Rand Fishkin, CEO, and co-founder of SEOmoz joins us for another episode of Inbound Now!
Rand is the co-author of The Art of SEO, and the go-to guy in the SEO industry. He shares some great SEO insights in this interview!
How is your companies SEO strategy looking these days?
In this episode, we chat about:
David: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode Number 22 of Inbound Now. I have a very special guest with us here today, Mr. Rand Fishkin. Rand is the CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz. He is the co-author of "The Art of SEO." He's the go-to guy in the SEO industry. He really knows his stuff. I read his blog all the time. I recommend you guys check it out. I'm kind of disappointed, to say the least, about your shoes, man. You need to be wearing the yellow Pumas that you're known for. What's the story?
Rand: Yeah. Well, I was here in Boston for a conference, so I'd worn my yellow Pumas for two days in a row, and I figured my feet could use some different shoes for one day. I didn't realize how important it was. Next time I'm on the show, I promise.
David: Next time, or you're not invited. I'm just kidding. I'm glad to have you here. I wanted to get you on the show to talk about how social media is affecting search.
Rand: Sure.
David: Suddenly that's a big thing everyone's talking about. Some of your favorite link building strategies. I've seen a lot of presentations you've done on that, and I'm really excited to dive into that. Then I have a couple of fan questions to throw your way.
Rand: Sounds good.
David: Then, basically, we're going to talk about what's on the horizon for SEO and what you see kind of happening moving into the future.
Rand: Awesome.
David: Sound good?
Rand: Love it.
David: Cool, awesome. Let me just turn this around, actually. All righty. So, let's get started. Social media, it's starting to impact search. What kind of stuff have you seen? I know you've done a number of studies on the SEOmoz Blog. So what have you seen it kind of affecting in that respect?
Rand: There are two big areas where social is pushing into search. Number one is there are some direct signals right now.
David: Right.
Rand: In terms of Facebook and Twitter, both sell data to Google and Bing, and that data makes its way into the ranking algorithm. So, they use the number of times something has been Facebook shared, who tweeted something, how many times it was tweeted to calculate two things: Number one, content authority, and number two, author authority. So they're trying to figure out how important are you, David, and if you tweet an article, should that increase its ranking slightly in Google or should it increase it a lot or should it not impact it at all, those types of things. That's the direct impact. So, more tweets, more shares, more important people tweeting and sharing means your content ranks high.
There's another part to it, which is essentially the latent social influence that being connected to other people and networks will have on your search results, and you can see this through personalization of your results. If you do a search in Google and you're logged into your Google account and you've connected your Google account to Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or you haven't even connected into Facebook, but you are logged into Facebook while you're logged into your Google account, Google will actually show you, "Oh, @randfish shared this on Twitter or Will Critchlow from Distilled shared this on Facebook. You will see those results essentially move up in the rankings, be higher than they normally would be, and how this little personal snippet of a friend of yours, someone you're connected to, shared this through one of their networks.
David: Right.
Rand: Which is also potentially huge, right? If lots of people start seeing those, lots of people are opting into that, we're going to see just a ton more search rankings influenced by what our friends are sharing and saying.
David: Right. It's a more credible link, right? It's like an organic SERP, but it's also backed by Rand beginning with this data.
Rand: Yes.
David: Exactly. So I see that as a very powerful thing. Have you guys done any studies on that, like the click-through rate of social share versus the other?
Rand: It's very hard to do, unfortunately. Well, it's extremely hard to study because there is no way to know for sure whether someone is seeing those unless you can get many, many thousands or tens of thousands of people to go off into their Google account and share that data with you and then search and give you all their search history. Privacy issues, opt-in issues, challenging. But I would be almost certain that click-through rate is higher and that conversion rates after the click are also higher, because there's that social proof of well, if this person says it is good, it must be good. Bing just implemented this two days ago. On Monday, they implemented the . . . it will say Rand Fishkin and 13 other friends, and it will have a little list of all your friends who shared that link.
David: Interesting. So, what are you thoughts on Google's +1? It rolled out a couple of weeks ago. I really haven't seen it do anything.
Rand: The rollout was very, very tiny. They basically wanted to see who would adopt it, and then they're going to be rolling it out in bigger fashion.
David: Right.
Rand: Coming out soon, the button that you can embed on websites should be out in the next three or four weeks.
David: Yeah.
Rand: I actually think Google desperately needs this. Right now they're relying on data from Facebook and Twitter. Those two networks could close off access to their information to Google. Bing will always be able to get Facebook's data I believe because they actually own a piece of Facebook, and I think one of the agreements as part of that ownership is you need to share this data with us. So I think for as long as they retain their stock in Facebook, Bing is in a good position to be able to get that data.
David: Interesting.
Rand: Google, on the other hand, is not in a good position to be able to get that data. Therefore, they need their own wholly Google-owned social share data, and +1 is their effort to do that. What I like about it is that +1 is dead simple. So easy to understand. If you think this is a good web page, you should click +1, and then Google will learn things that you like and don't like, and we will show you better stuff and we will show you things that your friends +1'd. So there's an incentive for everybody. There's an incentive for searchers, there's an incentive for your friends, and there's an incentive for website owners who, if they get more +1s, will rank higher.
So, I hope to see Google rolling this out big. I hope they don't get too aggressive on the just letting everyone's +1 count, but I think they're going to be very picky on which +1s count and don't.
David: Right.
Rand: So if you start spamming and you just go to HubSpot's site and you +1 everything on HubSpot and you never +1 anything else, they're not going to count anything you've done.
David: Right. Interesting.
Rand: But if you organically look like a natural user of +1 and you +1 good stuff, probably . . .
David: Right. I want to see how it plays out. I was thinking it was another Buzz or another Wave. Like it comes and goes like . . .(inaudible).
Rand: Buzz and Wave were both very complex, hard to understand products. +1 is so dead simple, and that I think is where Google has gone wrong in the past on social is that they've tried to over-engineer a problem.
David: But with Facebook, the likes, I mean, it's like people have to do either or now or it's like both. It's like another step.
Rand: You can do either or, or both. But I think the thing about liking a page on Facebook is it does nothing for me.
David: Right.
Rand: When I click "like," how does that help me?
David; It shows that you're sharing good stuff or you're liking good stuff to your friends, but it's not really business friends on Facebook.
Rand: The nice thing about +1 is that I can be assured that if I +1 stuff that I like in Google, Google will become more useful for me.
David: Okay.
Rand: That is useful.
David: There you go.
Rand: Like, no wonder I should do that. I think Google has a good value proposition to share here. They just need to . . . I hope they lean on it strategically in the right kinds of ways and don't sort of go [males sound]. It doesn't do anything for the first four years that it's out.
David: Gotcha.
Rand: Well, they could definitely mess it up. Don't get me wrong. I have infinite faith in Google's ability to mess up anything social, but so far, the concept looks good.
David: So far, so good. Awesome. So switching gears a little bit to link building.
Rand: Yeah.
David: You do a number of presentations. I saw it was like 34 ways to link build from New Orleans or something. It was really good. So a lot of companies, a lot of customers that I deal with here at HubSpot, they have a hard time doing off-page SEO, going out and building links.
Rand: It's so hard.
David: So they should just give up right now, right?
Rand: No, no, no. The great thing about any marketing practice that's really hard is it means there's a competitive advantage to doing it well.
David: Yeah.
Rand: That is what I love about great link building, about great social media marketing, about great inbound marketing. If you do it well, you can be assured that nine out of ten people in your industry are going to suck at it. That just means such good things for your business. So, people who are watching this program, people who know what HubSpot is, know what SEOmoz is, like you are already a step ahead and that's a pretty awesome thing.
David: Definitely. So what advice or tips would you give for them to start going and doing off-page SEO. What are some of the low-hanging fruit that they can go out and get some links coming in?
Rand: I think some of the easiest ways right now are social ways. So, connecting with people on Facebook and on Twitter and on LinkedIn and through Q&A sites – Yahoo Answers, Quora, Facebook Answers, LinkedIn Answers, Formspring, ChaCha. There are all these different platforms for answering people's questions, for replying to people who might be in your industry or around your industry and have questions about it.
David: Right.
Rand: I was showing off an example of a men's fashion site yesterday, and I just did a quick search that was "need a suit" in Twitter. Do you know how many people tweet that they need a suit?
David: I'll bet a lot.
Rand: So many people. Every hour there are multiple people tweeting that they need a suit. If you could reply to them and say, "Hey, I have this awesome page on my site that will really show you things to look for in a men's suit if your price range is X or Y or Z and what means good tailoring and where should the sleeve fall. Don't go to these stores, you'll get fleeced. Don't go to the Men's Warehouse because the quality is terrible." Whatever it is, right?
David: Right.
Rand: They will be able to attract a ton of people, these are people who are connected on Twitter. They're using the Internet. That means they're probably going to blog about it, they're going to tweet about it, they're going to link to it, they're going to share it on Facebook, they're going to "like" it. You are connecting with this social linkerati individuals, and that just has so much power. So that's great loading.
The other thing I'd say is that almost every business in the world has partners and customers. If you have partners, you should go to your partners and say, "Hey, we love your product. I would be happy to contribute a testimonial. I'd be happy to be listed as a partner, and they will link to you and you can dictate to them. Here's my photo, here's my title, here's the name of company, and here's how I'd like you to link to me." Ta-da. Link. Beautiful, perfect, excellent link, White Hat link. Google's going to love it. Everybody's going to love it.
Likewise, you can go to your customers and you can say, "Hey, if you've got a great experience with us, the highest compliment we can receive is you sharing with us. Here is a little badge you can put on your site. You can 'like' us on Facebook. You can tweet about us." Well, whatever it is, whatever that activity is that would be best suited for them to share, that's usually very low-hanging fruit too.
David: Cool. Definitely leveraging the existing relationships you have. So listening into the conversation, answering people's questions, and providing that resource so they can link to it or whatever, right?
Rand: One of my favorite things that people say, "I really want to get links from all these bloggers. How do I get links from all these bloggers?" Here's a great way. Email the bloggers and don't say would you please link to me. Say, "What resource do you wish was created in this niche? What questions, what are you curious about, that if it were created and if it were really awesome, you would share with your audience?" Ask them that question. Five, six out of ten of them will answer you, and after they've done that, it creates confirmation bias, and that means, psychologically, when you build that thing, they will link to it. They will share it. Don't go out and build something that, well, it seems kind of cool. Maybe it'll get links. You can try it. You can experiment with that. We do it all the time. But if you want to be guaranteed that you're going to get those links and those references from those bloggers, reach out to them and ask the question.
David: Right.
Rand: If you say to me, "Hey, Rand, what thing, if I produced it, would SEOmoz link to," I'll email you back and I'll be like, "Well, these three things are really big in my mind right now. If somebody made an awesome infographic, a great article about this, I'd totally use it all the time and share it with people."
David: Okay, cool. So what are your thoughts on guest blogging, guest posting on other sites like using different search to find guest posting opportunities. Is that something that people should be doing, or should they go after their partners first?
Rand: I love it. I love it as a strategy. Where I think you have to be really careful because there's a huge difference between guest authorship, as in, "Hey, I love your site, I'd love to contribute. Here's what I've written and I'm a great writer and I can bring a lot of traffic to your site because I have a big Twitter following and I'll tweet it. I have a big Facebook following and I'll put it on Facebook," and blah, blah, blah versus "Yo, why don't you let me write an article for you?" I'm from Jersey, so I can get away with that. I'm just saying that attitude of I will contribute an article of 500 words to your site, email me back and you spam that to 500 people. It's ridiculous. Or even worse because it can actually hurt your business is, "Oh, yeah, I'm going to do article spinning and article marketing."
David: Right.
Rand: That whole industry, I mean, the idea of article marketing sounds perfectly legitimate. I'm going to write an article and I'm going to market it to other people.
David: Yeah.
Rand: But it's come to mean I'm going to write an article and then someone somewhere is going to rewrite that article 500 ways and submit it to these 500 super spammy sites that are going to post it up.
David: Right.
Rand: It's going to contain these links back to me that look all spammy and keyword stuffed and non-authentic, and somehow that's going to help me what?
David: Yeah. So they are links, but not credible links at all, right?
Rand: I really think you can get yourself into so much trouble with that kind of stuff.
David: Right. That's one of the things that you stress in that presentation that I saw. Stop getting links and start earning links.
Rand: Exactly.
David: So, on that note, can you elaborate on this? How can people just start earning links?
Rand: It's the difference between I am going to go find an article spinning software and then do article spinning out on 500 sites, versus I'm going to write a guest post for this great clothing blog in my industry that would really appreciate my writing style, and I'm going to get good enough and I'm not going to spam anyone. But they're really going to want to have me contributing. I'm going to answer people's questions on Twitter versus I'm just going to auto @reply everybody who tweets men's suits and say @so-and-so you should buy your men's suits here, you should buy your men's suits here, you should buy your men's suits here.
David: Right.
Rand: There's a huge difference between what you call going out and oh, I'm just going to produce links automatically to my site in manipulative ways versus I'm going to earn this link. I'm going to do something that earns the trust and respect and authority of people in my space, and they're going to naturally want to share it.
David: Right. I think it's just like lazy marketing versus you're actually doing the work, finding the credible blogs that you actually would want to contribute to that have a high authority that pass the links back.
Rand: It doesn't just have to be blogs. There are sites of every kind. You could down street here, right, and there's like a men's tailoring shop and they've got a website. If you were like, "Hey, I have this awesome article. Could I maybe just put it on your site?" They'd probably like, "Sounds good."
David: Get out of here. What are you talking about?
Rand: I mean, half of them will do that, and the other half will be like, "Yeah, cool, we don't have anything on our site right now that would help with that." You're like, "I'd be happy to contribute. I'll write great posts. I'll use photos from your store. I'll come in and shoot them." They're like, "Yeah, we can do that."
David: A walking, talking link building machine everywhere you go.
Rand: That's it.
David: Nice. Cool. So switching gears a little bit. I have a couple of fan questions for you.
Rand: All right.
David: So, Craig Deacon on Facebook wants to know a little bit more about the Panda update and what small businesses out there should really know because Google is changing its algorithm all the time. Keeping up with it, it's like too much. So what do they really need to know?
Rand: The Panda update should be very good for authentic, small business marketers. It really should, because essentially what it's doing is it's trying to take all these huge, what are called content farms sites, your Ezine article and your wikiHow and eHow and these kinds of things, and they're essentially pushing down the authority that those domains get where they just write for everything under sun, which should expose more content from small authentic business websites and really good sites. Now, granted, a lot of time these content farms have kind of the only good resource on a weird long-tail topic.
David: Right.
Rand: But if you're contributing content to the Web and you're doing a good job and you're an authentic good writer, you're going to do really well. Where you're going to do badly is if your site is overwhelmingly filled with advertising blocks all over the place and to get to any piece of content and read an article that is five paragraphs long, you have to click through next, next, next five times and skip over these interstitials, and the content reads like some of this keyword-stuffed garbage that I think is basically meaningless and useless. The site design is ugly and hard to read. All that user and usage data that Google now has from Android, Chrome, the tool bar, the free Wi-Fi and all the air cards, the cameras in your house, the satellites that watch every move, the embedded net chips, Google is using all of this great data now to essentially boost their algorithms so that they can recognize where people find frustration in sites like these content farms and where are people genuinely happy, like on small business websites, blogs, the New York Times. LinkedIn actually had a great boost from this. Facebook got a nice boost from this. Good sites where you're like, "Yes, I get want to content from you."
David: Right. Okay. Cool, awesome. So another fan question for you, it's actually another consultant here, Andy Pitre. He asks for small businesses, what search vertical should B2B, small or medium-sized businesses be focused on, like local, instant images? What should they really focus on?
Rand: Image is a weird one. There are some businesses, interior design businesses, like kitchen decor type businesses, where image traffic can bring you some value, but most of the time image is low quality traffic and you'll never find a scummier hive of spam. The spam in image is awful. Video right now is absolutely huge because you can do video mark-up through the video XL site map, so you don't have to host the video. You don't even have to necessarily be the producer of the video.
If you're embedding YouTube videos on your page, you can send a video XL site map to Google saying, "Hey, I've produced this piece of content, and I embedded this little short clip from a Pixar movie in there and here it is." Then, Google, if they want, they can annotate the listing to show a little snippet of the video, right? A little image next to the listing. Oh, my god, the click through rate goes through the roof. The time on site goes up. People get more engaged with video. Video is just an awesome, awesome play.
Local is absolutely huge. Every business that is locally focused that can drive most of their customers from local referrals needs to sign up for Google webmaster, sorry, Google Local Business Center. They need to get their business address registered. They need to sign up for Bing Local, as well. They should definitely be trying to get those local citations and see where other people go. There's a great tool call the Whitespark Local Citation Finder that really is going to help you find good sources for that. Local is a big area of investment.
David: Nice. You're mentioning images, there's a lot of nefarious SEO tactics going on out there, and I used to do SEO. SEO was like my main job before working at HubSpot. So I know there's a lot of Black H people out there. I didn't go there, but I know about it. Okay.
Rand: I know that world.
David: So, basically, hiring an SEO consultant or agency, what tips would you give? What questions should companies ask when they're thinking about doing it that way? Or should they not hire out? Should they actually focus on building content in-house?
Rand: Boy, it's tough. I would say if you're a tiny, local small business all the way up to a medium-sized business, I would bias towards at least learning the basics yourself. It's nearly impossible to judge how credible, accurate, high quality, intelligent an SEO expert or a consultant or an agency is if you don't have some underlying fundamental knowledge yourself.
David: Right.
Rand: So that you can say like, "Oh, well, I know what cross-domain rel=canonical tag is. So if this guy tries to BS me, I can ask him that question. If he says, "Oh, yeah, that's a little piece of code that you can put in top of your header file and then it tells the search engines that the original version of this article is on some other page or some other site," then you're like, "Great. All right. This guy knows his stuff. I feel pretty comfortable with him." If he's like, "Oh, well, you don't actually have to worry about that. We're going to help you optimize our meta keywords tags." You're going to be like, "Go, out. Get out."
That basic amount of knowledge is quite easy to come by. If you search for "SEO guide," you'll find SEOmoz's "Beginner's Guide to SEO." You'll find the Google SEO Guide, and you can read those two articles probably in an hour or two, and you'll have so much more knowledge and understanding and be able to ask the right kinds of questions. Those right kinds of questions should be definitely classic things you ask a consultant. Who else have you worked with? Can I talk to them? But some consultants will have good and bad experiences, and it's not necessarily true that if they didn't have a ton of success with someone else, remember SEO consulting is all . . . I mean you've done it.
David: Yeah.
Rand: So you know you can advise an organization to do a lot of things, and if they don't put it into action, they're not going to see any results and they might be frustrated. But what you can say is things like, "Tell me about the strategy that you designed for so-and-so. How is it going to work? How is it going to drive good content, good keywords, good links? Why was it going to be successful for them? How do you measure your campaigns? Tell me about some of the toughest SEO experiences you've had and some of the easiest ones. I want to hear the difference between those two." Ask them about the ways in which they would build links and which methods they consider black hat and white hat. Then you can judge that against your own knowledge. Those types of things, and you can also search for SEO consulting questions.
David: Right.
Rand: I think the guys from Distilled actually wrote a great blog post about that.
David: Yeah, there are a couple of them out there like seven questions you need to ask. If they guarantee rankings, stuff like that.
Rand: Oh, yeah. This is tough because a lot of people, they ask, "Do you guarantee results, guarantee rankings?" Then they think if they say no, I shouldn't hire them.
David: Right.
Rand: It's the reverse. If they say yes, I can guarantee rankings, either they better say oh, and I work on Google's algorithmic team at Building 43 in Mountain View and I'm just moonlighting as an SEO. Nobody does. They don't allow that. Or they better say, "No. No one should guarantee rankings because only Google controls the rankings. What we can guarantee is that we're going to send you more good quality traffic."
David: Cool, and definitely check out some of the resources on SEOmoz's Blog. You've got a lot of great illustrated guides that I found really useful back when I was training, doing all this stuff, like it was really helpful. I just wanted to throw that out there.
Rand: Thank you.
David: So another thing that SEOmoz does that I really like is you guys leverage a ton of user generated content. You have an entire blog dedicated to your user base, the YOUmoz, right?
Rand: Yeah.
David: So what kind of successes have you seen with that, and how did you get that up and running?
Rand: It was just an idea that we had several years ago to let our users contribute. We'd always had guest authors who wanted to do a post on SEOmoz and that kind of stuff. We said, "Hey, let's scale this out, give them a place where anyone can literally just register and start composing a blog entry and submit it to us." Then we have an editor who reviews it, and it's been great. It drives about 10% of the site's overall traffic right now. That feed is subscribed to by 5,000 other people who read it every day.
The number of submissions a day is usually three or four, which means that we are usually rejecting about half to three-quarters of the entries that come in, because we only tend to publish one or so a day. That means that it's tough to get in, but the benefit of submitting a great article is really high because tons of people will see it. Then if the article gets a lot of thumbs up and our community loves it, we'll promote it to the main blog. It gets seen by 95,000 people who read that blog every day.
David: Nice. Yeah, I think it's an awesome idea. I mean getting all that content created for you and it's a win-win situation.
Rand: We've got to practice what we preach, right? If you're telling people hey, you should guest blog and you should let people guest blog, we want to have that ability also too.
David: Right. Cool, awesome. So what do you see on the horizon for SEO? What should people really be keeping their eyes out on?
Rand: A few things I think. Number one is given this Panda update, I think they went a little light on what they can do from user perspective. So make your website beautiful, make it usable, make it fast, make it so that users who come to your sight are like, "God, this is so refreshing to experience this site. I just love going to this site because they don't give me a crappy Flash intro with a ton of overlays and a bunch of advertising, and the content is easy to find. The layout is pretty and it looks good." Start with that. Please at least do that. It will bring so many other benefits besides just SEO. It really will.
David: Right.
Rand: The second thing that I would worry about is if you are not on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter, at a minimum, you need to get on those networks. At the very least, claim your name on those networks and participate a little bit. Probably you should try investing a few hours every week into participating on Twitter, answering some questions on Facebook or on LinkedIn. Doing some status updates, following some good people, seeing what they're talking about, learning what gets people lot of followers, you should invest in that. There's this great company called HubSpot, they have something called "The Science of Retweets."
David: I've never heard of them.
Rand: This Dan Zarrella guy does all this awesome research about what predicts success on Twitter. You should check that out.
David: Right.
Rand: Then the third thing I'd say beyond usage and social is you should be watching the content that you produce very carefully. When people say great content, they don't mean, well, I wrote this all myself and it took me a long time to do and I think it's really good. They mean go find out from your users, from the bloggers in your industry, from the people who are on Twitter, what do they want and need? What is the best way to consume it? Is it video? Is it infographics? Is it photos?
David: Right.
Rand: Is it like a montage, a little Flickr, like Slideshow. It is it just pure text content? That can get pretty boring. I'm biased towards having some of those graphics. Make that great stuff. One great article is worth a hundred pieces of it's good original content.
David: Right.
Rand: Oh, it's unique content. I put it up on my site, like I described this shirt.
David: Yeah. Exactly. So, speaking of infographics, what other types of content, and I know infographics is big. I thought by now it would have been played out, but it's still working wonders and its driving tons of links.
Rand: Because they're so easy for human beings to connect with and understand. They're so compelling. They're visual ways of learning that can be really fun. They can be creative. I love infographics. What I don't love is people who are like who is the cheapest infographic designer on the Web? All right, a $100, turn these 12 paragraphs into an infographic. It's like, yeah, there's like a little men's bathroom, dude, and that's how you represent the other person. Come on. Info crap fix. Don't work, right? Infographics work. I think SlideShare is actually a great way to go if you can make really good slide decks and they're easy to click through. It's a great format. A Slideshow makes that content easy to share and embed.
David: Right.
Rand: That's a great way to go. Storify is this new one where you can take Twitter conversations and meld them together into content you can put on your blog. It's really cool. So I think there's some emerging content paths, and video, of course are all good.
David: Cool. Awesome. So, Rand, where can people find you online?
Rand: Almost anywhere. If you search in Google, I will appear. No. If you go to SEOmoz, you can find me there. If you're into entrepreneurial stuff and VC type of stuff, I write on my personal blog, RandFishkin.com, occasionally.
David: Right.
Rand: And you can follow Twitter too at @randfish.
David: @randfish. Awesome. One last question, can I get an inbound link?
Rand: Oh, you definitely can.
David: All right. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Rand. It was a pleasure to have you.
Rand: My pleasure. Nice to be here.