Part II:

Transcript

Brett Tabke: This is Brett Tabke we are back with Christine Churchill here in Silicon Valley. Thank you for being with us Christine.

Christine Churchill: Hey it is fun. I always like talking with you.

Brett Tabke: Yeah, I appreciate taking you the time, so currently running under the Moniker KeyRelevance before that you were well known for being at Net Mechanic one of the early tool sites.

Christine Churchill: Oh. You are making me feel old.

Brett Tabke: Well. Hey, everybody we are talking to has been in the business nine, ten years so it is rare to talk to somebody these days that has been in it less than five. You have to get into the social marketing really to find somebody that is fairly new that is successful. So today your big main stay seems to be PPC, SEM.

Christine Churchill: SEO, Pay Per Click, we do some link building for SEO clients, do a little bit in the social, but a lot of our clients are a little bit hesitant about getting into it, they tend to be conservative kind of. They want to go into it gradually so I am kind of introducing it to them in a very safe controlled environment so they feel comfortable with it.

Brett Tabke: Right. Hmm, hmm. Well, what type of social marketing are you playing with, blogging or are you talking.

Christine Churchill: Actually we do quite a bit with blogging we have done some with, I look at the whole social networks the social aspects as a lot of different components everything from Flickr, we have some Digg. We do quite a variety of little things. We are not heavy, heavy into it mostly because reluctance on our client's side, but we are working with them. They are coming around, we have done some things and they have actually seen some changes and they have seen how things perform. They are warming up to it, but it is bigger the client the more conservative they tend to be.

Brett Tabke: Well, there it is a PR game. Everything in social media is PR some of it can backfire.

Christine Churchill: Oh, yeah. We are trying to be very careful about it.

Brett Tabke: It can be difficult. So what is the biggest change you have seen in SEO in last 12-24 months?

Christine Churchill: Oh, it would definitely be Universal Search. When that came around we literally went back, we took a step back and started re-evaluating our whole strategy because one of the things we do when we start with the client is we map out the strategy we are going to use fairly early on, so we know where our progression is is. We know what we are doing and so we have a path that we are going to be following. Universal Search that was a major change for us I mean, yeah, we sort of we were hearing you rumors saying things like that were going to happen, but when Ask came out with it.

Brett Tabke: Hmm, hmm.

Christine Churchill: That was a pretty profound change. So that really changes what we are doing and on the organic side because now it is not just those ten blue links it is now looking at other, we are looking at podcast and videos and so we are having to look at other areas and make sure they have blogging going on things like that so it is much bigger pie to work on than it used to be.

Brett Tabke: Yeah, you can't just do one thing and do it well or you have got to.

Christine Churchill: It has gotten hard.

Brett Tabke: Yeah, you have to do a little bit of everything.

Christine Churchill: We have to really earn our keep.

Brett Tabke: We really do.

Christine Churchill: But it makes us more valuable because the people that understand how profound this change is and start planning now to incorporate and be able to take advantage of the Universal, I think they are going to be way ahead of most of the search marketers. I think you know that a lot of people are like oh its not very much of a change and it is a huge change. It is the biggest change I have ever seen you know I have been in this industry, you know, I have been here since the 90s. So it is the biggest thing I have ever seen.

Brett Tabke: Yeah, you know you are no longer trying to get top ten or top seven it is top three.

Christine Churchill: No, now you are trying to get top ten in the industry that is quite fast.

Brett Tabke: Yeah.

Christine Churchill: You have to be very visible so that you have to be higher than you used to be.

Brett Tabke: Yeah, because you know video pops up in their now and you are pushed down to three, four and you are looking at the fold now being at right between three and four.

Christine Churchill: Three and four, but the big thing is when you start putting graphics and visuals over there. I have done a lot in useability side and I know what a dramatic picture does to the user. Their eyes, shoop! Talk about eye magnets. They see a video or something that you might have number one ranking. They may never see your number one organic rannking with a really compelling, graph a photo on the right side of that page. Like on Ask right now. I do think that Google is not too far behind. I think you are going to start seeing more of that. Right now they are in the main you know the linear page park, putting different things in there, but I do think we are seeing more of that in the future.

Brett Tabke: Well, what can we do other than trying to do good at the video, the images and organic is that the only thing we can really hope to do or is there

Christine Churchill: Well, I think we definitely need to broaden our horizons it is no longer the ten links that we used to all look at.

Brett Tabke: Right.

Christine Churchill: And you know think we are all hot potatoes because we were at the top of that list.

Brett Tabke: Top ten.

Christine Churchill: We still have to do, we still have to do that. We still have to do our homework and do that and do all the link work that is required for that, but now we have to do more and we just really have to open up the scope and we have to do, we have to go into video and it may require you know specialization. I think you are going to see new growth niche industries where you are going to see companies that specialize in video you are going to have some specialize in podcast and it may be some of the agencies are outsourcing a lot of these specializations in time. It may happen in-house, but it is going to be something has going to have to grow over time. So I see a lot, actually I see a lot of opportunities for people looking for new niche areas to work in so I think it is going to be a good day.

Brett Tabke: Excellent. Yeah, everybody we have talked to it has been the big thing of the year is Google Universal.

Christine Churchill: Yeah.

Brett Tabke: So you think that Google is going to add more things to the page in the future?

Christine Churchill: Well, I think they are going to go into it slowly. They tend to be very careful about user experience and I actually think they are sort of sitting back and watching how Ask does, I think they are kind of watching and observing and we will see what happens. I don't think it is going to be next week or next month. I think it is going to be a while, I do think in time they will go to it. I think you will get more the Ask, the three column approach to get it a little more accepted universal acceptance. So it is not such a dramatic change we may go to it.

Brett Tabke: Right.

Christine Churchill: I do think they will eventually go to it. I may be totally wrong, but I think eventually they will find that that is what people are going to want.

Brett Tabke: Well, and Google's advertising is fairly well hidden in the page therein, you actually don't know what you are clicking on anymore.

Christine Churchill: Yeah, that is a good point.

Brett Tabke: Now you originally started out your kind of net career at, web career at Net Mechanic.

Christine Churchill: I did, I did. I was back in the, I will tell you. I probably came into search from one of the weirdest backgrounds in this industry. I used to be in a missile officer. We used to do targeting of other missiles.

Brett Tabke: And now is that in the air force?

Christine Churchill: No, it was actually in the army. You know it is kind of funny I tell people that I worked on computer simulations in fact because I actually got into the web via the computer simulations I was working on because I got kind of known as the geek, in our division and everything because I was the computer woman. At that time I was Microsoft certified, but actually I was the IT manager for a silicon graphics, IRIX, it is a version of Linux, new operating system so I was pretty versed in that environment, I was real comfortable in that and the boss walked in one day and he goes, we have got a conference in about a month you think you can throw together a website? This was like 1994-95 something like that. I did not know what html was. Actually I was the geek so I was like ah, let me see. So I threw together a website and you know what the ironic part is? They are still using it. Honest to god, every once in a while I go back to see it, it is the most hideous thing in the world. The spinning globes that were big back then. It is a frame site.

Brett Tabke: Flaming logos.

Christine Churchill: There is a little thing at the bottom where you click on it to do a mail and this little mail box opens and closes. Oh it just is hideous and they are still using it. They update the date on it because it is an annual conference that they do and they are still using it today because nothing absolutely changes for this conference, but I got known as the person that knew the html and pretty soon I had everybody and their brother come to me, can you build html site for me? Can you build this site for me? Suddenly my computer simulation work was being shoved to the side and they were saying, well, this is more important you need to do this because this is like critical to what's going on. So I just started web sites left and right and I just got a lot of work, you know the link checking the maintenance of websites. My husband and one of my best friends worked with me and they were programmer geeks and I said, "This is really tedious having to check these links every time you know make a change on this website I break something." So they started building these tools, and that actually evolved into Net Mechanics because they put the tools online so I could work from home or from my office and I would use what later because Net Mechanic tools, the html checker, the link checker, the graphics optimizer, they built all these to make my I guess basically because I complained a lot. This is a lot of work and I would come home in a bad mood. So they built me all these tools, and we had it out on the web. We had no idea of the value of it and we get this phone call from this guy who is a venture capitalist out in Washington State and he said, "I'd like to buy your tools." Now we just had them sitting out there free at the time and we go hmm, you know, we may have something here. So we through together this really ugly website, the first website we had and we had nasty icons for navigation it was a hideous orange color. It was just everything nasty you could possibly have.

Brett Tabke: I remember it.

Christine Churchill: You remember it? It was orange and black.

Brett Tabke: It was the original Net Mechanic back then.

Christine Churchill: It was. We had this dorky looking robot guy, but we put that together and all of a sudden we got all this traffic. I mean we would get like tons of traffic and I also happen to have an MBA, and they said, "Look you know how to do marketing?" This wasn't something they taught in school. I mean this was all new and I just started playing with it. I got addicted overnight. We quit all our day jobs and we started Net Mechanic. I just fell in love with it. SEO back then was so easy. That is when you could get most of the top ten places for your company, but I think at one time I had like top five ranking for just about every search related term. I am serious. At one time I owned most of those domain names and when we sold the company they went with the company, the new company they did not know what they had. We had domain names I probably could have retired on.

Brett Tabke: It is hard.

Christine Churchill: It is, but it is kind of a stretch coming from a computer missile simulation background into the web and then going on to SEO, but you know it was a matter of reality we had no marketing money and I was since I was the marketing person it was kind of fun. I actually fell in love with marketing online. I will tell you what it has been the smoothest transition I have ever had in a job. I love it. I will never. I still wake up and I am pretty excited about what I do because I really feel like I am benefiting and it is still fun.

Brett Tabke: Cool

Christine Churchill: As long as it can still be fun.

Brett Tabke: Well, speaking of founding things are you still involved with SEMPO at all? We were

Christine Churchill: No, actually I am not right now.

Brett Tabke: You are not.

Christine Churchill: I was you know. I still own the domain name. I told you I bought a lot of domain names. Am I blushing? But it is mostly a time thing to be quite honest. I mean you and I were both on the board on the original SEMPO and it was fun, but you know it is a matter of I just don't have time for it anymore.

Brett Tabke: Right.

Christine Churchill: I have got to concentrate my time on doing business and everything else I am doing so I had to drop something.

Brett Tabke: Alright. Well yeah, we did, we did and it was a hard year.

Christine Churchill: It was the toughest year the board of directors had absolutely no idea how easy a ride they had.

Brett Tabke: Oh, I think they know.

Christine Churchill: You and I had a number of phone conversations about that.

Brett Tabke: They come up to me at conferences you know Brett thanks for doing that. You know they know there is a couple of them they have a clue. In fact we were just talking with Dana earlier today.

Christine Churchill: You did.

Brett Tabke: She knows. She knows. Well, we are about out of time here so thank you for being with us Christine.

Christine Churchill: Hey, you know what I always enjoy talking with you.

Brett Tabke: Thank you.