web analytics

SEO Consultant/Agency Pricing, Structure, & Services (US & Canada Survey Results)

Date / / Category / Data, Marketing

In late November/early December of 2015, I ran a survey of consultants and agencies asking deep questions about their structure, fees, employees, projects, and more. Thanks to responses from over 400 folks around the world, I’m able to share what I hope will be some of the most useful data from that project.

Founders, owners, and presidents/CEOs of consultancies & agencies took this surveySurvey takers were primarily founders, owners, and presidents/CEOs of consultancies & agencies

To start, some brief disclaimers:

  • All of the participants of the survey have been anonymized, and any segments that had fewer than 10 participants have been removed to maintain that protection. Thus, some countries with only a few agencies/consultants filling out the survey (like South Africa, Japan, Russia, and India) have been removed from this dataset. Hopefully in the future I’ll get heavier feedback from those regions and can update this project.
  • Because much of the data averages and ranges were similar, I’ve grouped the United States and Canada together, and I’ve also grouped participants from Western European countries (specifically Ireland, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark), the United Kingdom, and Australia together as a cohort due to the similarities in the averages of their responses (this latter set will need to wait for a second post, as I’m overwhelmed with other obligations).
  • My final segmentation was between solo consultants (firms that had only a single full-time employee) and multi-person agencies (ranging from two-person groups all the way up to 500+ person agencies).

Below are links to the various data points I’ve extracted for each of the 2 groups:

It’s Official: I’m Writing a Book that Will Be Published by Penguin/Random House’s Portfolio

Date / / Category / Book

Last week, I went to New York to pitch a book about transparency, startup struggles, and the last 15 years of Moz’s story to publishers. It wasn’t dissimilar from the VC-pitching process; lots of nervousness, waiting, hoping, and tension. But, midday Wednesday, after meetings on Monday and Tuesday, I received a phone call from my agent, Sylvie, with exciting news. The conversation was something close to this:

Sylvie: I have good news
Rand: OK
Sylvie: Portfolio made a preempt offer.
Rand: I don’t think I know what that means.
Sylvie: It means they’d like to stop an auction from happening with other publishers.
Rand: OK. That sounds like a good thing.
Sylvie: It’s for $– (sadly, I’m not permitted to share the advance amount, but it was a big number) for world rights, which means they want to be able to sell the book globally.
Rand: I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite hear you. Could you… (I realize there’s lots of people around and I don’t want to repeat the number I think I heard out loud)… Could you say the number again?
Sylvie:
$–

rand-outside-bookstore(at this point, I turned to Geraldine, who was inside the bookstore, and made a face, which she somehow had the presence of mind to photograph)

My Complicated Relationship with No Longer Being CEO

Date / / Category / Moz, Personal

It’s been 22 months since I stepped down as the CEO of Moz and turned over the role to my longtime Chief Operating Officer and close friend, Sarah Bird. Since then I’ve recovered from depression, traveled to and keynoted dozens of events, started (and now nearly completed) a new product with a small team at Moz, and kept up my usual tasks – Whiteboard Friday, blogging, SEO experiments, chairing Moz’s board of directors, evangelizing TAGFEE, feminism, and diversity, and being the best husband I can to Geraldine.

waiting-for-mozcon
Waiting backstage before my closing talk at Mozcon Seattle, July 2015  |  (photo credit to Rudy Lopez)

When I stepped down, I changed my title to “Individual Contributor,” an homage to the dual-track system we established at Moz that I so strongly believe in. I only have a single direct report these days, Nicci, my amazing executive admin. The rest of my contributions are as an advisor, evangelist, content creator, board member, and product designer for our Big Data and Research Tools teams (not the UX/UI kind, but the strategic “this is what we’re gonna build and why” kind).

In many ways, it’s a dream job. I’m well paid. I have great benefits. I’m challenged. I work with people I like on projects about which I’m passionate, and most importantly, I get to help people do better marketing…. But it is an immense shift from being CEO. That’s what I want to write about and share today – the difference.

What Do Attendees Want from Marketing Conferences?

Date / / Category / Data, Events

Over the course of a few days in mid-December, I ran a survey asking folks about their experiences at conferences and events in the marketing world. 248 people replied, primarily via Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. Despite the small number of questions, I found the responses immensely valuable and quite interesting. A few even caught me by surprise.

smx-munich

SMX Munich in 2014 (via Web & Tech)

To start, let’s look at which conferences were most popular/attended in our field:

A Look at the Keyword Research Tool Universe in 2015

Date / / Category / Data, Marketing, Product

In 2015, I’ve been pretty obsessed with keyword research and the tools web marketers are using to do it. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m working with Russ Jones (after our SERPscape acquisition) and a small team at Moz to build something in this space. But, I’m always trying to learn more and, in that spirit, after some nudging to try using Typeform again (which is pretty damn great survey software, BTW), I put up a short survey asking for thoughts around keyword research tools.

kw-research-typeform-stats

With 300+ responses, I think we’ve got enough data to be directionally accurate about the state of the KW research tools world. Let’s dig in.

Does Making a Website Mobile-Friendly Have a Universally Positive Impact on Mobile Traffic?

Date / / Category / Data, Marketing, Moz

From October of 2004 to April of 2015, Moz’s website remained entirely mobile-unfriendly. The experience on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices was the same, and if your screen was small, you had to pinch and zoom. Many of our readers complained and many more wondered why a technology company in the web marketing field would de-prioritize such a crucial element of user experience.

moz-mobile-hate

The answer in this case was a matter of prioritization and resources. Moz’s internal team that handles our front-end website had, over the prior few years, also taken on a massive number of other, crucial engineering responsibilities at the company including billing, cross-product navigation, SKU management, site performance, and more.

But, there was another problem as well – the data we had suggested a move to mobile might not have a big impact. For years, this blog (my personal one at moz.com/rand) has been mobile-responsive, yet the delta in traffic stats between it and the rest of our site didn’t make an overwhelming compelling case. Below is a screenshot showing part of an email Cyrus sent to the team illustrating the comparison (gotta love how data-informed he makes us):

How to Cheat at Creating Great Presentations for Tech & Marketing Audiences

Date / / Category / Events, Marketing

I speak a lot.

In the last 3 years, I’ve given nearly 80 unique presentations at 100+ events in the technology and marketing fields. A good percent of the time, I get scores back from the organizers telling me how the audience perceived my talk in relation to other speakers. And, though it feels deeply, uncomfortably arrogant to say, I’m often in the top 1-3.

speaker-rating-email

Based on my experiences of watching the other speakers I lose out to and observing when I get the top scores, I’ve noticed there are two ways to be one of the highest rated presenter at an event in our industry:

  1. Have more natural talent, sweat-equity experience, and high-quality content than your peers
  2. Gain and implement knowledge about what tech/marketing audiences appreciate and rate highly better than any other speaker (aka, use what I’m calling “cheats”)

This post is not about how to do the first one; it’s about the second. Make no mistake, these are hacks that leverage psychological and industry-specific biases, not necessarily remarkable strategies that will stand the test of time or work in every field. But, hopefully, sharing them will mean that even those of us who are still developing our talents will raise the bar industry-wide.

Why I Believe in Intentional Efforts to Increase Diversity

Date / / Category / Events, Hiring, Moz, Startups

Wil Reynolds is one of my closest friends. When I reflect on people I love, respect, and want to spend time with (even when I’m in my introvert state), Wil is on the top of that list (along with his wife, Nora). But, that doesn’t mean we see eye to eye on everything.

In an on-stage interview last month, Wil brought up a conversation we’ve had in private a few times around diversity in the SEO and web marketing fields, specifically about the gender balance between men and women (although we also discussed other kinds of diversity, too). You can watch the video recording below:

(via SEER’s recap of the event)

In the interview, I didn’t do a stellar or comprehensive job of describing the reasons I hold the beliefs that I do, nor why I and Moz work so hard to promote diversity. In this post, I want to try to expand on those ideas a bit.

The “Pester Your Potential Lead Until They Hate You” Approach to SaaS Sales Sucks

Date / / Category / Marketing, Startups

I caught this tweet from Peep Laja (someone I admire greatly and whose advice I generally think is gold) today:

best-sales-tip-peep

This was one of the rare times I disagreed with Peep (or at least with my initial interpretation of this tip), and so I replied, wanting to provide some nuance but limited by Twitter’s short-format. Hence this blog post to explain in greater depth a problem that I think is becoming endemic to the B2B sales and, particularly, the startup/SaaS worlds.

The Traffic Prediction Accuracy of 12 Metrics from Compete, Alexa, SimilarWeb, & More

Date / / Category / Data

Services that claim to predict the traffic websites receive have been around for 15+ years, but I’ve long been skeptical of their accuracy (having seen how poorly some have predicted traffic on sites whose analytics I accessed). In 2012, I ran a project to test the veracity of the numbers reported by some of these tools, and came away very unimpressed. Mark Collier (of the Open Algorithm Project) expanded on these tests in 2013 and discovered similarly disappointing results. In recent years, it would seem, services like Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, and others simply don’t do a consistently good job of estimating a website’s traffic.

What about now? Some new services, like Similar Web and SEMRush, have been lauded by practitioners in the marketing community for having much better data. Compete, supposedly, has improved its own service too. I figure it’s time to re-run the data and see how traffic prediction scores perform in 2015.

imec-traffic-chart

A few months back, I asked for volunteers through the IMEC Labs project to share their web traffic data in order to see how accurate the predictive traffic scores from various vendors stacked up. I received 4 months of traffic data (unique visits in Dec 2014-March 2015) from 143 websites, ranging from a few hundred visits per month all the way up to 25 million+ monthly visits, then added columns with data from. A snippet of the data is in the spreadsheet above (click it for a large version).