Whenever we interview someone on Heart of Business, I make a mental note – a marker, if you will – each time a guest says something highly quotable. A good guest will deliver the gold every few minutes and a great guest, if you’re lucky, every 30 or 45 seconds.

After interviewing Moz founder Rand Fishkin on the show recently, and hearing him drop a long chain of seriously wise, guru-level quotes on all things SEO, I not only ran out of markers, I had to entirely rethink how I classify guests. In my mind, there there are now three types of guests on our show: Good guests, great guests … and Rand Fishkin.

Despite suffering from a cold, Fishkin spent more than 30 minutes with us, sometimes speaking broadly about climbing search engine results, and other times drilling down into things typically overlooked, like coming up with an SEO-friendly name for your business. Here are just five things the SEO pro had to say about search, content, and evangelizing to your audience:

It’s time to ditch the mindset of transactional SEO
If you want to succeed in SEO, you have to ditch the tit-for-tat nature of outdated search engine optimization techniques, period. Instead of making a checklist of tasks, completing them, and expecting a certain outcome from each and every transaction, spend more time developing sharable online content and building your brand.

Even a single person can outperform an entire SEO team

For the average owner of a small business, trying out-rank a well-funded SEO team not only seems difficult, it can feel impossible. Fishkin has seen plenty of one-person operations out-play professional SEO teams, proving time and again that fantastic results are not exclusive to the big dogs.

What’s the difference between good content and amazing content? Sharability

Loads of people in the SEO business will tell you that a top priority is to create content that people want. According to Fishkin, however, truly successful content is content that people want to share with others. Focus on creating videos, blog posts and other content that you think friends, family, and strangers, will pass along via Twitter, Facebook, email and other platforms.

Those successful in social media will see future success with SEO

The votes are in: Social media plays a big role in SEO. How big? It’s tough to grasp the scope of social media importance, but Fishkin believes that people who do well with social media will generally see future success with SEO.

SEO is incredibly hard to start, but built for momentum

Here’s the news you might not want to hear: It’s not easy getting started with SEO, and it may take months or years to see the fruits of your labor. In other words, don’t expect instant results, but be patient, persistent, and constantly stay in motion.

Fishkin was the first Heart of Business podcast of 2014, and his interview was a perfect close of a year where SEO, social media and sharable content made all the difference between having a site rise to the front page in search engines or languish in 12th place in a Google search. We owe him huge thanks for sticking out the interview when he was under the weather, and look forward to having him on the show in the future.