Part II:

Transcript

Brett Tabke: This is Brett Tabke and we are back here again today in Silicon Valley and joining us now is Mr. Andy Beal a longtime member of the SEO community, SEM community probably best known for your old blog search engine lowdown, which was extremely popular in the day when you worked back at Web Source. Today you are principal and founder of Marketing Pilgrim. Thanks for joining us Andy.

Andy Beal: Thank you for inviting me. I am looking forward to talking with you.

Brett Tabke: So talk a little bit about bio. How did you come to be at Web Source? That is where I picked you up at.

Andy Beal: Okay. So I originally, so get into Web Source, well, uh, my wife dragged me over here to the States. She is from North Carolina so she got me over into the country and then

Brett Tabke: From?

Andy Beal: From England. So that is why I have this weird southern drawl kind of going on. I joke with people at conferences that you know if you catch me saying, tally ho y'all it is because I still mix between English and American, but it is gradually going closer to the southern drawl, but I joined the company at the very early stages, and it went through a number of different names. It was World Mall for a while. Keyword Ranking was our big brand. We grew the company to 180 people over a 1000 clients and then it kind of re-branded in towards, we kind of changed things so that Keyboard Ranking was the brand name and Web Source became the company name. Then I left the company there and since then it went on to become MarketSmart Interactive and whole life of it's own. Then I joined with up a group of investors and a co-founder to help get Fortune Interactive off the ground. I was there for a year helping them get you know hiring people and getting the service in place, getting the brand in place. Since then I have moved on to Marketing Pilgrim you know we had started that as a blog focusing on internet marketing news that became extremely successful and I decided that instead of trying to come up with another brand name again I just blend my marketing, my consulting services into that and so now Marketing Pilgrim represents not only the Internet marketing's new site, but also my consulting services.

Brett Tabke: So you are doing consulting still the SEO, SEM type consulting?

Andy Beal: Yes. Actually it is a good mixture I do a lot of strategic SEO consulting so for example, I have worked with SAS so the big software company and I kind of help them to figure out you know what are the best strategies for SEO and help them and guide them I think it is kind of like a training. I do a lot of business coaching so after I finished with Fortune Interactive I got asked by a lot of search marketers hey, can you come in and help us and structure our services and let us know how you know the best pricing and who to hire? So I did some training and this is all public record, but I did training with Jim Boykin, Rand Fishkin and a whole host of other companies and so that works out well and I still do that. I have companies. I have agencies especially agencies that are outside of the US that want to know what is the latest trend so I have clients in England, Australia, Europe and different places.

Brett Tabke: So what is the hottest trend you have seen in the last year in search marketing?

Andy Beal: Well, you cannot deny that you know social media marketing has really had a huge influence on search engine marketing. I mean everybody is talking about how can we leverage Facebook, MySpace, and then you have got the social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us and Digg and how they play into search market. I think one of the trends that I have seen and I have certainly moved myself towards is that it is really search markets are really just becoming Internet marketers. There are so many different channels that we utilize and so many different areas of expertise that we bring in that all help us with Google and with SEO that you cannot really ever say you are purely an SEO or SEM. You have got to know social search, you have got to know link building, you have got to know rich media, and you have got to know reputation management, all those things need to come in because your clients are going to need all these things.

Brett Tabke: What do you think the effects of Google Universal have been and will be on the industry?

Andy Beal: Well I think it is gonna. You know we have already been shifting from search engine optimization as a technical function more towards a marketing function. I think universal is really just kind of the last wake up call for any search marketer that was relying on just very narrow focus of let's just tweak some code and lets just make some changes here. I think universal search really gets search marketers thinking more on a global campaign in terms of marketing and that is there are other cannels we need to look at it is not just about can we penetrate those ten blue links on a page. It is you know are we leveraging video content? Are we helping our clients' images to get into the index as well? And not only just getting them in there for the sake of it, but what images do we want to show up and how does that benefit the business how does that, it is one thing to have a number five image result on Google Universal, but how does that benefit the company you know because you don't want to just drain your bandwith by having these images showing up for no reason. Is there a good side reason to bring people in so I think that Universal search is really helping I think it is going to make search marketers more aware of different types of web content that need to be touched with optimization. I think that is a good thing because we are moving into a multi-media world the content is changing. Not only are we seeing more video content proof of this is this actual video, but we are seeing micro media we are seeing things with Twitter, we are seeing things with mobile content and all of those things need a search engine marketer's touch so I think Google Universal was almost like it was kind good in a way that Google did not go right out and say, okay every search is going to be universal. Everything is going to have video news blog blended into it because that would have been a shock to the system. We are seeing it on very popular, very topical things. So that is kind of introducing us to it gradually so that as marketers we can kind of get a feel for what do we need to do here and how does it benefit our clients.

Brett Tabke: And here in the middle of August when we are recording this it is actually only still just turned on United States market.

Andy Beal: Right.

Brett Tabke: So there is another shoe to drop there on the world.

Andy Beal: We have been talking with a lot of people here this week and one thing keeps coming back time and time again is how difficult it has become to be an optimizer these days. There are just so many things you have to know to rank well to keep your rankings high and with the changes to universal search pushing down the organics there is kind of a general feeling that almost Google is driving marketers to SMO, Social Media Optimization. Do you think it is true at all that the SMO is actually benefiting by how difficult it is to optimize on Google?

Andy Beal: Well, yeah, I mean you certainly when you look back at recent discussions about paid links and so Google is making it very difficult for marketers to utilize paid links that rather you didn't do it they want your competitors to shop you if you are using paid links and so what is the natural alternative? Well, the old way is to just grunt work of building links, but you could use you know social media marketing to you know put together some great link bait, and kind of viral content that gets under the home page of Digg and brings in lots of visitors, but then filters out to the rest of social media and gets you the links from blogs and things of that nature, which all help you with your search engine ranking and so Google is you know we are seeing that ever since you know things like the Sandbox effect where you know now it is not a case of just putting up a great site that is optimized and relevant and pointing a few links to it you have really got to convince Google that you are an authority and so you know if you can get a swarm of links from a number of different popular news sites or you know book marking sites then you know that is going to help to convince Google so that goes back to I really think the lines are blurring between SEO and SMO because I think that it is going to be virtually impossible to be one without the other. I think that I would not be surprised if in the next couple of years we actually see a single acronym if you like that describes both because I think they are so intertwined I don't think you can distinguish between an SEO and a Social Media Optimizer. I think you are going to just have one person that does both because there are so key to each other.

Brett Tabke: What are we going to see new out of you. I have heard rumors that you are working on a book.

Andy Beal: Yeah, that is why I am looking haggled these days is working on a book fortunately I have a co-author as well and Dr. Judy Strauss and so between us we are writing this book and as far as we can tell it is the first book on online reputation monitoring and management. I am really excited about it because we cover everything from why your brand is important online and how the conversations influence the perception of your brand whether that is a company brand or an individual brand, but we also cover a number of things like online public relations like optimizing your press releases so that they spread further. Search engine reputation management so if you have got something that is negative that shows up in the searches in Google then how do you manage that? How do you try and push positive content in there and we touch on blogging and monitoring and all that kind of stuff it is very exciting it is a lot of hard work, but I think when it comes out probably early 2008 in the Spring I think it will be something that I hope a lot of people will get a lot of value out of it.

Brett Tabke: Hopefully we will have time to have you back again sometimes.

Andy Beal: Yeah, well, it sounds good.

Brett Tabke: Because we are out of time right now I appreciate you being with us Andy Beal.

Andy Beal: Thank you.

Brett Tabke: Thank you.