Howdy readers!! Welcome to another interview edition of KVR Webtech!
Today, we have a special guest with us, his success story influences many and he is among Forbes’ Top 10 Online Marketing Experts list. Yes, it is about the SEO superstar and the Wizard of Moz: Rand Fishkin!!
Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz, a software company that builds amazing tools to make inbound marketing easy. He is also a regular contributor to Whiteboard Friday (We all love that) where he talks about SEO, Content Marketing and Social Media.
Through this interview, we got a chance to know him better in personal as well as professional way. This is first time Rand has featured in KVR Webtech interview edition and we all are highly excited. Hope our readers enjoy it too!
Major topics discussed in the Interview:
1) The journey of Rand and the biggest challenges and accomplishments.
2) The controversies involved in the journey.
3) Rand thoughts on Moz’s Keyword Explorer and how it is different from SEM Rush and other top tools.
4) The Future of SEO and role of artificial intelligence.
Explore what the expert has to say…
Rand: I actually don’t consider myself a success at all. An entrepreneur who raises money from investors has the obligation to get the returns those investors are seeking in a sale or IPO of the company. Moz has not accomplished that (at least, not yet). While I have hope that someday we will, I consider myself and Moz “striving to achieve success,” not “successful.”That said, biggest challenges are definitely around building a great product and maintaining it over time (especially in a dynamic field where we need to keep up with the search engines’ changes) and managing people (which is a nightmarishly tough and complex problem).
Biggest accomplishments… That one’s hard. Our revenue and customer growth have been big accomplishments, but very incremental ones over time. Fundraising is very hard, but not necessarily an indication of success or accomplishment. Maybe I’d put a few products that I’m particularly proud of into the “accomplishments” list: Mozbar, Moz Local, and Keyword Explorer are among my particular favorites.
Rand: It’s different in lots of ways. Whereas SEMRush focuses on showing keywords that a particular domain or page appears for, KW Explorer’s suggestions are much broader and include ideas from Google Suggest/Related, from AdWords, from topic modeling-based results, question-type queries, as well as those for which similar pages rank. SEMRush is much broader in what it offers (not just keyword suggestions, but competitive intel, search traffic estimates, etc), so the two products aren’t necessarily competitive. We overlap with SEMRush on one feature, but that’s it.We do try to compete more directly with Google KW Planner, and there I think we have a lot of advantages. Our volume data is more accurate, especially in this new world of Google combining keyword volumes for related terms (Moz keeps them separate using a process that includes getting clickstream data and segmenting data from AdWords, too). We have additional metrics that are critical to the SEO process – difficulty (how hard it is to rank), opportunity (what CTR you can expect to the organic results based on what SERP features appear for a keyword), and importance (which you can control to set how valuable a keyword is to you).
Keyword Lists are probably our most outstanding and unique feature, and enable SEOs to save hours of work compiling metrics in Excel and trying to prioritize keywords. All the metrics that we found folks grabbing from various tools and putting together in Excel or Google Spreadsheets are now automatically compiled and sortable inside KW Explorer’s Lists. You can export them, import keywords to get metrics, and even add your own custom Important scores to express more or less interest in a particular term/phrase.
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We really thank Rand Fishkin for sparing some time from his busy schedule for this interview session.
We hope you all liked this interview and the tips shared by Rand Fishkin will surely help you to grow your business successfully.
Please share your thoughts about this interview in the comment section.
Stay tuned with us for more informative interviews.
You can also read the interesting interviews of other influencers of the digital marketing world here.
Started working as a digital marketing expert, Varun Sharma is now also a well-known digital marketing speaker – a speaker on performance development, and a trusted mentor to businesses in the digital world. His keynote expositions are based on the digital marketing theories, which provide a fascinating insight into the secrets of high performance.