Dear Mr. Rand Fishkin,
Long-time writer/listener, and first-time love note scribbler, here.
To start, our agency wouldn’t exist today if it wasn’t for you. The dozens (hundreds?) of people who directly benefit from working with or for us simply wouldn’t. On a personal level, I probably would have only risen to the status of adjunct professor (while a noble profession, not one I’d be any good at) instead of the almighty content marketing agency owner. My kids wouldn’t respect me, my wife wouldn’t love me, and my cats would probably feel the same way about me: ennui. I certainly wouldn’t have mastered the art of hyperbole.
Seriously though, in 2013 I lucked my way into an interview for a copywriting job at a marking firm. I had one major hurdle to overcome, though: I knew nothing about SEO. I didn’t even know what the letters meant. So I took a Moz crash course on SEO the night before, LIED during the interview, got the job, and now my wife loves me.
What I learned from your Moz content and now your prolific SparkToro articles has been a guiding post for Content Workshop’s movement through the content marketing universe.
Let me tell you more…
Scanned by Robots but Written for Humans: 2013-2015
When I applied for that first job in 2013, I actually Googled, “What is SEO” (true story), and stumbled across your Beginner’s Guide to SEO. I printed it all out (because that’s what you did to consume lengthy content back then), highlighted and pored over the pages for two days, and got through the interview.
I got the job, and it set me on a path that eventually led to starting my own company. Content Workshop wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for your guide getting me through that first interview.
The first things I learned from that crash course in SEO were the basics: how to leverage keywords, alt text, and visual cues like headers and bold words. How to use SEO to tell the robots crawling through websites, “This is what this article is about. Now put it in front of the humans who are searching for this kind of content.”
But even more than basic how-to knowledge, the biggest lesson I gleaned from your work was that context matters. Even though SEO means robots are scanning our digital content, we’re not really writing for those robots.
We’re writing for humans.
The robot-crawlers are like a race of SEO gatekeepers: we have to get past them in order to put our content in front of the humans. Once the humans start reading, we want them to benefit from the content, so we write first for them. But people don’t want word salads of robot-friendly keywords–people want stories.
When I started Content Workshop, your story-is-king principle laid the foundation for our approach to writing. Even then, that principle began to set us apart: We didn’t create content, then go back through and insert keywords, doing linguistic gymnastics to make bizarre phrases halfway fit—we create our content with keywords in mind from the start (the real questions real people are really asking). That ongoing philosophy helps us create meaningful content with real value.
No Substitute for a Story Well-Told: 2015-2017
In 2015, I graduated from an MFA program at the University of Tampa and found myself in the same boat alongside some grad-school-friends-turned-freelancers. We were all drawn to creative pursuits, but we also needed to pay real-world bills. At the time, we thought, “Hey, we can make some money if we sell our creative writing experience commercially as a group.” While I was working as a freelancer for a couple of years under the Content Workshop moniker, it was tough to land large clients. We figured they might take us seriously if we called ourselves a company. Lo and behold, we became a real company, and Content Workshop began to shape a larger identity.
Here’s where you reenter our story, Rand: In those early days, we were inspired by your Whiteboard Fridays. You encouraged us to write valuable pieces and every week, you practiced what you preached by offering valuable video content for your audience. As part of your audience, we found your content truly valuable. We took your advice and example to heart—in fact, we built our business upon it.
From the beginning, we decided there’s no substitute for a story well-told. That foundational premise didn’t just affect the way we wrote our pieces; it also affected the kinds of writers we hired. To this day, we look for people who are natural storytellers first, not marketers. We can teach good writers how to employ SEO and marketing principles, but we can’t teach average writers how to tell compelling stories.
If you can’t build a narrative thread, it doesn’t matter how many marketing classes you took in college. It’s still our mission to find the best storytellers and train them how to write commercially so we can put value first in all we produce.
Chatter Is the Topic, SEO Is a By-Product: 2018-2020
As our company grew, we continued learning from you. Your growth helped to direct ours. In 2018, when you founded SparkToro, you took the leap of leaving the traditional keyword-heavy approach so you could explore another way to attract an audience: by focusing on the people themselves and what they were already talking about.
Your work with SparkToro inspired a paradigm shift in content ideation: In the past, marketers had obsessively focused on producing SEO-driven content strategy. They started from the question, How do we write content around these keywords? But you started asking a different question: What is our target audience talking about, and how do we create valuable content in that conversation while also hitting the keywords? The keywords became a secondary target —almost a by-product of writing the right way—rather than the primary factor used to attract an audience.
As you were transitioning away from Moz and into SparkToro, we were transitioning too, learning to create content differently than many of our marketing peers: When we ideate content for our clients, chatter inspires the topics, and SEO is secondary. We’ve found that when we engage in the right conversations, SEO falls into line more easily. The hard parts—the most important parts—are telling the story, understanding our audience, and determining how to attract them.
In 2018, the same year you published your book Lost and Founder, I published mine, Kingmakers: A Content Marketing Story, which opened us up to many more clients, and In 2019, I quit my full-time job to focus on Content Workshop exclusively.
Google Lies, So Just Do Your Thing: 2021-2024
As our company has grown, so has our conviction that audience and story matter above all. More than SEO. More than keywords. More than marketing tricks and manipulations.
Over the past few years, this methodology has been validated time and again as the world has peeked behind the curtain of Google’s secretive algorithms. First, there was the Department of Justice’s investigation, which recommended that Google be required to sell Chrome to prevent a monopolistic search environment. Then came the leaked Google Search API documents, which a Google insider shared with you, Rand, and you, in turn, shared with the world. (Again, our heartfelt thanks—yet another reason we penned this letter.) We now know that about sixty percent of Google searches never leave a Google-owned site. This deeply affects smaller websites that rely on organic searches to attract readers and consumers.
What did we learn from all this? In a nutshell: audience and story trump every other metric. (Exactly what you’ve been saying all along.) And so we at Content Workshop have doubled down on audience more than ever. We’re even more convinced that serving content for SEO isn’t effective. Now that we’ve learned more about Google’s misleading algorithm, we realize the likelihood of people actually clicking on links is fairly low. It’s not that we don’t write for SEO anymore, but we are cautious and skeptical. We don’t obsess over any single metric–unless that metric is “valuable content.”
We also don’t buy into the inflated hype (and fear) surrounding AI. We’ve learned that AI isn’t good at telling stories on its own–people are good at telling stories. AI is a tool just like anything else. Just as a pen needs a fantastic writer to wield it and give it power, so AI needs a fantastic writer and editor to wield it and give it power. As a company of classically trained writers, we’re neither threatened nor particularly allured by AI.
Back to your influence, Rand: In 2023 we went all-in on Moz as our source for measurement. We’ve always used Moz alongside other sources, but last year, we went all-in because Moz creates its own information. Moz helps us focus on domain and page authority, which is less influenced by the data Google produces and more on maximizing value on every page.
Grace in All Things: 2025 and On
Rand, you’ve been beating a powerful drum for years now, marching to your own trend-setting rhythm: Put value first. Provide focused content. Give away your best advice.
Or, as we like to say at Content Workshop, show grace in all things. In other words, do the right thing.
Do it even if you can’t measure it.
Do it simply because it’s the right thing to do.
Maybe the right thing is the generous thing, the honest thing, or the thought-provoking thing.
Maybe it’s the thing that makes the world a slightly better place.
Or maybe it’s the choices we make as we grow our company: the quality of work we provide, the caliber of people we hire, and the kind of partners and clients we choose to work with.
As Content Workshop enters our twelfth year of business, we are growing fast. All the hard work of living by our value-first mantra is paying off. We survived the Covid years and came back stronger than ever. Now, we’re able to charge a premium for our services because we offer premium services. We’re able to pick and choose who we want to work with because we have values, and we don’t need to work with just anybody. We aren’t forced to negotiate and bid on lower-return work. We’re able to offer a quality of life to our team members and freelancers that most companies aren’t able to provide because they’re way too concerned about margin. We don’t have to play in the “who can do it cheapest and fastest thanks to AI shortcuts” mud. And we don’t view other content agencies as competition—there are plenty of great agencies out there. But they are not our competition. Our competition is shitty content. We are committed to producing different content, the best and most valuable content. As it has from the beginning, it all comes back to value.
Rand, we learned this from you on day one (actually several years before day one, if you count the crash-course-in-SEO-courtesy-of-Rand-Fishkin-before-my-first-job scenario). You set a meaningful course for our company, and we’re carrying it forward into our future.
As we’re experiencing greater success, we feel a heavier responsibility. It’s sobering to realize that the average person may consume more commercial content than any other type of content in their lifetime. If that’s the case, we have a duty as a company—more, as individuals and intellectuals— to produce content that raises the bar. We are what we eat, right? What we consume is who we become. At Content Workshop, we consider it our duty to produce content that elevates the level of discussion. In a world that often feels like it’s trending down, we want to lift people up.
Call me quixotic if you like, but I’m on a mission to improve the quality, depth, and integrity of whatever conversations my company and I engage in. I don’t know if I can bring the whole world along with me, that may be my greater-fool Achilles heal, but we have people here who embrace the concept of how powerful and meaningful—let me wax briefly poetic and say how world-changing—great content can be.
And when I really stop to think about it, our mission, values, and success all connect back to the lessons we’ve learned from Rand Fishkin. And that’s why we love you.
Thanks for your years of unknown support!
Love,
David J Ebner
President & Founder – Content Workshop
