I guess I'll be the only person to comment on the actual Moz business struggles rather than the depression side of this post. Moz raised their money at a really tricky time because it was right before Google essentially bent over the SEO industry. When Rand mentions the Content tool that hasn't even started being developed, that was something that was supposed to take your Google Analytics keyword referrer data and match it to your content and your rankings and your links and your competitors and basically help you spot keywords and content you can easily rank better for.
The timeline seems to be matching up where they had this plan for this tool before any of the Google SSL stuff started, so as they started working on the design and UX of it, Google started rolling out the SSL stuff and it basically ruined their idea. Moz ended up adding tools to try and guess what keywords made up your "(not provided)" data but that's a far cry from what they were originally planning.
I'm basing this entirely on being heavily involved in the SEO industry around the times mentioned in Rand's article and having even run a successful SEO SaaS product (which is still going even though I've moved on to other projects). I just remember seeing screenshots of what they wanted to build and thinking "wow, if they can nail this, it will be great". I wanted to build a similar app. But when Google started hiding all organic keyword data in analytics, I distinctly remember saying "Well there goes Moz's whole new product".
Google really fucked the SEO world up with their (not provided) move. Think what you will about SEO but it's still a legitimate marketing channel and I really have never been able to understand why Google thinks it's ok to not share your organic keyword data but your paid keyword data is totally fine to share with site owners.
But not much anyone can do about that now I suppose.
Thanks for commenting on the actual business struggles - I found that missing here too.
I have watched Moz very closely for the last 3 years as well and was not super delighted by Moz Analytics, and this sheds some more light on it now. I do love their Moz Academy though, that was a big improvement.
On the content tool - why do you think they couldn't pull in Webmaster Tools keyword data instead of the GA keyword data? Not as accurate, but 75% of the way there. They could have also matched up rankings to content pages to still make a cool tool. I imagine they are 80% there on a bunch of features like this but just haven't finished them. Possibly related to the comment on Rand's high potential/low performance (although that take a team and that quote is quite deterministic).
Well they certainly can do that now, I just think that that's not what they were planning on doing originally and with all the other dev problems they ran into, they couldn't pivot fast enough to the new data source.
I think they're just facing a lot of growing pains in trying to become a Big Company in an industry (SEO) that is getting rocked year by year by Google. That's why they're trying to change to "inbound marketing" with a more balanced focused on social, seo, etc. I don't think they're necessarily wrong for doing that, I just don't think the market they're targeting is big enough personally.
The thing about the recent Google updates for Analytics and Penguin/Panda is that it knocked a ton of beginner or amateur SEOs out of the park. Basically the guys who dabbled in Grey Hat, thought Black Hat was cool but didn't know how to do it right, and fed on as much White Hat stuff as they could to "protect" themselves from the big G. When Google rocked all of their sites, most of them just gave up - I saw this directly in my subscriber numbers after a big penguin update - leaving the pure White Hat guys and the Black Hats.
The Black Hats don't give two shits about Moz and most openly deride them because they either build their own tools or plain just don't care. So that really just leaves the White Hats, which is a tough road to follow when you ultimately have no control over the algorithm.
Hubspot has a very different client base and sales system than Moz does. Hubspot sells their services and tools directly to small business owners and it is not cheap at all. Moz sells to SEOs, of which there aren't a lot of and the pool is drying up slowly every day.
"that was something that was supposed to take your Google Analytics keyword referrer data and match it to your content and your rankings and your links and your competitors and basically help you spot keywords and content you can easily rank better for."
That doesn't sound very clear to me exactly - how?
Google Analytics ALREADY did match your rankings to your content - it showed which search terms ppl entered when they landed on a specific page.
GA showed you which keywords were driving traffic, correct. But they didn't ever tell you the position your content was ranking at.
So what if you have an article on your site that is ranking bottom of first page (~#10) for a keyword you didn't expect and with a little bit of on-page optimization and some on-site interlinking, you could boost that page to the top spot? That could cause a pretty big traffic boost with very little work.
All you would need to know is what keywords your page is getting traffic for and then you can scrape Google to find out the positions for each of those keywords and then you could use something like Moz's Keyword Difficulty tool (or mine, serpIQ) to find out which keywords would be easiest to rank higher for.
Before (not provided) this was a very good strategy to use. You basically identify promising keywords and make your existing content rank better for them. Now that (not provided) ruined the whole organic keyword data, you have to use something like SEMRush to find out which keywords your pages are ranking for, and they just simply will never have fully comprehensive (or up to date) data.
Well, good content is always important for a variety of reasons. Links are and will always be a major factor for why a site ranks. Technical SEO is what I recommend to most people...basically doing site audits to make sure you don't have any duplicate content, all your links work, proper content siloing, page speed is good, etc.
You can also use tools like SEMRush to still kind of find out where sites are ranking but obviously their data can only be so good as they're just crawling Google SERPs. But it's the best we've got now unfortunately.
The timeline seems to be matching up where they had this plan for this tool before any of the Google SSL stuff started, so as they started working on the design and UX of it, Google started rolling out the SSL stuff and it basically ruined their idea. Moz ended up adding tools to try and guess what keywords made up your "(not provided)" data but that's a far cry from what they were originally planning.
I'm basing this entirely on being heavily involved in the SEO industry around the times mentioned in Rand's article and having even run a successful SEO SaaS product (which is still going even though I've moved on to other projects). I just remember seeing screenshots of what they wanted to build and thinking "wow, if they can nail this, it will be great". I wanted to build a similar app. But when Google started hiding all organic keyword data in analytics, I distinctly remember saying "Well there goes Moz's whole new product".
Google really fucked the SEO world up with their (not provided) move. Think what you will about SEO but it's still a legitimate marketing channel and I really have never been able to understand why Google thinks it's ok to not share your organic keyword data but your paid keyword data is totally fine to share with site owners.
But not much anyone can do about that now I suppose.