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Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Marketing

Contrarian Take: Don’t Start Your Content Marketing with “What Do My Customers Want?”

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
If you’re in the business of content marketing, I know you’ve seen advice like this: “Start with your customer personas.” “Create content that will resonate with your customers.” “Great content is content that your customers actually want to consume.” It sounds compelling. But in my experience, it’s wrong. Or at least, incomplete. Why?…
Hiring Psychology Startups Team

Why Elon Musk’s “People as Vectors” Analogy Resonates

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In his keynote at INBOUND last year, Dharmesh Shah (Hubspot’s cofounder) shared a personal story of meeting Elon Musk and their short but powerful conversation about aligning people on a team as you would vectors in an equation. Unlike many folks in the startup world, I’m not a die-hard Musk fan. I appreciate his creativity and accomplishments, but also find…
Data Marketing

Is SEO Opportunity Growing or Shrinking?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s our existential question as SEO professionals — is SEO still growing? Or have Google’s actions reduced the opportunity potential? I see this phrased in all sorts of ways: Are there more searches on Google this year than last year? Is Google taking more of the search traffic for themselves? Do more or fewer clicks go to the organic results…
Events Marketing

How Cultural Conditioning Biases Us to Make Bad Decisions in Our Lives, Our Work, & Our Marketing (my talk from INBOUND 2017)

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This week I was invited to give a spotlight talk at Hubspot’s INBOUND in Boston. INBOUND is a unique event for me. It’s typically the largest in-person audience I’ll speak to in a given year (often in excess of 3,000 people in the room), and a less SEO-focused crowd than usual. Most of the time, I’m just trying to impress…
Marketing

A Case Study in Google’s Use of Visit & Click Data

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
There’s still a weirdly large percent of the SEO and web marketing worlds that, despite overwhelming evidence, don’t believe that Google is collecting or using visit, engagement, click-through or clickstream data. This week, we stumbled across a superb example of the search giant doing just that, so I had to share. Something funny happens when you Google from the Mozplex…
Moz Startups Team

Moz Returns to SEO

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Preface: This is a hard post to write, and one that’s taken far longer than I hoped to publish. Never before have I been so challenged to walk the line between empathy and transparency. Never before have I had to get a blog post approved by my boss, board, and legal team. And so I ask, humbly, that you read…
Events Marketing

What Are the Most Powerful, Mind-Expanding Ads You’ve Seen?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This year at Mozcon, we’re doing something new — featuring some of the most unique, creative, and mind-expanding advertisements of the last few years during the breaks (just before we introduce the next speakers). e.g. this praise-garnering Deutsche LA Volkswagen ad from 2011 But rather than just editorially select the ads, we’d love to have your contributions and +1s on…

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