Duane Forrester, Founding Co-Chair For The In-House Committee With SEMPO
Duane Forrester is an in-house search marketer for a sports media company in Canada. He’s also a private search marketing consultant and a co-chair on the In-House Committee and a board mem- ber of SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), a professional organization for search marketers.
SEMPO is a global non-profit organization serving the search engine marketing industry and market- ing professionals engaged in it. Its purpose is to provide a foundation for industry growth through building stronger relationships, fostering awareness, providing education, promoting the industry, generating research, and creating a better understanding of search and its role in marketing.
Jerri: Does being an in-house search marketer change the way that you approach SEO and search marketing?
Forrester: Being in-house doesn’t change it, my perspective does. And my perspective is that I treat my company as if they are my client and I am their consultant. I am a consultant. But when I start getting into the nuts and bolts of search marketing, it’s no different than if I was at an agency. I would approach search marketing the same way, I just wouldn’t know the client as well as I know the client that I’m an in-house marketer for.
There are some differences worth noting between smaller and larger companies, however. Smaller businesses usually have fewer stake-holders in a given project, making it much easier to be heard at the table and ensure the right bits get “baked into” the search optimization pie from the very beginning.
Because our organization isn’t large, I can sit down with a product manager and say, “Here’s what I need and here’s why I need it.” They can then build the product around those needs, making the entire process more efficient.
So one benefit is that it’s much easier, since I’m in-house, to get exactly what we need integrated very early in the development cycle.
Jerri: What would you consider the state of search marketing today?
Forrester: There’s a lot of offshore growth in search marketing and a proliferation of search engine software. Lots of seemingly knowledgeable search marketing experts take a software application and spin it to make it appear to meet more needs than it does. It’s a very lucrative business.
But if I were going to hire a search marketing company and planned to spend $7,500 to $10,000 a month for that service, I would expect the effort to be based around knowledge, not just a software tool. There should be some level of personal experience and interaction as well.
It is so expensive to hire a search marketing company now that I would shy away from any con- sultant or business that relies on a software program to guide them. For the same budget, there are some great search marketers who have a lot of experience-experience makes the difference, not
Many search marketing consultants are expensive and they rely on diagnostic software to do the job that should really be done by an experienced person. Using the software, they will do a basic examination of the site and give you a report on their findings.
Then, based on their understanding of your site, your needs, and where you are currently, they will provide a series of recommendations that may or may not be accurate. The state of search market- ing when the software was built and the state of search marketing when the software is used often changes subtly and dramatically. There can be a large discrepancy there.
So what happens is companies hire these search marketing organizations and it’s just money out the door. The money is spent and the company finds that they get little or no value from the investment—no usable return. So, they’re out the money and they still don’t have the help that they need.
Relatively few people have a large amount of experience in search marketing. For the handful that do have considerable experience (more than three or four years, which is often the minimum require- ment when an organization is hiring a search marketing consultant) trying to recover from the dam- age done by these services becomes an image protection mechanism.
I want the industry to look good. If it doesn’t, I suffer because my potential customers still remem- ber when they got burned. I have to come up against the bad stuff and try to overcome it. This is part of the reason why I take on so few clients.
So I would say that when you’re looking at search marketing capabilities, you need to know what questions to ask. If you don’t know what questions to ask you’re going to find yourself in a posi- tion to spend money and never receive results. You’re going to get a lot of pitches from people who don’t know what they’re doing. Asking the right questions will help to let you know if they’re expe- rienced or just someone who thinks they can handle search marketing because they bought some software.
Jerri: What should organizations be focusing on to improve search marketing?
Forrester: Training is one area that is still being developed in this industry. I’m a bit biased, but I think the SEMPO curriculum is one of the best available today. It’s not an endorsement of a person’s capabilities. When they finish a course, they receive only a certificate of completion. Other programs offer a “certification,” which can lead potential clients to feel the person is not only knowledgeable, but ethical, too. Though no program could ever hope to certify an individual’s ethics, it comes down to perception and presentation. If someone says they are “certified” and you don’t understand exactly what that certification entails, it’s easy to assign more credit to an individual than they deserve.
There are other training options besides SEMPO. I tend to gravitate toward the broader theory- based components of education as opposed to the “here’s a tool and here’s how to use it” method. But some people work better with theory and others work better with tools. Personally, I don’t use tools in search marketing, or I use them as little as possible, and if I do have to use a tool, I only use it for specific tasks. Keyword research and link management are two areas that come to mind. I use specific tools to help me manage workloads in those areas, but I’d never put my trust in software that claims to “optimize my site” for me-software like that is only as good as the programmer who built it, and only as current as the last update. Miss an update and you may be in dangerous territory.
The search marketing industry is still very young. There are not a lot of experienced SEMS with seven-plus years of experience, and those who do have it are expensive to employ or contract with-though their experience leads them to be able to perform, so many are easily worth it.
Those seeking to build in-house teams of SEMS in their own businesses tend to seek a lower number of years of experience. Typically, in other industries, to reach the management level or the director’s level and above, five to seven-plus years of experience are required. I see lots of search marketing management jobs posted each week where management level positions are seeking only two to three years of experience.
Most smaller companies cannot afford to hire a six-figure SEM to get the best. They need to strike a balance, so less experience is often acceptable. This is not a reflection on a company’s level of professionalism, but rather a statement of the relative youth of our industry. There just aren’t that many deeply experienced SEMS floating around—and those there are command higher salaries. The critical point for companies to remember is this-while learning the basics of search market- ing can be compressed into a short period of time, and a person can be theoretically competent, it’s often the better network that the more experienced person has that makes a difference.
Jerri: How are organizations budgeting for search marketing?
Forrester: The budget for search marketing has continued to grow over the last two or three years, but no additional funds have been added to cover that budget. Instead, companies take that budget from other areas like e-mail marketing and pay-per-click advertising. Organizations are already wor- ried about marketing strategies like PPC because of click fraud. That’s a serious concern, because it’s very real and hard to control.
So what we see is organic SEM budgets that are growing at the expense of other areas of marketing. Many companies feel organic search offers the best ROI – it’s a long term investment that can be comparatively low-cost. Large PPC campaigns can easily run into the millions of dollars each year. By comparison to a PPC campaign that requires a constant influx of money to perform, organic search marketing needs are often met after a number of months of work, effectively moving a web site to a new baseline level of inbound traffic. This type of effort will continue to perform long after the last bill to an effective SEM consultant is paid.
Jerri: If organizations are taking away from their e-mail and PPC marketing budgets, then what are they doing to ensure that potential customers are seeing them?
Forrester: There are two models for the marketing that companies are doing: organic and paid. In paid, money is being shuffled around so that organizations are bringing their search marketing in-house or they are hiring third-party vendors to manage their search marketing efforts.
On average, the overall marketing budgets are not growing. Companies are looking for what are profit centers, so they need to allocate existing budgets differently. The money has to come from somewhere, and it usually comes from other marketing efforts.
For example, if a company’s marketing budget for PPC has been $100,000 a year in the past, and they begin to use a consultant or vendor that requires $10,000 a month for six months, that leaves just $40,000 a year for PPC marketing. And that’s one area where budgets are being shuffled. Companies understand that an agency will likely help them get better converting traffic for their investment, either by providing better converting traffic or by reducing the cost of existing search marketing cam- paigns. And most search marketing agencies are very good at what they do. Many larger agencies do not practice “churn and burn” tactics. They know if they perform for a client, the client will come back. Short-changing a client for the sake of immediate profits is always a poor business model, yet is sadly still popular with many of today’s “instant experts” who use software to manage everything and claim to understand what they’re doing.
We are also slowly beginning to see some of the older, larger advertising agencies toying with the idea of doing search marketing now. As traditional advertising spending has dropped consistently, these larger organizations are beginning to realize that their customers want more options for mar- keting, and the online channel brings good results for less investment. So the larger agencies have begun to realize that they could be holding onto a portion of their clients’ spending if they are offering the search marketing capabilities that those clients want. But these older companies are kind of behind the eight ball now, because search marketing companies have already been estab- lished and they’re good at what they do, so these more traditional agencies will have a hard time breaking into this space.
Jerri: What tips would you give an organization looking to hire a search marketing consultant or firm?
Forrester: First, get a list of past clients, and not just anyone in the organization. Request the con- tact name and number for the person who was responsible for the SEM agency relationship. Then, meet with them and ask them the hard questions. Ask how the relationship went. Ask if and how quickly the company responded to their requests. And the most important question to ask is, “If you needed work done again, would you still hire this company?”
The agency’s job is to make you look like a hero, but if they are overloaded, you end up in a situa- tion where you’re just left hanging. So, if a reference says they would prefer to do their search mar- keting in-house or would not hire the company again for any reason, then you should reconsider whether you want to hire the company or not. It’s a telltale sign when a previous customer won’t hire the company again, but if they say they would, then that’s a good endorsement for the company.
In the end, it’s a leap of faith – at some point you’ll need to pony up the cash to get the program up and running. Just make sure that whoever is handling the agency relationship in-house under- stands enough of the various facets being worked on to know if the agency is getting the job done properly. If you are a marketing manager tapped to manage this effort, get cracking on learning about organic search and paid search marketing yourself. Even a basic level of understanding can be enough to spot problems and get this sorted properly for you.
Jerri: If you find that your relationship with a search marketing organization isn’t working, how do you get out of that relationship?
Forrester: Contracts, contracts, contracts. Make absolutely certain there are performance clauses in the contracts before you sign them. And because search is a long-term investment, clarify how long it will take to reach the results that you’re being promised by the search marketing firm. Then you can incorporate a provision to pay a percentage of the fee up front and the balance of the fee when the performance goals are reached. If the organization is doing a good job with meeting their prom- ised performance goals, then they should have no problem allowing this type of clause in the con- tract that they ask you to sign.
The most important part of hiring a search marketing firm is vetting them as a vendor. Ask for at least three references and then speak to them. If, for some reason you can’t reach one of the refer- ences, then go back to the vendor and request another one. Successful agencies should have plenty of customers waiting to tell others how good they are, and in fact larger agencies have a list that’s as long as your arm of people who have praises for them.
One final thought:
If an agency or consultant ever promises you they can get you ranked as number one for any organic efforts, run, don’t walk away from them. No one can guarantee results in the world of organic search results. We don’t know the actual algorithms the engines use to rank sites, so making guarantees such as #1 is just a sales tactic, nothing more.
Results should be measured on actual metrics-inbound traffic from each search engine, conversion on the site, those types of things.
