 Howdy all. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us at MozCon this year. It's my absolute pleasure to be here with you. And I'm pretty excited. This is MozCon number 10. So it's been going for a few years now. I know many of you have been to MozCon before. I just want to say that this year the organizers have gone an extra mile in my opinion to make this an extraordinary event. And I think you're going to experience that today. I think you're going to experience it over the next three days. So let's dive in. I've got some exciting stuff I want to share with you, which you might have taken a sneak peek at on Twitter. This slide deck, at least the data portions of this slide deck are available on Slide Share. And I look at the MozCon hashtag or my Twitter and you'll get the URL there. So let's talk about what Google's been up to this last year. I think they're trying a whole bunch of new stuff sort of interesting. So breaking into job listings, which I'm sure you saw just a couple of months ago, into reservations just a few days ago. So now you can book right through Google. So I think schedule illicity and sort of those folks in that space probably a little freaked out, which I think would be fair. Breaking into cultural content, have you seen this project, Google Arts and Culture project? This is Google essentially breaking into the content world and coming up with some really remarkable amazing stuff. I mean, they obviously have an incredible budget for it. But it spooks me out a little. It spooks me out a little because, well, I'll show you why. I think Google getting into the content game is dangerous for all of us and something that we have to pay real attention to. They've also been doing some, I don't know, I really find this kind of sketchy. So this list of the best accounting software, which I'm sure you've seen many card style formats like this, this comes from the top ranking organic URL. If you go to that page, you'll find an actual list. It'll include all of these. It'll have details about them. But Google's sort of saying, oh, no, I think I'll just take your content and I'll publish it in a format that gives you no clicks and no credit. You don't even see a URL there. There's nothing that you can click on. These will just bring you to searches for these other products. I don't like it. I think that is breaking the fundamental contract between web content producers and website owners and Google. That contract has always been, we produce stuff, you show it, but you give credit. You give credit. You give some path. They're taking that away. Very frankly, it's troubling. You might have also read AJ Cone's amazing blog post recently on the challenges Google's facing, the challenges all of us are facing, with Google deciding not to penalize link spam, but instead to mostly, mostly ignore it. You might say, well, Rand, why is that a problem? Well, here's the problem. If you are a spammer, you had to pay close attention to the work that you were doing because you could get sites penalized or banned and removed from Google. But now that it's being potentially ignored, you can kind of spam and jam all you want and just see what works and what doesn't. And so I think there's this reemerging ecosystem of link spam out there, and that's a little troubling as well. Google's also facing what I think is their first real threat in years with Amazon's Alexa. I think Google knows that voice search is a huge future, not the only future, but a huge future for search, and Alexa is a real challenge. Google lost their first big case to the EU. I mean big, $2.7 billion that they lost for promoting their own results ahead of other folks' results. And I think this is actually a very good thing. I hope Google does not win this case on appeal because I'd like to see Google get a little more careful about how they display results and a little more fair about that. Of course, that happened in the EU because in the US, this is nearly impossible. In Canada, Google's facing some potential regulation of their results. You can check that out. In the US, Google is just a very smart, savvy political player. So they were, I think, the second largest lobbyist donor to both Republican and Democratic lawmakers over the last few years. They are also this article, great article from the Wall Street Journal, revealing that Google has been paying a lot of professors and academic institutes to produce research saying that everything they're doing is good and fine, and no one should pay any attention to them from a regulatory standpoint. Which I don't know, I know it's legal, but sketchy, man. Is that not doing evil? It's like doing, that's kind of evil. But they are still the unquestionable behemoth. I have some great data to show thanks to, we formed a partnership with Jump Shot and I want to say a big thank you to Sean and Randy from Jump Shot. I think Sean, you are actually here. I don't know if you're in the room. If you are, raise your hand. He's super rocked. Oh my God, look at him back here. You rock. You were, all right. I know I only have a few minutes, but yesterday, yesterday, Sunday morning, I emailed Sean. I'm like, hey, I need this other data for the presentation tomorrow. He's like, sure, I got nothing going on. It's Sunday. If you do that for you, sends it over, phenomenal, phenomenal. So let's ask ourselves, where do people search on the internet? Where do they search? Turns out this is a breakdown from the clickstream level, right, Jump Shot monitors, millions of US web users through their browsers, both mobile and desktop. And you can see that core Google search, I don't think anything on here is hugely surprising, except images. I almost could not believe images, and in fact, I'm going to do a whole blog post with the data that Jump Shot has about Google images. Basically, most of that Google image search is coming from Google core search, but once someone does a Google image search, they do hundreds of Google image searches, right? I think this is mostly people in bars who are like, no, I think he kind of looks like Bradley Cooper. Look at C, Bradley Cooper, no, man, he doesn't look like him, he looks like this other guy. I think that's what it is, that's my suspicion. This is May 2017, so that was October. This is May. You can see it's changed a little bit. I actually have a delta here. We think this is because of Halloween. October has an unusual spike in image search. We believe that's a Halloween related thing. And then this one over here, so Google Maps going down, is actually compensated by Google's local packs getting more of those clicks. So Map Search is not getting the referrals. And then Amazon and Facebook, I'm interested to see that both of those are growing their share of searches. I think that's fascinating. So far, 2017's trending about 10 to 15% higher in search volume, total search volume than 2016 was. There's some seasonality, of course, that you can see in there. And I think that's a good thing for us. That suggests searches still growing even in a very mature market like the United States. That is a very good sign for search marketers, very good sign for Google, certainly. We also had a breakdown, US, UK, Canada, so you can see in there how many searches people are performing on average per month and the percent of searchers with 10-plus sessions. So there are a surprising number, I think, a surprising number of people who performed fewer than 10 searches per month that really, really kind of shocked me. I guess it's because of the world that we live in. I can't imagine only doing nine searches in a month. Someone told me, you only have nine Google searches to do this month. I would be panicking. That would freak me the F out. All right, click through rate breakdown. So many folks, myself included, have been worried that a lot of what Google's doing is cannibalizing the clicks that organic listings, like the ones we all try and optimize for, are getting. And I think this data is suggesting that is not the case. This lid is suggesting I need to work out more. Jeez. SEO, I think, is not actually being cannibalized. You can see, so paid search up there, getting about two and a half, three percent, and then no click searches, getting around 40-ish percent, 45 percent sometimes, and the rest going to organic. And that's been fairly flat over the last year and a half or so. So I wanted to ask, I asked the jump shot guys, like, hey, Sean, can you tell me what are the web's top traffic refers? Great. Now I'm getting myself all wet because I can't. And Sean said that to me. This is basically a breakdown of the share of referral traffic sent by all of these websites. These are the top eight, I think. I don't know. I guess it doesn't surprise me, but Google being ten times bigger than anyone else freaks me out. This is just Google's world and we are living in it. And that is, that is frustrating. That's hard, right? So over here you can see when Reddit stopped using Imgur for their image hosting and that meant Imgur dropped dramatically in terms of their traffic. I mean, Reddit's a behemoth too. That is somewhat surprising to me that Reddit is so big, right? They're bigger than Bing in terms of the referral traffic that they sent. But a lot of that was to Imgur. And in seven months, right from October to May, Google actually gained more share than anyone but the top five had. Insane. Insane. That's frustrating. Not all traffic refers are equal, though. If you're rooting for Facebook here, be warned, take a look there. Facebook sends most of its traffic to the top ten. Google is really evenly distributed, right? I mean, this is, look at that, the 10,000, or the lower 10,000 sites that, beyond the first 10,000 sites that Google refers traffic to, actually get more share than the top ten or the top hundred. That's good news, right? Google is sending traffic everywhere. Facebook really buys to the top Reddit and YouTube even more so, right? They basically send traffic to a few websites, but not the rest of us. So we live in a Google world here. I mean, when it comes to web traffic, Google is just so unbelievably dominant. I don't think most marketers even recognize how dominant Google really is in this space. I think we think of Facebook and Amazon and other players as being potential. But stay tuned on Wednesday. I'm going to talk a lot more about how we can fight back against this, rather than just scaring you. I will have a presentation on that. So we've had ten years of MozCon. It's been an extraordinary journey. And this is the first one. This is the only photo I can find of it, 2007. You can see donuts, the only snack we could afford at the time. We had one presenter, well, a slightly chubbier version of me. And I think it was at like seven hours of presentations. And I was the only presenter. So I did like, here's my keyword research presentation. And now here's my link building presentation. I don't know. I was young and dumb. Was anyone there for that? Does anyone remember that? A couple of books of that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right. Crazy. So MozCon 2017, what do we have in store for you? Well, we do have an exceptional lineup of speakers. And then they invited this guy. I don't know who he is. Looks like he has a ridiculous mustache. We've got, we've really worked with our speakers on making sure that the tactics and the takeaways are very actionable. We have lots of snacks. Lots of great snacks. I'm looking forward to that. A giant friendly robot who you can hug and take photos with. And I'm very pleased to say that Charlene, Charlene Ditch is back running MozCon. She's done an amazing job for years. And now she's working as a contractor and runs her own events business. And it has been wonderful working with her. We have one hashtag for you, hashtag MozCon. Don't need to use the year or anything like that. There's two parties. Those are on the ones tonight, the crawl. And then on Wednesday, the garage party. We have three days of flawless weather. Like Seattle is basically like, oh, the rest of the country is really hot or humid or whatever. Just keep it a nice 75 degrees and sunny. We can do that for you. On Tuesday night, MozCon Ignite will be hosted by my wife, Geraldine. I hope you will all join us as an extraordinary event. One of the most special things that we do every year and really a powerful experience to see your fellow marketers outside of a marketing context giving some really interesting talks. As always, I recommend in order to keep hygienic, in order to prevent the spread of germs from many countries and many states, let's all fist bump instead of handshake. I think that will really, really help. Marketers love science and science says the fist bump is the way to go. So let's do that. We have a code of conduct here at MozCon. It is very important to us. I'm gonna tell you a brief story about a project that I'm working on. So last year, sorry, this is hard. Last year, I got an email from a woman who said, Rand, I'm sorry that I need to share this with you, but I don't know where else to go. She had attended an event that I had spoken at and she was assaulted at that event by a speaker. By a speaker in our field and she told the organizers about this event. She told the event organizers and they said, we'll take care of it. And then a few months later, she saw on their website that they had re-invited that speaker to keynote the event. And I was heartbroken. Like I did not think that kind of thing happened to us. I didn't think that's who we were. And so I'm not just gonna tell you about this event. I did talk to the organizers. They uninvited this guy. I've tried to make sure that he doesn't speak at other events as well, but he is not alone. This happens in our field to people that we care about and we can put a stop to it. And that's why I'm starting a project called Project Events Safe. The website is not yet live, but it will be soon. And I've been working with some lawyers here in Seattle who've donated some time to help make this happen, as well as many organizers, dozens of organizers around the world who I've emailed and they've said they'd be excited to participate. Hundreds of speakers who said they'd do the same. And when this launches, I hope you'll all help me. But this is a real issue and we wanna solve it. Oh, thank you.