Category: Marketing

Hiring Marketing

The T-Shaped Web Marketer

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
There’s been a good amount of talk on the web about the “T-Shaped” marketer becoming a model for the future. Several articles will go into more depth than I can, but I did want to share my thoughts on the topic and an illustration I made for a recent presentation.…
Data Marketing

Vanity Metrics May Not Be All Bad

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s becoming common wisdom in the SEO, startup, and marketing worlds that so-called vanity metrics are accursed trolls of numbers, sent from the fiery deep to confuse, mislead, and prey on the weak-minded marketer. E.g: In a lot of ways, I agree with posts like those Eric Ries has written on the topic. Pivoting based on actionable metrics vs. those…
Marketing

Google’s Updated SEO Advice is Almost Correct

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Here’s what Google used to say about how to improve rankings in their search engine results: “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.” Here’s what they say today: “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will…
Events Marketing

11 Tips I Gave to Marketers this Morning

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Today finds me blogging from Australia, where I had the privilege of keynoting SMX Sydney and participating in a site clinic (wearing an SMX lab coat, which is always fun). While looking through the show’s program guide, I discovered that I was also supposed to be on a panel today! The description read something like this: Bill Hunt and Rand…
Data Marketing

What Do Correlation Metrics Really Tell Us About Search Rankings?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I’m excited to see the marketing field getting more interested in correlation data and metrics around SEO. There’s a lot of folks citing data from SearchMetrics’ UK Study, from Mark Collier’s Open Algorithm project, and from Moz’s own ranking factors and follow-up reports. (Searchmetrics’ study at left, OpenAlgorithm at right) The trouble is how this data gets perceived and interpreted…
Marketing Psychology

Why “Optimization” is a Terrible Way to Think About SEO

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Sometimes we make assumptions that lead us in the wrong direction. I’ve made plenty, and I’ll continue to make them for as long as I’m alive. And sometimes, we’re inadvertently responsible for wrong assumptions made by others. When that’s the case (and we notice it), there’s an obligation to correct the misunderstanding. I recently encountered an example of this in…
Data Marketing

Is There a Long Tail to Referral Traffic?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I was recently chatting with my friend Matthew Brown of AudienceWise about the distribution of the web’s traffic, and we both wondered – do referrals from external domains follow a “long tail” distribution pattern? I surmised that only ~20% of the referrals that the average website receives comes from the tail of the distribution curve, whilst Matt felt that number…
Marketing Psychology

Broadening Our Thinking on the Practice of Conversion Rate Optimization

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Many times when businesses invest in improving online conversion rates, the practice goes something like this: Brainstorm a list of things that can be changed in the conversion process or on the landing page Determine which are easy to build/test Create a set of A/B or multivariate tests to run through them Allow winning changes to remain Unfortunately, this process…

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