Episode 35: Interview with Rand Fishkin

In this times OMReport Andre visits Rand Fishkin, the wizard of Moz, in the the Mozplex, his office in Seattle, USA. Rand is one of the most well-known SEOs not only in US but worldwide. He is also the and author of the book „The Art of SEO“ and is speaking reguarely on local and international conferences like SearchLove Conference, Mozcon or Online Marketing Rockstars.

Also do not miss his exclusive SEO Dinner Talk he gave at Online Marketing Rockstars 2014.

interview Transcript

Andre Alpar: All right. So today’s OMReport is with Rand Fishkin. Nobody else, of course. Thanks again for showing me around Mozplex, it’s a really great office you have here and there is quite some room to grow.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I’m thrilled to have you Andre!

Andre Alpar: Thanks a lot. I really like the openness and… all the groups kind of organise themselves, so it seems that you push a lot of… at least from the culture I would guess that you push a lot of responsibility into the different groups to organise themselves.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah that’s really the hope. I think that self-motivated teams, small teams working on individual projects and problems are the ones that produce the best work.

Andre Alpar: Right. So… I’m also impressed by the number of engineers, like I think more than half of the staff are engineers. I think that’s kind of underestimated when people look at a website because there’s so much content on it, so you would think there’s hordes of people writing but of course the strong community keep pushing a lot of the content in.

Rand Fishkin: That’s true. I think all in all our content team… you know, we pull from various members of the team all over the place including myself, but our content team is only 3 full-time folks, as compared to our engineering staff which borders on 80.

Andre Alpar: And then there’s the product team working together with them and so on, marketing team…

Rand Fishkin: Product team, marketing team, operations team and then the executive team.

Andre Alpar: So what will become of Moz? Because I see so many different things where I see growth or development impulses so you have of course this strong background from SEO but then there’s this drive into Analytics, there’s a strong drive to analyse and find out things within Social, and of course there’s this omnipresent content machine, it seems like… This overwhelming, like another Search Engine Journal or Search Engine Watch or something. You push so much content and there’s these different growth directions so what’s it gonna be?

Rand Fishkin: Our big long-term plan is: we wanna help people do better marketing. In the next 4 or 5 years that’s really centred around creating software that helps inbound marketers specifically focus on channels like content, search, social community. Those are our central values and tenets, so what you’re gonna see from Moz over the next few years is more integration between the research tools and Moz Analytics, and a lot more efforts to help people with Content and Social. But probably more of those starting 6 months/2 year out… right now we’re very heavily focussed on SEO so we want to… in my opinion we have lost some gain to some competitors in the link sphere, in the keyword research sphere, a little bit in rankings. And those are areas that we should just be the best in the world. So right now that’s just what we’re focussed on, being the best in the world at those things. And then we’ll branch out of SEO once we feel like we have a really strong background there.

Andre Alpar: I think also in the region of crawlers, like, different tools to crawl your website there’s been quite some development there from different angles.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah so, I mean, Screaming Frog is the one that a lot of them talk about.

Andre Alpar: But that’s kind of like for the Average Joe, I mean professionals don’t use that any more, usually everyone switches to…

Rand Fishkin: You’d be shocked!

Andre Alpar: That’s true, but then again I like to live in my ivory tower, it’s great there, everything’s beautiful. No I’m just joking. But I see many people switching to professional software, to service tools that can leverage stuff that, you know, Screaming Frog will look like a toy against it, so it can’t grow that far.

Rand Fishkin: I think this is another area for us. We’re very focussed on the small and medium business, right? And the small and medium agency consultancy. If you’re helping Amazon do their SEO… great, OpenSite Explorer might be useful for you, a few of our research tools… you know, you probably have a subscription because $99 a month doesn’t mean anything to you anyway. But, that being said, I would say there’s a tremendously large group of people in that sphere and they need consistent, reliable stuff. In the enterprise world, that’s where you get very advanced and very costly and very custom-made pieces of software.

Andre Alpar: OK. If you say SMBs are your target group you don’t really mean the hairdresser from round the corner or the barber or something?

Rand Fishkin: No, so I differentiate between these 3 groups: VSB, Very Small Business… that would be, you know…

Andre Alpar: But like the small online shop, that would be your target group?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah and generally all the way up until they get to 500 or 1000 employees and their website is pretty darn complex but not yet millions of pages complex.

Andre Alpar: Couple of hundred thousand, that’s kind of…

Rand Fishkin: Yeah sure. Right around a million is where we put the cut-off. You have a million pages on your site, you’re bigger than that? Go to Conductor, go to some of those other sites.

Andre Alpar: You have to name German…

Rand Fishkin: SearchMetrics yeah absolutely! Go to those folks. And underneath that, that’s where Moz is really trying to help, and we try to do that at a very affordable price, right, you can subscribe for $1000 a year. You know, Conductor or SearchMetrics you’re gonna spend many thousands of dollars a month! So a very different story.

Andre Alpar: OK so is that also the reason why the content on Moz is so often so technical? Because I tried to put content on Moz once. And I got the answer that it was way too technical. And then I’m not going to say on which of the other portals, but one of the big other English-speaking portals they gladly published it, and mine was not too technical. So I’m working on another one, I’m gonna try it for the second time soon sometime.

Rand Fishkin: I wish you luck! I wish you luck.

Andre Alpar: Your content team is tough, man!

Rand Fishkin: They are really tough! They are really tough. I think what they’ve learned over the years is sort of what resonates with folks, what does well, what doesn’t. We still miss steps sometimes, we’ll accept a guest post that we think we really like and it just doesn’t work out. But our communities, they’re picky! They’re really picky, right. They care deeply about the kind of content that’s being discussed. If it doesn’t help them do their job better, right that minute, they can’t see the instant value, those thumbs-down start showing up and nobody’s sharing it, so we try and avoid that. And also, we really don’t want our guest authors to look bad or feel bad.

Andre Alpar: Sure, sure, sure. Probably they saved me from something.

Rand Fishkin: Well, you publish something on Moz and if it doesn’t resonate, you know, people kinda go ‘who’s that guy’ right? So we wanna make you look good when you publish on Moz.

Andre Alpar: Maybe I’ll be more lucky next time. I don’t know yet. So that’s why also the content…OK. But then also that… I can see kind of the logic that the content is not so much like… what enterprise SEO looks like, because many times it’s, you know, like you don’t have topics on big companies, because in big companies, in enterprise you sometimes have the problem of these very specialised organisations and then you have this ugly SEO channel which is so integrative and they wanna talk to product guys and they wanna talk to tech guys and corporate communication and corporate design, they wanna try to work with everybody. And big enterprises, they’re organised very strictly, everybody’s in kind of their silos, and then we come along and we say ‘hey, you gotta work together’ and they don’t like it really. So how do you tackle… Do you have that?

Rand Fishkin: We do have some content on that, so you’ll see some folks who’ve been enterprise SEOs and have written about that, but it’s designed specifically for that audience, I would say maybe 1 out of every 40 or 50 posts would touch something that an enterprise SEO would find that resonates with them and not with the SMB audience… so it is, I would say, more tailored for that SMB audience but not exclusively. So SMBs, right, high-ended enterprises are both gonna get value out of posts on link building or advanced keyword research techniques or a conversion rate optimisation case study… you know, the type of stuff that gets a lot of publication on Moz.

Andre Alpar: So how do you usually… What do you think for the enterprise SEO guys… What do you think… How to solve these kind of contradictions between this specialisation within companies and this integrative SEO channel?

Rand Fishkin: I mean the real answer is, there needs to be a deep belief about the value of SEO from all these different departments in the enterprise and from the leadership and then there has to be support at the rank and file levels in terms of people, you know, engineers and product people and communications folks and marketing folks saying ‘yes I will give my time and energy to this because I believe in it’. That’s very rare! But because it’s very rare it’s also very valuable. And I think that’s a beautiful thing for enterprises, right? It’s that, if you can get your company on board with it, oowee! That’s a competitive advantage that 9 out of 10 of your competitors will not be able to touch, because they don’t have that belief system in SEO, they don’t have that agreement to invest in it from the management and from the rank and file and all these different teams. I love things that are a high barrier to entry! Any time something is nearly impossible or incredibly hard to achieve, it’s kinda nice because it means that no one’s chasing you, right? They’re not gonna catch up on you anytime soon.

Andre Alpar: Also you have like… I mean sometimes like these very like simple cultural clashes where somebody says you know… from product, ‘aw our product should look like Google, you know, there should be just like this one little thing’ then you tell them ‘well Google can’t read what’s on your website, it doesn’t get it’ then like, how are these contradictions usually solved? What do you think, how do you discuss these issues?

Rand Fishkin: The way I think about it is product… The product design…

Andre Alpar: Because sometimes these product people will say ‘Google should get it. Why should I put the content on it. It’s their mistake, they don’t get it, what’s on there.’

Rand Fishkin: Yeah well. Fantastic, so if you would like to lose all of the traffic that will go to our competitors, because remember: those people will still be searching, they just won’t be finding us. So if you wanna do that then be my guest. We can happily go out of business as the world shifts to use search to find things.

Andre Alpar: The funny thing is that usually companies are good. I mean, they have a core that’s good. I think that SEO would add another 5 percent but then again they don’t see it because it’s… They don’t know how much you’re gonna lose…

Rand Fishkin: And hopefully everybody at those companies has stock options, right? And they’re all feeling the pain of not getting the 5% of new customers that quarter, so that’s one thing. But the thing that I’d say is, these things can live in harmony. You can have beautifully simplistic, minimalistic design, but the one thing that product and design should do, and Google’s a great example of this, they should provide exactly what the customer, the searcher, the person who’s landing on that page needs. If the person landing on that page needs only the most simple little input box, as you do with Google, then great! That’s the right product to design and that’s the right way to design it. But very, very rarely is it the case that the only thing that anyone ever landing on that page needs is one input box. That just doesn’t happen very often. Sometimes, but rarely. Rarely, right. And so, a good example of this is like the front page of Zillow. It doesn’t really need too much, it just needs to say what Zillow is, how you find property estimates, how they get their data, and then there needs to be that one input box. So it’s a little but more than that, but all those pages, those landing pages that tell you about a neighbourhood, tell you about a city, tell you about a specific home? There’s a lot of detail people need in there. You can’t have this hyper-simplistic, minimalist design with all that data, right? How you balance those things I think is where product design really comes into play. It’s not about the simplest or the lightest experience, it’s about the one that satisfies the user the most.

Andre Alpar: Yeah I think there’s always all these different kinds of users. Some would like more guidance and some would like less guidance, and I think a product especially has a tendency also towards ivory towers. They have a certain kind of customer in mind and not everybody’s as advanced, as experienced, as focussed and as clear about what they want. And then more guidance would be good and that’s exactly where I think you can find a good compromise with SEO.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Absolutely.

Andre Alpar: Right, so you’ve come around a little bit when travelling and doing speeches. What I was asking myself when preparing for the interview, which is a rare case because usually I do not prepare for an interview. It’s actually probably the second time I ever did. So what I was thinking, because you give so much output, and I know speaking is demanding, people are looking at you, people are putting a lot of expectation on you, they want something…

Rand Fishkin: Wait, people are looking at me??

Andre Alpar: No I mean theoretically! It’s just because of the moustache.

Rand Fishkin: That’s it, that’s it.

Andre Alpar: That’s why I came up with a barber example, I’m sorry. No but I’m thinking, you know, to be able to produce as much output as you produce you have to, I mean… It’s not easy! Because you have to experience different things to be able to tell different things. So how do you? And still I would guess there’s still people within the company expecting stuff from you? Or are you limited only to being this external presence?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah I do a lot internally and externally. So there’s a few things that kind of are very helpful for me to help pack the presentations. First off, it’s something I’ve been doing for a decade so I have a lot of experience making presentations, giving presentations. I don’t feel any discomfort on stage, it’s not particularly hard for me to get up and give a talk. Making a presentation, I challenge myself to make what I hope are really good ones and that can be very time-consuming. But, you know, I don’t have kids, I spend my weekends usually building PowerPoints, right. That’s what I do. And I would say the other thing that’s nice is, because I speak so often, I can make… You know, I’ll probably make between 15 and 20 slide decks this year, and I’ll probably give each of them 2 or 3 or 4 times.

Andre Alpar: And usually also when you give a speech the first time you hear the questions and then you can make it better and make it better and make it better so it’s a great incremental development there.

Rand Fishkin: And a lot of the times, the first time I give a talk I will use it to collect feedback, I’ll do it at a smaller event and then I’ll expand it, make some edits.

Andre Alpar: I once did the mistake of trying to come up with a really great topic because it was a really prestigious talk I could give, but then again the result was I think not as… I wasn’t as happy because it wasn’t all thought through and I was missing some explanatory steps in between. So it was… But now I know, I’ll do exactly the same thing. First try it in a smaller round and then look where you lose people and try and make it better.

Rand Fishkin: It’s very nice, I send my slide decks to our marketing team here a lot of the time and they give feedback.

Andre Alpar: OK. They don’t just polish the graphics and correct your errors, they really give feedback?

Rand Fishkin: They don’t polish my graphics, my graphics are all me! I do all my own graphics, which actually can be time-consuming too, but again for years I was blogging and making my own graphics for that and so I do it that way.

Andre Alpar: But how do you come up with a new presentation, like for example you’re working on something for a local university tomorrow. So how did you come up with a topic?

Rand Fishkin: Well so I talked to David Mihm a little bit here at Moz and asked him who’s gonna be in the audience, what do they wanna hear… And I had this idea that what I’d been seeing in Local a lot is for a bunch of local searchers recently there’s almost been like this one brand dominating, right? Like they have an organic listing above the local results, they’re the top listing in their local results, they’re the first listing in the top blackbar… They’re just killing it! And then you click on the Yelp! result there or whatever local listing and they’re the top one on that and it’s just like, man! How did they achieve that? How did they become such a dominant force? And so my presentation is really: what are those people doing. Not what’s everybody else doing, but how do I get my result in a local 6-pack or 10-pack or whatever, or how do I move up… I wanna talk about domination. How do you become that local brand that dominates. And so I found probably two dozen examples of those people in different US metros and then I’m digging in to five things that I see from each of those.

Andre Alpar: And you think it’s probably just people that are into the topic and they just found their way within there or do you think they had the same person help, or the same agency?

Rand Fishkin: No, I think that a lot of the time it actually turns out that a ton of what gets them that positive stuff… well, a bunch of things, but two things I’ll be talking about tomorrow: 1 is consistent continued investment in experimental forms of marketing. Like, no matter what it is, they’re trying everything from Groupon to Foursquare to this other local listing service to producing a video… they’re trying a lot of stuff. They’re failing at most of it, but they’re trying. They’re going way beyond what you would think a local small business would invest in marketing. They’re just putting an inordinate amount of additional effort into their online marketing. The second thing is, they’re almost always the same people who have an extremely remarkable product in service. Their offline marketing is powerful. You go to… one of the examples I have is Molly Moon’s Ice Cream here in Seattle, and while you’re here you should give them a try, because the ice cream is just really effing tasty. Like, it’s just a lot better than most ice cream places and it’s a fun environment, their flavours are really creative, the staff is cool…

Andre Alpar: Are they somewhere close to Pike Market?

Rand Fishkin: Uh yeah let’s see, there’s locations throughout the city…

Andre Alpar: OK so there’s more than one location.

Rand Fishkin: I think they have 4 or 5 locations, they started with just one in Wallingford and then they’ve been expanding, cos they’re just a hit! I mean, when they opened their Wallingford location there was lines out the door!

Andre Alpar: You would think like ice cream’s nothing new, right?

Rand Fishkin: Ice cream’s nothing new, but they do something remarkable with it. Another good example, I found this… I’ve never been to Tulsa, Oklahoma… you know, it’s a smaller US metro…

Andre Alpar: Wouldn’t know where it is.

Rand Fishkin: There’s this one spa in Tulsa that I saw mentioned in a magazine and I was curious. I saw them mentioned and so I went and did a search for Tulsa spas. They’re the number one organic result, they’re the first listing in Yelp! and in spafinder.com which rank above the local results, they’re the first one in the local pack… I mean, they’re like 3 of the 4 top results. Just incredible! And then they’re in all these services too.

Andre Alpar: So how can you understand why their service is better?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, I went and I looked and I started reading the reviews from people and I saw they do run a blog. I don’t think it’s a great blog, but they tried video stuff, they’ve clearly tried content marketing, they run social accounts, they’ve tweeted people, they Facebook message.

Andre Alpar: How many spas do that!

Rand Fishkin: How many spas do that!

Andre Alpar: But do you think that there has to be a certain online agility, or do you think that everybody should have to know their way round the internet because especially with the SMBs, like with your clients it’s not like every SMB is like ‘yay internet is great, I’ll do it all the time’.

Rand Fishkin: But this is where I think, um, a presentation is powerful. The presentation is not saying everyone should do this; the presentation is saying, ‘Do you wanna be the one outta a hundred in your niche that dominates like this? Here’s how you can do it’. And 99 of your competitors will not even try. They’ll be like: ‘Man, I don’t even have time for this.’ But you can be that one in your town. I think that’s a more exciting message.

Andre Alpar: Good stuff, good finding – also good story. I really like it.

Rand Fishkin: So that’s how I come up with a presentation.

Andre Alpar: Nice. Um, a totally different topic now. Besides the classic SMB enterprise, what about the publishing industry? The ones that make earnings out of advertising? They seem to, you know, as far as my guess work or looks into the future, but I think there are tough times ahead of them I would guess. You know, because of the knowledge graph and all of those structured data that you could provide with it…

Rand Fishkin: I think they have a lot of risks in a lot of factors, right? And… what I see is a desperate need to provide value and user experience beyond merely answers to questions. If answers to questions are all you can give with your content, Google’s gonna disintermediate you. They’re gonna take that traffic and they’re gonna show that one answer that is, you know, the answer, and you’re kinda out of it. On the other hand, if what you’re providing is a level of analysis, a level of emotional connection and emotional writing, a community and a sense of passion around the topic, a very unique interface and way of presenting that material – I think you’re gonna be just fine. I mean, an example that everyone uses in this field is five-thirty-eight, right? And I think what the team there has put together is just incredible. I will read a five-thirty-eight article that’s linked to anywhere just because I see the brand name and I go ‘Oh man, I know this is gonna be good.’ Because if it’s on anything that I care about, I know it’s gonna be good when I get there. That’s something that Google can’t disintermediate. I would subscribe anyway, I would find it even if Google banned them, right? And so Google is working that out. I think the New York Times actually put together a wonderful piece on content strategy, um, that’s worth every publisher’s time to read if they haven’t already, right, ’cause it was leaked…

Andre Alpar: Yeah, that’s what I thought, that the presentation was leaked.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah and I, I mean “leaked”, I think they knew that it was going to get out, it was fine. But you know, regarding that, I mean they were not as smart…

Andre Alpar: Their talking was not as smart as their talking yet, I thought when I was browsing through it.

Rand Fishkin: Yep, they’re not there yet, but…

Andre Alpar: That’s their plan.

Rand Fishkin: Yep, that’s their plan and I think that is the roadmap, right, that shows you how to become a publisher that is beyond merely, you know, whatever I’d call an SEO farm.

Andre Alpar: Yeah. But then again, you know, because for years they have been learning to kind of optimize for this source of free traffic, and now they kind of have to emancipate from that or…

Rand Fishkin: I think the beautiful thing is there’s convergence between what users love, what they share, what resonates with them and – excuse me – what Google wants in their index. And those two things are getting closer and closer together. So as a publisher, what you used to have to do was, like, optimize for these people differently than you optimize for Google. Now, there’s a lot of convergence. You’re basically targeting the same thing.

Andre Alpar: Right. So what about content marketing? It seems like the über-buzzword, seems like everybody’s talking content marketing and you see, like, big advertising agencies who are doing content marketing…

Rand Fishkin: We were doing it back when it was old school, like back in ’99 we were content marketers!

Andre Alpar: But you hear the same argument, you hear it from advertising people that are saying ‘Well, we put, like, recipies on your Cornflakes box, that was content marketing.’ So you see, everybody is claiming ‘We were doing it in the old days’ and PR agencies like, tell me one PR agency that can’t prove they did content marketing twenty years ago.

Rand Fishkin: But…

Andre Alpar: Everybody used to do it a long time ago, it seems.

Rand Fishkin: Recipies on a Cornflakes box? That is not content marketing.

Andre Alpar: I agree, but they don’t.

Rand Fishkin: What I will give you, is absolutely content marketing and it started, I think, in the 1700s, late 1700s: the Guiness Book of World Records. Now that is some old school content marketing, right? The folks at Guiness basically said, ‘Hey, how do we keep people at bars longer? How do we, like, hold their interest? Hey, why don’t we come up with – and what they saw, right, was a bunch of their customers drinking Guiness and fighting over who had the biggest…. you know… win in baseball history or in…’ I don’t know what the Irish were playing at the time. But you know, in some sport or who can throw the boulder the furthest, I don’t know. And so they came out with this book of world records and put one in every bar in Ireland and then in the UK and then it came to the US. And so, people were fighting about it, they could pull out the Guiness Book of World Records. That is content marketing, brother!

Andre Alpar: Meh, I think it’s just a part of it because it’s much like… for me, from my humble perspective, I think there’s two parts in it. On the one hand, there has to be this marketable content. And on the other side, there has to be the marketing of the content. And that’s what makes it content, the combination. Because that’s why the recopies on the Cornflakes box, from my perspective, are not content marketing because – yes, they are some additional content to the product, but they were not made so you could do specific marketing for this content, right?

Rand Fishkin: And that’s why the Guinness Book of World Records…

Andre Alpar: Exactly, but it wasn’t marketable because they weren’t marketing it specifically, right?

Rand Fishkin: But they were. They were saying ‘Hey, come to the bar and there’s the Guinness Book of World Records. Here you can read it.’ And eventually you could buy your own copy. I think that was a few hundred years later. Definitely many decades later. But the whole idea was that the content itself was pulling you in and the content was keeping you there and by the way the content was made by the producers, but it was essentially free, right? You could come to the bar, read the Guinness Book of World Records or go to your local bartender and be like, ‘Hey, settle this bet that Andre and I are having.’ You know, so it’s pretty old school. But yes, I hear you, I think there’s a lot of desire to claim ‘We were the first content marketers.’ I think the difference today is that even five or ten years ago you did not have nearly the quantity or depth of people sharing their content as a daily activity. Right? Like, maybe that bartender back in the 1800s told a few people that he had this Guinness Book, but he’s one in a thousand, one in ten thousand. Today, you know, you’ve got 25% of Americans under 35 who are sharing content as part of their daily activity! They’re doing it every day! And they’re reaching far more people than that bartender every day.

Andre Alpar: Do you think there’s going to be some kind of eclipse or peak, or to even go the other way around, because now it seems like everyone is this little publisher pushing stuff but I’m not sure…

Rand Fishkin: I don’t know, I think it might be part of identity for the foreseeable human future. It would not surprise me that in 100 years, what we share is a part of our identity, it’s how we define ourselves, it’s how we announce our social status, our proclivities to the world around us.

Andre Alpar: So it’s actually like a very psychological need?

Rand Fishkin: It’s something that we’ve always done we just didn’t have a platform whereby we could see it from everyone, right? You would only know, if you and I went out to dinner together, and I told you about whatever random X-Y-Z and what I thought. So yeah, I can see it being there long term.

Andre Alpar: Because it could make sense that there could be a version of it that could not be public. You know, like a part of it moving to be shared within smaller groups.

Rand Fishkin: Well, Facebook is that now, right? You’re sharing essentially only with the people who are your friends if you so choose. Um, Google+ is like that with Circles, Secret is like that kind of in reverse, right? So yes, I think there will be many networks that have different mechanics and that people will gravitate towards the ones that appeal to them, and that’s all fine and well, but all that that means is dramatically more sharing. Sharing is a part of human existence and technology-enabled life and thus tremendous additional benefit to marketers and brands who can figure out a ways to create content that lots of people will spread for them.

Andre Alpar: But do you think that will kind of make brands the new publishers?

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s already true. I think that brands are the new publishers.

Andre Alpar: But do you think that there’s additional marketing necessary for the content that is created, or do you think that it kind of markets itself?

Rand Fishkin: No. Ah, well, okay. For the one in a thousand pieces of content that are really just good enough, that have a high enough viral coefficient so if I share with only two or three people they will help it resonate throughout the web and it’ll just spread like wildfire, right? We’ve all seen that tweet that that one guy sent, that um…

Andre Alpar: Did you see the CIA tweet?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Right? Good example.

Andre Alpar: That was really good. Everybody saw it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. They didn’t need very many followers to have everybody see it, or the tweet that the Whitehouse aid guy sent about killing Bin Laden. Everybody knew that Bin Laden had been killed 4 hours before it had been officially announced. Or 8 hours before it had officially been announced because that one tweet… everywhere. And he wasn’t followed by many people. But there are some kinds of things, some type of content that does market itself. But the vast majority, 99.9% of content must be marketed actively.

Andre Alpar: Isn’t it exactly that – that I agree on – but I think that’s kind of strongly underestimated, strongly not emphasized enough in the communication about the topic. Because the PR guys…

Rand Fishkin: Hey man, I’m totally with you!

Andre Alpar: Because you know, the PR guys, the advertising guys they push this great piece of content and we think ‘Wow, that could be marketable’ and then it just stands there, and waits and sits and nothing happens and it seems like that’s kind of where our integrational, our kind of “core skill set” from an SEO perspective would be.

Rand Fishkin: That is what we’re built for, right? SEOs are built to help content spread. In the early days that was through search engines but that was also through those early social media channels like Digg and Reddit and StumbleUpon. Nowadays it’s via social media outreach, direct, email, on social, broadcast, community building – that’s our world, right? And so I think there’s, um, yeah. If you want a piece of content to spread far and wide across the web, you want an SEO.

Andre Alpar: So do you think that in the future that you will kind of have these different worlds that have been developing from different backgrounds into the topic of content marketing? Do you think that advertising agencies will be working together with SEO agencies to really build…

Rand Fishkin: We’re seeing some of that already, but um, I don’t know…

Andre Alpar: Because I would say that I don’t know that other part that’s missing, they don’t know that whole other thing that’s missing.

Rand Fishkin: Right. And I think there’s a little bit… I think this goes in two ways. One: people who specialize and love their specialization will continue to stay specialized will be called upon for those specific projects. And then there’s people who will become more generalists. And they might not call themselves SEOs or ad agencies or PR agencies. They might call themselves marketing agencies or content marketing agencies, right, if content marketing becomes as big as it seems like it’s becoming now. Such that they take all of those tactics and all or those specializations and apply them to amplifying content’s reach.