INTERVIEW – with Bernard May, CEO of National Positions

Part 2 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: How long do you typically work with a customer?

Bernard May: Typically, it’s ongoing. What a lot of clients will find is that the return on investment is phenomenal, and that once they start getting all the first page rankings they’ll either increase the number of keywords that they’re using, or in the case of a very competitive area—let’s take something like insurance or mortgage or in the United States—and I don’t know how it is in Europe, but—ticket brokers, we have quite a number of those, very, very competitive market, so there are other companies that also are optimizing sites. So what we’ll typically do is put people on a maintenance program, and we have a 97% retention rate. So people stay with us pretty much forever, and they like the service, and they like what they’re getting, and they like the value for money, because—if you consider this like any other marketing spend—the return on investment is phenomenal with internet marketing, and it’s trackable and it’s measurable and everything is quantifiable. As a VP of Marketing and Director of Marketing at other companies, that’s been the biggest frustration when you do a print ad or you do a newspaper ad or you go to a trade show, it’s so much harder to judge the success of your campaign.

Hans Wendland: One of the things you talk about is your excellent customer service program. What are the key success factors that make your customer service program so great?

Bernard May: There are a number of factors: one is having a very strict project plan. The fact that there are a lot of small companies out there is testimony to the fact that this is still a growing and emerging market, but what I’ve tried to do is introduce mechanisms to try and make the customer service area as efficient and effective as possible. So we have web-based tools for everybody around the world to be able to view the project status at any particular point in time. We have a very strict project plan that customers are aware of; for instance, in the first 30 to 45 days there are seven or eight particular tasks that their project will go through so that they’re up and running very, very quickly. And that’s one of the keys as well, especially because we do sell this on a month-to-month basis: we work exceedingly hard in the beginning to get people up and running as quickly as possible, have everything in place A.S.A.P. so that they get the rankings in very short order. And obviously all the other things: good training, and try to hire pleasant people that have good computer skills, those kinds of things, but that goes without saying!

Hans Wendland: You were talking about your customer base being predominantly in the U.S. market. I know you have a presence in India for your programming, and writing in Capetown. You obviously have a very healthy marketplace that you’re growing by leaps and bounds. Are there any plans to transport that to, for example, Europe or Asia?

Bernard May: Definitely. Actually one of our goals this year is to open up a U.K. office. And then we’re at least prospecting in Australia and trying to build up that business as well. But definitely, especially with the weak dollar and the strong Euro or pound, it makes a lot of sense for us to focus there.

Hans Wendland: Do you find that in the UK or European market the SEO offerings are as competitive as they are in the US? Do you find any reason that is geographically specific to opening up an office in the UK?

Bernard May: I believe that the offerings are, on paper, the same. Everyone’s trying to get people top rankings, get them to the top of the search engines. Everything that we’re doing in Europe is the same as what one would do in the US; it’s just a smaller market and in many cases it’s easier. So for instance, trying to optimize for google.co.uk or trying to optimize for .de or .fr domain is actually a lot easier than for 99% of our North American clients who are all doing .com’s or .info’s or etc.—these usually have more of a global perspective—and there are many people all over the world that are still using .com’s although they’re based in a particular geographic area. Also in non-English-language optimization: we have a very large client where we’ve done optimization in multiple languages for them, and it was exceptionally easy to optimize in German and French and Spanish compared to English.

Hans Wendland: One of the things that I’ve been involved with in the past year or so is the mobile and web2mobile world, and obviously now there are sites and tools and applications very much specific for the mobile. Are you focusing on the mobile in any way?

Bernard May: We’re definitely keeping our eyes open on that front. Right now when people search on a mobile, they’re doing it the same way that they’re doing on a regular computer, so they’re still going through Google, and they’re still going through Yahoo!, and the results that are being rendered are still the same. When they render different results—for instance if you go to Yahoo! and you’re looking for restaurants in Los Angeles—it will know that you’re on a mobile and then generate different results. We’re looking closely at that to see what type of variations occur there, and obviously that market is growing substantially. We haven’t really seen anything yet that would mean that we would optimize in a different way.

Hans Wendland: Are you seeing your clients talk about or ask you about potentially optimizing for mobile searches?
Bernard May: No, not yet. I think that people are more interested in how to turn their website into more of an interactive Web 2.0-type media environment: making their websites more interactive, making their websites more like an infomercial with video, how we can have video. Areas that we’re looking at are how to index video and how to add that more to the websites. What you’re finding from our end is we have a dependency on the search engines, so we’re waiting for their moves before we can generate our strategy—it’s very much dependant on what they’re doing.

Hans Wendland: One of the things that I did, of course, is I went onto Google and on Google I typed in some keywords that I thought were relevant such as “market intelligence”, “SEO”, “metadata optimization”, and I didn’t see you guys listed. I didn’t realize that you were spread out in 15 different websites, but I didn’t see National Positions or NetSuccessUSA. Why is that?

Bernard May: This is a whole philosophy and strategy that is very interesting: everything is determined and predicated off of keywords—and this is where small companies can beat out the larger companies—so you need to find your position, your place on the web, by segmenting your market and by selecting particular keywords. So for instance, we have terms like “SEO company” which generates a LOT of traffic, and typically we’re on the first page for that—we’re definitely on the first page always—I can tell you where we are today—we’re number 4 today in the US.

Hans Wendland: So it’s the difference between typing in “SEO” and typing in “SEO company”?

Bernard May: That’s correct, absolutely. Everyone is different.

Hans Wendland: Why wouldn’t you keyword just “SEO”?

Bernard May: The whole idea—and this is where we start with our clients—is to try and figure out the competitive picture of various keywords, so you’re looking at supply and demand: how many people are typing in a particular term and how many people purchase that term, and it makes a lot of sense. For instance, “SEO” is an extremely competitive term. You can imagine that after “gambling” and “sex”, it’s probably the most competitive word on the web. We have to start somewhere, so we chose many of the bigger words, but we didn’t go for the term “SEO” or “search engine”. Some people look for “search engine optimization” but there are about—I can tell you exactly how many people are typing in “SEO company”—let’s have a look at that quickly, I’m going to Wordtracker, which is actually a UK company—and I’ll just give you a quick indication—and this is how some of our smaller companies can beat out larger companies—according to Wordtracker, 39 people type “SEO company” each and every day, so you times that by 30 and you get 1170 searches a month. So this is a very respectable number and you can get lots of leads from that. So those are the types of things that we’re looking at. So literally the keywords you typed were not ones that—let’s take one of those like “metadata optimization” and I would take a guess that not many people are typing that in—let’s have a look. According to Wordtracker, no one types that in—which doesn’t mean “no one” types it in, but it’s below the radar.

Special thanks to Tracy White for editing and transcription.