Shifting Tides in Digital Marketing with Rand Fishkin

Marie Tepman and Brittany Jones are on The Property Management Show, interviewing Rand Fishkin, co-founder of Moz and founder of SparkToro, about the changing landscape of digital marketing.

This is only Part 1 of our discussion, which includes a look at the shift from SEO-centric strategies to a more diverse approach, the distinction between platforms of influence and entertainment, and the challenges of marketing attribution.

Introducing Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin is a name that’s synonymous with the world of SEO and digital marketing. He founded Moz, which revolutionized SEO tools and education for marketers. He wrote a book called Lost and Founder, an honest take on what it’s like to be part of the start-up world and follows the journey of a founder.

Recently, he’s been making waves with his new venture, SparkToro, which is changing the way marketers like us understand and target different kinds of audiences.

A Changing SEO Landscape

For the longest time, Rand was a prominent voice in SEO and content marketing. He was known to say that everything starts with keywords and data. Recently, there’s been a pivot to the opposite sort of thinking. We asked him to explain his pivot and his new view on digital marketing.

When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In the world of digital marketing, there are hundreds of channels and opportunities to reach an audience and build a brand and show off. Because he was addicted to and grew up in the SEO world, his focus was on:

* Target keywords

* Building links

* Making website accessible to search engines

* Optimizing everything

It was all viewed through the SEO lens when it came to marketing.

Two things happened to cause a pivot in the way he approaches digital marketing:

* Over the last six seven years, and especially since the pandemic, almost everyone is doing decent SEO. There was a big opportunity from 2000 to 2015. It was remarkable what you could do if you had any kind of savvy around SEO. You could be in the bottom 40 percent of SEO skills and still get a lot of traffic. Google was growing. There was more competition. Now, every smart business owner in every region and ever industry knows what they’re doing with basic SEO. It’s not the competitive advantage it once was.

* Demand is not growing. Google has acquired every human with an internet connection. There’s not a lot of growth left for them. They have 91 percent of the market share in the U.S. and about 95 percent of the market share globally. With no room for growth, Google has had to change the game. Now, we’re seeing Zero-click searches where people get information without even having to click on a link. Google provides it right there in the search results. That’s great for consumers, but frustrating if you’re a business owner looking for traffic. Google is using your own content and taking clicks and traffic away from you.

These forces combined to mean that SEO is not the golden opportunity it once was. If you’re creative and entrepreneurial, you look for other opportunities. That’s what Rand has done.

Distinguishing Online Platforms: Influence vs. Entertainment

Let’s talk about TikTok.

This has been a rising trend, and there are also reels on Instagram and shorts on YouTube that are popular. These are not sources of influence for businesses; they’re very particularly focused on entertainment.

The content there is not similar to the content that you might see if you are doing SEO things or business to business marketing or even participating in other platforms like Reddit or LinkedIn or YouTube or Threads, which is more like the old version of Twitter.

Unlike entertainment platforms like TikTok, those other platforms are serving niche functions. You might find botanists in U.K. clustering around a few account on Threads and some YouTube ...