Part II:

Transcript

Brett Tabke: This is Brett Tabke we are back here again in the Silicon Valley and joining us now is Lee Odden from TopRank Online Marketing.

Lee Odden: Good job. Good job.

Brett Tabke: Well, I think of you most often from the blog. You know you do such a great job of covering the industry there and you've put up some great interviews with people over the last year and video. YOu may have been the inspiration for this in fact.

Lee Odden: I appreciate that. Well, I'll take credit if it goes well.

Brett Tabke: ha, ha, ha. Great, so what's going on at TopRank these days?

Lee Odden: Well, um so we have both a small public relations firm and a search agency and we started as two different entities in 2001 and up to 15 people now and still hiring and it's amazing how integrated the traditional public relations work we do and online search go together more and more as we identify what methods are going to be most successful for a particular client. It's kind of funny. I get to speak at different conferences, right. So at a search conference I'm a search guy that knows about PR. When I speak at a Public Relations conference I am a PR guy that knows about SEO and it is amazing how these two communities really need to get together you know because um I believe search is a form of PR. If someone searches for your name or one of your brand names and you show up high in the results there is credibility associated with that not unlike editorial in a print publication and on the other side of things, good public relations, getting picked up in mainstream publications, maybe some links,
that also effects your search visibility, so they really tie into each other well and what is really going on as far as Top Rank goes is becoming even more of a master at I think how to leverage that approach to the market on behalf of our clients.

Brett Tabke: Speaking of how people are going to consume all of this and how it is going to show up in the SERP's.. one thing we have been talking with a lot with people this week is the advent of Google Universal. Not necessarily that it is anything revolutionary, other than it is revolutionary to Google. We have seen it before with Ask. We were even talking with Detlev Johnson earlier we saw it going all the way back to Alta Vista in 98 they were doing multimedia tabs and inserts and graphic inserts clear back then. So how do you think this all shakes out? How does it all effect the industry?

Lee Odden: I think it provides an awesome opportunity for marketing oriented search marketers, not so much tactics-oriented search marketers because I think you have the ability to go to a client, right; And what we do, one of our processes that we have learned is to inventory what media they have to work with. And we take a look at what sort of textual assets do you have outside of web pages or what are you putting out. Are you putting out press releases, case studies, news letters, are you archiving news letters, do you have a blog, that sort of thing? Um, and looking at other media formats, like are you producing images that are unique and interesting? Are you doing any video? Are you doing any podcasts? And are you doing any other things that might travel, like something in an RSS format? And taking a look at that and seeing how it might fit in to the target audience. If the target audience is 60 to 75 year olds I don't know how much social media we will get into, but if it is the tech crowd, the millennials, 18 to 24 years old well then we are looking at Digg and things like that and you know matching up the different media formats with the target audience is something I think ties in really well with Universal because not only can high visibility on a YOuTube of Google Video or Flickr drive direct traffic, but some of those media or data formats are showing up right in the middle of Google search results. You search for some movies right now, you can watch the movie right in the middle of Google search results or at least the trailer. That is pretty cool and I think that is a great opportunity.

Brett Tabke: And it opens that whole box and pushes everybody way down below the fold and you are it. You are Google.

Lee Odden: Reputation management people look at well gosh you know, you used to have to set up other micro-sites, do press releases, do things to shine link popularity on other friendly domains to displace the negative search results. Well today, maybe we can shoot a video, get some links to it, and it will do an even better job at displacing those negative search results.

Brett Tabke: It is almost an opportunity to do pro active damage control before there is a problem.

Lee Odden: That is a good point. That is a really good point actually, yeah. The more media formats you have the more channels of distribution you have to get your marketing message out so if someone runs into your brand or whatever keyword message you want to be known for in video or news or Google standard search results, it all reinforces what you are trying to get across overall. What is great about it if it is search, they are pulling themselves to that message. You know, you are not jamming it down their throat through advertising.

Brett Tabke: You are puttin it in front of them at the right time. You read like I do, you know an hour two hours a day of all the marketing blogs, the mainstream stuff, the big news. There is kind of a quiet buzz going on out there. Since talking with everybody we kind of hear there are generally three camps right now. There are the people that think we are just getting a good start on search. Then the people that think well we are fairly mature but there is a long way to go. And then there is a growing core of people who think that search has peaked and it is all down hill and in-house from here. What is your take on the lay of the land?

Lee Odden: So, well search uh, the need for guidance in the search space will always be needed as long as web developers are creating sites that don't make it easy for search engines, whatever form they may take, to understand, categorize, and sort that information. There will always be a need for someone who does specialize in that as an advocate so to speak for the client to help them make it through that. I also think that there are companies for example, I am involved with a search engine marketing counsel, as is Detlev and Heather for the Detrec Marketing Association and we have these calls with a lot of in-house marketers and ask them how many of you are retaining search agencies. What are you doing? Are you keeping it all in house? Or are you going outside at all and it was interesting because a lot of them said well we are doing a lot of the grunt work in-house, but we are maintaining relationships with outside agencies at a strategic level and I think if anything changes, I think that's the trend. I think if anything that there are a lot of commoditized sorts of skills like keyword research and copywriting and that sort of stuff that will be and is being brought in house, but on a strategic level I think agencies that are able to provide strategic guidance will still do quite well and we work with a couple of fortune 20 companies and I know that they are very interested. In fact they engage us in a large part for our testing that we do so we can give them insight as to what is coming down the road in advance and I think a lot of search agencies do that, but in particular i think a lot of large organizations are looking for reliable information. Sometimes it is just to confirm what they already know, you know. They just want to hear it from another source. So I guess that is my take on the future of search I think search is always going to be here in one form or another and uh, there will always be a need for a guide.

Brett Tabke: uh huh, uh huh. Excellent. What is your background before you got into search marketing?

Lee Odden: Well I was born, worked in the circus, and picked rocks in the plains of North Dakota. Actually the picking rock things is true. I grew up in a small town in Minnesota and went in the army after high school to pay for college, worked at direct marketing company, doing various things, corporate training was actually one of them, sales training and so forth, but then I got a real job doing outside sales and what not and sales just got a little tiring for me, there was travel. Landed in 96 at an Internet company and a friend of a friend owned it or something like that and initially I was selling, but I started teaching myself how to do some web development, really basic stuff and they were selling templated web sites and people started asking for more functionality so I would sneak into my supervisors office during lunch to learn frontpage and actually make sites. They were selling sites for hundreds of dollars. I started selling sites for thousands of dollars and they let me run with it and we built a lot of sites and people asked, "well ok we have a site how are people going to find it?" and that is where the search stuff came into play. In 2001 after building up that side of the business, custom web dev, search and what not to 70 percent of revenue I decided maybe it would be a good idea to go do this for myself instead of for someone else and in 2001 founded TopRank.

Brett Tabke: Excellent. You have been doing quite a bit with video lately. How do you feel the future of video is?

Lee Odden: Video. Micro-content is awesome. I think really long videos might have a place, but I think it is really fun with the short attention spans that seem to be you know the way of consuming information for the up and coming generation, video is awesome. If you have people telling stories you can get complex ideas across in a very short period of time, unlike text, or different than text I should say. And like I said before I think the more media formats you have available for people, for them to consume information, the better job you might do at reaching your intended audience. We do videos. I use a very basic camera and shoot video at search engine conferences of various people that I run into, where it just comes across as hey lets do a video. In fact you did one with me.

Brett Tabke: And you ranked for my name for months. uh huh.

Lee Odden: Well ok you are right. That does happen actually, yeah. So we do a lot of text interviews and the videos so um I think if people can spend a minute or two minutes looking at a quick video interview and they respond well to it.

Brett Tabke: As you say it is just how people want to consume the information, if it is pocast, video or read it. Speaking of micro-content, we are out of time. I appreciate you taking the time.

Lee Odden: ok great.

Brett Tabke: Good talking to you today. Thank you.

Lee Odden: You bet.

[edited by: Vanessa_Zamora at 8:46 pm (utc) on Dec. 31, 2008]