INTERVIEW – with Bernard May, CEO of National Positions

Part 3 of 3 Need 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: When you work with a client who’s interested in actually working as part of the team to achieve the results that they need to as opposed to an organization that says “Here’s the 800 bucks a month, you go for it” when you have an organization that is really willing to invest their own time as well as their money with you guys, what are the first steps that you take?

Bernard May: Most of our clients after speaking to us for a very short period of time realize that outsourcing this work to us is a lot easier especially with our foreign offices, the question really is, can you hire someone in the US or in Europe at $4 an hour? Probably not. That’s what the whole concept of having a flat world is all about now. In our Indian office, many of the people that join there come from IIT, which is the Indian Institute of Technology which is like our MITs really phenomenal. Obviously there are varying levels of expertise that people have, but much of the work that we’re doing is very tedious and very time-consuming. Yes, someone could do the metatags and title tags and write content for their website, but would they like to do that, or would they rather have someone write articles for them in South Africa where they could do it at a third of the price? Many times people do blogging themselves; we have a service where for $250 a month, you can have someone every business day do your blogs. Is it worth the $10 a day to do it, and to remember to do it, and to do it effectively, or to outsource it? We do have a lot of clients that have their website to a particular point: they cannot do the linking portion of it, and they’ll just outsource the linking portion, so we do do that part. And then many people will do their own pay-per-click advertising, for instance, or they may also do their own affiliate marketing.

Hans Wendland: One of the things that you talk about is email marketing, and of course the big row particularly here in Europe and I suspect in the States as well is all about spam. How do you differentiate your email marketing programs with what is typically perceived as spam? And more importantly, how are your clients end users able to make that distinction? One of the things that brought me to you actually was an email that was sent to me. It happened to come just at the right time, at the right place, and it was very well-written and it cost me very little time to follow up and with excellent results, so I commend you for that. How do you make that differentiation, and how do your clients end users make that distinction?

Bernard May: I think the place to start is with the legal definition of spam. We very closely, for all campaigns that we do, follow the federal guidelines of the CAN-SPAM legislation. The way I would define the difference between unsolicited email and spam is that spam you have no way of opting out, no way of asking to be removed from a list. Unsolicited emails, yes, it’s the same as junk mail you never asked for it, but potentially Europe has an interest in it. In our case what were doing is looking for people who aren’t ranked well, that are in specific industries, and so we do do a targeted email campaign to people that we think we can help.

Hans Wendland: What are your response percentages on these email campaigns?

Bernard May: Email has very, very low percentages, so a tenth of 1% would be considered good. Email is a very grey area, and we typically don’t offer that service anymore to many of our clients because it takes a lot of expertise, and a certain amount of endurance as well, to be able to effectively handle it.

Hans Wendland: To get the results that people expect.

Bernard May: Right. Unfortunately it has a bad name, and much of it has to do with people who’ve been spamming people over and over and over, emailing the same people. We try not to email people over and over: one-time email, sometimes we’ll follow up.

Hans Wendland: On your site you speak about offering a brand identity service that focuses on the evolution of value propositions, positioning statements and emotional essence. What is your brand identity offering about, do you work with agencies, and is it something that you do often?

Bernard May: It’s something that we’ve advertised since the inception of our company and we really haven’t had anyone utilize those services, but I do have a lot of comments about branding and positioning. Anybody can be a winner on the Internet. It doesn’t matter how big you are, whether you’re a two-person business working out of your garage or you’ve got 200,000 people working for you worldwide. What you need to do is very specifically know what your unique selling proposition is, what you’re selling. Google, and I’d say all the major search engines, have determined what they consider to be websites that they like. Google likes lots of content; they like a website that has a specific subject area. So say, for instance, you’re selling cars: they prefer to have someone who’s selling a specific brand of cars. If you’re selling luxury cars, they prefer a site that has to do with Porsche to a site for luxury cars or cars in general, so the more specialized you are, the more specific you are in what you’re selling, the better you can do on the web. So much of what we teach people is how to organize their website around subject areas, and trying to build their brand around a particular set of keywords. This is a whole new area that most people don’t understand and haven’t quite fathomed. In fact [many people are] trying to open up a store online that has whatever they were selling offline, and many times it’s much more effective to have subject-specific websites, and then those subjects very, very clearly delineated within the website itself. When you think of branding in the true sense you think of a particular brand name that on the Internet today isn’t as important because people are searching for results. So say, for instance, you’re looking for an SEO company, and you’re typing in the term SEO company, does it matter that the company is called National Positions or NetSuccess or Regional Internet Marketing, which actually all belong to National Positions? It doesn’t really matter. What you’re getting from Google is an implied value of your brand by just coming to the top of the search engines. It’s a very interesting concept.

Hans Wendland: It really is. I’ve just started to really understand it. I’ve had a great time speaking with you it’s been very, very helpful and the information is extremely valuable. Thank you very much for your time!

Special thanks to Tracy White for editing and transcription.