Educating the SEO Market — Cyrus Shepard // Moz

Quotes

• “I think it started way back in the beginning, like we discussed 2004, ran blogging every day, then published the beginner's guide to SEO and people have always looked to Moz as a source of truth in the industry.”

• “Mozs business runs on trust, runs on education, runs on authority. And it's that marketing flywheel that's been driving us for, you know, 15 years now.”

• “Google does great PR, they do great education, but I have to question sometimes their motives, their motives are not to necessarily see every website succeed. Their motive is to see Google succeed in great search results.”

• “I think the SEO community has to do a better job of looking out for itself and sometimes questioning where information comes from with a critical mind and not blindly accepting everything that's fed to us.”

• “Speed is very, very important...but even as Google says, it is a tie-breaking ranking factor. They don't talk about the big stuff. They don't talk about links very often. They don't talk about content relevance. They certainly don't talk about engagement signals...”

• “But if you say what really matters in driving the rankings, people are optimizing for those factors. I think theoretically that makes everyone better in the same way that, well, site speed makes a difference.”

• “And I don't blame Google at all. I would do the same thing in their shoes, but I think as individual SEOs, we have to go beyond that. We have to go beyond what they're saying.”