The One Thing I Would Change as the CEO of Moz

Editor's note: This post is Wil's wrap-up of October's CEO Swap, where Moz CEO Rand Fishkin and SEER Interactive CEO Wil Reynolds traded jobs for one week. To read the partner post, written by Rand for the team and community at SEER, check out the SEER blog.

What many of you might not know is that this CEO Swap scared me. It didn't scare me because I would have a hard time letting go, and not because I would be allowing Rand to view every little thing about my life with no filter by managing my inbox and experiencing everything that I experience everyday. What scared me the most was that I wouldn't add value to Moz. Let's be honest: Moz is two times the size of SEER, has more money in the bank, and has more senior leadership. So I was scared that I would learn so much personally and would contribute very little back to the team, and I went to bed every single night worried about it.

My belief about worry is this: If you are concerned for one reason or another and can do something about it, stop worrying and start WORKING. If you can't do anything about it, let it go! Based on this belief, during the CEO swap I started working every night to build something of value for Moz; something that could help Rand make as many millionaires in Seattle as possible.

Every night when I got home, I sketched out what I learned that day and how it might help Moz achieve their organizational goals. To me, Moz Analytics seemed to be the biggest bet that they were making, but I wasn't sold, so I asked myself: Why not be sold? To be honest, we don't use it very much at SEER. Instead, we use Open Site Explorer and its toolbar like mad; Moz Analytics is rarely used. I decided that if this was Moz's big bet, I wanted to help them to win it.

I took an in-depth look into Moz's goals and core values and made a pitch to Rand that I thought would fit. I started with the problems below:

Problem #1: We get rankings from Google in a way that they don't like very much, which to me is risky. I feel that the industry would be forced to steer clear of keywords as the major KPI and that rankings will still be important when it comes to direction, but not so much in a functional manner when it comes to day-to-day impact.

Problem #2: The "big bet" on Moz Analytics integrates very nicely with Google Analytics, but kicking the hornet's nest on rankings was a problem. A big problem. Betting on analytics is the future while betting on rankings is the past, and we're risking this analytics relationship so that we can focus on the way SEO was done in the past.

Problem #3 – Rand hardly ever talks about tracking rankings anymore, at least not in a positive light. He's been placing the concept of inbound and content marketing as a theme in every slide deck he creates. I literally went through about 10 of his decks and tried to find him speaking about a positive side of rankings. While it might get a mention here or there, not a single one of his decks are themed around the critical nature of rankings.

Problem #4: Both Rand and Dr. Pete believe that social metrics have a pretty strong correlation to rankings.

So that we can address these problems appropriately, it's best to develop an understanding of Moz's mission:

Moz is all about better marketing and not just better rankings. One of their initiatives is to reach a marketing audience that's a bit more broad:

Rand's presentations even talk about how having a high ranking doesn't always mean maximum traffic:

He says it again:

And again:

I have many more examples, but i'm sure you get the point by now. Rand doesn't believe that our jobs are all about rankings. He knows it and presents that philosophy everywhere he speaks. So why does Moz believe that rankings have to be provided? Let's start trying to answer that question by taking a look at true love.

Rand likes to talk about building true love with your community:

Even Roger realizes the power of community and true love:

Every day, Rand inspires an entire industry to level-up, to become strong content marketers, and to make their audiences fall in love with them. Yet, Roger goes around the web looking for "rankings"?

Each night I went home (to Rand's home, that is) and I presented a personal challenge by asking myself: If Rand's True Love is great marketing (which is a distant second to Geraldine), then why doesn't Roger tell me when my competitors are starting to achieve "True Love" with their audiences? We both want to help marketers, and I feel that with the tools that Roger has and the team behind him, that he can be deployed in many new ways.

Both Rand and I want to see the industry level-up and we don't talk about rankings often. This is because we realize that:

And then, eureka! It hit me. More people care about competitors than they do about rankings. A small number of businesses care about rankings, but almost every business wants to know what their competition is up to.

Roger is focused on my analytics and my rankings, and as we have seen, Google has started to meld these things together. This is exactly where I see a major risk to Moz. During one of my meetings at Moz, I got a much-needed reminder from Adam, Moz's Chief Product Officer on the E-team, that we have to add value over what Google can provide. And it was a GREAT reminder.

The fear within this is that right now I can get:

Adwords + Rankings in Google Analytics

Adwords + Natural Search in Google Webmaster Tools

Rankings in Google Webmaster Tools

In my eyes, the big threat to Moz, to Roger, and to the amazing people I met that week is that Google is bringing together its own data in ways they never did before.

So I decided, what if Roger took a stand and went to a place that Google will NEVER go? I'm talking competitive analysis. Google barely wants to give us our own rankings, much less the rankings of a competitor. (See? I still believe that rankings have a role, just that they shouldn't be a KPI.)

I believe that more people care about competitors than they do about rankings. To this point, I haven't checked SEER's rankings in months, but I check on my competitors regularly.

There are so many businesses out there; hotels, the creators of tablets, potato chip companies, food distributors, and they all have something in common. They all have competitors, and they all want to know what these competitors are doing on the web.

And I think Roger can help with that and it also connects to one of Moz's goals:

Google's "True Love" lies within the attempt to rank great content, and it always has been. They might not be able to rank this content well in every instance just yet, but they are working on it:

Think about what happens when your competitor goes and sees this guy at a conference.

After the conference, they decide to change their ways and to work at becoming better marketers who think more broadly about the role of search in marketing. They start to become content marketers, inbound marketers, email marketers, all in addition to already being SEOs. They start working their tails off and their rankings start moving from 50, to 45, to 30, to 17, to 7, and so on.

Roger isn't so smart (not yet anyway, but some people are working on this. Shh, it's a secret.) He has the capability, but he isn't smart enough to find the competitors that you might want to track that are growing their community and their links, producing videos, content, whitepapers, and a whole host more. The issue with what we consider to be "typical" competitor tracking is that we all take a look, see who is ranking highly, and put them into the competitor box.

Roger isn't saying, "Hey! Someone you ignored for years isn't on the content marketing bandwagon just yet, but they are building community. So get on it!" When he should be saying just that.

Think of it Scooby Doo-style. ROGER, where are you?

Roger, where are you to warn me when I need you to that someone just read everything that Rand has written over the past three years, has started implementing it, and is moving on. See, Roger, I need your help because by the time I even get the hint that someone is taking me over, it's too late. What am I supposed to do when they are producing five times more content than me, have grown their community ten times, and 25% of major influencers are following them on Twitter, while I only have a mere 5%?

By then, it's too late for me to do anything about it. So help me out, Roger. You need to show me not only the people who are ranking in the top spot right now, but those that will be later so I can catch them before it's too late. I need to know who is developing content that might be relevant to my audience AS they are developing it.

You can do this, Roger. What about your own Followerwonk? You show me a Venn diagram with overlap in audiences. Here I look at SEER and SEOGadget's common audience- wouldn't it be great to let me know when their content is getting more shares from our overlapping audiences, with a little Topsy magic?

It all comes down to what both Rand I believe in:

Cyrus Said it:

Rand said it:

Zappos didn't become Zappos by doing everything for rankings. Instead they cared about their customers, and now they dominate rankings because they combined love for their customers and a love of rankings. Right now I have a client that is dominating their space in a similar way in that their competitors never saw them coming. They climbed from 50, to 40, to 33, to 27, to 15, to 6 in the rankings for major terms, and by then it was too late for their competitors to catch up. Now they are on top of the rankings for thousands of keywords, and their competitors are just beginning to do what they've been doing for years.

Could Roger have helped competitors to see us coming?
Can he help me to see the next competitor coming before it's too late?

Over time, could the correlations above take the place of "rank tracking from a directional sense?" This would help to minimize the strain that Google has with scraping, which is a major risk.

When it comes to specific types of content like videos, I want Roger to tell me when a competitor (tracked or untracked) produces 10 videos that are receiving engagement on a topic relevant to a brand and/or keyword that I am targeting. Ultimately, that competitor knows that video content is a long game, and therefore they are in it for just that, which will eventually reward them with rankings. So naturally I want to know about it.

I don't care about my rankings. Instead, I care when a competitor is producing more content, getting more visibility with influencers (social authority) to their content, and growing community.

• "Wil, I'll tell you when the industry is getting hot with content from competitors named and unnamed (big thanks to David Weiser, Tom McElroy, and Shawn Edwards). I'll watch your back. I'll catch people who are creating great content well before they start to outrank you and hurt your business. Moz is all about great content, so we can even point you to Moz blog posts that can help you fight back."

• "Wil, your competitor was followed by an influencer with high social authority (maybe even a social media active CEO). I saw it with Followerwonk. That's ten in the last three months! Eventually, with this growing community of influencers sharing their content, they will outrank you, get more press, more branded search, and beat you in rankings."

• "Influencers are tweeting their content seven times more than yours." (Shout out to Matt Peters for helping me realize this was possible.)

• "The new Thai joint that opened 5 months ago is still getting rave reviews and at a faster pace than you are. Eventually this will lead to (unless they are fake, of course) them getting: more customers + higher rankings = MONEY!"

• "Wil, I'll tell you when videos are going to show up, and if my named competitors are producing that video on critical keywords."

• "I got your back, Wil. I'll monitor the velocity in your competitors' Linkedin, YouTube, local reviews, Slideshare, blogs, and more. I'll keep an eye out anywhere they are producing great content, and if that velocity of content marketing is greater than yours, I'll point you to our content, slideshare, video, or whatever I can that can help you keep from getting beat."

In this scenario, Roger's got me covered so that no company can come out of the blue and take rankings. Roger also knows that great content often drives conversions and not just rankings, so as such, this will also alert you to when your competitor might be getting more conversions from great content marketing.

I know that something like this will take time, but with the many things that I saw on the back end of Moz's business, I know that people are already working on a lot of these things in many different ways.

Going back a little bit to my first day and first meeting at the Moz offices, I was in a (not provided) discussion. I was joined by Senior Product Manager Miranda, Dr. Pete, Adam, and a few others. The objective was simple in that parts of the Moz toolset would show zeros and (--)'s given that keywords were no longer provided.

I listened for the first part of the meeting and then started to ask questions. A big one was if people really use keyword rankings as a major KPI. As SEER expects to no longer have rankings be a major KPI by the end of 2014, we believe our work can have a much larger impact while also boosting rankings.

So to the Moz community, employees, and leadership, the CEO swap pushed me to develop something for you that could at least spark internal conversations at Moz, and I hope this write-up does. Rand inspires me to do great content marketing, get better at building community, and be better to my customers. He inspires me to find True Love. This may very well be on your roadmap, so maybe all I am doing is validating what you already know, but Roger needs a "True Love" meter for me and my competitors both named and unnamed. We all know that the time is now. Every single day, Google is integrating more and more data from their tools, which does present a threat. But Google jumping into the competitive tool business is highly unlikely, so maybe the team at Moz can get there first.

--Wil Reynolds
CEO
Moz