Rand Fishkin has been involved in web development since the late 90s, where he would consult 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 he got involved in the field of search marketing and search engine.

In 2004, he co-founded SEOmoz, which has since grown to 18+ employees and a community of over 100,000 active search marketers. Since 2005, Rand has been the CEO at SEOmoz and oversees the company’s strategic and product direction, helping it to become one of the most visible companies in the search marketing world.

Rand has been invited to speak to the search engineers at Google & Microsoft, contributed to the launch of the SMX conference series, and given presentations for Stanford University, Public Media, NPR, Benchmark Capital & Ignition Partners. He has also appeared in dozens of publications, both online and mainstream.

What do you believe differentiated your company from others and allowed you to survive the Dot Com bust? What advice can you give to entrepreneurs about perseverance through times of instability?

That’s taking me back a ways, but honestly, I’d have to say that we didn’t succeed in the bust to nearly the extent that I’d want to be offering advice. We made it through because we dug ourselves deeply into debt, took on projects that earned us virtually no money but, rather, some decent amounts of experience, credibility and branding. Perseverance itself, as a character quality, is virtually all I can recommend from that timeframe. I’d also suggest that in good times, you find ways to diversify your business, so you’re not as open to risk as we were.

For example, in the downturn starting last year, SEOmoz has flourished - both in revenue from consulting projects and revenue from our PRO membership and Linkscape web index products. Being able to tweak several levers when others are failing to fire is a powerful tool.

You have over 100,000 registered subscribers to your website, where you give free advice and instruction on SEO, amongst other things. Does it worry you that this information could be used by competitors to improve their products and services, or do you think that the business world can truly benefit through a spirit of openness and sharing?

Looking right now, I see we’ve got ~120,000 registered members on the site, and that grows by a little over 200 each day. Those members have registered because we offer free content, free tools and an open, sharing environment for web professionals seeking to learn SEO. In my marketing experience, there’s nothing more powerful for building a brand on the web than offering this type of “free” access. I see companies like Google, Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, 37 Signals, Kayak and dozens more doing the same thing - offering something for free in exchange for participation & positive branding.

Personally, I never worry about competitors using our free tools or data to overtake us. I worry about us not executing and taking advantage of the massive opportunities. I’ve heard a lot of other entrepreneurs that I respect extoll the same virtue - concentrate on what you do, do it well and stop looking over your shoulder. In a startup environment, I don’t think of it as a race between many runners, with a finish line and three medal colors. It’s a sinking track and you need to run fast enough to avoid being swallowed - worrying about whether someone else can watch your technique will only slow you down.

In early 2007 you turned down a $10 million deal to push a gambling website to the top of Google’s results. What was your reasoning behind this?

The deal may have sounded good, but it really was not. We were offered $10 million upon receipt of a website that ranked in the #1 organic position in Google.co.uk results for “texas hold ‘em” and “online poker,” with the absurdly challenging caveat that the positions had to be achieved solely through “white hat” (aka search engine approved) SEO tactics. I still have my doubts as to whether such a thing is even achievable, and even if it were, the years of toil for a single payoff are most certainly not the best use of time. Our current business model gives us thousands of customers, each paying a monthly or annual subscription to access a product they love - to my mind, it’s not only many times more scalable than building a gambling website for hire, it’s a much more enjoyable pursuit.

Do you believe it important to maintain a sense of professional integrity when working in a potentially controversial industry such as SEO?

I believe that it is actually far more important in an industry like SEO. The general perception is that SEOs are going to be scammers, spammers and deviants, so successful SEOs must go above and beyond to counter that image. It’s actually been one of my biggest personal goals to elevate SEO in the minds of web professionals to the level of serious marketing & development work. Sadly, very few people are open-minded on this issue, meaning SEOs need compelling experience, data points and an exceptionally positive brand image to help make their case.

When did you first recognise the need for external funding, and why was this a more preferable option than gathering funds from the company’s income stream, particularly given the lucrative nature of the SEO market?

SEO consulting as an income stream would require SEOmoz to scale in a direction counter to the growth opportunity we wanted to pursue. A large, profitable consulting business is, as I’m sure most entreprenuers and investors are aware, requires a huge staff and is typically valued at 1-1.5X revenue by buyers. A product-based company, on the other hand, particularly one with a stable, subscription-based revenue model, can be worth 6-8X revenue, possibly more if the technology, patents & data behind it has inherent value as well.

The project I wanted to build, Linkscape, required massive development effort - a crawl of the World Wide Web and the algorithms to power effective, search-engine-like metrics are very challenging projects. Without the injection of capital, I don’t believe this would have been possible in less than 3-4 years, but with it, we built out in just over 10 months.

Venture capital also helped us to become a more serious company. By serious, I don’t mean we were fooling around or wasting time before, I just mean it gave us access to people who had built companies successful before and pushed us to make SEOmoz the best it could be. In retrospect, I think that this aspect of outside funding was at least as valuable and important as the funds themselves.

You have worked with a number of high profile clients, including Microsoft. Have you found that the the quality of your service increases with the renown of a client, even if only on a subconscious level?

Not neccessarily, actually. I’d say the companies I have the most passion for are other startups - particularly when the engineering team, the executive team and the marketing team are all 100% behind SEO. That’s hard to find in big organizations, and although I don’t think we deliver lower quality consulting or value, we do frequently find that our recommendations can take months or years to implement, rather than days and weeks.

 

Interviewed by Nicholas - entrepreneur and founder of Nimbler Website Design and Development

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Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Nicholas