Transcript

Brett Tabke: This is Brett Tabke. We are back here again in Silicon Valley, and today we are with Ken Jurina Jurina of Epiar, and Curtis Dueck Dueck of Epiar. Ken Jurina you are the CEO and President, and Curtis Dueck you are an Account Manager with Epiar.

Curtis Dueck: It's true, yeah. We all wear many hats, uh, one of the joys of being a mid-sized organization is that we do get to specialize in some things and also we do some things that maybe a thousand person firm would have specialists on, but keeps everyday interesting for sure.

Ken Jurina: I'm just the face of the company. I just, you know, I take the credit for all the quality work that is being done.

Brett Tabke: How old is the company?

Ken Jurina: Um, it's actually getting into its seventh year now. So it's been around for a while, um we were through the trials and tribulations of people not even knowing they wanted a website, never mind optimizing a website so it ranks in the search results and so forth, so it's been a bit of a challenge and I have a sister company as well that does website design and development so we went from the interesting transition of developing the brochure websites, the great looking websites, to all of a sudden realizing it might be important one day for these sites to rank on the Internet, I think this might take off, so.. Then, there abouts is seven years ago when Epiar came around and started doing some pretty innovative things with our different applications that we have developed, which we have now been known for, and have pretty much focused ourselves on more of the organic side of things as far as the services are concerned, um, and that's really where our applications focus towards, but yeah I've been making some really interesting waves ang getting a good mixture of clients from Canada and the States.

Brett Tabke: Which is important to note that you are from Canada. One of the proud few Canadian SEO firms.

Ken Jurina: There is more and more of them out there you know. We go walk around at different events and different conferences and so forth and find more people from Canada. I also sit on a search engine marketing organization, SEMPO, and there is a number of Canadians involved in it, but we are still finding that the Canadians are a little lagging behind in the adoption of um, I guess benefits and general awareness even of search engine optimization and marketing in the states, so our client mix is an interesting one because we continue to, I guess, brand ourselves more, be involved in the community, whether it be at like conferences, whether it be at presentations and so forth, um more and more clients are coming from the states and um it's working out very well for us because you've got a great coversion, but I'm surprised, and actually a little frustrated as to why Canadians are not really embracing the opportunities that there are online with search engine optimization marketing so that's why I also started and founded up the search engine marketing professional organization in Canada with a fellow by the name of Alex Barget, out of Vancouver and uh, we are looking to try to do as much as we can to further educate the general public and companies out there on the opportunity that they are missing. It's a little bit longer of a sales cycle for people in Canada than it is in the States.

Brett Tabke: What have you guys seen as the biggest change in SEO in the last year, two years?

Ken Jurina: Hmmm. There is a lot. I would say that um, obviously the way the search results screen is looking. The incorporation of the local search, the um personalized search, the everything above the fold. The room is getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and local search and so forth. Everything creeping in, and of course the company was primarily focused on organic. It's always of concern as to how many of those organic listings are going to be appearing above the fold. So that to me has a been a very interesting trend, and people who are ignoring or not paying as much attention on the local side of things. The local search, and the opportunities within local search because they are coming up at the top of the screen people. Yet so very few people are really aware of how they get themselves into those listings. So that is where you know when it comes down to percentage of where people are clicking on the screen. That is one of the biggest changes I've been seening. I'll give you an opportunity to chat too.

Curtis Dueck: Well I think that similar to what you mentioned, right now sort of the new buzz is the universal search results and basically the mixing of multimedia into the search engine results pages, and I think that the implications of this are pretty profound. They were, Google was talking about the changes of the algorithm and how they are now sorting, how they integrate multimedia features, and uh I think that the impact right now for people who want to have successful websites is pretty clear. It's called build good content, and on the one hand, obviously that's been the rule of the Web since it was born, just build good content and link to it, but I think right now people are realizing good content may mean videos and news stories and blogs and images and everything, but basically if there is a format out there that's, that our culture has demanded in the past, and if you are a real business, Make sure that you are representing yourself well in all of these different areas, and so I think that impact, is you know right now it's sort of coming out, but I think that this is going to be a real factor for the next many months and years. The YouTube, social media, all of these tie-ins as well where funny videos or weird creatives are sort of having these unexpected effects on a sites popularity. Well people are starting to think right now, oh we really need to be on top of all of this, and that requires a lot of resources, a lot of creativity, so that would be my response to the biggest change right now, the biggest I think new opportunity.

Brett Tabke: Well gentleman, thanks for being with us we are out of time. I appreciate you stopping in to talk to us today.

Ken Jurina: Thanks Brett. Thanks for the opportunity.