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From Frustrated Blogger to the Wizard of Moz
Complexity isn’t new to Fishkin. He started his marketing career exploring the subtleties of one of the most complex algorithms in the world: Google’s search algorithm.
Updated hundreds of times a year, this algorithm helps Google connect users with relevant information. It also allocates a firehose of web traffic; Google gets nearly six billion queries per day, and sites its algorithm perceives as “relevant” see huge numbers of search-referred visitors. However, the algorithm’s definition of relevance remains shrouded in mystery.
Google offers some guidance on SEO best practices, but an entire tech vertical has also risen up to refine, automate and add to those best practices. SEO currently has its own suite of specialized software, from companies like Moz and SEMRush; a host of consultants and online courses; and a controversial black-hat sector.
Back when Fishkin was starting his career in the early aughts, though, SEO resources were sparse and expensive. He had dropped out of college to work with his mom, Gillian Muessigi, on her marketing business, then called Outlines West, and he realized that, if they were going to offer clients SEO services — as they had promised to — they couldn’t afford click here to contract out for it. Fishkin would have to learn to do it himself.
“I probably was reluctant until my mom showed me the bank account,” Fishkin said. “We were in pretty bad financial shape.”
SEO was confusing, though. Fishkin began blogging about his frustrations with it, and the insights he was able to piece together. That blog built a brand for Outlines West, which became Moz. The blog, which had great SEO when you Googled “SEO,” became a launch pad for bigger things.
By the time Moz launched its first software product, “we already had this audience who had been reading my blog for years at [that] point, who knew [and] ... trusted us,” Fishkin explained.
These core loyalists bought the software, even as the 2008 financial crisis unspooled. Moz raised a first round of venture capital totaling $18 million.
All told, Fishkin stayed at the company for more than a decade, holding positions including CEO and the so-called “Wizard of Moz,” a title his wife Geraldine DeRuiter invented for him. (She also thought of the title of his most recent memoir about his time at Moz, Lost and Founder, in “maybe 30 seconds,” Fishkin said.)
While he was there, a new type of complexity emerged in his work. Google’s algorithm was complicated, but Fishkin’s feelings about SEO grew complicated too.
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