Interviews
INTERVIEW – with Bernard May, CEO of National Positions
Last modified on 2009-09-09 12:22:26 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
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.
INTERVIEW – with Bernard May, CEO of National Positions
Last modified on 2008-11-07 03:10:36 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
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.
INTERVIEW – with Bernard May, CEO of National Positions
Last modified on 2008-11-07 03:08:13 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
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.
