Rand Fishkin

Wizard of Moz

“I think it would be really really powerful and it would be wonderful to see people coming out of those certification programs doing a wonderful job in the industry and then having that certification program be able to be recognized by agencies who hire consultants, by businesses that hire in house SEOs, by marketing teams that want their marketers to get trained.”

 

 

Welcome to ‘Take Ten’, OMCP’s podcast where we spend 10 minutes, more or less, talking to online marketing thought leaders, educators, and career professionals about training and certification with hosts Jane Flint and David Temple.

OMCP: I’m here with Rand Fishkin, the Wizard of Moz. Rand, why don’t you tell us a little about yourself?

Rand Fishkin: I certainly will, David. It’s a pleasure to be here with you, what a great friendship we’ve had over the years. My name is Rand I founded a company called Moz in Seattle. I founded that company with my mom, actually my co-founder Jillian and I ran it as the CEO from 2007 to 2014. When I stepped down, I promoted our long time CO Sarah to the role. So, these days my title is Wizard of Moz and really what that means is I do a lot of education, a lot of evangelism speaking, a lot of content creation and promotion. I get to do plenty of hands on as CO and testing and experiments, which I love. I’m still the chairman of the board at Moz. I’m trying to see this company through to a great outcome and continue to try and help marketers succeed and be better as CO’s.

OMCP: Well it sounds like a great role, I mean you certainly earned it, it didn’t just happen. When you first got in the industry, I remember that the yellow shoes were your trademark. Now it seems to be your mustache, tell me about those yellow shoes. Was that a conscious decision or did it just happen? And then talk about your mustache.

Rand Fishkin: It was semi-conscious with the yellow shoes so basically I had been in a lot of online forums for years before I ever went to my first SEO marketing event, which was Search Engine Strategies in 2000… I think it was either 2004 or 2005. It was in New York and it was super cold out, it was March. My grandfather and I went together, Si, who you know, Si Fishkin. He and I went together to that show, we stayed in a hotel a few blocks away so we were walking through the icy cold in my yellow shoes. And I wore them because I wanted people from the online world to be able to recognize me in person, and so I told people through the forums and blogs that I was participating on “Hey, I’ll be the guy in the yellow shoes. Say hi if you see me.” And it worked. Barry Shwartz from Search Engine Round Table came up to me in the first five minutes of me getting there and said “You must be Rand Fishkin.” So those yellow shoes became a trademark ever since.

OMCP: And the mustache?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, the mustache. The mustache is a little different. I had a deal when I was CEO that I was not going to shave my mustache until Moz returned to profitability. I then stepped down as CEO and about three months after making that agreement in 2014. It’s been about eighteen months now, Sarah, to her credit, I think is a great CEO but she’s chosen, she actually doesn’t want to run the company to being profitable. She’s more focused on trying to grow. So that meant my mustache got real long. At board meetings I’ll occasionally be like, “Hey, Sarah when do I get to shave this thing?” We’ll see.

OMCP: That’s a great story. Rand, how did you start educating yourself about online marketing back in the day?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, when I first started in web marketing my first discipline was we...