"SEO is seen as a narrow set of activities that move rankings up and bring search visitors in"

Hmm, sorry Rand, but that definition seems quite accurate to me. What are the end goals of SEO if not higher rankings and more traffic? Someone please fill me in...

That's precisely the problem :-)

If SEO is perceived by others to be just a "narrow set of activities" when it actually encompasses a whole lot more, there's a mismatch in expectations. UI/Content/Social etc. as inputs, and revenue as an output.

This! If you're an "SEO" just doing links, then that's all you'll be allowed to do. I don't know about the rest of y'all, but I'm tired of links. I want to do big really cool stuff that blows traffic out of the water, not build some freakin links.

... so we can make a ton of cash to a) buy private islands and whatnot but more importantly b) justify the work we do. :-)

and c) justify the work we do while working from our private islands!

:-D

That being said, I hate people that call all marketing SEO: like "design is SEO", "conversions is SEO" etc - it's not. It's all marketing, but SEO is essentially still about "more search engine traffic". 

I 110% agree. It USED to be a narrow set of activities. But now that you actually have to market, it encompasses a whole lot more.

I'd argue that SEO touches anything that impacts your position in search engines. That includes things like design, load time, etc.

However - there are people who do *just* those things as their entire jobs. So I think we need to be careful on how much we try to own since we end up treading into areas where we're the amateurs.

I think the rebrand is a great testament to how far Moz has come as a company - it's a great example for all marketers.

I'm proud of my SEO and won't be dropping it from my title, description or what have you any time soon - but in Moz's case, when you look at all of the things that they provide now, limiting the name to just one part of the digital marketing spectrum didn't make sense.  The new name allows them to embrace all parts in equal measure without any external premonitions.  Certainly doesn't mean to me (and hopefully them) that SEO has been pushed into a corner as a result - still strong and still alive.

You may be forced to drop the SEO in your title soon too as industry leaders abandon it. 

Depends on whether customers/clients abandon it too though...

I still don't understand why you would want to limit yourself to marketing when you were doing optimization until now. You can optimize all kinds of things, not just search. Even in search "marketing" was always a subset of mostly paid techniques.

SEOmoz is also giving up their unique selling proposition while trying to serve a mainstream audience that it can't serve. Just look at other marketing software which is basically cradle to cradle in the best case encompassing the whole CRM to marketing to sales process.

SEOmoz giving up the SEO acronym ultimately means the death of the acronym in the long run. Soon you'll be retiring too or frantically trying to compete with real marketers. 

While I'm incredibly flattered by the suggestion that Moz removing "SEO" from our name could alter, even slightly, the trajectory of such a huge part of the marketing and technology ecosystem, I obviously disagree. Our branding, IMO, will have something between 0 and 0.00001 of an impact on SEO as an industry or practice.

"Soon you'll be retiring too or frantically trying to compete with real marketers."

I'm totally game for competing with real marketers :)

Disagree on Moz giving up USPS. Their own tools and data brings a lot new to the table. Sure, they're fighting gorillas in the room, but it's the game in 1, 5, 10 years time that matters. That's the bet Moz, Foundry Group, Rand and the folks are making.

I'm glad Rand himself eventually considered PPC as inbound marketing (see interruption vs inbound image within the article)

Couldn't agree more! Free vs. paid has nothing to do with whether something is "inbound" or not.

Now that Moz is just marketing and not SEO anymore I bet they soon add banners etc. to "inbound" too. I mean just look at the typical "opt in email" that is inbound according to that visualization. 

Usually you get huge overlays hiding all the content to "opt in". Now if that isn't an interruption I don't know what is. I understand though that you need to compromise when going mainstream and trying to serve everybody. 

I was actually quite compelled by many of the arguments for it made on this very site (by people in this thread!)

About time :)

just wrote about it here: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/05/29/what-is-inbound-marketing

Still, I wonder how he can consider Blogger Outreach to not be outbound???

Not sure why Moz went with the rebranding. They were the leaders that could turn the industry perception around and evolve the industry stereotype.

I'm really interested in how well they move their domain and assets though. That's an awesome case study ahead!

We tried that for the last decade, but I think momentum and preconceptions about what SEO means are too far established for a single company or group to change. We'll see what how the new brand and product fare!

I don't know why but I feel like someone gut punched me this morning. 

* The "logo home" is not a logged in different page now (should obviously go to a non-promotional page for those who've already paid, maybe: http://moz.com/pro/home like it did, although that site is basically a completely different experience.

* The on-site community (and overall website) is harder to navigate in general. More buttons, less use. Less on-screen data (reminds me of my quibbles with the Inbound redesign - actually useful on-screen info removed (thumbs up/down on responses were pretty much the easiest way to track if your response has been seen other than to subscribe to every question we answer and for those of us answering 3-5 per day or more, that's not realistic. We'd get 50+ emails a day.)

* The color of links on the site ... really? Light blue on white - I don't understand why this was a good idea. Links are hard to read, names are hard to see. I'm assuming it's the same (actual) color as the top menu bar. But the top bar is that color in bulk. Text is much harder to see this way.  This really affects our ability to see how many responses a Q&A question has - it blends into the background WAY too much.

* Speaking of the design, W T F is wrong with the menu on http://analytics.moz.com/pro/research_tools  It looks like CoolText got ahold of it and plastered 1995 all over it.

* Titles aren't clickable on http://moz.com/learn/seo Just feels wrong.

* The gamification aspects of the community are all but destroyed. Instead of being the "top 50" of 15,000 Moz users, we're the top 50 of the 3300 you choose to show, and I don't even see http://moz.com/community/users linked on any of the page's 3 or 4 different top menus. 

*We lost profile pics but gained "star ratings" where the 22nd highest person on the site is "3 stars" which is a middling ranking on every other known chart.  Yet 22nd out of 15,000+ users is "middle" now??  

* The page descriptions still aren't accurate for community changes that were made before I even started on the site. (Featured questions was changed to "Bounty" and yet they STILL haven't been updated in 2 years.)  Is +500 points really required for Q&A access?

* All this was changed for "new analytics" which as long as we get five of, is still bloody freaking useless for anyone in a small agency trying to make Moz their "long term data" solution. We're a small company and I have 25+ freaking clients. I have never understood how to make this work other than on my own site, which I don't even TRY to SEO.  Which 4 should I bother monitoring?  The whole "good" of new Moz is for long term analytics data. Pro Elite is 5x as much per month and still *barely* covers our small agency. I don't understand this - never have.  The one part of the site I really don't use is the new whole focus. :-( 

* The consistency of the menus is SO FRUSTRATING.  Just go to Moz.com. Products, Learn, Community, Blogs, About. All of those look like they're on one site (the new one) but click "Campaigns" and all of a sudden we're back to the CoolText menu.  Completely different look, completely inaccessible other than "Learn & Connect."  Now scroll through the blogs. Moz blog fine. Youmoz fine. Rand's looks like a completely different site. Devblog looks like a brand new Wordpress install but is years old.

* The increased size of the Q&A question titles makes some of them take up like 4 or 5 lines. User error but wow is that u.g.l.y.

* Do the thumbs up & thumbs down work on moz.com/blog yet?  I can't seem to hit them from outside of the post, only the "did you like this post" at the bottom of each works for me. This could be me, could be the site. Hard to say - but it doesn't seem to show which ones I've thumbed up. If you're going to make a change, at least show that so we can see which ones we've read/liked&disliked, etc. 

---------------------

I know a lot of things are changing but it's really inconsistent overall currently. Maybe I'll wrap my head around the new design - I'm not against "new" overall. I know this sounds like a fairly negative "rant" against the changes but I feel like I may as well point out what I see because I seem to be the only voice of dissent right now. 

Separately - I'm happy for you and the company that you're doing something you see as a major upgrade. Maybe when the new stuff gets here to play with I will feel better about it as well. Currently the site feels unfinished & wrong, there's no new tool to play with, if it's only useful for 5 campaigns, I probably won't use it any more than I use the current campaigns, and my favorite part of Moz has always been the Q&A and community, which I think took obvious steps backward today.

I don't care that the site removed "seo" from the title. Couldn't care less. Don't care that the domain changed. You (Rand) said on Twitter that you think the best design is on the product tour page. I agree, it is. Let me be positive for a minute because that's more in my nature. I like "Support" questions. I like the idea of data over time. I like the idea of having an all-in-one marketing dashboard (although I wonder how that fits in between Hootsuite & Google Analytics).  I absolutely *love* the new products (Get Listed, FollowerWonk, etc.)  I love how hard the team has worked on getting bigger, faster Mozscape indexes to us. 

Obviously I have a lot of problems with the new site - some are UX, some are UI, a few are product related, a few relate to the gamification which some of us do put time into, a lot is about menus, color, consistency, (and again, MY user experience as a very active community member.)

I've crushed about 90 minutes on this now so I have to stop but as you probably know, I LOVE what you guys do - obviously. I spend a good portion of time everyday on Moz and Inbound, I participate as fully as time allows. It would absolutely NOT be any part transparent for me to say anything but what I said on Twitter - I *hate* the changes so far. And it pains me to say that. 

Thanks for the critical feedback and the transparency around what makes you angry Matt. I'll make sure our design and product teams see this.

Unlimited campaigns is something we've considered, but we'll first need to build functionality to allow you to choose how to allocate your keywords, crawl, social accounts, brand mention tracking, etc. so it may be some months out in the future.

Thanks Rand. Appreciate your own transparency and hey, if I don't fit in the future plans, that's the way it goes. :) 

I think the community taking a beating gets most of my unhappiness because I know some of us work really hard to help everyone out. We don't expect compensation for that but what we've seen in the past is recognition - 3 stars and a hidden leaderboard, with more focus on the huge title and less on the answers and the answerers ... it did get me a bit off this morning and that got me looking at why the whole thing made such a negative first impression.  I hope it helps - truly. 

Maby try Raven Tools if you have 25 small clients, "moz" isn't really designed for companies with a huge number of SMB clients. 

Also I hear you on the top users page going to ask about that on the blog. 

Thanks James. I'll look into it. Actually, I've already been given an extended free trial by another company as well (in response to my tweets this morning.)  I guess Moz's rebrand coinciding with my own work on my business isn't so much coincidence as time to review *everything* we do and see if it still makes sense.  You may be right that Raven is best for me - maybe something else. I don't want to lose OSE, FollowerWonk and GetListed though ... so we'll see.

As far as top users, the only place it is really linked now is in the Community sidebar.  Which you can't read easily. heh.

Matt, I know you've seen this on the Q&A thread, but for the benefit of other people I responded to some of the comments and concerns about MozPoints and the star system at http://moz.com/community/q/about-the-stars-and-points.

Replied over there. :) 

A few bugs, but liking the new design overall!

'Better marketing' is a great definition of 'inbound marketing'. I like that.

Super-excited about this! I look forward to testing their new analytics software. :)

Not sure I would pay 99$ for another analytics tool. Most people will stick with Google Analytics. 

To be clear - Moz Analytics is not visitor analytics, it's marketing analytics. That means analytics for SEO, social, content, brand mentions, links, etc. You can get a pretty good sense of the product on the tour page: http://moz.com/products/tour

$99 is the price of what was/is SEOmoz PRO today, and all the features/functionality of that product will remain inside Moz Analytics, along with lots of new ones.

Can I be honest Rand?
I, like Tad, was fooled too by the "Analytics" word in the name.

I instantly thought: "Did they put some visitor analytics in there?" and didn't quite get confirmation/denial of this though until I logged in with my account.

Dunno if you'd like to consider explaining a bit more on the page or in the tour/feature section.

Anyway: Great job!

Good point. I'll make sure that's clarified. The product does continue to integrate with Google Analytics for visitor data (quite deeply in fact), but you won't have to put any additional tags on pages for it to work.

Depends on what the tool could do?

Value adds like "revealing not provided" might make you pay a heck of a lot more than $99/month. Whatever they've got up their sleeves (doubt exact keyword data is possible, but plenty of value add ideas probably are) I'm sure there's a value proposition to "upgrade" from GA

Rand brought up a good point- we can explain what SEO is today, but it still can't change people's perception of what THEY think it is. However I don't think the term "SEO" is going away. It may end up being a term that future generations will use, but not know what it really stood for in the past. Like FedEx.

I think it's a smart move. The way things are going -- and in hindsight, Rand your comments here on and your own blog the last few months -- were an indication of the direction. Personally I think this is going to be a rebranding case study.  And the Moz Analytics looks pretty sharp at a glance. Will take a close look at it later.  

I'd ask you this: does this move Moz into direct with HubSpot? You both strike me as Frenemies right now. 

I don't understand what people see here with Moz vs. HubSpot. They both sell inbound marketing software, but that's where the similarities end.

HubSpot is an all-encapsulating platform for small and mid-sized businesses that simultaneously combines every marketing tool into one place. It's users are SME owners who have a hundred things to do as well as marketing. Each customer has a consultant. It costs at least four figures a year upfront. It's designed to take an SMEs marketing budget for the year. Growth is from more SME customers, especially in international markets.

Moz is a data company. They're one layer away from the consumer. It's users are in-house marketers and agency consultants who do marketing each and everyday. It's API powers tools for other companies services nearer the consumer, like HubSpots Marketing Graders. Moz is a simple SaaS business that takes a small proportion of marketers budgets. Growths through more marketers signing up and delivering a portion of their budgets in exchange for data and tools of ever greater use and sophistication.

Moz and HubSpot would do a really ugly job trying to be each other. HubSpot invests a ridiculous amount of resource in sales, finding and training the right customers on an ongoing basis which Moz has no infrastructure for. Similarly, Moz is crawling the frickin' web (that's huge!) and building a heck of a lot of proprietary data sets.

Comparing the two as competitors is like saying Bloomberg is a bank, Heathrow is an airline or Wal Mart is a farm. They're related but fundamentally different businesses.

Really curious as to why they continued using Feedburner with the rebranding. I just had to delete the old SEOMoz feed from Netvibes, add the new one, and with many folks seeming to think Feedburner is dead, I expect I'll have to do that at least one more time.

Funniest article on Inbound Marketing. PPC is also a part of inbound marketing, ha ha ha ha, good joke Rand :)

I am anxious to see how Moz will leverage the GetListed acquisition to providing more tools for those of us that are running Local SEO campaigns for our clients. The overall redesign turned out great, but I am a little puzzled why it wouldn't be responsive...

I prefer shorts names and I prefer moz than the old one, anyway a good tool !!!