In this episode you can hear the OMReport.com interview with Greg Boser from BlueGlass.
OMReport.com - Greg Boser
The interview is also available on iTunes and on Youtube.
Also a transcription of the podcast is included in the post.
Transcription of the post:
Alpar: Alright, we’re at the OM-Report and this time it’s with Greg Boser. Greg, can you introduce yourself?
Boser: My name’s Greg. I’m an SEO guy.
Alpar: Okay.
Boser: And I actually- my actual job is President of Products and Services for BlueGlass Interactive so, I’m not technically and SEO guy anymore but I still run the strategy team at BlueGlass and…
Alpar: So how many people does BlueGlass…
Boser: Probably about 45 – last count, give or take.
Alpar: And it’s pretty much a new brand, right, in the business.
Boser: Yeah, it’s- we like to call it a mash-up kind of, so it’s- several of my partners, we all had consultancies individually and then a year ago – June – four of them got together and merged and created BlueGlass and then I met them here. I already knew them but they came to Oktoberfest last year and started talking to me about coming in and running the Search Division and over a few beers that sounded like a good idea. So I said yes and merged my company into it and now a year later- like I said, I moved out of the Search and I run the Products and the Services so we’re developing some tools and stuff like that and then I also…
Alpar: Tools like monitoring or like work-flow management tools or what kind of tools?
Boser: Yeah, kind of enterprise level SEO and marketing tools to manage that, a lot of the processes that I’ve used, I’ve been doing this since I don’t know, ’96, so basically to…
Alpar: Before there were search engines, basically.
Boser: Before, yeah, before- back when we used to argue about the name SEO, before the phrase even existed. So there’s not very many of us back then and so over the years, just a lot of the methodologies that we put together and just the internal tools that we had at my old company, we decided…
Alpar: Can you probably give like one really, really specific example? You know without giving away too much? Like what would be such a tool?
Boser: Yeah. Ah, the thing that we’ve been…
Alpar: That you would think, ‘Wow we have that and it’s really cool.’
Boser: Yeah, the thing that we’ve been working on this year a lot is- we had an internal tool, visibility tool that basically would go out and pull positions but it also factored like market share of the engine, average click-through rate, we had some data…
Alpar: What positions…
Boser: Yeah, we had some data that I got from…
Alpar: Would you differentiate…
Boser: Drinking with the Search people over the years, right? As far as percentage of clicks and so we would use a…
Alpar: Wasn’t there like leakage a while ago, like a year or a year and a half ago?
Boser: Yeah and there was AOL data, so part of that was factored in there and we used to use that in my company to do performance-based contracts where we could come in and baseline and establish that there was a trust…
Alpar: And they would trust your visibility score? Could they trust your visibility score? I mean, was there- because I think your customers need to have like a certain level of expertise in order to be willing to let themselves, you know… You know, put their lock on your visibility index without being afraid of you manipulating something, you know?
Boser: Yeah… The way that we did it, so, in those contracts we would be fully transparent and disclose how we calculated it. So if they wanted to check it, I mean they could actually do the math manually if they wanted to so there is definitely in that kind of model a bit of client education but we found it was- you know…
Alpar: Are clients in the US, in general that- you know, far out I mean d-
Boser: Yeah, I mean I was…
Alpar: Or is it a lot of education, actually?
Boser: For me, personally it wasn’t but I tended to get, you know, when you’ve been doing it long enough, like if somebody calls me…
Alpar: Yes, yes, yes.
Boser: You know you’re like ‘I don’t want to take a lot of clients that are new to the space.’ They’ve usually been referred by somebody so probably a little higher calibre client as far as knowledge than some places but it was very interesting because I was really the only- not too many SEO’s work that way and…
Alpar: You know, in Germany and in some parts of Europe, many work that way since about three years or so?
Boser: Really?
Alpar: There are like three tools that provide visibility index with usually a…
Boser: Yup, like a Sistrix and um…
Alpar: Sistrix, Searchmetrics and then there’s like two or three others.
Boser: So yeah, ours is…
Alpar: Is it similar…
Boser: It was similar…
Alpar: But with a custom keyword base, you know, that’s adjusted to the client? Is that how you figured it out?
Boser: Right, so basically what we do is- in those kind of contracts- is we establish a bucket of phrases that the client agrees on, we basically take a snap-shot of what we feel represents the majority of the search traffic – usually 50 to a hundred phrases – and their estimated volume as far as search traffic so we can quantify how much a phrase is worth and then our payment system and our bonuses would be based on how they rank for that whole body of phrases, so it would be a global visibility score for the whole domain, so we could run that and then…
Alpar: But in the keyword space of this client.
Boser: Right, so we can run for this and it is … Apples, right? For all your apple keywords, you’re the 27th most visible site on the web and we can see how big the gaps are between the scores, so we could look at that and be able to get an idea…
Alpar: So usually…
Boser: What it might take to get him to move and then what we would do is we’d establish that baseline and then we usually start like on a twelve month contract and we would have a certain level that we would have to reach increasing that score over that twelve months and if we hit that, then the contract would get extended and we’d have a new metrics, so it usually worked out to be about three year engagement if we hit our number. And we would come in and we’d start working for probably
Alpar: They would pay a fixed fee and an additional bonus just to reach the- if they hit the buttons?
Boser: Yeah so, I- it was basically about 60 percent less than what I would charge on a normal consulting gig so, I’d work for cheaper up front and with the bonus tier, obviously…
Alpar: You can get over it.
Boser: Yeah and the nice thing is at the end of those- the tail-end of those kind of contracts, because it was a small shop that was really the only way I could scale and so the nice thing is, when you’re on the tail-end, you don’t really have to do a lot of work and they’re paying significantly more than you would have charged them… So it ends up working out to be about 3.5X return on it. The upside for them is, if we don’t hit that metric in that first year then they…
Alpar: That’s cheap for them.
Boser: Then they can walk away and they paid a lot less than they would have to other firms. So, we took that tool that was part of things that I brought into the BlueGlass thing and right when I got to BlueGlass, Google rolled out all their localization stuff in the States. And not only including Google Place-Listings but also flavoring the organic listings based on where you’re searching from.
Alpar: And then which kind of searches they are because some searches are obviously local. If you’re looking for a hairdresser, well, you’re obviously not looking for hairdressers but…
Boser: The big thing that they- the changes they made is they started taking queries that didn’t have a GEO…
Alpar: Yes, yes, yes.
Boser: qualifier to it.
Alpar: But they can figure out which queries usually would have a GEO qualifier and then blend in some local results in those.
Boser: Yeah and so we got really fascinated by it and then the other thing they did is they gave everybody a location – you could no longer opt-out of it. So it used to be, you’d be logged in to get that location thing and so for our bots that crawled and create this visibility score, they would just not take cookies so you could get an accurate snapshot. Then what happened is even bots have cookie- or location now. So all of a sudden we noticed- I came in one day and our bots at the time were in Dallas, Texas and all the data was skewed. I started seeing all these Texas domains and local Dallas, all these sites and organic! So, through the numbers I was like ‘Wow, that’s… How do we? We can’t do this model anymore because it’s- how do we get accurate data like that?’ So that got us on the mission to rebuild this tool to where we can select and run that same thing on dozens of different GEOs, and qualify them based on population and… So basically, to do it, it’s, you know, we want to go look at the top 50 US Metros and see how you rank in each one. So now that bucket of a hundred words becomes- you have to query that 50 different times.
Alpar: Understood.
Boser: So from a scalability standpoint, it’s been…
Alpar: Just a lot more detail and then you have to work with that.
Boser: Yeah, it’s more requests to Google, so not getting banned and managing the IP’s so that’s what we’ve been working on this last year since I’ve been there and we’re just getting ready to- we’re rolling out internally now and it’ll be fully operational by January but also ties in, so not only can you score it, you can pass the data anyway. So we can now look at stuff as like, what kind of sites rank in cities with less than a thousand- a hundred thousand people in them, right? And we can start seeing trends and tying and linking profiles and really now understanding what’s- how Google’s driving all that and now we can go back to doing the performance-based stuff but it’s very interesting because you mentioned Searchmetrics and I had a call with him on Monday and I love their stuff but the data they gave- or anybody, it’s not just them- anybody that’s doing it based on crawling.com, it’s so different than what people are actually seeing.
Alpar: Yes, from the services.
Boser: Yeah, because it’s… So what I find is, clients will be like, ‘Okay, my traffic’s dropped but I rank, they see themselves ranking,’ they don’t know where they’re not, where they’re not so now we’re going to be able to give them very micro-focussed information on that and be able to build strategies around that so… and that’s going to roll with the rest of our tool suite which will do backlinks and you know, be able to go take those sites, query them, get all the backlinks, all that kind of stuff. I’m hoping we’re going to start working with Searchmetrics, kind of jointly and offering their tool to clients as well which is very complimentary with the stuff we’re doing. So hopefully in a year they’re going to add some API’s and we’re going to be able to- I’d love to use them as our data provider, they’re- I really love their stuff and I think matched up with our ability to bring that kind of thing to the table from the States would be pretty powerful so… And then we’re going to get back into doing some performance-based stuff and…
Alpar: If you look at BlueGlass it seems like it’s like a- it’s a band of superstars – I would call it – and it’s funny because usually for me, sometimes you either have like single persons that have themselves as a brand of some sort and then there are these one-man consulting armies, I would call them, that you know, yeah.
Boser: Definitely been there.
Alpar: You know what I mean? And then some of those guys, then they tend to, you know, some are willing or some prefer to build an organisation around that, to kind of scale it a little bit and you bring it into structure, but then again you know, this is not as easy as well but I’m not aware of- usually, like each of the agencies, many times they’re branded by like a single- one specific single person and then there’s this BlueGlass thing that just shows up and it’s- isn’t it confusing? I mean, do you have to build a brand or are you guys like…
Boser: That’s interesting, that’s- those are great … and it, you know, the number one comment- and even since I was the last person to join, even though they’re all my friends, when I first started it was like, ‘That’s a lot of chiefs, not a lot of bread.’ There’s a lot of ego there, you know what I mean, it’s like everybody’s well-know, been doing it for a long time, it’s like I can see prob- like how is that going to work? And…
Alpar: But what was the idea behind it? Do you think it’s that the certain sized companies are not willing to work with individuals and this is why you know it does make more sense to team up?
Boser: Well it’s a little bit of that so yeah it’s interesting. I mean in a small shop, typically what happens is you get projects that are too big and we already outsource to each other anyway, so my focus was primarily organic SEO – that’s what I’m known for and so when I’d have Social Media stuff, these are guys I would refer clients to or sun-contract them and then there was in many of your larger agencies, and they do a lot of outsourcing to vendors as well, so it really was a kind-of a one-stop place where you could get it all. So that was the idea, like, the sum of the parts could be more powerful than us individually. The challenges in doing that have been, you know, a lot of the same things that everybody thought. It’s like it was, then you come in and not only that, not only are you merging up the personalities and the egos of the people that ran those companies but you’re also merging employees and systems and everything and they came out of the gate with a ton of- they already had- we never shut down at all.
Alpar: The clients.
Boser: Yeah, so out of the gate, you know, so I stepped in BlueGlass, I had like over 120 clients and very large and fast-moving.
Alpar: And did you all- did you all switch contracts from the individuals to BlueGlass? Did you go all the way?
Boser: Most did, yeah, yeah.
Alpar: How does that work?
Boser: I didn’t bring a lot of clients into it at the time but the other companies did and… So there was a bit of chaos and it took- we learned a lot over the years of how to…
Alpar: You know these one-man SEO armies, they also sometimes- they work out of home, they’re probably not even used to working in an office, going into an office each day. Did you have these cases as well? Or not so much.
Boser: So I still work from my home.
Alpar: Oh, okay.
Boser: Because I’m on the West Coast but everybody else is- most of everybody else is in our office in Tampa. We have an office in downtown LA that I go to, well not every day but primarily for programmers so like the guy that came with me from my company is our VP of Products, he’s in LA and him and I go to that office and work but it’s not a regular daily thing but everybody else was already in Tampa, pretty much because Dave’s company, Search & Social, he’d merged with Lauren Baker previously so they were already working in that office. Chris and Daniel Winfield came down – they actually relocated from New York so they live in Tampa and they’re in the office daily. So I’m- I’m really the only one that- other partners- it’s not …
Alpar: Okay, so I was bitching about you when I was asking that question. I’m sorry, I didn’t know! I- you should have given me a sign, I would have stopped it.
Boser: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it’s interesting because… I’ve done- I’ve done both, I’ve worked from home I- we had an office for many years and then in the credit crunch thing we ended up shutting the office down and just decided to get lean and not be wasteful ‘cause we were wasting money like everybody was in that time it was- and so I was back working from home and it’s an interesting adjustment. And then I also have the East Coast, West Coast thing so I get up a lot earlier now than I ever used to, to just make sure that I’m available for more of the day with my team back there, so that was a interesting thing, not…
Alpar: So how do you coordinate? Mostly like Skype or some video chat?
Boser: We do a lot of Skype, we do video chat, Chris Winfield and I have daily management meetings – the two of us ‘cause with the new structure now and Dave and some of the other partners, we spun off a new venture called Steelcast that is a joint venture between us and some other people here in this room and so Dave, so there’s less partners running BlueGlass proper now. Dave took the stuff that he was working on and we set him up over there, they’re doing a lot of vendor stuff for us now, we’re getting much…
Alpar: What do you mean by vendor stuff?
Boser: Ah just stuff that’s like production so we do a lot of link-building.
Alpar: Okay.
Boser: The actual work of going out and doing those links so that kind of stuff is moving to Steel- we came up with the idea that as the reason agencies…
Alpar: Just a- just a funny thought – imagine one of the partners brought in some client and now, this- you know, the client moved to BlueGlass and now the partner used to work for the client, he’s now going to Steelcast. Isn’t that- do you have some, you know, explanatory work to do with the clients or do they all take it well?
Boser: No, you know… That’s certainly…
Alpar: they can say like ‘Wait, wait, wait, my man is going away! Well I have a contract with him, how can he go away?’
Boser: One of the hardest issues when you’re a consultant is that your clients do get a lot of real personal time, right? In this kind of model, there is an adjustment period there. You know, having clients that come to you because they like- it’s interesting now, I still this quite a bit. My job at BlueGlass is really far beyond SEO. I actually … with Chris managing .. its more like being a boss.
Alpar: So it’s more like management. Yes it’s management because…
Boser: Being the boss, you know what I mean, doing management kind of stuff. Like I said, I still stay probably more active in it that I should but I still lead and do consulting in the strategy part for organic search.
Alpar: But if clients are big, they want to talk to the boss.
Boser: Yes. Yes, and…
Alpar: They need to face up to the boss and not just to somebody from the company, right? They want some face time, some of that premium face time.
Boser: Absolutely and it’s- and it’s important to take the time- we have a lot of really smart, young talent.
Alpar: How do you recruit them? Are they also like big egos who had huge social media visibility before or are they- you just recruit them young?
Boser: We’re very big on- we always try to hire within at first and the idea, especially now, we’ve created this separation with BlueGlass is that we- one of the things we did shortly after I got here is we ditched the individual channels. Like, so we used to have- I was the VP of Search and then Lauren was VP of Social Media and we kind of ran as individual departments and we didn’t always communicate well with each other. We’d have larger clients and we’re all working on it but sometimes, you know, and then I think it’s all so integrated now, that we merged all that into one Services union…
Alpar: So you have like one Key-Accounter that are talking to a client and then…
Boser: And we have- we really do attack it as a group project – the whole company, the whole- we have a strategy team now that crosses social search and everything. So when we get a new client we really do map out the plan from the top down and the whole company’s involved in doing that and everybody- we’re much more transparent, everybody knows what everybody else is doing, so we can really leverage our collective brain pool because that’s what we think is our advantage, is that we can come up with good ideas and… So it took a while to work out, you know, how to structure it. The analogy I already- always give my partners is like- trying to make these changes is kind of like fixing the flat tyre on a car whole you’re driving 50 miles an hour, right? It’s getting the time so we slowly trimmed down the number of clients, the types of clients we change; we try to work with fewer and…
Alpar: Bigger?
Boser: A lot but we had to work out what our monthly minimums and that kind of stuff were and…
Alpar: So what is a monthly minimum?
Boser: I don’t know, if I’m going to say it on a podcast but I’m going to probably guess but you know, we’re not your cheapest, we’re not your most expensive… But what we did is as indivi-
Alpar: So how can there be more expensive ones?
Boser: Ah, you’d be surprised at what some bug agencies charge.
Alpar: But do you think they just sell better? Or how can you give- what are you…
Boser: I mean, the question is, is that are you getting more value for that money? I got into this with BlueGlass because I wanted to prove that you can scale quality, right. I think the smaller shops can offer a lot of times better quality, that’s how I made my living – going up against larger agencies, that could do better work, but I couldn’t scale and so…
Alpar: So how do you think that worked? ‘Cause usually agency work, I mean, it’s usually driven by people so scaling has to do with people and processes probably. Processes and organization
Boser: So a lot of the tools- so my approach from the product side of the company is that even though we might turn it into a tool that we sell as a product to end-users at some point, that’s not how we design and build stuff. Everything’s built for our team first, so it has to work for me and my team and do what I need it to do and when that’s completed and it’s efficient, now we can do more business because data-collection, especially in search – there’s obviously a lot of ground work in organic search – to do proper research and to build real strategy, you have to put in the time and the data. So a big chunk of the scalability is taking my years of processes and putting those into a suite of tools that we can then use to train new, younger people…
Alpar: And then you can scale things because that is suite is your work.
Boser: And then- then the idea is- I prefer- we always try to look to hire within first before we, you know, probably not going to be a lot- another big name like your so-and-so come in and- because we find that the kids that come to us – I call them kids because I’m the oldest guy in the company, they’re not really kids but – they are all excited and want to learn how to be marketers, you know and they’re very smart and they work really hard…
Alpar: But then again, marketers- a marketer is not necessarily like a team player, right? If you’re building like a big agency and once it’s scaled you need like more team-players, right?
Boser: Right. You do but I’ll tell you my theory on that so I think a lot of things that messes agencies up is that they try to, you know, good talent at some point is going to leave and want to go do their own thing and that’s just a natural process that happens and agencies a lot try to pressure people into staying and create bad situations. In my model because the things that we’ll be doing in 2012, there’s also training and partner programs, so I want to be able to take these large-scale systems and tools to that smaller shop and help empower them…
Alpar: So if they go rogue, or not go rogue…
Boser: I’ll support that. Right? So that’s…
Alpar: If they go… Yes. And they can still use the tools and so on and so on but you also…
Boser: use the revenue from there and then we have a place to refer- we get a lot of great referrals…
Alpar: Like the smaller clients are probably too small for BlueGlass, you can refer them to your old employees.
Boser: Yup, exactly and…
Alpar: Oh that’s a smart move, I like it.
Boser: that’s- that’s the model that I really want to build because that’s- that’s where I came from, I am one of those guys and I know that space very, very well and the idea is not to try go cannibalize that market because it happens all the time. We get leads in that are great companies, great clients, but just from a cost standpoint there’s a certain price point we need to be at to make sense versus… But we want to take care of that client; we want to give- so we want to give, so we say hey…
Alpar: And if you refer him, you want to be sure…
Boser: That they do good work, yeah.
Alpar: He’s in good hands because otherwise you get the, you know, the back.
Boser: So, if we can take some of these smaller shops and build models and processes that we know work because we’ve grown our company with it and they’re effective and the tools to support that, then we can empower them and have a place to refer them too and the same thing applies to in-house shops. So we do a lot of consulting with companies that have large in-house operations. We want to, so let me say it like the amature thing – we’re tools bundled with consulting and we can come in and train, help you build and internal team, actually doing staffing stuff. I think we’ll be doing some of that this year, so…
Alpar: So from a- if we jump like from a level higher, if you look at the whole industry, do you think that in the States there is still an in-transparency problem when people are wanting to pick an SEO agency, isn’t it really, really hard for them to understand? You know, each of the agency, they’ll say, you know, ‘I have a budget of 200 000 a year,’ each of the agency will make an offer that will, you know, meet that, what they need and obviously it won’t be less because the agency wants the revenue and so on, and then how, I mean, if you look at it from a client perspective, then you have these five agencies, they all have great pitches, you know some might gave away a little more because probably they’re hungry and they’re willing to work for free and others will probably say, ‘No, first you sign the contract otherwise I don’t analyze your website, you know, I can’t tell you anything,’ but there’s still like a hug in-transparency and the tickets that are- I mean, the contracts, you know, if you sum up the amount of money, it’s quite a bit So how do- how is this solved?
Boser: Yeah it’s interesting. It’s very difficult for clients to know…
Alpar: How do they see good from bad?
Boser: Yeah and I- my personal take on it is that I’m not a big fan of sales-pitchy kind of- I don’t think a real agency needs a sales team, right? And that’s not how…
Alpar: How many real agencies are there then?
Boser: Well that’s it. We’re building a new model, right and my thing is, I think the biggest mistake that happens in the agency world is that an agency- a lot of agencies will take any client that has the money. They don’t take the time to see if that client’s really a fit. So, I actually spend more time kind of interviewing the client than the other way around. My thing is I want a relationship that’s going to be long term and I want a company that not only has money to pay us but is a fit for all the different things we do so my whole team is engaged, it’s not- we don’t- I don’t-
Alpar: So the task that they want from you is something that you can actually fulfill and you will not- the company will be pissed off all the time
Boser: And do a great job, exactly. You got to be willing to say no, even to- and here’s where it happens when especially young, growing agencies where they really get tripped up is- they get really excited when it’s a big brand name, okay because it’s a feather in the cap and you can say ‘I do work for so-and-so’. In those relationships …
Alpar: Is that usual in the States because in Germany nobody really wants to say who they work for and the companies that are being worked for also don’t want the SEO agency to say, ‘Okay, I work for them.’
Boser: There is an out- a middle band where like I never was big on disclosing clients and I would have- I would ask the client first, but there’s a certain level when you start competing with other agencies and you start the RFP process in the States.
Alpar: What’s RFP?
Boser: RFP is a Request for Proposal.
Alpar: Ah okay.
Boser: So real large companies will send those out and then the big agencies prepare bids and do a lot of work for no money up front that is, I think is kind of crazy sometimes but to get in there you have to be able to say, you have to be able to have- show that big brand that you’ve worked with another big brand, right? So it all becomes this chest-pounding, macho thing.
Alpar: You could do that.
Boser: Yeah, yeah it’s…
Alpar: From your looks I mean
Boser: yeah, yeah. That’s a good one.
Alpar: Sorry
Boser: And so what ends up happening there is I think agencies end up making bad choices based on that and then they’re not able to exceed the client’s expectations so, I’m always trying to teach our- you know, promise less, deliver more and don’t always be a yes man because I’ve seen- I’ve walked into situations, you know, where over-aggressive salesperson, somehow the contract ends it with some kind of promise of 30 percent monthly growth in search.
Alpar: What you don’t do that? Only 30 percent? What is BlueGlass doing anyway?
Boser: And I actually saw the situation where- and then the company actually achieved 27 percent growth over time which was phenomenal but they said 30, so now they’re- and as a client, they’re a failure right. So just learning the nuances of how to be able to not get overly excited and chase a client that’s a bad fit – that I think is the most important thing for scale or growth and that helps a lot in the brand recog- the referrals from those clients because you did do a good job. I’d rather take a client that nobody’s heard of now and a year later be the one that gets the credit for building a brand than…
Alpar: But then again, how do people know that you worked on it?
Boser: Because a lot of
Alpar: Are they okay with you disclosing you worked for them?
Boser: A lot of companies- it varies from- but we have, we’ve had clients before that are fine for people to know they went through us.
Alpar: I guess you do some link-building for most of the companies, right?
Boser: We do a lot of cli- there’s a bee that’s going to sting you in a minute.
Alpar: No, it’s not going to sting me.
Boser: We do a lot of content marketing. A lot of info-graphic stuff, outreach, really organic, so that’s the core…
Alpar: It’s really a US phenomenon though, unfortunately. It doesn’scale that way in other countries. At least, that’s my experience, probably I’m totally wrong.
Boser: Well it’s interesting because one of the companies, the things that we spun off into the Steelcasting is a company called CopyPress which is a content-writing company that has…
Alpar: But what is that? It’s not the- CopyPress? Sounds so familiar. I’m sorry.
Boser: But that’s how we originally addressed that. We built that system as a team…
Alpar: Similar to TextBroker or not?
Boser: It’s similar, yes. We think it’s better, but same idea though – outsource content writers where you can write content for projects and that’s how a lot of the smaller agencies now do scale for that kind of content and marketing because you don’t have to have full-time staff. So, now that that’s over there we have in-house writers at BlueGlass and graphics people and we use a combination of both so we can scale up when we need to.
Alpar: Whenever you do these kind of link-marketing activities, it seems to me that the actual trick is the seeding, although I’m not sure how you call it but you now, through the initial push of attention because that’s usually happening through social media.
Boser: Social’s a big part of it so we social media pushes and we have a team that handles that part so we publish a piece of content and then the team goes out to try to generate visibility for it through social channels, you know we…
Alpar: And then the magic happens anyway.
Boser: Some- yeah and not everyone’s a hit, that’s how social promotion is but when it is, it can be hugely successful. We also do application development now, web development, so we’re doing a lot of off-brand kind of micro-site stuff for clients to help give them- ‘cause one of the biggest things that you run into with the bigger companies is…
Alpar: They’re not that fast.
Boser: You call it paralysis, yes.
Alpar: Paralysis, yeah.
Boser: They…
Alpar: And then everybody has to decide how the homepage will look and then every link has to be discussed and it’s a …
Boser: And you pay me a lot of money to write this brilliant organic search strategy but there’s a lot of IT, there’s lot of rebuilding.
Alpar: Do you do like a mini site on a different domain or just pick a sub-domain or like a sub-directory and then work with the…
Boser: So… Well a lot of different ways so… For example I used to work in the travel-space quite a bit and a client a lady consulting for- called Uptake.com and founder of the company used to- run Yahoo! travel and a bunch of really smart people and they had a search tool that was basically pulled from all different places. With sentiment-search so you could plan vacations around holidays, romantic stuff, that kind of thing and so they have these great pages but Google didn’t think they were algorithmically surrounded. They were like fins, even the Panda kind of thing, right? But users liked them when they got there so instances like that, we went out and helped them establish a blog-network, that wrote about travel stuff that kind of surrounded the site and we pushed that stuff in social media and when appropriate, that content linked back into those pages on the main ship. So we use the content marketing to build the kind of attraction and almost through the links that got Google to change its mind and rank that kind of stuff. So and that’s the kind of thing that we’re moving into a lot now because we can do that separate of their IT infrastructure.
Alpar: And then it happens fast, especially if it’s a…
Boser: And they- and then we manage the whole thing, it’s our writers, we run the blog, we do the SEO on it, so we find we’ve been a lot more creative with things like that.
Alpar: And the client, it’s their blog or it’s your blog?
Boser: It depends on the contract, so we’re going to be building more of our company on products.
Alpar: Portfolio.
Boser: Yeah, I mean I think ultimately at the end of the day, we will be somewhat of a media company that way and have properties that we own and run on our own, that we sell advertising, you know. Demand Media is like the big kind of giant of that model, so they actually run LiveStrong and they actually have eHow and they do that- their content, you know a more micro-focussed, hopefully better from the consulting side but that’s an appealing model to me because there’s no, there’s more value down the road in properties than there is services, right? You hit a cap and plus you can do more things.
Alpar: Regarding scalability or what do you mean?
Boser: In potential to sell your company, you know, evaluation, things like that, so…
Alpar: ‘Cause you have some assets that you can show. But then again if…
Boser: Yeah it’s, the lowest multiples that you can get is on a pure service business, right, because your clients can go away and then you don’t have it. Assets…
Alpar: If that was the case, if people were purely regarding that then there agencies would never be sold, so there are usually set-ups, you know, there are lock-up periods, you know earn-out periods and so on… So, let’s jump somewhere else. You seem like a really calm person and I cannot accept that, so I want to hear about one issue that really pisses you off in the Search business but I want to really, you know, I want to see the angry side of you. You cannot be that calm and that laid-back. I mean, there have to be things that make you boil, come on.
Boser: It’s funny, over the years I’ve been angry at a lot of stuff. I guess my biggest beef really is Google’s predatory aggregation approach to stuff, the way they’re cannibalizing specific industries. Like I’ve worked in several industries that have…
Alpar: Well basically anything that’s a comparison business is getting killed, sooner or later.
Boser: I- many years, worked in the States with companies like BizRay and Price- so I know the Comparison Shopping space very well and that…
Alpar: Comparison Shopping or Travel Aggregators – anything that aggregates, they won’t…
Boser: Exactly, so basically what Google has done is- initially, I think it’s the greatest bait and switch that’s ever happened in the States, so they came out initially and said ‘Hey, our mission is to organize the world’s information and we want to send you to that great information as quick as possible,’ and we went ‘Great, we love you!’ So we went out and became brand Evangelists and I got my mother to switch her homepage to Google.
Alpar: Oh my God! I’ll slap you.
Boser: yeah, I mean like- yeah, I know it’s like, I would actually go around to my…
Alpar: Go back and switch it to somewhere else, like to Yahoo!
Boser: I call them my NIF’s – my Non-Internet Friends, right?
Alpar: Oh so okay, NIF’s?
Boser: NIF’s. N-I-F-S. We work in these business, everybody has them. You have your- and they don’t really get what you do but I would go around to all those friends and say, ‘You got to check this out,’ ‘cause I- it was so much better and I believed what they said. So now that they’ve grown and now that they have all the eyeballs, they’ve switched from ‘our mission is to organize the world’s information’ to ‘our mission is to own the world’s information.’ Right? So they’re going out and cannibalizing and they use the search engine to unfairly compete in other spaces because they don’t have to start from scratch, build it and gain the organic attraction, they just instantly are at the top and Comparison Shopping was the best one because they started burying them for queries, they changed it up to where only new sites ranked for products…
Alpar: So where’s that leaving us? I mean, we don’t have a chance, they cannot be stopped and the trust will not happen and it will not be fast enough and the trust also don’t go all the way, so what is the… What will it look like in…?
Boser: I agree that they probably won’t move fast enough, I’m not…
Alpar: You know, in four years, they’ll pay a couple of billion of fees and then they’ll continue.
Boser: What I would like to see come out of it is basically that – you can’t use the engine, you can go buy whoever you want and you can jump in a market, compete but you shouldn’t be able to instant domination destroy good companies with a lot of great people because you’ve decided that the only aggregator in the world that’s valid is you. And they are actually doing this. They are going directly to- they’re bypassing- and some of these are well-established middle- online education spaces in an area where Google’s made pushes, they went and had a summit with schools in New York and basically cut their middle guys out of the conversation and said, ‘You don’t need us.’ I think you’re going to see it in the States in Real Estate very soon, like Google MLS…
Alpar: Credit cards…
Boser: Mortgage rates ..
Alpar: Flight- flight travel, anything.
Boser: Right, right and so that worry- it’s interesting that the biggest reasons that I’m pushing our company to go in the applications and that kind of thing is that even though I’m a search guy, I tell clients all the time – start working on ideas to connect and engage your clients away from Google. Right? If you can get all your users searching your site from an app, then you’re not depen- as dependent. And start building models that will allow you to survive if your space is the next space. More branding – really become a brand, be in that keep organic, generic keyword kind of company. It’s just not a long-term thing…
Alpar: The generic keyword, you don’t need like a keyword as in a product, but like a brand name like…
Boser: Yeah, even like there’s a lot of companies that sort of focus on domains that match keywords and they don’t really build like a name like a Yahoo! or a Google or a name that’s not a real word. There’s a lot of value in that – doing stuff to generate more brand-related searches, to establish yourself, you just have to start making that move because like you said, if it does get fixed…
Alpar: I must say, I like your angry mood; it’s still so reflective and stuff. I think I have to step on your to e really hard, then I can see you’re angry.
Boser: I think I- I, you now, over the years I’ve certainly been more outspoken before. I used to do a session at SES years ago, Danny still put it together and it was called, ‘The ten things search engines do that piss me off,’ and…
Alpar: And you couldn’t name ten?
Boser: Oh no, there was ten. It was back in the time when they were doing kind of shady stuff, when they had paid inclusion and Inktomi was running around targeting people for monetization, they were kicking people out of the database and then knocking on the door saying, ‘Hey! Miss your traffic? Come sign up!’
Alpar: Right.
Boser: And I used to have a lot of experience in one year with all that stuff and Danny was doing this panel of standards like, and I said, ‘You know what? They need standards too. We’re not all the crooks.’ Then I started telling them these things I experienced that year and he was like, ‘Hey, do a panel on that,’ and I’m like ‘Alright.’ So I have been far more flamboyant and outspoken but, you know, I have to be a little bit more… I’m a boss now.
Alpar: What got you to calm down?
Boser: The people that pay attention to what I say and…
Alpar: So it’s the new role that gets you calmer?
Boser: Yeah, you know and you got to be a…
Alpar: Like the solid rock so everybody can lean onto you?
Boser: Exactly. I got to assure myself because…
Alpar: There’s so many right pictures in this one podcast. I think I have to cut it in half so there’s not too much at one time
Boser: Part two, yeah. So it’s assuring my partners that I’m not going to be a loose cannon, but you know you do- you mellow over somewhat. I don’t know if jaded’s the word. There are just some things you grow to accept because it’s not worth the anger and you just refocus on new stresses that’s the same thing. It’s like I’m the organic SEO guy and I’m out creating iPad apps and things like that.
Alpar: What do you tell to people you know, who say, is there going to be SEO at all in five years because Google’s hunting and fighting against everything and they devalue links and you know these kind of guys? You don’t have any…
Boser: And here’s my thing is like, I love the fact that Google’s getting better on that stuff and it keeps the job creative and we were having this discussion last night that this is what really Facebook is latching onto is that SEO to me is more of a mindset and a style of- it’s very analytical. People that are SEO’s are people that love to be okay with ‘I don’t know how it works but I’ll figure it out,’ right ‘cause that’s…
Alpar: Reverse engineering – you have to enjoy it.
Boser: Yes and it’s a spe- not everybody has it. You can a great marketer, but that mindset, so that mindset applies to anything on the web. So, I know a lot of a- a kid that worked at Uptake – I call him a kid – he worked at Uptake and now he works at Facebook. He’s brilliant, young guy who loves that kind of thing and now he’s at a place like Facebook where he can apply that to not only search engine stuff but everything they do and that’s my thing is that I might not wake up every day and go, ‘I do social media’ but I love- I can sit down to figure out what could be a cool social campaign because I can approach it the same way I used to do 15 years ago with and algorithm that, you know, just trial and error, testing and all that kind of stuff and there’s a lot of that that will apply to all aspects of the web and that will never go away but it is all blended now. So, you can’t live in a bubble anymore. That’s my biggest thing – I’m doing a talk in PubCon this year – I did it last year too but it’s kind of like an hour of just me and me at the front and this old guy Greg just talking about…
Alpar: How it used to be in the old days.
Boser: Lecturing the little whipper-snappers. You know, the young kids, saying: “You know kids …”
Alpar: Getting that finger up in the air and going, ‘Ha! You don’t know what I have seen.’
Boser: You know, just trying to tell them like you need to go out and test; we have what I call a second generation regurgitation. Like these…
Alpar: Regur-what?
Boser: Regurgitation, like…
Alpar: Okay I don’t know that word.
Boser: It’s a nice way to say vomit. They’re just tossing up what they’ve gotten from somebody else. They didn’t learn it themselves. So they read a blog…
Alpar: And then they think, it is that way.
Boser: Their knowledge of SEO is what they read on the blog and they never went out and challenged it and tested it.
Alpar: Is there another truth?
Boser: Yeah and you know and it’s always someone’s like, even the best bloggers, take what they say and go ‘Oh!’ and run with that and go do some tests and see if that is true. Is it true in all spaces? You’ll find out a lot of neat stuff, but validate your own thoughts and prove them to yourself before you go out telling them as the gospel to a client, right.
Alpar: As a gospel to a client?
Boser: Yeah, you know like, it’s kind of a lost art form in a lot of ways, ‘cause everything’s much different, you know, the social networking, you now, coming to these things – I’m better as an SEO because of my personal connections throughout the world, knowing very, very bright people, having great relationships with them. So, when I’m seeing something I can’t figure out, I can’t find somebody that’s at a higher spot, I can call people that run and they’ll tell me right, and you can’t do that on Facebook.
Alpar: Well thanks so much. I think that’s probably the longest Podcast I’ve ever done.
Boser: Sorry about that.
Alpar: No, no, no, no I think it’s enjoyable. I think it’s full of good information and fun things to think about. Thanks a lot.
Boser: Thanks for having me.
