What still works, and what was overhyped
Hello SEO beasts. Kate Toon here – your once SEO-obsessed, slightly odd host of The Recipe for SEO Success.Today is a big, squishy, full-circle moment. After 11 years of recording (with a few gaps), 200 brilliant guests, more than 500,000 downloads, and thousands of fabulous humans taking my courses – we’ve arrived at the penultimate episode of this podcast.
And who better to help us cross the finish line than my very first guest, the moustachioed maestro of marketing himself: Rand Fishkin.
I’m keen to hear how Rand thinks marketing has changed over the last decade or so.
What he misses, what he’s glad we’ve left behind.
Also, where he thinks we’re heading in this world of AI.
We’re going to talk beyond blue links and into the messy, magical world of podcasts, newsletters, communities, and those shadowy corners of the internet where great marketing quietly happens.
Let’s get stuck in.
Tune in to learn:
- Stepping Away from SEO: Rand and Kate’s Journey
- What Marketers Believe Now vs 2015
- Overhyped Trends: Mobile-First, Voice Search, and AI Job Losses
- Which platforms work best for different types of businesses
- Zero-Click Results and the Future of Search
- What Still Works: Copywriting, PR, and Email
- What’s next for Rand
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Connect with Rand Fishkin:
Useful resources:
- First episode of Recipe: SEO for small business: Interview with Rand Fishkin (NEWBIE)
- How to go Viral with Rand Fishkin (NEWBIE)
- Six Figures in Sales
About Rand Fishkin
Transcript
Kate Toon: Hello SEO Beasts, Kate Toon here, your once SEO-obsessed, slightly odd host of the Recipe for SEO Success. Today is a big, squishy full circle moment. After 11 years of recording with a few gaps, 200 or so brilliant guests, more than half a million downloads and thousands of fabulous humans taking my courses – we’ve arrived at the penultimate episode of this podcast.
And who better to help me cross the finish line than my very first guest, the mustachioed maestro of marketing himself, Rand Fishkin. I’m keen to hear how Rand thinks marketing has changed over the last decade or so. What he misses, what’s he’s glad that’s being left behind and where he thinks we’re heading in this world of AI. We are going to talk beyond blue links and into the messy, magical world of podcasts, newsletters, community, and those shadowy corners of the internet where great marketing quietly happens.
Let’s get stuck in.
Hello, my name is Kate. I’m the head chef at the Recipe for SEO Success, an online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization. And today I’m talking to Rand Fishkin. So you see Rand why I wanted to save that moment.
Rand Fishkin: I do indeed. Mazal tov, congratulations.
Kate Toon: Thank you
Rand Fishkin: On such a wonderful run and, I’m honoured that you thought of me for the next to last episode.
Kate Toon: Well, this is it. Well, you were my first ever guest and if I’m honest, Rand, and I’ve told you this before so you can blush, I made up the podcast just so I could talk to you and then because you agreed, which I didn’t think you would, I kind of had to continue it for like 11 years. So it’s actually all your fault.
Rand Fishkin: All 11 years, my fault. I think that’s fair. I’m happy to take-
Kate Toon: Take the blame.
Rand Fishkin: The responsibility for this tragedy that has entered your life for over a decade.
Kate Toon: Yes. Well, it is, the penultimate episode will just be me explaining why I am stepping away from SEO. but I think we’ll probably talk a little bit about that as well today, because obviously you’ve, you know, stepped away from SEO.
No one will let you let it go completely. But they still keep coming back to you regardless. But let me explain to everyone who has been living under several rocks who Rand is. He’s the co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, makers of fine audience research software, punfilled Google Alerts alternative, Alertmouse and co-founder and director of Snackbar Studio makers of a soon-to-be-announced video game for pc, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation.
So that is Rand. I think there’s a lot more we could have added there, but that’s a nice succinct bio. So are you as sick of SEO as I am Rand?
Rand Fishkin: Well.
Kate Toon: Yeah? No?
Rand Fishkin: You know, it was a very good field to me for a long time. Helped me build a great career and a lot of wonderful friendships like yours.
Kate Toon: Yes.
Rand Fishkin: And I think, I think it still serves a lot of people well, I think it’s still a necessary practice. Do I wanna personally practice it? No. I am personally done, but that doesn’t mean that it’s less important or the industry doesn’t matter to me or the people who do it don’t matter to me.
Kate Toon: Yeah, that’s beautifully put. I will steal that little bit and use it in my final episode. I feel the same. I feel like for me, the mission is complete. It’s not the end of an era. It’s like I feel I’ve contributed all I can to this space. It is moving on. And I just don’t get excited about it in the way that I used to and I think when you get that feeling of, ugh, rather than, ooh, you, you need to kind of accept that and maybe think that it’s time for new things.
So, we’ve been doing this a long time. You’ve been doing it for longer than me. But if we go all the way back to 2015 when we were young and hopeful and full of dreams, can you think of three things marketers believe now that they didn’t back then? Like, do you think we’ve become more cynical as marketers?
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, I think we, I think we have, but it is not our fault. I think that the world of big tech has proven who they really are through their actions and deeds. And we, myself, especially, I mean, I don’t know about you Kate, but I, you know, I was a long-time advocate of sort of doing things the right way-
Kate Toon: Right way.
Rand Fishkin: The way Google told you to and not spamming them and, you know, building your sites for, so that search engines could access them.
I don’t know. I think that the, I don’t think that was bad advice at the time, but I think that it was naive advice. I think that I should have clarified that if you wanna abuse Google short term, you go for it. Squeeze every last penny out of those. I want to use very strong language here, but I’m going to resist, m-effers and a-holes like you go for it because they’re gonna do exactly the same thing to every system they get their hands on. They’re gonna ruthlessly bribe and, you know, elected officials, which is legal in the United States, unfortunately. and, you know, buy their way into the EU commissions, in rulings on GDPR and those kinds of things.
They’re gonna do everything in their power to resist any sort of regulation. They’re gonna take every dollar they can from advertisers and marketers. They’re gonna break every deal that wasn’t ironclad and that can’t be enforced by lawyers.
Kate Toon: I think that’s the-
Rand Fishkin: And that’s even the ones that are. There’s no reason to listen to them. The only reason to listen to them, the only reason to do things, the sort of right way is so that you don’t get into trouble or don’t get caught, don’t get problematically hurt by the search engine. And even then, if you’re a big brand, you can get away with it. You can totally get away with it, and you probably should because what is Google gonna do?
Take Amazon or Walmart out of their rankings? No, they’ll look like idiots. So abuse them all you want.
Kate Toon: I think that’s the biggest thing for me. I think, you know, 10 or so years ago I was naive and I kind of thought Google were good.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Kate Toon: Like they were good, they were magnanimous. Organic search was a fair playing field, you know? And I kind of thought Facebook was a bit of fun, and lots of fun. And Instagram was just a fun little platform. And I think now, you know, gosh, we won’t go into the political side of things, but when we find out that all the people who run these companies are, you know, not necessarily the most nice of people.
And when we see that Google is not just broken every kind of legal deal, but they’ve broken the contract with us as businesses that they won’t steal our content. That they won’t, you know, put 17 ads before the organic. They’ve, they’ve kind of, they’ve really, you know, moved the goalposts. They’ve actually demolished the goalposts altogether, to be honest, and burnt them somewhere in a field.
And I think that’s my biggest change. That, you know, I used to be a bit more trusting and now I’m not.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, I think that when people show you who they are, you believe them. Right? You need to believe them. And Google and Facebook and certainly, well, Twitter’s new owner at least, and TikTok, they have all shown exactly who they are and we should listen.
Kate Toon: Yeah. And yet, unfortunately, we still have, well, we don’t have to, but it’s very hard to run a business without muddying our feet, you know, wrestling with the pigs as it were.
Rand Fishkin: Oh yeah.
Kate Toon: You know, and it’s, you know, it’s tricky. I think another thing that I, you know, we were told back then was that, you know, traditional media was dead, TV was dead, direct mail was dead. Do you think that’s all still true? Like I must say that as a small business owner in a local town-
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Kate Toon: All those old school methods actually still work really well, you know,
Rand Fishkin: Still work really well.
Kate Toon: And they’re actually easier. Yeah. Much easier than wrapping my head around Meta ads, you know.
Rand Fishkin: Absolutely. And I think that we did what we thought was right at the time, which was to try and wake people up to the opportunity that was in the digital marketing world, which is substantial.
Kate Toon: Hmm.
Rand Fishkin: And it’s still substantial. But at the same time, I think we over blew the case against traditional media and sources of influence of all kind.
You know, now that I run SparkToro, my whole job is find your audience’s sources of influence. Like who gives two craps, if that’s, you know, a Google search keyword or a bunch of prompts in ai, or a podcast series, or a YouTube channel, or a subreddit, or a conference series. Like it doesn’t matter.
Let’s find where those people pay attention and reach them in ways that are gonna amplify your work and get their attention and hopefully earn their business. You know, Meta, Google doesn’t, online, offline, doesn’t matter.
Kate Toon: Yeah, it doesn’t matter. One of our most powerful things from my little bookshop that I’ve bought in my local town was just making a little Christmas catalogue and dropping it off at all the doctors and the dentists and the pathologies.
And that honestly boosted our sales more than any ads or anything. ’cause it was a physical, tangible thing that people took home, put on their fridge. Old school tactics still work, I think. Talking about, you know, not overhyping things, you know, what do you think were some of the biggest, biggest trends over the last decade that were overhyped? That were really-
Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah.
Kate Toon: That people really got carried away with. I’m gonna – what was that platform where everyone had chats in little rooms? It’s gone now again, not Discord. It was before that.
Rand Fishkin: Oh yeah.
Kate Toon: I can’t remember. I was really popular on it for like five minutes.
Rand Fishkin: Was it Chatroulette?
Kate Toon: No, it was, I can’t remember it now. I’ll find it in a minute. But there was, it was so big, and I finally was an early adopter and I did so well. I’ve got loads of followers and then everyone went off it in like a year and I was like, damn it. So what were your biggest overhyped things in the last 10 years, do you think?
Rand Fishkin: Okay. Me personally, on a very small scale, I really hoped that Mastodon or Blue Sky would take off after Twitter turned into a hellhole, and it’s disappointing, it’s sad to me that Threads was the one that won. They’re now bigger than Twitter, I think officially as of January, which, okay. I guess I’d rather pay attention, you know, to Zuckerberg than Elon, but barely, barely by like a hair.
Kate Toon: An eyelash.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, an eyelash, exactly. The ones that I think were really overhyped, over the last decade are the switch from desktop to mobile-
Kate Toon: Hmm.
Rand Fishkin: Never happened, right? Desktop activity. The amount of time people spend on desktop computers is almost exactly the same today that it was in 2008, 9, 10, 11. Mobile didn’t kill desktop, it just killed all our free time.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: The other one, oh man, do you remember when social media was gonna kill search?
Kate Toon: Yes.
Rand Fishkin: Right. Facebook and Instagram and, and then TikTok later, right. These were gonna be, oh, you know, gen Z or, and then later Gen Alpha, they’re not gonna use Google anymore. They’re gonna use social media search. Some people do use social search. I use it for some things. Turns out Google search activity basically went up and up and up until 2024 and now has plateaued. Like it did not go down even a little bit. Yeah.
And then the final one, I think this is controversial, but for six years now, people have been telling us AI is gonna take jobs. Nope. Nope. Every single job loss that you can point to from AI is actually just a company who overhired during COVID, who’s bringing back down their numbers because they didn’t have the numbers to support it anyway, right. And you can prove this to yourself very, very easily by looking at headcount of something like, you know, block, right?
Which on Square, the Jack Dorsey company that got all the headlines in January for doing this big layoff. And then you look at their numbers, you’re like, gosh, they’re still bigger than they were in 2022, huh. Right. And so it just doesn’t-
Kate Toon: Doesn’t add up. Doesn’t add up.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, it doesn’t add up.
Kate Toon: I think for me, I remember, you know, everyone getting really hysterical over voice search.
Rand Fishkin: Mm-hmm.
Kate Toon: I had to optimize our sites and you know, really, I ask Google the same questions every morning. What time is it? What’s the weather today? And, and can you play Spotify? That’s it. That’s the three things I use voice search for. And you know, they said it was gonna completely transform the way we searched and whatever, and I just don’t think it has in any way, shape or form.
Rand Fishkin: Overhyped, definitely people searching in Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, those kinds of AI tools. Under hyped, AI influencing results in Google.
Kate Toon: Yes. AI, yeah, results.
Rand Fishkin: When people are like, oh, is AI search a real thing? I’m like, absolutely. But not in the AI tools. It’s a huge thing because it’s now 17-18% of responses in Google or a AI generated at the top.
Kate Toon: Yeah, I mean, that’s what the next question I was gonna come to, because, you know, we already had featured snippets before this, or Google was already an answer engine, as you’ve said before, rather than a search engine. It just, it was pulling out snippets of code. Now it’s generative. And then people keep on saying, well, ChatGPT’s got such a small market share, which is still a giant market share, but it’s Google using ai that’s the big thing.
So what is the role? What, you know, how is this zero-click results thing changing the landscape? I know you talk about this a lot on LinkedIn.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Kate Toon: In a lot of your videos. yeah. So, you know, AI answers. Where are we going with this Rand? What do you think is gonna happen?
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Well, so zero click, right, this phenomenon of Zero-click world and, and zero click marketing that we have to do as a result is basically omnipresent on the web. Like, it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about social platforms, content platforms, search, AI tools, all the big places that you can possibly imagine where activity happens on the internet and influenced us too, they are all trying to conserve time on site and attention and engagement and stop you from clicking out to anywhere else.
And as a result, you know all the algorithms, whether we’re talking about Google search algorithm or whether we’re talking about the AI tools and when and how much they show, you know, citations and links, which by the way, might not even be connected to the answer they gave you, which is another topic. Or if we’re talking about Facebook or Reddit or YouTube or LinkedIn or Threads, they all hate links. You know, they will bury. You, I know you’ve seen this Kate on threads in particular, right? Mm. That they will, they’ll show a post to 10 times as many people, maybe even a hundred times as many people, if it doesn’t contain a link versus if it does, and that’s infuriating, right? It’s just infuriating because the open web was supposed to let us drive traffic and do marketing.
Kate Toon: It was supposed to be a web. It’s supposed to be a whole thing, yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, it was supposed to be a web.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Exactly. They don’t call it the line.
Kate Toon: They don’t call it the cave.
Rand Fishkin: The cave, yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Kate Toon: I know. And I think that’s, you know, the thing I’m, you know, we’ve talked about this a lot this year. Everyone’s started to go on about branded search and you know. People say to me, oh, how do I get my blogs featured in LLMs? And I’m like, you don’t want your blogs crawled and gobbled up. You want you to be recommended by LLM. You want someone to type in who’s got the best sausage shop in Colorado and your sausage shop to come up.
And that’s personal branding and brand signals which have been doing for years. You know, I don’t think I’ve done anything new to be AI-ish in the last six months. And yet bizarrely, if you type ‘who’s the best copywriter in Sydney’, you still get me. I haven’t been a copywriter for six years, but you still get me ’cause the signals are there from years ago.
Rand Fishkin: Right?
Kate Toon: You know, if I typed who’s the best SEO, you’d probably still come up, even though you haven’t done it for like six years. Do you know what I mean? It’s crazy.
Rand Fishkin: It’s pretty infuriating and it’s funny to see how slow these models are to retrain, right? That essentially whatever happened on the web 5, 10, 15 years ago, still makes up the base of content-
Kate Toon: Absolutely.
Rand Fishkin: That ChatGPT or Gemini or, Claude or Perplexity, like use under the hood. And so even if, even sometimes if the citations, the things that they, you know, will link to on the sidebar or whatever, even when those are up to date, the actual answer is way outta here. And the other thing that frustrates me so much, you’re totally right.
Kate Toon: So out of date.
Rand Fishkin: And you’re right, by the way, I get listed as a top SEO all the time and I haven’t done it since 20 February of 2018. So it’s been more than eight years, is that because those AI answers are how people do research, especially a lot of content creators, you know, then they’re like, oh, well the best author in Sydney is Kate Toon. I’m just gonna list her lazily without investigating whether she’s still an, you know right, Copywriter or whatever.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: And then, boom.
Kate Toon: I know.
Rand Fishkin: You know, more content is coming out every day that says you are the person, and the only thing I will say about this is you can use it to your advantage. Like, it’s very frustrating, right, Kate? To like, be pigeonholed into a space and then to feel like you can escape from it. And like, you have to run a podcast for 11 years because you just-
Kate Toon: Just because of Rand.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, because you, because you wanted to talk to this one dude one time. and if instead you think of it as, oh. It’s kind of like compound interest on a bank account. Like if I just leave the money in the bank, right? Which is essentially if I just leave the engine running on my career in one particular direction for a long, long, long time, especially if I specialize, I’ll get associated with that. And sure, three years into my career it’s gonna seem like, ugh, where’s the progress? Five years in, it’s still frustrating. Seven years in, okay, maybe a little bit of progress. And then 10 years from year 10 to year 35.
Kate Toon: That’s it.
Rand Fishkin: Oh man. You won, right? Like you’re now the person.
Kate Toon: Yeah. It’s like people have been following me and been on my email list for so long. They’re like, oh, you’ve got an SEO course, and I’m like, literally, you probably received 300 emails. But it is hard ’cause when you want to pivot, I hate that word, obviously, but when you want to move and you want to be something else, you want to, you know, you’re a Madonna in your bra period. Now you want to be Cowboy Madonna or Disco Madonna, the AI just take a long time to let you let go of that old personality. So anyway.
Rand Fishkin: I mean, thank God Madonna didn’t try to go into SEO after being a singer.
Kate Toon: Oh God, she would be top SEO right now. She’d be out there beating you. But you know, organic search, as I said, I’ve done nothing AI ish in the last six months or year to become recommended by anything of just, it’s all the old things. What still works in organic search that surprises you? What old school stuff still has power?
Rand Fishkin: I love that Google had to admit during their Department of Justice trial that their number one ranking signal was user engagement.
Kate Toon: Yes. After lying about it.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, after lying about it to our faces and, you know, being really shitty to a bunch of us who sort of proved it over the years.
Kate Toon: Who guessed it. Yes, exactly. Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Who guessed it. And then ran experiments to prove it. But what that trial showed was essentially that if you, for example, search for, you know, what’s the name of your bookstore, Kate?
Kate Toon: Umina Beach Book Nook.
Rand Fishkin: If you search for the Book Nook, and then you click on it and you end up buying some books from you, right, or clicking the map and then driving there, Google learns, oh, we should rank this Book Nook higher when people search for books in this sort of radius or area on Google Maps or in the Google search listings or whatnot.
And simultaneously, if someone clicks, one of your competitors goes to their site, scrolls around, and then clicks the back button and chooses to click someone else, Google will push that down. Now, I’m talking about it like it’s one search-
Kate Toon: Yeah,
Rand Fishkin: No, no, no. Obviously they’re doing this across billions of searches and you know, clicking on your competitors and then clicking the back button is not gonna help you rank any better.
But I do think it’s great, and I think this is the reason why people don’t love ChatGPT and are moving away from it for search. Right. After this long period of adoption, we saw the plateau and then the decline lasts November, December, and I think that is because people are like, oh, the results aren’t as good because Google knows where you go. They know where everyone goes.
Kate Toon: They know everything. They know your bra size-
Rand Fishkin: They know everything.
Kate Toon: And everything. And I remember you doing a demonstration of that in 2015 of ProBlogger. You made us all click on something.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Kate Toon: Yep. That was 2015. You were always ahead of your time. I love that.
Rand Fishkin: Yep. And it wasn’t. When was the case? It was like, the case was like 2021 or something-
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: That they testified? Yeah. So, yeah.
Kate Toon: Yeah. All the evils come out eventually. And the other thing I think backlinks, you know, Google has consistently denied that they use those in any kind of way. Where do you stand on those?
Do you still think they do? ’cause obviously LLMs really rely on citations as well. Do you think Google-
Rand Fishkin: Wait backlinks?
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Oh man. I never heard Google deny that. They were always like, yeah, yeah, get good links.
Kate Toon: Oh yeah, they said earn good links. Don’t buy links.
Rand Fishkin: Oh, I see, I see.
Kate Toon: I think they underplayed it a little bit and said, oh, it’s not that big. It’s not that big a deal. Just write great content. Just write helpful content. Links don’t matter as much as great content. That’s the mantra I’ve always heard.
Rand Fishkin: I think they were lying when they said it 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, but now they’re now it might be telling the truth because,
Kate Toon: Okay, good. Who knows?
Rand Fishkin: I think links don’t matter nearly as much as they used to.
Kate Toon: Mm-hmm.
Rand Fishkin: At least from what I’ve seen you, you know, you should ask an SEO expert, like, they pay way more attention.
Kate Toon: Yeah, sorry.
Rand Fishkin: But all the, you know, all the stuff that I see out there is basically that links matter far, far less. And now it’s brand mentions exactly like you were talking about.
Kate Toon: Mm-hmm.
Rand Fishkin: PR is the new SEO. It’s the new AI SEO, it’s the new way to get people to walk into your shop. It’s the way to get people to search for you directly and come to your website. It’s the way to get people to follow you on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Reddit and all those places. Like that PR, which I wanna be clear, it’s driven PR is I think driven 30 or 40% by marketing and, and 60 or 70% by product.
Kate Toon: Mm mm Yeah. PR is so powerful. Well, let’s move away from SEO ’cause we’re, we’re both no longer SEOs, which is good. If you were starting from scratch today, and you did this several years ago at SparkToro, which two communities or platforms would you build your business around?
Rand Fishkin: The answer is always, it depends. If I were to give you an answer, for example, I’ll give you an answer for Alertmouse, right?
Kate Toon: Mm-hmm.
Rand Fishkin: The two communities that we really built around were LinkedIn and Threads. Should you build around those communities? Probably not. Like, statistically speaking, probably not.
Like if you’re doing exactly what we’re doing, B2B SaaS, right? Software as a service in, a sector that has high adoption of both those platforms and. Is self-service great then. Then threads and LinkedIn are reasonable. But if you’re stronger at video. Maybe I do YouTube instead of Threads.
And if you’re particularly good at short form vertical, I would be tempted to do TikTok and Instagram potentially, even though it’s B2B, and YouTube shorts. I’d probably do YouTube shorts. I also would be tempted if you’re not great at video, I would be tempted to go down the Reddit hole. Like Reddit is very influential in a lot of results around B2B. So anyway, the reason, the reason I say this, like whole, it depends, Kate, is because Snack Bar Studio, right, my third company, we are doing almost nothing and will do almost nothing with LinkedIn. It’s not gonna help us. Just that, you know, I’m gonna be putting stuff out there on LinkedIn just ’cause I have fun with it and like, I’ll put it on my personal account. But the Snackbar account, once the game is announced, which will probably happen in, maybe three to six months, that will be very focused on places where gamers pay attention and that that is, you know, stuff like Twitch and Discord and YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and probably some Reddit and maybe still some Twitter. There’s a community there. Threads is barely just starting. Blue Sky actually has a little bit of a game community we might play there.
So it’s, it’s completely different. and we wouldn’t do any search. I would do no Google, no AI optimization whatsoever because it doesn’t pay. The only thing I would do is PR for when the game launches to try and get on all the lists that, you know, whatever PC gamer or Meta critic or, you know, all these people with popular blogs and game journals, which are mostly YouTube now, I wanna be on all their lists of games to watch.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Or upcoming rogue-likes or you know, whatever.
Kate Toon: Yeah. So you’ve gotta adapt. I mean, it’s what you say with SparkToro all the time. Go where your audience is.
Rand Fishkin: Go where your audience is. Yeah.
Kate Toon: Yeah. Short form video. I mean, you know, again, you’re a bit of a pioneer with that. You were making your Whiteboard Friday videos back in 1942 or whenever it was. And you know, you still post regular videos on LinkedIn, but I haven’t seen you dancing on reels yet, and I haven’t seen much of you on TikTok.
Rand Fishkin: Oh, no, no. I have not played in vertical short form. it’s not a strength for me, I’ve found, and so I’ve seen, I don’t know if you follow him, but I’ve seen Darren Shaw start to play with it.
Kate Toon: Yes. He does a lot on, on TikTok and yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, he’s getting better. I can see him getting better. I can see him developing the hook for the first, like five seconds and catching attention. I have another friend who’s here in Seattle who’s sort of like a parental coach and she is struggling hard with it. Like it’s really, really tough to get that stuff going.
Kate Toon: I think as well, it stands out like a sore thumb. So I do a lot of reels for the bookshop, but obviously the bookshop is an endless creative and fun environment. But every time, you know, kind of scrolling through fun stuff and then a stop, a talking head video pops up saying, here’s one tip on SEO that, oh, bugger off, scroll. You know, it just feels in congress, it’s like that boring person at the networking do, do you know what I mean?
Rand Fishkin: I think the only way I’ve seen those get attention and unfortunately get attention. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, Kate, but this is my other problem, is that a lot of like digital marketing experts on, especially TikTok and Instagram reels-
Kate Toon: Mm.
Rand Fishkin: Give absolutely terrible advice. Just totally baloney, crap advice, but they do it in the right format. Right? So it’s like vertical, they’re here, whatever, and then they’re pointing to things and grabs pop up-
Kate Toon: They’ve got blobs popping up.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Kate Toon: Yeah. I hate them.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. It makes the right noises and they have the right intonation. And I just think to myself, I don’t wanna be associated with that. Like this, as soon as people try these things, even though they’re getting 300,000 likes on their, you know, what, post or whatever, and we’ve been featured by a few of these where like someone on TikTok will say, SparkToro is the answer to dah, dah, dah, dah. And then they’ll do like a, you know, sort of video about us.
And it, it sends a lot of people our way. But we can see, we can see when those spikes happen, Kate. It is all, you know, go f yourself@gmail.com or like, bugger off at 69 your mom.org or you know, whatever. It’s, and I’m serious. These are like real-
Kate Toon: That’s my email address. How did you know, that’s bugger off at mom of 69?
Rand Fishkin: Those fake emails and like crappy signups, they use a bunch of our bandwidth. They’re a waste of our time. I don’t think those people are very serious, and I think unfortunately, they’re, that’s that ecosystem, right? Is the like, make money fast online crowd and serious marketers have, have figured out, oh, I, I’m a professional, I should, I should follow people on LinkedIn. I should read the subreddits. I should subscribe to newsletters on, you know, Substack or Beehive. I should listen to podcasts, right?
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: That’s not the crowd you see in those places.
Kate Toon: Little Rand Fishkin-isms come back to me because I remember you talking on a previous podcast about how yes, you had gone viral and that viral is actually a super negative thing because as you get further and further, a, you get to the sort of far reaches of the internet where the weirdos live, who start writing things like, I hate your ear lobes and stuff like that. But also, as you said, the quality of the leads just got worse and worse. No, my ear lobes. And then I also, you know, remember you saying at another event, I’m such a fan girl, I’d rather have like one email subscriber than a thousand followers on Threads, so.
Rand Fishkin: Well, as long as it’s the real email address.
Kate Toon: As long as it’s not, yeah, bugger off 69.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, I did do some research. right. around this and, as of last year, even. Email open and click-through. Rates have basically been unchanged for 25 years.
Kate Toon: Yeah. Mine have been unshifting for so long. Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Kate Toon: It’s great.
Rand Fishkin: It’s really incredible. The only I, I will say I should, I should correct that, the last two years we’ve seen a small decline in click-through rate. So basically people are opening the emails, actually they’re opening them more than ever, but they are not clicking through on links. And I believe this is not because like the email has an algorithm, right, Gmail, whatever your, your subscribed to, Outlook doesn’t have an algorithm around this. The problem is that people are not used to leaving a platform when they’re in it.
Kate Toon: Mm.
Rand Fishkin: And so as a result, what Amanda and I have started doing is taking more of the content that we were going to link to and just summarize it, put it directly into the email itself to give people the value. And then rely on the ones who are like super interested to click the link if they need to actually do something.
Kate Toon: Yeah. So be a bit more detailed in the email. I like that. A couple more sort of, you know, oldie worldie questions ’cause it is the 10 year, 11 year thing. What do you think we used to do better in business and marketing even though the tech was worse? What did we used to be good at 10-15 years ago that now we have all this tech to do better? But you know what I’m saying? I just said that question four times. You know what I mean?
Rand Fishkin: Copywriting.
Kate Toon: Copywriting.
Rand Fishkin: Oh my God.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Copywriting, especially in the AI era. You know what I think the problem is? I think a lot of people use AI to solve the cold start problem.
Kate Toon: Oh, the blank page. That’s my biggest thing. You’ve gotta have a blank page. That’s where all the good stuff comes from.
Rand Fishkin: And, and when you’re unwilling to live in that discomfort of the blank page-
Kate Toon: Preach.
Rand Fishkin: Your creativity and your ability to capture attention just falls. And so when people use AI to suggest a bunch of ideas, and it does give-
Kate Toon: Pretty good.
Rand Fishkin: Good ideas, it gives good ideas, fine ideas, plenty of good ones. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a problem, but I am saying it can never be creative. It cannot come up with new things. It can only ever follow patterns that it’s seen before. That’s how it’s programmed. Anyone who tells you it’s an intelligence or a super intelligence, or it’s getting software, no, none of those things are true, that you’re being completely lied to.
The AI companies are, you know, pushing that sort of narrative because they want you to think that the power of these words that frequently come after other words is incredible. It’s just spicy auto complete and that’s all you’re gonna get. So I really, I encourage people to, when something matters, when it really matters, come up with it yourself.
Kate Toon: Yeah. I so agree. I’ve just written a book, which I’m gonna plug in a minute because you’re in it, there’s a whole three pages about you. So I’ll send you, send it. It’s not just like pictures of you and stuff. But it was a real massive struggle. It was my third book and you know, I must say on some days, you know, I had to write it in quite a short time period.
I was like, I’m just gonna use AI to structure the chapter, just to give you some subheaders. But even that, the structure of the argument, the cadence of the story, it’s desperation to have a beginning and a middle and end because that’s what most things do, you know, they flow in that, oh, this happened and I got here and now I’m here.
And that’s a great, that’s one-story arc, but it’s not the only story arc. And every time I tried to use it, it gave me a bum steer and I’d like, wouldn’t be able to write and I’d feel awful. And then other times I would say, can you write this in the style of Kate Toon? And it would do this amazing parody of me, like the most ridiculous phrases I’ve ever used, and I’d be like, God, it’s so cringe. but yeah, I really, that’s my biggest problem with it. The blank page is really important to keep your brain ticking. And if you don’t keep using it, you do start to take the slop as pretty good. It’s pretty good. It’s not amazing, but you lose the ability to recognize the poorness of the content as well, you know, so.
Rand Fishkin: It’s so tempting to put out ‘good enough’.
Kate Toon: Yes.
Rand Fishkin: Right. And look, if you have a corporate office job-
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: And you’re working at a big company-
Kate Toon: Good enough is good enough,
Rand Fishkin: Like just fine throw, give them good enough, right? I don’t, honestly, I kind of don’t care because I don’t want big companies to succeed. They already have so many advantages. I’d rather everyone in big corporate world use AI for everything. Great, fantastic. And leave the human stuff to us, indie and small folks who can get a competitive advantage from it.
Kate Toon: Yeah, I love that. There’s a similar analogy with bookshops. I, you know, we’ve got a little bookshop and we’ve got cute, weird bits of furniture and whatever, and then there’s a big corporate bookshop here that wants to look indie.
So they ordered 27 of the cute little wooden nails that they then sent to each franchise. Do you know what I mean? And it, they’re made in, they’re made by Temu or you know, it’s like-
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Have you read the analysis of how, is it Waterstones in the UK and Barnes & Noble in the US sort of went from shrinking and dying-
Kate Toon: Yes.
Rand Fishkin: To like growing again. I think that they’re opening 61-
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Barnes & Nobles in the US again.
Kate Toon: We’re coming back. We’re coming back.
Rand Fishkin: They’re coming back. And what’s even crazier than that is much like Starbucks, when Barnes & Noble opens in a city or in an area of town, the indie bookshops in that area tend to do more business.
Kate Toon: Oh, that’s good. That’s good to know.
Rand Fishkin: Which is the same, the same as like Starbucks coming to a region and then more indie coffee shops doing well.
Kate Toon: Well Starbucks tried to come to Australia and we just wholesale rejected them. There’s only one Starbucks, I think, in the area because we love our little coffee shops.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Kate Toon: So look, we talked a lot about the past. What are you most excited about in marketing today? What, you know, what do you get excited about? What’s coming out? I mean, AI obviously is a bit confusing and conflicting sometimes, but is there anything you’re super excited about in marketing?
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, I am hopeful that a lot of marketing teams are going to look at their budgets, and see that, you know, 99 cents of every dollar of margin is being spent on advertising and they’re gonna see that, attribution is getting less and less reliable because all the big platforms are taking away, you know, data around this.
And hopefully, I hope a lot of businesses are going to get permission from their executives to test turning off their ads so that they can see how much contribution is really happening from advertising versus, especially digital advertising. Right? I think other forms of advertising. It’s hard to measure, but it’s also very serendipitous and you probably will see things if you do them well.
Digital ads, right? Like buying your, your brand name in go the Google search results or bidding against your competitors in Google or showing up on all the random websites on the internet with your little banner or your video, your pop-over, whatever. I think all of those things are Meta and Google and TikTok and the rest taking credit for sales that would’ve happened anyway.
Kate Toon: Yep.
Rand Fishkin: Not all of them, but a huge, a huge portion of them are just sales that would’ve happened anyway.
Kate Toon: So this is the bit that you’re in my book talking about Rand. You don’t know this, but my book is called Six Figures in Sales: How To, I can’t remember the title now, How to Build A Wonderful Business Without Spending a Cent on Ads.
Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah.
Kate Toon: So it’s an anti-ads, anti-meta. And in it, the bit I featured you on is your pizza, I’m not gonna go into it now, but the pizza flyer story, which I always loved ’cause you always said to me that you felt that like meta takes credit for things that would’ve happened anyway. And so I’ve switched off my ads long ago and the exact same amount of people signed up for things because every time I asked someone, how did you find me?
They’re like, I don’t know. It was this, it was this. I can’t quite remember, but every ad person who signed up, they were already on my list. They’d been on my list for years. They’d seen my content. So yeah, I’ve written a, pretty much an anti-ads manifesto, so, that’s my new book, so I totally agree with you. Can I ask a personal question?
You, you can answer this as diplomatically as you like. How the heck do you keep going? So here I am, I’m a bit older than you. But you know-
Rand Fishkin: But you look a good bit younger, so that’s-
Kate Toon: Oh, stop it. My beard just isn’t as grey as yours. I shaved it today. You know, you’ve finished one epic career, you’ve moved to a new thing. You’re starting up separate companies. You got video games, all this kind of stuff. And you do, you know, I think you are a normal person. I’ve met you in person. You’re not like perky all the time, but you do seem to have this drive to keep going. And where does that come from? Like, how do you wake up every morning and go, come on Rand, Let’s do this.
Rand Fishkin: I don’t know. How familiar are you with Judaism?
Kate Toon: A little bit.
Rand Fishkin: It’s very guilt-inducing
Kate Toon: Right.
Rand Fishkin: So like I have many thousands of years of ancestral DNA sitting in my body, making me feel bad if I’m not productive and like doing good things for the world around me and starting things and, you know, helping other people succeed and all that kind of stuff, right? Like, I cannot turn it off.
Kate Toon: I love that.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. So potentially, if you want to go to a rabbi, I don’t know if you know the rules, they will turn you down three times.
Kate Toon: Okay.
Rand Fishkin: You try to convert, Kate, you can say, look, I think I should become a Jew. And they’ll be like, no, go away. We don’t want you. And then you have to come back several times.
Kate Toon: Couple times. Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: It’s a whole process. Jews don’t proselytize, like you won’t find any knocking on your door with a-
Kate Toon: Yeah,
Rand Fishkin: An old Testament.
Kate Toon: Damn it.
Rand Fishkin: That’s not gonna happen.
Kate Toon: Okay. So Judaism is the way forward. I think for me, I mean, I’m more of a satanist, I will say, but.
Rand Fishkin: Oh yeah.
Kate Toon: Someone said to me yesterday, where do you find all your energy to do everything? And I said, it’s pure spite. Like, I just wanna prove people wrong.
Rand Fishkin: You know what? I have to say, that is the other, those are the two forces that sit on my shoulders, right? Is the-
Kate Toon: Two wolves. We’ve got the wolf of guilt and the Wolf of Spite.
Rand Fishkin: The wolf of guilt and the, and the hound of-
Kate Toon: Spite and bitterness.
Rand Fishkin: No, you are wrong.
Kate Toon: Yes. That’s it. I love it. That’s what’s kept me going with the bookshop. We’ve had so many dramas and people keep on telling me I’m gonna fail, so I just, I’ve never given up. I’ll be there as a corpse trying to sell books just to prove them wrong. It’s amazing how powerful.
Rand Fishkin: It’s so important to me that examples exist that are not-
Kate Toon: Fluffy.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Well, and that are not like Elon Musk and Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg and, you know, whatever, all these like Epstein Island visitors, right?
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Like, I hate how much we’ve learned about how bad all these people are and how connected to this, just well of evil.
Kate Toon: Just feels seedy. Just feels seedy. Even thinking about like, they feel dirty. And I, in my last book I wrote about how all these supposed CEOs that we’re supposed to look up to, these amazing men, you know, they’re all, majority of them are divorced, majority of them have terrible relationships with their children. Majority of them look horribly unhealthy and probably are all to some degree, sociopaths or, you know.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Kate Toon: There’s something deeply wrong with them that’s driven them to be so driven at the cost of everything else. I’d love a bit of drive, but not when you’re driving over everybody else. And I think, I do think the, the veil has been lifted a lot. You know, I do think we’re looking for kind leaders to follow and flawed leaders and empathetic leaders. Or I am.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Kate Toon: But there’ll still be a massive group of bros online who will worship at the altar of Musk and, you know, forever. It’s sad.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Kate Toon: It sucks.
Rand Fishkin: No, it’s heartbreaking. I can’t stop that.
Kate Toon: Mm-hmm.
Rand Fishkin: But I think you and I and other people like us, right, can provide an alternative.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Like, hey, do you wanna have a great life and like, enough money to do the things that you wanna do and-
Kate Toon: Make pasta.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, make pasta and, and have friendships that are real and authentic, that are not driven by greed and the lust for more greed.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: That’s possible.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Like you can, you can do it. Come with us.
Kate Toon: Yes. Be one of us. Bring your wolves. Bring your wolf and your hound.
Rand Fishkin: It’s really lovely.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Like it, it’s just lovely. People, I think, point to a lot of these folks and they’re like, oh, they’re very successful. And what they mean by successful is, they have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and I, that as being the sole marker of success, the only criteria of success, is a complete failure in understanding. I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate how deeply unhappy and unsatisfied and unfulfilled and frankly, shitty these people’s lives are.
Kate Toon: Yeah, totally.
Rand Fishkin: Like I don’t think that- I think if they had one day as good as most of my days they’d be like, oh my, oh my God.
Kate Toon: That’s how people can really live. And I think for me, that’s one of the reasons I’m stepping away, ’cause I had some really good success with this, you know, and made some good money, but I’m just not prepared to live the way I had to live to have that kind of success.
You know, it just, I just don’t care enough anymore about, you know, speaking at events and winning awards and I just don’t care enough. And I think when you realize that it’s very hard to keep mustering that energy, so.
Rand Fishkin: Do you have a little bit of the, I find myself thinking, you know, when I get invited to a lot of events, and sometimes I’ll go.
Kate Toon: Yeah, sometimes they’re fun.
Rand Fishkin: I’ll do four or five events a year or whatever.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: But I often think to myself like, gosh, I’m really glad I’m turning this down, because I hope they’ll give some younger person an opportunity.
Kate Toon: Well, that’s it. Some little whipper snapper.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I really hope, you know, like there must have been people in their forties and fifties and sixties when I was a speaker in my twenties, right? Or I wanted to be a speaker who turned, they turned down those events and I got a chance as a result.
Kate Toon: Yeah. Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: That’s what I want to do.
Kate Toon: I like that. And I feel I’ve done enough and people have heard everything I’ve got say. I don’t have anything new to say just yet. Who knows?
So for me, what’s next is focusing more on my books and on my bookshop, you know, having a little bookshop is a dream I never thought I had, but now I have it. What’s next for Rand? You’ve got many companies, you going to launch anymore or you’re just gonna focus on the three you’ve got?
Rand Fishkin: That’s so funny. Let’s see. So I’m gonna focus on these three for a while. I think Alert Mouse really has legs. Like Google Alerts is terrible, but everybody needs it.
Kate Toon: Mm-hmm.
Rand Fishkin: And Alert Mouse is just, it’s really good already. And I think it’s good-
Kate Toon: Super cute name as well.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. And it’s an adorable website. I love all the puns and like, just the ridiculousness of it. And I just think being able to tell people when they’re talked about on the internet is really wonderful. You know, we have like people of all kinds, Kate, we have like, you know, everything from nonprofit that’s looking for when they’re getting mentioned to like authors who wanna make sure that nobody steals their book
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: And posts it on the internet.
Kate Toon: Yes. Yes.
Rand Fishkin: Right. And Alert Mouse can help them do that. Where Google Alerts won’t show you any of that junk. We have OnlyFans creators who are trying to track when sketchy things happen with their accounts. I’m like, oh my gosh, great. Like we tried to implement an adult filter and we got some emails that were like, oh no, all my results disappeared.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: And we were like, oh, shoot. Right. We gotta, we have to serve this audience too. Entrepreneurs and founders of course. And then like PR specialists, like it’s just great. Snackbar Studio is the other big one. So that. Oh my God, Kate, when you play the game, you know it’s gonna be so beautiful.
Kate Toon: When’s it gonna be ready?
Rand Fishkin: It’s gonna be ready July of next year. June or July of next year.
Kate Toon: Okay, cool. I’m excited.
Rand Fishkin: When you play the game, you are going to hear Geraldine’s voice, like, I’m serious. In every character that you meet, you’re going to, you’re going to hear her and you’re going to see her, and you’re going to, you’re going to know where that comes from, you’ll be able to see a bunch of stories like about some, you know, old Italian couple and you’ll be like, oh, oh, that’s from her aunt and uncle who had that insane experience.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: In this town in, you know, back in the fifties. You’re, you will see it.
Kate Toon: That dark humour.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Kate Toon: She did some, she did a comment the other day about like, If you wanna call white people, you need to bang a spoon on a jar of mayonnaise. Oh my God. I snort laughed. It’s so funny. She’s a funny woman.
Rand Fishkin: That humour is all through Snackbar.
Kate Toon: It’s just like, beep, just a little aside. That’s the kind of humour I like best. Very, very British humour, I think, that kind of dark, sarcastic sardonic.
Rand Fishkin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kate Toon: Love it. Love it. Awesome. Well, look, thank you. You were the first guest. You are my last guest. As I said, huge influence on me throughout my career. And look, I hope we can stay in touch and I wish you all the best on all your adventures.
Rand Fishkin: I’m honoured. I’m honoured to bookend this podcast and I really hope, I really hope I get to visit-
Kate Toon: The Book Nook.
Rand Fishkin: The shop. Yeah. The book Nook. And I hope that, maybe, you know, we can do something else together.
Kate Toon: Yes.
Rand Fishkin: At some point.
Kate Toon: We’ll get you over here and we’ll do a big book launch for both your books and-
Rand Fishkin: Wonderful.
Kate Toon: Show you the beach and-
Rand Fishkin: Oh yeah. Zero Click Marketing should be out end of this year, so.
Kate Toon: Okay. Yeah. Oh, your new book?
Rand Fishkin: Yep. The new book.
Kate Toon: Oh gosh. Tell me about that quickly before we go. I wanna hear about it.
Rand Fishkin: Well, this is the one I’m writing with Amanda.
Kate Toon: Okay.
Rand Fishkin: So Amanda and I are writing the Zero Click Marketing book together, which we’ve been working on for about a year.
Kate Toon: Okay, fantastic.
Rand Fishkin: The edits are almost done, so it’ll go to press this summer. Yeah.
Kate Toon: Oh, amazing. Alright, fantastic. Zero Click Marking. Fantastic. We’ll keep a lookout for that. Rand, thank you so much. I’ll speak to you soon and give my love to Geraldine.
Rand Fishkin: Thank you so much.
Kate Toon: Bye.
