Part II:

Transcript

Brett Tabke: This is Brett Tabke Tabke we are back here today with Todd Friesen Friesen of Range Online Media, Director of Search Engine Optimization. That's a pretty big title for an old affiliate guy.

Todd Friesen: It's got a lot of letters in it. We actually spelled out search engine optimization on the business cards.

Brett Tabke: Do you? You didn't want SEO on there? Actually I'm sure working with your clients you run into people who don't know what SEO is yet.

Todd Friesen: absolutely. I mean, from time to time it has really, it's shifted a lot, I mean we are lining up SEO clients left, right, and center, and a lot of what we are bringing in today are second, third time around which obviuosly holds a whole different set of challenges, but the days of what is SEO and clients not even getting it are fading. They know what it is, some of them still don't get the value yet though.

Brett Tabke: So you are not seeing a lot of first time search buyers or a lot of..

Todd Friesen: Very few anymore, very few. Like I said, well we were working with so and so or we were working with so and so and we are doing an agency review or we weren't happy and it has a little bit to do with the level that we get to play at, we have a lot of luxury brands and more fortune 1000 size clients, so at that level, I think a lot of people have caught on to it more so than some of the smaller companies.

Brett Tabke: So you are still not fighting the old battle of education really, they kind of know what is going on coming in the door.

Todd Friesen: Yeah, exactly. There is a little bit of an education process sometimes still around, like I said, the value of it, and there has been some discussion around that, where you know well is it worth $5,000 a month is it worth $10,000 a month, and that is a nice rev share model or performance based marketing starts to roll into that. That is hard to push through at any kind of agency level, because of all the bureaucracy, red tape of whatever, but I think there is a move that direction because let's say that you are doing SEO for 10 grand a month for somebody, and it works. All of a sudden they are just laughing, ya know. They are making 100 to 1 ROI on that spend. They are going, wow this is great, and you are going, see I told you.

Brett Tabke: Now let's back up a little bit. I've known you since what, 99? Going clear back to the old search engine forum days.

Todd Friesen: Since the launch. The launch of WebmasterWorld.

Brett Tabke: And back then you were doing a lot of affiliate stuff, completely independent.

Todd Friesen: Well not even at that point. During the search engine forum days I was still working for an oil company. That is where the oilman name came from, actually, but uh, yeah I was an accountant. We were hanging out at search engine forums, and I knew the day had come, there was a post one day it said, "Brett Tabke Tabke, Oilman help". Oh I made it man. I still had never done practical SEO in my life at that point, adn then jumped out of there to a small tech-start up, about three months before the bust, which was fantastic, got laid off, and that's when I went out on my own as a moderator on WebmasterWorld at the time and posted in the back room, hey I'm you know, don't have anything to do, who needs some work, and one of the guys sent me a link to a phentermine site, and said hey dude you should try this out, and this was early on. Yahoo was still just a directory. There was only twelve results for phentermine in Yahoo at the time, so jumped on board of the bandwagon and then turns out people like to buy prescription drugs online.

Brett Tabke: Wow, who knew?

Todd Friesen: I had no idea. I made $150 the first month and thought it was pretty lame.

Brett Tabke: What did you make the second and third month?

Todd Friesen: Those are sealed documents.

Brett Tabke: It was funny. You moved out of the basement and into your own house in a hurry.

Todd Friesen: Exactly. The house that phentermine built.

Brett Tabke: What's the biggest, what was the biggest moment for you after you joined Range? The big, this is completely different than I thought it was ever going to be, what, what was that moment, what was it?

Todd Friesen: You know it's really, it's kinda hard to say, but I mean as far as one big moment. There was sort of a realization. I can't really tag it to any particular moment, but I used to, when I first got into that it was, I didn't, I just got hired as the director. Hey build us a department. Go out and sell SEO to these big companies, and so I'm sitting in the offices, in the board rooms of some of these clients that we have, like CompUSA or Nike, and what not, and I'm, just, I'm freaked out, going like this is the CTO os some big national brand or some global brand and you know everybody is looking at me to sell this guy on SEO, and after about the third or fourth time, it just, the realization hit me that, and it seems stupidly obvious, but, that you know they are just regular people that have regular jobs and they don't know anything about SEO which is why we are there in the room and then once I sort of came to that realization that I am the expert, they are paying to hear me talk to them and tell them what to do, all that sort of nervousness about it sort of went away, and I don't have any trouble sitting in any kind of board room talking about SEO now, but for the first little while, it was kind of, it was scary.

Brett Tabke: Oh I imagine.

Todd Friesen: That and I was deathly afraid of screwing up in front of Misty too ya know.

Brett Tabke: We'll edit that part out. So what's it like working for...

Todd Friesen: It's fantastic. I mean Range is a very unique agency, wonderful people, really great culture...

Brett Tabke: Great state of Texas.

Todd Friesen: Absolutely. Fort Worth baby. Um, but it was really good for me, and I get asked a lot why I even went corporate, went agency, went "white hat", and I just wanted something beyond just being the SEO guy or the spammer in the basement and it's been fantastic to be educated and to see how the industry is so much bigger than I ever thought it was, and to start learning more about how paid search, and feeds, and paid inclusion, all that stuff, how we are working that together to provide a full solution. It's been fantastic. Like I said I had no idea how big this was. I had no idea how many. I mean we thought we had an idea, but we are just dabbling on one little side of SEO selling Viagra, phentermine, or dental plans or whatever we were selling. That was great people were making hundreds of thousands millions of dollars doing that, but that's a drop, that's an absolute drop compared to how big this thing really is and so its been kind of fun to have that growth and realization and start to tie that together.

Brett Tabke: I think a few people got a clue watching Google stock.

Todd Friesen: Well there is that, but.

Brett Tabke: Watch the quarterly report come out, so everybody we have been talking to we have been asking the question what has been the biggest change that they have seen in SEO/SEM in the search industry in the last year, 24 months?

Todd Friesen: man, I honestly don't know that I can say that there has been a drastic change in SEO. I mean we are still doing SEO the same way that we have been doing SEO for years. You go in and you get your on page stuff in line, you get your links in line, you get some press realeases through PR Web with your link in them you know all that kind of stuff and yeah I've been accused of having it better because of the brands I get to work with and there is something to be said for that. You go in to work on some of these large brand sites and they already have 500 or 1,000,000 backlinks, but at the end of the day as far as anything drastic I honestly can't say that there is anything that has really come out of left field. We haven't had a jagger update or a florida update or anything like that, but...

Brett Tabke: What do you think of Google Universal?

Todd Friesen: Google Universal is pretty cool. I think its a great opportunity, um for the time being I'm not seeing it impact B2C search very much at all like retail sales kind of things. Typically when you are going out there and looking and you watch all of the examples anybody gives at any conference when they are talking Univeral Search, they are pulling up band names, movie stars, uh, world events, hurricane Katrina, hurrican Dean that's moving through now and your getting the news integrated with the picturesand if there is video it's showing up and stuff like that, but if you go search for notebook computer, you get regular search results and so until it moves into that retail channel it's not really affecting a lot of us on the agency side because we just don't see it.

Todd Friesen: Really, hm okay. What do you see as the next big change in seach or..,.

Brett Tabke: Well, just to keep on the Universal Search thing. I think that and personalisation once they get the kinks out of it that is going to be very significant and when I talk about Universal in that light I mean we are taking steps already. We have some companies that have some video, you know tours of their hotel rooms or that sort of thing. That stuff is all getting repurposed up onto Google video and on to YouTube and on to MetaCafe and all those kinds of places because at some point they are going to turn it on, on to the more commercial searches and I think its just right now they are and this is personally just my opinion. I think they are just testing it out and they are playing with a very defined space that they know they have results around. When you start moving into that other stuff, you are going to start seeing the Cnet reviews showing up for technology and shopping related terms, you know laptops and digital cameras and that kind of thing. so once they start actually rolling that out it is going to be significant.

Brett Tabke: Cool, well we are just about out of time. I appreciate you taking the time to be with us Todd Friesen.

Todd Friesen: My pleasure, thank you very much.

[music]

[edited by: Vanessa_Zamora at 2:29 pm (utc) on Jan. 16, 2009]