Moz trims product line to focus on search, lays off 28% of staff

Moz, a company many SEOs have grown to love, announced they have made a strategic change to focus more on search, which means they are killing off Moz Content and Followerwonk.

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Moz has announced they are refocusing their toolset platform to focus on search. That means they are no longer going to offer the Moz Content or Followerwonk tools and that they are laying off 28 percent of their workforce.

Sarah Bird, the CEO of Moz, said “after a lot of analysis and soul searching, we decided to radically simplify our strategy to re-focus on what we love and what our customers value from us: search.” She said this focus will help the company build better and great search tools, which they were founded on and continue to be most well-known for.

The sad part is that 28 percent of the Moz staff will be let go. Many of those people are people our community has grown to love. Sarah Bird called that part of the change in Moz’s strategy the “gut-wrenchingly painful part.” Having to let go of any employee is hard, but almost one-third of your staff gone in one decision is a sad thing. Sarah said they will be providing those who have been let go with “severance, coaching, and assistance finding new roles.”

Ultimately, Sarah and the management team at Moz believe this will lead to a better set of tools for the search industry and a stronger company.

(Photo by Thomas Ballantyne and used via Creative Commons license.)


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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