Formerly called SEOmoz Industry Marketing | Type Private Founded 2004 | |
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Founder Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig Headquarters Seattle, Washington, USA | ||
Moz is a software as a service (SaaS) company based in Seattle, Washington, U.S., that sells inbound marketing and marketing analytics software subscriptions. It was founded by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig in 2004 as a consulting firm and shifted to SEO software development in 2008. The company hosts a website that includes an online community of more than one million globally based digital marketers and marketing related tools.
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History
In 2004, Moz was founded by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig as 'SEOmoz'. In September 2007, the company raised $1.1 million in Series A funding from Ignition Partners and Curious Office. In 2012, it raised $18 million in funding from Foundry Group and Ignition Partners.
In June 2012, SEOmoz acquired Followerwonk, a tool for searching, filtering and managing Twitter bios with other Twitter management functions like analytics. The terms were not disclosed, but SEOmoz said the acquisition was for somewhere between one and four million US dollars. In December 2012: SEOmoz acquired GetListed for $3 Million. In May 2013, the company rebranded as 'Moz' and relaunched the website at Moz.com. During the period 2008 to 2011, SEOmoz grew from $1.5 million to $11.4 million in revenue. In January 2016, Moz secured a $10 million investment from the Foundry Group.
In August 2016, Moz laid off 28% of their staff to double down on SEO and focus on earning profitable revenue to continue the companies success.
Tools
Moz has a series of tools in its SEO Toolbox, including Moz Keyword Explorer, a leading keyword research tool that provides keyword suggestions, seo competition, opportunitiy, SERP features, saved lists, and accurate search volume data.
MozPro provides SEO site crawl checkups, prioritized SEO fixes, rank tracking, competitor tracking, SERP feature tracking, and more.
Open Site Explorer is a free SEO tool that provides link data. You can explore recent links, internal links, external links, anchor text, link opportunities, and comparative link analysis.
mozRank is an alternative to Google PageRank. Moz also has a tool for researching popular search trends
Moz offers an SEO browser tool called MozBar.
In August 2016 Moz announced that it was dropping the Followerwonk tool to focus more on SEO.
Culture
When it raised funding in 2012, the CEO Rand Fishkin blogged about his personal opinions, doubts and analyses as the company went through the process. In September 2007, more than 400 readers posted opinions on Moz on the CEO's facial hair based on six photos he posted. According to the New York Times, he arrived to the conference in Stockholm "unshaven and bristly" based on the crowd-sourced decision.
Business
The organization's business model is largely based on inbound marketing. The company says that 85% of the trial users of its software come through organic search, social media and referrals. 85% of Moz's revenue comes from SaaS subscriptions.