Rand Fishkin

(Co-founder of Moz and Inbound.org, the Co-Author of the Art of SEO, In 2009, he was named among the 30 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30 by BusinessWeek, He’s an expert in SEO and Content Marketing)

Why Rand Fishkin Stepped Down as CEO of Moz?

What are the services of Moz, how it works and How much it cost? Content Creation vs. SEO is it 80 vs. 20?, Best SEO plugins for wordpress? What are the must use analytics tools? How to use categories and tags efficiently?

Video Interview

With English and Arabic Subtitle

Audio

Bio

Bio

Rand Fishkin uses the ludicrous title, Wizard of Moz. He co-authored/co-founded the Art of SEO, Inbound.org, and Moz (he clearly likes doing stuff with other people). Rand’s an addict of all things content, search, & social on the web, from his multiple blogs to Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and FourSquare. In his minuscule spare time, Rand enjoys the company of his amazing wife, Geraldine, whose serendipitous travel blog chronicles their journeys.

I first became involved with the World Wide Web in 1993, while still in high school. After playing with MS Frontpage and building websites in the late ’90’s, I moved into consulting on the usability side of the equation, assisting local Seattle-area banks, law firms, doctors and small businesses with their domains. It wasn’t until 2002 that I got involved in the field of search marketing.

The major forums of the SEO world were my training ground, and after months of lurking, I started posting my questions, responses and experiences. In 2004, the scope and size of my material outgrew the forums and I began posting reports, data, and tools on a website that eventually became Moz.

At the start of 2005, through the generosity of Danny Sullivan, I attended my first industry conference. That April, I spoke on my first panel (on organic listings) during SES Toronto and continued with panels in SES San Jose and New York. In December of 2005, I authored the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization just before we were featured in Newsweek magazine.

Over the last decade, I’ve had amazing opportunities to see Moz grow and become one of the most visible companies in the marketing world. I’ve been invited to speak to the teams at Google, Facebook, & Microsoft, co-founded Inbound.org with Dharmesh Shah, and given presentations for the United Nations, Stanford University, Public Media, NPR, YCombinator & Hackers & Founders. My travels have taken me from Beijing to Stockholm, Toronto to Milan, New York, London, Lima, Sofia, Cape Town, Sydney & many more. I co-authored The Art of SEO book for O’Reilly Publishing. Now, I’m working on scaling Moz & trying to get comfortable with a new, much more demanding role.

From 2007-2013, I was Moz’s CEO, but have moved into a new position as an individual contributor, while our longtime COO, Sarah Bird, takes the CEO reigns.

When I’m not working I’m off exploring new parts of the world, spending time with Geraldine (whom I proposed to in Feb. 2007 and married in Sept. 2008) or watching the NFL. I’m also a big supporter of some local charities including SeeYourImpact, a startup non-profit focused on scaling the interaction between contributors and those who benefit as well as Seattle Children’s Hospital.

Interview Questions

Questions

What’s your background before Moz and what are you currently focused on?
What are the financial problems that you faced with your family in the past and how did you manage to overcome it?
What’s Moz?
What are the services of Moz, how it works and How much it cost?
Who should use Moz and what is the main added value of Moz for your clients?
You have your own crawl (now called Mozscape) what does that means?
Is the use of Moz Pro account will cover the use of any other analytic software or still need to combine it with other users?
What are the most important things to look at in terms of analytics?
How did you manage to raise capital for Moz from 1.1 Million in 2007 up to 18 Millions in 2012? And how much you still own from the company, and what’s your current annual revenues?
Why you decided to Step Down as CEO of Moz? And it was a personal decision or a decision resulted from external pressure?
Content Creation vs. SEO is it 80 vs. 20 focus or how do you see it?
If someone starts a blog today and blogs on daily basis for two years with 0 SEO, is it possible that the blog rank no.1 on google in its competitive niche?
Ok now we decided to use SEO for the new blog, what should we do first?
How do the keyword search? The selections should be for general keywords like in our show case business interview or post base focus based on the content of each interview.
What are the must use analytics tools?
How do you rank google +, facebook, twitter, pinterest in terms of how important it is to google?
Is it matter if we post the same content at the same time or different times on all of our social media accounts through buffer or hootsuite?
How to use categories and tags efficiently?
Which content distribution platforms to register for?
Is it wise to put as much as possible links to other websites in a blog post? Example when I post an interview I usually put all the websites and social media links for the interviewee in the interview page? Or that will reduce the SEO juice?
How to make the slug or url or each post, should we include all the title in it?
Best tools to speed-up a wordpress site? Is wpengine will really make a speed difference in the hosting comparing with Go Daddy or Blue Host as example?
Best SEO plugins for wordpress?
What do you think of Yoast plugin for on page SEO?
Is footer is important for SEO?
What are the must do things on page?
What are the must do things off page? How to do link building and where to post?
How important to have a transcript for a video or audio content for SEO?
How important to add a title name for each picture that we publish?
How much a small blog versus a popular blog should spend on SEO?
What are the top 3 expensive SEO companies and affordable SEO companies?
Can you recommend any good SEO strategist that take over fully they SEO and content marketing strategies?
What’s inbound.org?
What’s your personal strategy to create and leverage content, how to write, leverage and publish your content?
Tell us more about your other projects that you are currently working on or planning for the future?
Share with us some of the tools or software that make you more efficient?
What’s your daily life and work routine looks like?
What are your other hobbies?
Who are your top 3 mentors?
What are the Top 3 apps that you use on your smart phone?
What are your top 3 favorite books?
What are the top 3 people that you are inspired by?
What makes you really happy?
Top 3 movies