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?…
How to Choose a Startup Name that Reduces Marketing Friction
A few months ago, I settled on a name for my new company. Since the launch two weeks ago, I’ve received the question, “why SparkToro?” a few dozen times. Unlike my prior entrepreneurial venture (in which I started with the very awkward SEOmoz.org, and later rebranded to Moz.com), I was far more thoughtful and intentional…
Why Elon Musk’s “People as Vectors” Analogy Resonates
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…
My Last Day at Moz. My First Day at SparkToro.
17 years ago, I dropped out of college to work with my mom, Gillian, on the business that became Moz. For 7 years (from 2007-2014), I was that company’s CEO. For the last 4, I’ve been in a variety of individual contributor roles. And today, for me, that journey ends. On a scale of 0-10,…
Is SEO Opportunity Growing or Shrinking?
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…
How Cultural Conditioning Biases Us to Make Bad Decisions in Our Lives, Our Work, & Our Marketing (my talk from INBOUND 2017)
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…
A Case Study in Google’s Use of Visit & Click Data
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…
Moz Returns to SEO
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…
What Are the Most Powerful, Mind-Expanding Ads You’ve Seen?
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…
What I’d Change, Keep the Same, & Don’t Yet Know
The older I get, the less sure of myself I become. Certainty, it seems, diminishes with age. Hopefully, that’s part of the “wisdom of the aging brain” as Nautilus described it. This week, at Business of Software Europe, I was asked to give a talk on this topic, and created a short, visual set of…