultants and agencies asking deep questions about their structure, fees, employees, projects, and more. Thanks to responses from over 400 folks around the world, I’m able to share what I hope will be some of the most useful data from that project.

Founders, owners, and presidents/CEOs of consultancies & agencies took this survey

Survey takers were primarily founders, owners, and presidents/CEOs of consultancies & agencies

To start, some brief disclaimers:

All of the participants of the survey have been anonymized, and any segments that had fewer than 10 participants have been removed to maintain that protection. Thus, some countries with only a few agencies/consultants filling out the survey (like South Africa, Japan, Russia, and India) have been removed from this dataset. Hopefully in the future I’ll get heavier feedback from those regions and can update this project.
Because much of the data averages and ranges were similar, I’ve grouped the United States and Canada together, and I’ve also grouped participants from Western European countries (specifically Ireland, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark), the United Kingdom, and Australia together as a cohort due to the similarities in the averages of their responses (this latter set will need to wait for a second post, as I’m overwhelmed with other obligations).
My final segmentation was between solo consultants (firms that had only a single full-time employee) and multi-person agencies (ranging from two-person groups all the way up to 500+ person agencies).

Below are links to the various data points I’ve extracted for each of the 2 groups:

26 Comments

feb 11 2016

It’s Official: I’m Writing a Book that Will Be Published by Penguin/Random House’s Portfolio

Date / feb 11, 2016 / Category / Book

Last week, I went to New York to pitch a book about transparency, startup struggles, and the last 15 years of Moz’s story to publishers. It wasn’t dissimilar from the VC-pitching process; lots of nervousness, waiting, hoping, and tension. But, midday Wednesday, after meetings on Monday and Tuesday, I received a phone call from my agent, Sylvie, with exciting news. The conversation was something close to this:

Sylvie: I have good news
Rand: OK
Sylvie: Portfolio made a preempt offer.
Rand: I don’t think I know what that means.
Sylvie: It means they’d like to stop an auction from happening with other publishers.
Rand: OK. That sounds like a good thing.
Sylvie: It’s for $– (sadly, I’m not permitted to share the advance amount, but it was a big number) for world rights, which means they want to be able to sell the book globally.
Rand: I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite hear you. Could you… (I realize there’s lots of people around and I don’t want to repeat the number I think I heard out loud)… Could you say the number again?
Sylvie: $–

(at this point, I turned to Geraldine, who was inside the bookstore, and made a face, which she somehow had the presence of mind to photograph)

56 Comments

dec 25 2015

My Complicated Relationship with No Longer Being CEO

Date / dec 25, 2015 / Category / Moz, Personal

It’s been 22 months since I stepped down as the CEO of Moz and turned over the role to my longtime Chief Operating Officer and close friend, Sarah Bird. Since then I’ve recovered from depression, traveled to and keynoted dozens of events, started (and now nearly completed) a new product with a small team at Moz, and kept up my usual tasks – Whiteboard Friday, blogging, SEO experiments, chairing Moz’s board of directors, evangelizing TAGFEE, feminism, and diversity, and being the best husband I can to Geraldine.

_{Waiting backstage before my closing talk at Mozcon Seattle, July 2015 | (photo credit to Rudy Lopez)}

When I stepped down, I changed my title to “Individual Contributor,” an homage to the dual-track system we established at Moz that I so strongly believe in. I only have a single direct report these days, Nicci, my amazing executive admin. The rest of my contributions are as an advisor, evangelist, content creator, board member, and product designer for our Big Data and Research Tools teams (not the UX/UI kind, but the strategic “this is what we’re gonna build and why” kind).

In many ways, it’s a dream job. I’m well paid. I have great benefits. I’m challenged. I work with people I like on projects about which I’m passionate, and most importantly, I get to help people do better marketing…. But it is an immense shift from being CEO. That’s what I want to write about and share today – the difference.

73 Comments

dec 21 2015

What Do Attendees Want from Marketing Conferences?

Date / dec 21, 2015 / Category / Data, Events

Over the course of a few days in mid-December, I ran a survey asking folks about their experiences at conferences and events in the marketing world. 248 people replied, primarily via Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. Despite the small number of questions, I found the responses immensely valuable and quite interesting. A few even caught me by surprise.

smx-munich

_{SMX Munich in 2014 (via Web & Tech)}

To start, let’s look at which conferences were most popular/attended in our field:

40 Comments

nov 25 2015

A Look at the Keyword Research Tool Universe in 2015

Date / nov 25, 2015 / Category / Data, Marketing, Product

In 2015, I’ve been pretty obsessed with keyword research and the tools web marketers are using to do it. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m working with Russ Jones (after our SERPscape acquisition) and a small team at Moz to build something in this space (and it’s now live! Moz’s new keyword research tool, Keyword Explorer). But, I’m always trying to learn more and, in that spirit, after some nudging to try using Typeform again (which is pretty damn great survey software, BTW), I put up a short survey asking for thoughts around keyword research tools.

kw-research-typeform-stats

With 300+ responses, I think we’ve got enough data to be directionally accurate about the state of the KW research tools world. Let’s dig in.

24 Comments

aug 15 2015

Does Making a Website Mobile-Friendly Have a Universally Positive Impact on Mobile Traffic?

Date / aug 15, 2015 / Category / Data, Marketing, Moz

From October of 2004 to April of 2015, Moz’s website remained entirely mobile-unfriendly. The experience on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices was the same, and if your screen was small, you had to pinch and zoom. Many of our readers complained and many more wondered why a technology company in the web marketing field would de-prioritize such a crucial element of user experience.

moz-mobile-hate

The answer in this case was a matter of prioritization and resources. Moz’s internal team that handles our front-end website had, over the prior few years, also taken on a massive number of other, crucial engineering responsibilities at the company including billing, cross-product navigation, SKU management, site performance, and more.

But, there was another problem as well – the data we had suggested a move to mobile might not have a big impact. For years, this blog (my personal one at moz.com/rand) has been mobile-responsive, yet the delta in traffic stats between it and the rest of our site didn’t make an overwhelming compelling case. Below is a screenshot showing part of an email Cyrus sent to the team illustrating the comparison (gotta love how data-informed he makes us):

15 Comments