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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The One Thing I Would Change as
the CEO of Moz'

Posted by wilreynolds
Editor's note: This post is Wil's wrap-up of October's CEO Swap, where Moz CEO
Rand Fishkin and SEER Interactive CEO Wil Reynolds traded jobs for one week. To
read the partner post, written by Rand for the team and community at SEER, check
out the SEER blog.


What many of you might not know is that this CEO Swap scared me. It didn't
scare me because I would have a hard time letting go, and not because I would be
allowing Rand to view every little thing about my life with no filter by
managing my inbox and experiencing everything that I experience everyday. What
scared me the most was that I wouldn't add value to Moz. Let's be honest: Moz is
two times the size of SEER, has more money in the bank, and has more senior
leadership. So I was scared that I would learn so much personally and would
contribute very little back to the team, and I went to bed every single night
worried about it.


My belief about worry is this: If you are concerned for one reason or another
and can do something about it, stop worrying and start WORKING. If you can't do
anything about it, let it go! Based on this belief, during the CEO swap I
started working every night to build something of value for Moz; something that
could help Rand make as many millionaires in Seattle as possible.


Every night when I got home, I sketched out what I learned that day and how it
might help Moz achieve their organizational goals. To me, Moz Analytics seemed
to be the biggest bet that they were making, but I wasn't sold, so I asked
myself: Why not be sold? To be honest, we don't use it very much at SEER.
Instead, we use Open Site Explorer and its toolbar like mad; Moz Analytics is
rarely used. I decided that if this was Moz's big bet, I wanted to help them to
win it.




I took an in-depth look into Moz's goals and core values and made a pitch to
Rand that I thought would fit. I started with the problems below:


Problem #1: We get rankings from Google in a way that they don't like very
much, which to me is risky. I feel that the industry would be forced to steer
clear of keywords as the major KPI and that rankings will still be important
when it comes to direction, but not so much in a functional manner when it comes
to day-to-day impact.


Problem #2: The "big bet" on Moz Analytics integrates very nicely with Google
Analytics, but kicking the hornet's nest on rankings was a problem. A big
problem. Betting on analytics is the future while betting on rankings is the
past, and we're risking this analytics relationship so that we can focus on the
way SEO was done in the past.


Problem #3 â Rand hardly ever talks about tracking rankings anymore, at
least not in a positive light. He's been placing the concept of inbound and
content marketing as a theme in every slide deck he creates. I literally went
through about 10 of his decks and tried to find him speaking about a positive
side of rankings. While it might get a mention here or there, not a single one
of his decks are themed around the critical nature of rankings.


Problem #4: Both Rand and Dr. Pete believe that social metrics have a pretty
strong correlation to rankings.




So that we can address these problems appropriately, it's best to develop an
understanding of Moz's mission:




Moz is all about better marketing and not just better rankings. One of their
initiatives is to reach a marketing audience that's a bit more broad:




Rand's presentations even talk about how having a high ranking doesn't always
mean maximum traffic:




He says it again:




And again:




I have many more examples, but i'm sure you get the point by now. Rand doesn't
believe that our jobs are all about rankings. He knows it and presents that
philosophy everywhere he speaks. So why does Moz believe that rankings have to
be provided? Let's start trying to answer that question by taking a look at true
love.




Rand likes to talk about building true love with your community:




Even Roger realizes the power of community and true love:




Every day, Rand inspires an entire industry to level-up, to become strong
content marketers, and to make their audiences fall in love with them. Yet,
Roger goes around the web looking for "rankings"?


Each night I went home (to Rand's home, that is) and I presented a personal
challenge by asking myself: If Rand's True Love is great marketing (which is a
distant second to Geraldine), then why doesn't Roger tell me when my competitors
are starting to achieve "True Love" with their audiences? We both want to help
marketers, and I feel that with the tools that Roger has and the team behind
him, that he can be deployed in many new ways.


Both Rand and I want to see the industry level-up and we don't talk about
rankings often. This is because we realize that:








And then, eureka! It hit me. More people care about competitors than they do
about rankings. A small number of businesses care about rankings, but almost
every business wants to know what their competition is up to.


Roger is focused on my analytics and my rankings, and as we have seen, Google
has started to meld these things together. This is exactly where I see a major
risk to Moz. During one of my meetings at Moz, I got a much-needed reminder from
Adam, Moz's Chief Product Officer on the E-team, that we have to add value over
what Google can provide. And it was a GREAT reminder.


The fear within this is that right now I can get:


Adwords + Rankings in Google Analytics


Adwords + Natural Search in Google Webmaster Tools


Rankings in Google Webmaster Tools


In my eyes, the big threat to Moz, to Roger, and to the amazing people I met
that week is that Google is bringing together its own data in ways they never
did before.




So I decided, what if Roger took a stand and went to a place that Google will
NEVER go? I'm talking competitive analysis. Google barely wants to give us our
own rankings, much less the rankings of a competitor. (See? I still believe that
rankings have a role, just that they shouldn't be a KPI.)


I believe that more people care about competitors than they do about rankings.
To this point, I haven't checked SEER's rankings in months, but I check on my
competitors regularly.


There are so many businesses out there; hotels, the creators of tablets,
potato chip companies, food distributors, and they all have something in common.
They all have competitors, and they all want to know what these competitors are
doing on the web.


And I think Roger can help with that and it also connects to one of Moz's
goals:




Google's "True Love" lies within the attempt to rank great content, and it
always has been. They might not be able to rank this content well in every
instance just yet, but they are working on it:




Think about what happens when your competitor goes and sees this guy at a
conference.




After the conference, they decide to change their ways and to work at becoming
better marketers who think more broadly about the role of search in marketing.
They start to become content marketers, inbound marketers, email marketers, all
in addition to already being SEOs. They start working their tails off and their
rankings start moving from 50, to 45, to 30, to 17, to 7, and so on.




Roger isn't so smart (not yet anyway, but some people are working on this.
Shh, it's a secret.) He has the capability, but he isn't smart enough to find
the competitors that you might want to track that are growing their community
and their links, producing videos, content, whitepapers, and a whole host more.
The issue with what we consider to be "typical" competitor tracking is that we
all take a look, see who is ranking highly, and put them into the competitor
box.




Roger isn't saying, "Hey! Someone you ignored for years isn't on the content
marketing bandwagon just yet, but they are building community. So get on it!"
When he should be saying just that.
Think of it Scooby Doo-style. ROGER, where are you?


Roger, where are you to warn me when I need you to that someone just read
everything that Rand has written over the past three years, has started
implementing it, and is moving on. See, Roger, I need your help because by the
time I even get the hint that someone is taking me over, it's too late. What am
I supposed to do when they are producing five times more content than me, have
grown their community ten times, and 25% of major influencers are following them
on Twitter, while I only have a mere 5%?
By then, it's too late for me to do anything about it. So help me out, Roger.
You need to show me not only the people who are ranking in the top spot right
now, but those that will be later so I can catch them before it's too late. I
need to know who is developing content that might be relevant to my audience AS
they are developing it.
You can do this, Roger. What about your own Followerwonk? You show me a Venn
diagram with overlap in audiences. Here I look at SEER and SEOGadget's common
audience- wouldn't it be great to let me know when their content is getting more
shares from our overlapping audiences, with a little Topsy magic?




It all comes down to what both Rand I believe in:




Cyrus Said it:




Rand said it:




Zappos didn't become Zappos by doing everything for rankings. Instead they
cared about their customers, and now they dominate rankings because they
combined love for their customers and a love of rankings. Right now I have a
client that is dominating their space in a similar way in that their competitors
never saw them coming. They climbed from 50, to 40, to 33, to 27, to 15, to 6 in
the rankings for major terms, and by then it was too late for their competitors
to catch up. Now they are on top of the rankings for thousands of keywords, and
their competitors are just beginning to do what they've been doing for years.




Could Roger have helped competitors to see us coming?
Can he help me to see the next competitor coming before it's too late?


Over time, could the correlations above take the place of "rank tracking from
a directional sense?" This would help to minimize the strain that Google has
with scraping, which is a major risk.
When it comes to specific types of content like videos, I want Roger to tell
me when a competitor (tracked or untracked) produces 10 videos that are
receiving engagement on a topic relevant to a brand and/or keyword that I am
targeting. Ultimately, that competitor knows that video content is a long game,
and therefore they are in it for just that, which will eventually reward them
with rankings. So naturally I want to know about it.


I don't care about my rankings. Instead, I care when a competitor is producing
more content, getting more visibility with influencers (social authority) to
their content, and growing community.





"Wil, I'll tell you when the industry is getting hot with content from
competitors named and unnamed (big thanks to David Weiser, Tom McElroy, and
Shawn Edwards). I'll watch your back. I'll catch people who are creating great
content well before they start to outrank you and hurt your business. Moz is all
about great content, so we can even point you to Moz blog posts that can help
you fight back."




"Wil, your competitor was followed by an influencer with high social
authority. I saw it with Followerwonk. That's ten in the last three months!
Eventually, with this growing community of influencers sharing their content,
they will outrank you, get more press, more branded search, and beat you in
rankings."




"Influencers are tweeting their content seven times more than yours." (Shout
out to Matt Peters for helping me realize this was possible.)




"The new Thai joint that opened 5 months ago is still getting rave reviews
and at a faster pace than you are. Eventually this will lead to (unless they are
fake, of course) them getting: more customers + higher rankings = MONEY!"




"Wil, I'll tell you when videos are going to show up, and if my named
competitors are producing that video on critical keywords."




"I got your back, Wil. I'll monitor the velocity in your competitors'
Linkedin, YouTube, local reviews, Slideshare, blogs, and more. I'll keep an eye
out anywhere they are producing great content, and if that velocity of content
marketing is greater than yours, I'll point you to our content, slideshare,
video, or whatever I can that can help you keep from getting beat."



In this scenario, Roger's got me covered so that no company can come out of
the blue and take rankings. Roger also knows that great content often drives
conversions and not just rankings, so as such, this will also alert you to when
your competitor might be getting more conversions from great content marketing.




I know that something like this will take time, but with the many things that
I saw on the back end of Moz's business, I know that people are already working
on a lot of these things in many different ways.


Going back a little bit to my first day and first meeting at the Moz offices,
I was in a (not provided) discussion. I was joined by Senior Product Manager
Miranda, Dr. Pete, Adam, and a few others. The objective was simple in that
parts of the Moz toolset would show zeros and (--)'s given that keywords were no
longer provided.


I listened for the first part of the meeting and then started to ask
questions. A big one was if people really use keyword rankings as a major KPI.
As SEER expects to no longer have rankings be a major KPI by the end of 2014, we
believe our work can have a much larger impact while also boosting rankings.


So to the Moz community, employees, and leadership, the CEO swap pushed me to
develop something for you that could at least spark internal conversations at
Moz, and I hope this write-up does. Rand inspires me to do great content
marketing, get better at building community, and be better to my customers. He
inspires me to find True Love. This may very well be on your roadmap, so maybe
all I am doing is validating what you already know, but Roger needs a "True
Love" meter for me and my competitors both named and unnamed. We all know that
the time is now. Every single day, Google is integrating more and more data from
their tools, which does present a threat. But Google jumping into the
competitive tool business is highly unlikely, so maybe the team at Moz can get
there first.


--Wil Reynolds
CEO
Moz
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