Rand Fishkin

Growth Marketing Today · Rand Fishkin on Why Google Is Your Competitor

• How Do You Benefit When Google Searches Get No Click?

  More than half of all searches on Google end without a click, and zero-click searches are not going away. An SEO has to present information so the company still benefits even if no one clicks. Most competitors are not investing there.

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• What Should You Publish If a Platform Used Monopoly Power Against Your Business?

  If Google, Amazon, or Facebook used monopoly power in one sphere to harm your business, write about it and show statistics. Those posts are what the Department of Justice, congressional investigations, and attorneys general investigations are looking for.

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• Why Is Google Becoming a Competitor Instead of a Search Engine?

  Google is becoming a gatekeeper to commerce and information. A job, a flight, a hotel, a map, a video, or news puts Google's own result first: Google jobs, flights, hotels, maps, only YouTube, Google News, AMP boxes, and colleges. A niche then expects to lose 60, 80, 90% of its traffic, so a better website still sits behind Google.

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• Why Does He Treat Transparency as Marketing?

  He hates secrecy, and he hates people using extra information to manipulate or take advantage of others. That feels ethically wrong. Being truly transparent, including the hard stuff people usually skip, builds authentic trust and an audience that cares, which is also marketing.

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• Why Invest in a Marketing Flywheel Instead of a Growth Hack?

  A growth hack has a high investment cost per output and almost always dies once it gets spammed. A flywheel gives only a little back, then a little more each time, usually over a few years, until a small amount of input returns a gigantic amount of output. Events, public relations, content, and social, like Merriam-Webster, the dictionary, all work that way.

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• Why Wait Until the Beginning of the Year to Launch SparkToro?

  About 350 beta testers are using it now, but maybe 10,000 or 100,000 marketers already follow him and SparkToro. The first few days with the free version stick for years, so he wants an extraordinary product at launch and will probably wait until the beginning of the year.

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• Why Does He Enjoy Being CEO of SparkToro the Second Time?

  SparkToro is two people full-time, himself and Casey, plus a few contractors. Ninety percent of his day is the work, not management and overhead. He expects to enjoy being CEO until the company reaches maybe forty or fifty people, and then it is a decision about hiring a president for day-to-day operations.

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• Why Can a Startup Vision Be as Small as Landscapers in Seattle?

  The world a startup changes can be very small. Landscapers in Seattle, Washington, who struggle with client management, consistency, and payment on time, are a fine vision. A localized, tactical product still changes those people's lives, which is hard to see when you clock in at a big company.

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• Why Does Tearing Down Convention Get Him Up in the Morning?

  He wants to tear down how things work and build a new system with more wealth distribution. That means startups outside Silicon Valley, Seattle, New York, and Austin, careers for people who are not only 20 to 50 year old white dudes, and better audience ideas for content marketers than a Google search of whoever has the most followers.

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• Why Is a Million Dollars Still Life-changing If Moz Does 55 and 60 Million?

  A million dollars is still life-changing for most people in the United States, Canada, or Mexico. It can pay for college and a house's mortgage. Moz, the company he founded before SparkToro, will probably do somewhere between 55 and 60 million dollars in revenue this year and about five or six million in profit, near 10%, yet venture investors call it stuck in the middle.

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• What Is Rand Fishkin's Fundraising Strategy Second Time Around

  Rand structured his new company in such a way that even if it were to never hit a home run, the founders and investors would all get a positive outcome from it.

  He says that while venture capitalist have to invest into a very large number of companies to hit a few big successes, a founder of a company only has that one company. This is something he's learned doing MOZ (formerly SEO Moz) and is the biggest cheat code he's taking with him on the new journey.

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