INTERVIEW – with Bernard May, CEO of National Positions

Part 1 of 3Need an internet marketing strategy that works? National Positions offers some of the best Search Engine Optimization services in the industry. Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Bernard May, CEO of National Positions and got an education on SEO services.

Hans Wendland: The limited knowledge I have of National Positions is what I’ve read on the web, so can you start off with a little bit of background?

Bernard May: We’re a company of just over 200 people, based in Los Angeles, with offices in New Delhi and in South Africa. The whole philosophy is to try and provide services to people in the US, in Europe and in Australia where we can still give people a good return on their investment. So we’ve found that having staff in India and in South Africa is a place where the dollar-rand and the dollar-rupee is still fairly strong, which is an issue for us here in the US. We started the company about four years ago. My background is that I’ve always been in high-tech companies; I used to run a couple of the lines of the Norton Anti-Virus product, in Santa Monica, California, which is here in L.A. I then worked for a publicly traded company called US Search, and they sold information over the web, and that’s how I really got into this whole thing.Then we started this company four years ago, literally started out of my home—the good old US starting-from-out-of-your-garage type of thing—with some of my contacts that I had in India during the time that I worked for Symantec. So I used that team, and it’s just grown and grown up to the point now where we do most of our sales and customer service here in the US, all the programming is done in India, and all the writing—and most of it is in English, although we do have some foreign language writing in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, etc.—most of the writing that we do is in English and that’s done in South Africa, in Capetown.It’s been quite a phenomenal success story, in that we’ve grown very, very fast, and there’s a huge demand for this: anybody who’s got a website and wants to get it promoted needs a service like ours.

Hans Wendland: And did you start by tackling larger clients, corporate clients? Or the middle ranks? How did you take off?

Bernard May: I think we’ve always targeted the smaller clients, smaller companies. I’d say our sweet spot is companies with ten employees. And we have quite a lot of larger clients that have come along the way, but the small- to medium-sized companies are really where most of our clients come from. And we have 400+ clients right now.

Hans Wendland: Mostly based in the States?

Bernard May: Mostly based in the US and Canada. We have a couple in the UK, and we have one or two in Australia. Mostly North America though.

Hans Wendland: One of the first things I did was crawl the web for National Positions, and I found something called NetSuccessUSA, and it seems to have the same content. Can you tell me about what the difference is between National Positions and NetSuccessUSA?

Bernard May: There is no difference, they’re part of the same company, they’re the same sites. One of the questions might be “Why do you have two of the same sites?” In fact we probably have fifteen of the same sites out there, and over time we want to change them. But one of the strategies that people have successfully implemented is that you can be a small player, for instance an insurance broker in California who has five different websites maybe positioned slightly differently, or positioned exactly the same, where that person could have a ranking position of 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 all on the first page, so that is not a strategy that I think Google likes—in fact I know they don’t like it. I don’t know how things are in Europe with Yellow Pages, but this is a strategy that a lot of people took in the States: say you had a locksmith, he might be ABC Locksmith, but he may also have John’s Locksmith, and Hans’ Locksmith, Bernard’s Locksmith, they all have different telephone numbers but they all ring in to the same place, so he had multiple places on the web to possibly get traffic.

Hans Wendland: Is National Positions a publicly-traded company?

Bernard May: No, it isn’t.

Hans Wendland: Are your expectations to go towards that direction?

Bernard May: The expectation is probably that we would be more a buy-out opportunity for a company than to go public, and I’ve been through the whole going-public process so I’m not that excited about it. But, no, I don’t think that we’re even anywhere close to thinking about that right now.

Hans Wendland: Are you pushed by venture?

Bernard May: No, we’re not, in fact we’re entirely self-funded.

Hans Wendland: You say that National Positions is one of the fastest-growing SEO companies in America. Can you quantify that with some revenue figures? Or how can you quantify that?Bernard May: I can quantify it by just growth rate—we grew by about 300% last year, and this year it’s going absolutely gangbusters—we’re adding three to five customers a day, so it’s really, really rapid growth. Can I quantify it—no, not really, but we do have a very good value proposition and a very good product, and so the growth has been phenomenal.

Hans Wendland: Speaking of growth, where do you see you biggest revenue growth potential within the next 18 months?

Bernard May: I think the biggest one is organic search or what we call S-E-O [SEO = Search Engine Optimization], that is the biggest area. We do have some other portions of our company that are growing very fast, and those are areas such as online video—we have a website called National Video Works [nationalvideoworks.com] which we have just launched, and there are a bunch of conversion tools as well. One of the issues with driving a lot of traffic to people’s websites is people don’t know how to convert the traffic, and so that’s probably our other area of focus that I think is going to grow fairly quickly as well.

Hans Wendland: Can you elaborate on that?

Bernard May: Yes, there are really two sides of the equation in Internet marketing. The one is obviously getting people to a person’s website, the other is knowing what to position, what products and how you’re offering your products—how you interact with visitors to turn them into paying customers or into a lead. There are various factors which are fairly easy to implement: where to place a telephone number, how to add forms, making sure that you have the appropriate analytics placed on the website so that you can understand what’s happening to the traffic. So we’ve launched a new product, it’s called National Sales Booster, and you can read about it at nationalsalesbooster.com. Both of those are different areas that I believe are going to be growing pretty substantially. We’re also launching more of a local search—I don’t know how big that is in Europe, but that’s becoming more and more important for smaller companies and individuals, for instance a lot of self-proprietors, attorneys—I know there are restrictions overseas in having attorneys advertise, but in the US it’s a big thing—so having geographic searches is a challenge, and I see a lot of growth there as well.

Hans Wendland: On the website I see that you talk several times about the LA SEO-enabled  internet marketing philosophy. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Bernard May: Yes, our philosophy is obviously to drive people to the top of the search engines, and the way we do it is through three main areas. One side is on-site programming. Our philosophy is really to generate lots of relevant in-bound links for companies. If you had to differentiate what we can do versus most other SEO companies, it’s creating good, relevant in-bound links and lots of them.

Hans Wendland: That’s very time-consuming.

Bernard May: Right. That is very time-consuming, and it’s very expensive.

Hans Wendland: It’s a manual process, is it not?

Bernard May: Right, it is. And those people that have attempted doing this in an automated fashion typically fail, and it’s not very effective. The whole idea is that we’re optimizing a site, so we have to make it look natural, and we have to make it not seem contrived to the search engines.

Hans Wendland: One of the searches that I did where you guys cropped up was a marketing event in the UK, where I was really baffled by the fact that there were over 70 SEO companies listed there. How can your customers filter through such a competitive environment and find the right SEO partner?

Bernard May: That is one of the problems, and one of the issues as well is that there are a lot of unscrupulous players out there, and a lot of people like you are mentioning not understanding what they’re offering because they’re trying to make it very mysterious, and very black box, and for the most part it’s because they don’t know what they’re doing. Really with White Hat SEO, which is ethical SEO and what we do, it’s very straightforward: there’s the content, there’s the linking, and there’s on-site programming, and this is genuinely what Google, Yahoo! and Amazon want. So what we try to do is reduce the amount of risk associated with working with an SEO company. We’re one of the few, the only ones that I know of that do everything on a month-to-month basis, don’t lock people into a long-term contract, don’t have any up-front fees, which is often the way that a lot of our competitors do it: they’ll charge a big up-front fee for doing the programming, for doing the writing if they’re doing any of that, and then they’ll lock people in for six or twelve months, and then at the six to twelve month mark people don’t have the results, and then what do they do? They have no recourse really.

Special thanks to Tracy White for editing and transcription.