Search Engine Marketing - Interview w/ Andrew C. Miller Transcription
Transcription from The Digital Bus Podcast Episode 4 interview with Andrew Miller of Your Search Advisor.
Derek Mehraban: And welcome to The Digital Bus Podcast episode 4. Today, we’re having a slight change in format for The Digital Bus. The Digital Bus now is going to be more about connecting experts often Generation Y, Millennials, these expert Twenty Something, technology gurus connecting them with CEOs, leaders of companies that are really looking for information on how do they take their business to Web 2.0, how to use the internet to maximum exposure and but first we’re also going to be talking to those CEOs and executives who might have you know 10-20-30 years of business experience that they can then come down and share with the Twenty Something. So it’s going to become an information exchange, still all about getting on The Digital Bus and today to help us get on The Digital Bus we have someone who, great guy, I share office space with him, his name is Andrew Miller. Are you there Andrew?
Andrew Miller: I’m here, thank you for the compliment.
Derek Mehraban: Okay. So Andrew, he runs a company called yoursearchadvisor.com and Andrew you want to tell us a little bit about what you do?
Andrew Miller: Sure. I’m a search engine marketing consultant. So I work with companies that want to increase their presence online, on the major search engines Google, Yahoo, that type of thing as well as different types of search engines that they might not have previously considered such as local search engines, mobile search, social search networks, that type of thing.
Derek Mehraban: Okay. How do you get into something like that Andrew, that’s a pretty interesting career path there?
Andrew Miller: I kind of evolved into it. I started after college in the traditional advertising agency setting. I worked at the Martin Agency in Richmond, Virginia doing traditional media planning and over the course of the years my role evolved into more interactive planning and I decided I wanted to swing more towards the online part of the business because that’s what I was interested in, that’s what my experience was, and that’s where I felt like I could add to most value. So after a few years at Martin I moved over to a corporate job at CarMax, which is also headquartered in Richmond as a web marketing manager. So there I was working on a lot of different internet marketing initiatives, everything from banner ads to paid search to search engine optimization and online PR and through some luck, some twist of faith my wife was accepted to a residency here at Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan so we moved up here, I struck out on my own, and it’s actually coming up on the one year anniversary in about three weeks.
Derek Mehraban: Yeah, that’s great man. It’s a great story and you know we share office space here at The Brickyard and you know we have a lot of fun, I mean it’s nice to be around people that are smart, you know we can share ideas and we’re all…
Andrew Miller: Who’s smart? Who’d that be?
Derek Mehraban: Who’s that? You know, hey! The crew man, The Brickyard crew, all the people here. So anyways, so Andrew, so tell us a little bit about you know why is search engine marketing, search engine optimization important today and then let’s put that in the frame of reference of you know what about these companies that are out there, maybe they have an established business or making lots of money, they probably have some brochure where website, but they don’t really know how to take it to the next level, why is what you do important for them?
Andrew Miller: Well, I think what companies want to realize or what they need to realize and act upon is the fact that it’s no longer a one way conversation between the company and their customers, their prospects, and their promoters and their detractors. It’s more of a dialogue now online with all the different outlets that regular people like you and I have to communicate with each other, with the companies that we do business with, and also other people that have done business with companies we’re considering. So there’s this great information exchange that really levels the playing field. It no longer really allows a company to determine the direction of the message that they’re putting out. With the internet, they have to be aware of that conversations are going on about their business, within their business, and this is a great opportunity for them to kind of join the conversation and make sure that they understand what’s being said about them, what they’re saying back to the community, and basically understanding that the customer now has a voice that they didn’t have 10 or 15 years ago before mass adoption of the internet.
Derek Mehraban: Right, right. So it’s less about companies talking at customers, more about talking with their customers these days. Is that how you’d say?
Andrew Miller: It’s definitely a large part of it. I don’t think the traditional push model of advertising will ever go away in fact it will become more rampant, but this opens up a whole new arena for marketers and PR professionals and company executives to really help leverage the internet to their advantage and unfortunately some fall by the wayside and really commit you know social and internet taboos, which will end them in a lot of hot water which I’m sure we’ll cover some of those examples later.
Derek Mehraban: Right, right. So you know because I’m thinking of a lot of companies that are out there and I think of your business, you are a search adviser, so I think these days findability on the internet, being able to be found on Google and Yahoo is very important, so you know if I type in the specific exact name of a company, they may come up, but in fact they still may come up lower on the results because other companies or businesses have that name. So tell me why specific is being able to be found search optimization as CEO important for these companies?
Andrew Miller: Well, primarily because regardless of what industry you’re in and no matter how niche you think your audience is, whether it’s B to B target audience or B to C you know business to consumer, there are people out there looking for your products and services and sometimes they look for you by brand name if they are already aware of you, if they happen to come across some of the other marketing material or have done business with you or a competitor in the past, but more often than not people are out there searching you know not only in our country, but around the world for the things that the company offers. They may not have been introduced to your company yet, so they may not be looking for you by brand name, they may be looking for the specific name or product or model of one of your offerings, one of your products, or a service that you would offer, so a lot of cases it’s in the best interest of the company to rank really well on search engines for those generic key words that are not really brand specific.
Derek Mehraban: Okay, okay. So we need to take into account the fact that consumers may not type in with perfect spelling your exact brand name, but they might be looking for barbecue grills in general or lawn fertilizers or I’m throwing out some spring summer topics, but they may be searching for more vague things, so it’s almost like we need to pay attention to how consumers think, what is their process when they’re searching?
Andrew Miller: That’s exactly right because it is ultimately if you think about the last time you used Google it’s all about what you want, it’s about what you typed into the search box. It’s not about what some company wants you to type into the search box. So you know a lot of times companies that sell specific products and are very entrenched in their industries are going to use a different vocabulary than their customers and I’ve seen this many times with very generic consumer-oriented things. A lot of companies will refer to things by product numbers, model numbers, brand names whereas consumers are using much more generic descriptors for those products and so as more companies…
Derek Mehraban: Can you give an example Andrew like a specific?
Andrew Miller: Off the top of my head, let’s see if I were looking for…well off the top of my head I’m not thinking of anything right off the top…
Derek Mehraban: Okay, okay.
Andrew Miller: …but you can imagine the situation where you’re going out and you’re looking for that barbecue grill that you mentioned before and most people might call it a barbecue or a grill or anything else that you Midwesterners call it, I can’t remember, I’m a Southerner, but to a company that produces or sells those products they may be known as liquefied propane, natural gas, they may be called something completely different range and so those could be an example of where the business and the consumer are disconnecting.
Derek Mehraban: Right, right. You know so that’s because you know we do some of that too. Ingenex, we do digital marketing, we do some SEO as well, so you know I think doing research, right? to really define what are people searching for, what is the terminology, you know that whole linguistic analysis does vary by region, you mentioned the South compared to the North compared to the you know the West, so obviously I think, so that’s pretty interesting. So companies I think need to think about that, you know and whether they go to a, you know niche firm like someone like you, right? a consultant and expert on search and then potentially agencies are starting to build up some of that expertise and offer that, you know companies that are building their websites. With Ingenex, we do build a website, we also optimize a website, but that is not happening too often yet, you know I think companies are still trying, they don’t even understand I think what you’re doing Andrew, this whole search engine optimization industry, they don’t understand it. So I think you’re in a good niche.
Andrew Miller: Well, thanks. I think you guys do some good work in this arena as well, so don’t sell yourself short, but you know maybe the best example would be the physical example. If you were to open a brand new store, you would want to make sure that the front of that store is well lit and wide open as possible, so you’re attracting all the traffic and the visitors and the drive-by’s into your storefront, but in the digital world we have to remember that there are the backdoors as well, there are the non-branded terms that people are looking for, there are the product names and specific you know the products or services that people are looking for that may not correlate to your brand, so you know opening up that backdoor, making that just as visible and accessible as the front door is an extremely technical difficult task sometimes, but it is in the business’ best interest to make sure that they are accessible from all sides for people searching for a variety of different terms.
Derek Mehraban: Yeah, I agree, I agree. Well, let’s go down, let’s talk to that CEO/President of the Company who may be listening to this podcast right now, maybe they want to you know become more internet savvy, they want to learn about Web 2.0. What do you think might be a good way for them to start? How can that CEO kind of dip his or her toe in the water and get started with using this new technology to help themselves and their company?
Andrew Miller: The one thing I would recommend first is if you are the CEO/President of the Company and you are not internet savvy I would not be the first to jump in into the waters and put your company out there and take that stance.
Derek Mehraban: Good point, good point.
Andrew Miller: I would recommend highly that for anybody, it doesn’t have to be a CEO/President of anything, but anybody especially you know executives in particular, but anybody should be spending some time on the internet, getting to know the types of information that are out there, the types of channels that are delivering that information, you know it goes beyond the mainstream news sources that we’re used to seeing in the offline world, you know they have a big presence online, but there are literally millions of niche sites out there that deliver news and discussion and gossip and all different types of information in every conceivable field out there, so the first step is to kind of immerse yourself in the online world, poke around anonymously, get to know the environment, get to know the players, get to know the people, try to understand the audiences that are using these sites, so you can get a feel for the types of communications and interactions that are taking place.
Derek Mehraban: Okay, yeah that’s a great idea. So subscribe to different news feeds, right? Subscribe to different blogs, read the blogs, and even you know comment on blogs or like you said, but I like your point about you know don’t jump in wholeheartedly right off the bat because it’s true as a CEO you’re leading your company, you represent your company, we need to be careful when we jump into these things, you know you want to do it the right way strategically, portraying the right image for both yourself and your business.
Andrew Miller: Exactly. The case I’m pointing, one of the companies I’ve worked with in the past, our online PR approach was threefolds. Basically, first step was just listen, monitor, take note of the conversations that are going on the internet about the brand, about the company, about the products and services that we offered and try to identify the issues that are out there. What we found was surprising that a lot of the negative stories, obviously in any business you’re going to have detractors, but those were outweighed once we started quantifying everything, about three to one positive to negative and the negative press usually gets a lot more attention, but there are some brand advocates out there and some people that are very positively talking about the companies that they deal with, they’re just usually not as prominent, so you know don’t get discouraged right off the bat by the initial hits that you find that maybe people that have negative experiences, go beyond that and look for the communities that are built up around your company or around your brand or your industry that are really going to be able to partner with you and help push the message forward. When you are at that active stage, so the next stage beyond the monitoring after we identified these sites and these audiences was start to interact, start to engage people, leave comments on blogs and start to post to social networking sites like Twitter and MySpace and the third phase is where you actually contribute, so going beyond just joining the dialogue you can actually start to lead the dialogue once you’ve established yourself as legitimate credible source and you always want to be upfront and transparent about who you are, who work for, and you don’t want to have these ulterior marketing or sales emotives, but if you are immersing yourself in the environment you can certainly push out content to your networks that you’ve developed over time that is valuable to them and useful to them and they will reward you for it, they’ll start talking about you, they’ll start defending you in social arenas, they’ll start inquiring different people, you know asking you about more information about your company and how to get involved and how the company is involved in certain things and it really opens up a lot of that non-marketing related conversation that companies are really craving with their customers these days.
Derek Mehraban: Yeah, yeah that’s true. I fully agree because if you’re going to have a conversation like that with your customer then it becomes much more than a client-customer relationship, it’s not a sales process, it’s more of becoming a friend or an advocate.
Andrew Miller: Exactly and you know even if it’s just you putting your customers first in the sense of developing your community and letting them know of new releases that are coming out, you know letting them be the first ones to get your new information as it becomes available or inviting them to you know simple stuff, inviting your users to beta test your new site, you know all these new networks can really be harnessed to do some pretty powerful things and give you honest feedback that you’re not going to get from people inside of the company or you know unnecessarily a hired agency or anything like that. You know, the man on the street is a pretty powerful influence.
Derek Mehraban: Right, so then, but what’s the goal? So let’s say you get some of this good feedback, you know you discover the issues, you discover the chinks and the armor through monitoring this conversation then does that help promote change with the company? Does that give you some real time research where you could say, hey these are some issues we need to address internally, I mean how do you feel that place with that?
Andrew Miller: I think it should be a big part of the feedback process, you know brand surveys and brand tracking and all that are great and it really helps efficiently capture a lot of that market data that companies are looking for, but people aren’t always honest, people aren’t always complete in their answers, sometimes people don’t like filling out surveys, but I can almost guarantee you for almost any company out there of any size that has a customer base that is using the internet, there is some conversation going on about you whether you know it or not or whether you like it or not and you know it’s no longer acceptable to turn a blind eye to that and pretend like it doesn’t exist or pretend like that negative feedback doesn’t need to be taken into account by your marketing or your customer relations or your PR folks, you know that information is out there for a reason and you need to be able to take advantage of that and incorporate that into your internal processes, so that you can act on it and demonstrate back to the customers that you are listening, that you are interested in what they have to say, and they will reward you for that.
Derek Mehraban: You know, I agree. I think today’s consumers are too smart and if these companies do ignore or pretend that it doesn’t go on then, I mean to me that would mean that that brand isn’t listening, that that brand isn’t being progressive, and how would I take action? Well, you vote with your feet, you vote with your checkbook, your wallet and you don’t purchase those products.
Andrew Miller: That’s exactly right.
Derek Mehraban: Yeah and so the companies that do take the time to invest in this conversation I believe are going to hook more customers especially young people, you know say the under 40 crowd is probably even more heavily into this than 40 plus and higher, but I think that’s what companies want these days, they want that younger buyer, you know these new people coming in the market place where they really have a chance to impact their lifelong purchasing habits.
Andrew Miller: Well and I’m sure that’s true, you know young people are usually labeled as more tech savvy and it’s easy for those of us in the industry just to assume that, but you know I’m always reminding myself of the fact that you know my mother and grandmother, I won’t disclose their ages because again I’m a Southerner and they would woop me, but let’s just say they are in the, they’re several generations removed from me, they are as almost as web savvy as you know as I was in high school, they’re online playing games across the internet with people around the world, they’re emailing, they’re instant messaging, they’re doing their research when they’re shopping for something and you know again it’s not everybody, but we don’t want to ignore those audiences of different generations.
Derek Mehraban: Excellent point, excellent point. Okay, so let’s talk about, okay here’s a question for you Andrew, how do you think search engine marketing is going to impact businesses over the next 10 years? Let’s kind of you know take a mile high view, where do you think its going? What’s going to happen? What are your ideas?
Andrew Miller: I think that search engines really are going to open up new channels for people to interact with companies and I base that assumption on the fact that you can go into your favorite search engine whether it’s you know Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, or Ask, you know which comprise about 95% of the search market share or any of the others that you want to use, type in the name of your favorite company and just see what comes up on the first page, you know you can literally look for listing by listing and see okay here’s the company’s corporate website, you know that should usually be ranking first again unless you’re doing something really wrong in terms of SEO, but you get past the first couple of listings that may be the company’s websites and different versions of their website or something like that, but then you really start getting down into what are the other communities that are based around this company, what are other people saying about them, and you’ll be surprise what you would see showing up near the top of the list for any brand name out there. Some of them are positive, some of them are negative, some of them are fan groups, some of them are you know so and so sucks dot com and I think it’s really important for companies to pay attention to the types of websites that are forming around their company and search engine marketing is only going to expose more of those, you know as the search engines get more sophisticated about the types of content that they want to promote, they’re looking for more well rounded search results, so they’re not only going to be showing websites from now on, but in the last year or so we’re seeing search engines start to roll out different formats of results, so integrated within you know just the 10 links on a page, you’re starting to see videos, you’re starting to see images, you’re starting to see product results, and news search results, blog search results, so all of that is incorporated into one search results page, so you know in theory not only could a potential customer or business partner or potential employee or new hire look at a company’s website when they go to search for it, but they’re also going to be looking at everything there is to know about that company, you know good, bad, or neutral.
Derek Mehraban: Alright. I’ll tell you that’s really interesting and I think monitoring as a company or as a, say the president of your company, I think monitoring what comes up is really powerful, so whether you’re a small company and obviously these larger corporations probably have whole departments that are monitoring and tracking all that, okay that’s just very interesting, you got me thinking on a lot of topics, but…
Andrew Miller: But I’ll add one more point to that.
Derek Mehraban: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Miller: You got me, that’s a good point, you know monitoring is obviously the way that companies need to first get involved in and what we’re talking about that, you know there’s a variety of tools out there that make that job a lot easier, you don’t have to sift through all the thousands or millions of web pages that mentioned your company, you know it’s as easy as signing up for rss feeds like you said or Google or Yahoo news alerts that automatically email you on a periodic basis when they find new results, getting into some of the different search engines like technorati.com which searches all the blogs. There’s literally, I would say in my arsenal there’s probably about a dozen go-to websites that I go to on a regular basis, you know daily sometimes, to look for news about particular companies that I’m working with and see what’s going on that just a regular Google search results page does not going to turn up, so we should, why don’t we post a list of the most important ones after we finish the podcast and really help give people the tools that they need to make sure they’re looking in all the right avenues for information about their company.
Derek Mehraban: Okay, you know here’s a question Andrew that I get a lot, these companies are hesitant sometimes to engage in social media for example by having a blog or even paying attention to it too much because the thing comes up is what if someone says something negative, what do we do if you know I type in my corporate business name into Google and the feeds result down is a negative comment, that scares a lot of companies, what do you say to something like that?
Andrew Miller: Well, the fact of the matter is that it’s out there you know it’s out there already and you can’t hide from it. It’s going to show up whether, you know if you want to hide your head in the sand and not even look for it, you know if you’re afraid to type your own company name into Google then maybe there are some operational things you need to be exploring first.
Derek Mehraban: Okay.
Andrew Miller: But, no I would say the smarter companies may decide that they don’t want to get involved, you know I’ve certainly come across examples of that where they say we don’t want to actively contribute content to the social networks or the online community, but they’re still monitoring and out there looking for people have had bad experiences or good experiences and then actually taking the conversation offline. I think one of the big things to point out is not all of these interactions that you’re having with your customers have to take place in a public forum, you know on a blog or in a community setting, you know you can certainly find information about people through their profiles or through their you know About Us pages or anything like that, that would allow you to contact them through normal channels and I’ll tell you in my experience it’s extremely powerful thing to post something on your blog one day saying, oh you know the company X sucks because they screwed me over and their customer service is horrible and then almost like magic the next day your phone rings and it’s a customer service representative from them, literally coming back to you on their hands and knees saying we’re sorry, what can we do to make it right and it’s really impressive to see companies that do reach out without trying to rebut you online or throw your concern away like it doesn’t matter because you know by reaching out to those customers that have bad experiences whether you do it online or in a more traditional channel via regular mail or phone call, you’re really telling those customers that they matter and that you care about them and that you want to make their experience right no matter what it is, so I think you know that’s another important point to highlight.
Derek Mehraban: You know I love that point Andrew because to me that’s it’s almost like the new etiquette, you know you mentioned you’re from the South right?
Andrew Miller: Uh-hm.
Derek Mehraban: You know it’s like proper etiquette, good manners. So sending a thank you card, sending a birthday note, letting people know you care and I think just what you said monitoring the conversation and then addressing it personally is gold for these companies. It’s a perfect opportunity. It should be almost the new standard of corporate etiquette, I would think.
Andrew Miller: Oh certainly and you know and regardless of where that responsibility falls within your company, whether its marketing or PR customer relations or you know if you’re smaller or mid size company and you know you’re the president you reach out to them personally. I think the point is that you know there is some response from the company. It’s no longer a big faceless corporation, it’s somebody with a name, you know, it’s somebody reaching out to you to say hey you know how can I help?
Derek Mehraban: Yeah, yeah, okay well final question, final question because you’re Twenty Something, you’re Generation Y, you’re a business owner, so if you had a question that you could ask you know a seasoned executive, someone who’s been very successful in their career, been doing it a long time, what would you want to know from them? You know let me just preference this a little bit because I think there’s a big issue out there where there’s a lack of mentorship coming down from top to bottom, it’s one of the reasons we’re doing The Digital Bus podcast like this because I feel not only that you have a ton of information that you can share with those execs, but I think they have a ton of information to share and they’re very busy, they’re very high paid, you know they’re almost inaccessible, but you know if you could ask them one question what would you want to know?
Andrew Miller: I would say the response I’d like to see from the more seasoned executives out there is what are they doing within their own companies to open up the lines of communication internally, how are they preparing to deal with this onslaught of new information in the future because it’s one thing to just say okay you know if they do decide to get involved with the internet or at least do a little bit more research into what could be achieved or what their objectives are going to be, you know it shouldn’t be purely just a marketing or PR role, it should involve all parts of the operation, everything from sales to production to distribution, anything that your company involves, they should all have a seat at the table when it comes to saying you know how should we address these things, what can we do to interact with the online community because I think you’ll see that if people across the organization feel like they’re involved and they can contribute, you’re going to get a lot more positive feedbacks. So my question to the executives is what other examples you have in your company of cross functional integration like this have you seen success with, and you know are there any obstacles or objections that you would see internally to incorporating something this when it comes to a more traditionally marketing or PR role.
Derek Mehraban: Okay, great question, great question. So I guess we’re about out of time. So I want to thank you very much Andrew for being part of The Digital Bus podcast.
Andrew Miller: Thank you for having me. I appreciate the time and I hope everybody out there, if there are anymore specific questions, you know leave a response on The Digital Bus blog and we’ll be sure to get back to you.
Derek Mehraban: Great and thanks for listening folks. Adios. So this is Derek Mehraban.
The Digital Bus is brought to you by Ingenex Digital Marketing.
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