Dave Bascom. Founder & CEO.
- Date of Incorporation: June 2007
- Location: Bluffdale, Utah
- Industry (Yahoo Finance): Internet Software & Services
- Employees: 45
- Website: www.seo.com
How did SEO.com begin?
SEO.com has been around as a company for two years, but its history goes back a lot further than that. Before it became an official company, I was essentially building the base of what would become SEO.com. I got into SEO when I was in college at BYU and worked at a company called Utah.com. Since then I have pretty much been doing SEO my whole career in some form or another, really focused on Internet marketing, specifically how to search the Internet. In the beginning I had a partnership with a couple of guys and our company was called bMarketer. The three of us decided to go our separate directions in 2003. One partner moved back to business school; the other partner went back to Canada and bought a farm there. We split up the company bMarketer and I started to do my own thing. In 2005, I moved out of the basement and got into an office, even though it was a tiny little room with folding tables and chairs. I hired my first employee, Nelson James, who is still with me. He’s my Vice President and has stuck with me all through these years. That company was called WebTargeted. We started to gradually grow that from 2005 to 2007. In June 2007, we were approached by an investor from back East who was looking for an SEO company. He’s a domain investor who had good connections and knew the owner of SEO.com. The domain was parked and the owner was trying to sell the domain. Mike Mann, our investor, tried to work this deal to combine our SEO company, a small but solid SEO company, with this great domain name and Mike’s capital; we came to terms and SEO.com was born. Essentially, it was a continuation of our old company WebTargeted, but we officially started the company when we rebranded it as SEO.com. Since that time, we have continued to be an SEO-focused Internet-marketing company helping companies optimize their websites to show up higher in the organic search. We also offer paid search management services, social media, conversion-optimization services, and other ancillary services. Our core business is SEO. We also do web development now. We’re becoming more of a broad internet marketing company, but most of our revenue comes from SEO.
When did you begin to foresee the value of SEO services as a viable business idea?
I saw the value back in 1998 when I started working at Utah.com before it was called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. We just knew that by getting a website to show up at the top of the search engines we could drive a lot business and a lot of value. I saw that value. I was originally hired by Utah.com to get the site to show up better. We started to offer that as a service and since that time, I’ve kind of stayed focused on that because I see the value and the opportunity. I think the demand continues to go up. There are more and more people looking for web search optimization services, something that they can do and should do. One of the things I like about it is that it levels the playing field. Small companies can compete with the big guys for keywords. It’s exciting for me to work with smaller companies to help basically beat out the big guys.
You have founded three companies over the past ten years, all of them SEO related. Many entrepreneurs tend to lose focus and switch ideas and industries. How have you remained vigilant through this process?
I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it. [laughter] I guess it’s because I maybe didn’t know anything else. That’s what I know. That’s all I’ve done throughout my entire professional career, so I stuck with what I know. That’s maybe one reason; also I think I see the opportunity. I really enjoy it. I’ve never become burned out or sick of it. It’s always changing, so there’s always something interesting. As the company has grown, I’ve been doing less and less of the actual SEO work. But for the longest time I have still liked to keep up with the algorithm changes and with the industry. But, I’ve had to pull back a little bit and have other people do a lot of the SEO work since I’m doing more management, planning, and financial work. There’s a lot more that I’ve learned and I enjoy management, but I still really enjoy the actual search engine optimization; the thrill of getting someone to show up at the top of Google is exciting.
You’ve talked briefly about the search algorithm. I’m assuming that you’re talking about Google. What do you do to stay up on top of that algorithm?
One thing that we do to stay on top of it is that we have 40+ SEO specialists and experts who are building links everyday for our clients. They’re doing the optimizations. They’re searching site rankings. We’re getting this constant feedback of what is working and what is not working. We actually do quite a bit of testing on some of our own sites to see what impact certain changes have. And, of course, we also read industry blogs and follow the thought leaders on Twitter and Social Media to see what they’re saying, but we don’t necessarily trust everything that we hear. We’re looking at our own analytics and our client’s analytics to see what is working and what’s not. That’s a lot of what we do to keep in the loop. We have regular meetings. Our account managers have meetings every week where they discuss what’s going on and what they’re saying. Some of this, not all of it is about algorithm changes, but that’s part of it. Part of it is just making sure that the tactics and the methods that we’re using are still working and getting results, and identifying any other trends or opportunities that we’re seeing for either new places to get links or new ways to optimize, or whatever it is that will give us better results for our clients.
What are some of resources that you use to stay up on SEO?
Well, going back to what I was saying before. I still have a RSS feed that I use. I use Google Reader as my RSS feed and follow 100 blogs that I follow, or used to follow. It’s hard to find the time now to keep up with those. What I usually do now is look to my team. They send over links or post links on their Twitter feed and point me towards what is most import. I watch some of the big sites. I really like searchengineland.com. It’s emerged as one of the better sites for news and information related to a search. They also have a Digg-like site called Sphinn that features the most popular or most interesting posts about search. I look at a few of those sites. Another popular site that I trust is seomoz.com. Our team is starting to put out some good content on the SEO.com blog. I’m always looking. There’s never enough time to read everything that’s out there, especially since SEO guys, and search marketers in general, just blog a lot. It’s just what we do. There’s a lot of noise. That’s why I look to my team for the most important news because I cannot keep up with what’s out there, and a lot of it is the same stuff repeated over and over. It’s just with different angles. I definitely try to pay attention to the real news and changes that are happening.
You were running WebTargeted.com when the infamous Google Florida update occurred. Did this have a big impact on your company? And, what did you learn from this event?
The algorithm change was a pretty big update. Looking back, it wasn’t personally as devastating as for many people. I had been doing SEO this whole time but my model had changed over time. For a while when I started doing web targeting, when it was me, I didn’t have any clients. I just had my own sites and I would do affiliate relationships where I’d make a commission on a lead or a sale. My sites were actually affected a lot, but that was around the time when I started taking on clients. My clients’ sites weren’t negatively affected, or at least not that much, by the update. But, my own sites were because there was a lot of the buzz from what I call thin-affiliate sites, where they provided the same content as every other site with an affiliate link to a relevant site. So, they wouldn’t offer much value. Google was essentially cracking down on those sites that had more value, by using their algorithm. A lot of people were affected. This is not to say that affiliate sites aren’t a legitimate business, because there are a lot of people who make a living on that type of business. But, a lot of times these sites didn’t have that much value. I knew that some of my sites didn’t have that much value. But, even some of my affiliate sites did well, thanks to the types of links that I focused on. I didn’t get into the site-wide links where you get the same anchor text across thousands of pages of a site or server hundreds of sites. Therefore, I had more legitimate links. My clients weren’t as affected, with only a few exceptions. Most real businesses made it through just fine. It was a huge shakeup, but then it gradually corrected over time. Some people that probably shouldn’t have gotten knocked down or knocked out of that first page of rankings did. Because of that one algorithm change, they got caught in the middle. If they deserved to be on the front page they had to work their way back in. But, I don’t really remember it being a big thing.
For me, I was used to search engines changing all the time. I think for a while for a few years people got comfortable. People were finding easy ways to game Google. I think that was the big problem. Ever since then, it’s been harder. Not that it cannot be done, but there are people who do it. I just try to take a long term approach that will hopefully succeed and not fall into bad graces with Google. For me, it’s all about relevancy. If you have a site where you’re selling paperclips, you deserve to be on the first page. There might be 10,000 other sites that feel like they should be there too. It’s kind of like politics. If someone is running for president there are probably one hundred people who are just as qualified as Barak Obama, but he had certain qualifications and he got his party and people behind him and was promoted up to that spot and got to become president. I look at optimization as the same way. First of all, to even be in the consideration set you have to be relevant in whatever they’re searching on. As long as you’re relevant, then the question becomes how to be perceived by Google as more relevant than these thousands of sites; the more sites competing for that the harder it is. It’s interesting because Google came along and changed the game. Before then, search engines didn’t really look at links, at least what Google did. Google came on and started looking at citations and links from other sites. That’s the game changer; that’s what made Google into the multi-billion dollar global giant that they are; they figured out a better mouse trap, a better search engine, and a better methodology. Now all the other search engines that are hanging around are basically Google-style search engines. In fact, a lot of them probably have ex-Google engineers working for them and they use something similar by looking at links, content and other things too. It’s interesting because Google’s method is one of those things that makes sense, but it makes it challenging. It creates a barrier to entry for someone who wants to start out because to compete with these guys on the first page with 20,000 links pointing to their site, you have to get in there with a good amount of links to compete.
Besides having a fantastic domain name, what differentiates you from the other SEO companies in the valley and in the world?
There are a lot of SEO companies around. I acknowledge that. The thing that sets us apart is our willingness to customize service. On the one hand, we have processes and systems that we’ve developed over the years, that I’ve personally developed and that my team has continued to develop, that apply to most cases of our clients. Companies that are reputable and get results have to have some type of process that works. Our processes have yielded results time and time again. On the other hand, we’re willing to try new things. Sometimes it has nothing to do with SEO. As an example, we did this live video feed for a tax guy. One of our SEO men dressed up as Uncle Sam and he did this live video feed where people could chat and tell him to do tricks. It didn’t work out as we hoped. We didn’t get nearly the buzz or publicity that we had hoped as far as in terms of people actually coming to watch the video, but we learned a lot doing it and the client appreciated it. It was something where we offered to take some of the time that the client was paying us to do SEO and do this. We try to focus on their objectives.
It’s not always about getting first-page rankings. A lot of times first-page rankings translate into more business, but if they’re the wrong keywords they may not get enough business or traffic. If their website needs help with their call to action or to test different offers and things like that, we’re willing to try new things. And that’s what has helped us drive into being more of a full-service marketing agency. We still focus on online and the core of search, but we’re starting to grow our expertise in these other areas because our clients trust us with their SEO and they’re looking for help in these other areas too. I’ve been laser-focused on SEO. I realize that there’s more to online marketing then just SEO. SEO isn’t the end all be all. It’s just a part of the full online-marketing suite. We understand that and I don’t necessarily expect to grow to the point where we’re doing everything, but we are growing the base of what we’re able to do in our expertise so that we can do several things that are interrelated, and do them well.
You talked about keywords and in-bound links. I also understand the power of content. What would you say are the key factors of good web optimization?
Right now, there are a lot of nuances and some technical things that you can go into, but the big factor is the content of the web page. First off all it starts with the right keywords, picking the right keywords, and sometimes you don’t know what those keywords are until you start getting traffic and you say you know what these customers aren’t buying. Maybe these aren’t the right keywords. So, you can test and change your keywords. It’s not set in stone. That’s the nice thing about the web is that you can adjust and you can test with a paid search campaign where you basically buy traffic on a certain keyword and see how it converts and if it turns into a customer; if it doesn’t work out then you can try different keywords.
The next step is getting those keywords into the content on your site in the right places such as in the titles, headlines, and body copy. We don’t really look at keyword density (10 percent or 3 percent or whatever percentage is on the page), but we look at naturally placing that word in the right places. Like I said, the titles and the headlines are extremely important.
The third factor is links; not just links from other sites, but also from links from within your site. A lot of times people will put a link on their page that says “Click here” and it links to their page. If you’re selling cameras and you say click here to buy this camera and the word click here is linked, that’s not as effective for SEO as if you link the word camera, because camera is the keyword that people are going to be searching on. That’s the signal to the search engine that says this page is about cameras. You need to link not just on your site itself but on other websites as well. And so you go out and get these links. Sometimes people will look to the quantity of links. Say I only have 20 links to my site or this site has 2,000 links or 20,000 links or 2 million links. The volume of links matters, but more than that is the quality of the links and where they come from. You’re better off having ten quality links from highly reputable sites like CNN, BYU, or from some big-highly reputable site than having 1,000 links or 10,000 links or a million links from some tiny blogs that no one else is linking to. It’s a matter of who’s linking to you and how they’re linking to you. Those are the main factors that influence search: right keywords, content, and links.
Let’s continue our conversation about web optimization. How will social media impact SEO?
I’m sure that you heard the new announcement that Google is going to use Twitter in its search. Bing started to show Twitter, and Google began to do the same thing. I see twitter posts show up in Google search a lot. It happens pretty often, but now it’s going to be built into their search functionality. I’m not sure exactly how it will be displayed; as far as I know, it’s not live yet, but it will be a supplemental thing kind of like how they show local listings sometimes or blog feeds or news. I’m assuming that it’s going to work where somewhere on that page will show what people are saying on Twitter about this keyword. It won’t necessarily show up every time. I’m assuming that this will be triggered by certain types of keywords that are popular by Twitter. You might be interested in what people are saying. I picture it to be blended into their universal search.
It could be different from that if it shows up every single time that will be different. Either way, we’re paying a lot of attention to Twitter right now because it’s getting to be not only popular in its own right, but search engine are paying attention to it too. It makes sense for us to pay attention too because we’re not going to just optimizing web pages and video images and everything else that we have been trying to optimize, but, now we’ve also got to start looking at the social media sites to make sure that our clients are showing up when someone is searching on their keywords in twitter because that’s going to show up on Google too. I see that as the next step in the near-term future of search, doing more real time search. Google has blogs and news and a lot of the other search engines to do the same thing. I talk about Google because they’re such a big player. You can do a search and it will pull up a blog post or news release or news article that was posted just minutes before, but you don’t see as much conversation from Twitter and Facebook and other social networks. Those two are the biggest right now. A lot of that stuff is not showing up on Google as real time. I think that’s going to be the next step. If people are talking about your business or your website on Twitter or on Facebook that is going to have an impact on where the site shows up on Google. You already can in a roundabout way generate links to your site, but I think it’s going to have a more direct impact. It’s probably coming sooner then a lot of people expect.
Are there any great influences—book, people, et cetera—that have helped you get to this point?
There have been a lot people who have helped me and have been mentors. I’ve read a lot of marketing books and business books. In terms of marketing books, I really like The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. It’s a really incredible book. We do some of the stuff that it advocates in that book. It’s a pretty short book, but it’s packed with the plan to build a sales machine; it’s not just about sales but there’s a lot about marketing in there. I just re-read recently a book called Leadership and Self Destruction. That one really opens your eyes to how prevalent it can be to be self-deceived, where you kind of see reality differently because of your attitude and feelings towards other people.
As far as people that have influenced me, my father was a great influence on me. He has always encouraged my entrepreneurial spirit. Until recently, he was kind of a corporate guy and worked at a lot of tech companies—Novell and Unisys. I think he’s always wanted to venture off and be an entrepreneur, so I think that was a big influence on me. I also really admired and still admire my first boss at Utah.com, Paul Mix. He was for whatever reason willing—maybe he couldn’t find anyone else who would take the pay—to give me a chance even though I had zero experience: no knowledge of HTML or web development, SEO—nothing. I knew literally nothing, but I was willing and eager to learn and he was willing to give me a chance. It was an awesome opportunity to get into a small business and learn a lot how a business runs and of course, the search engine optimization. I owe a lot to him for seeing potential or being willing to gamble on me.
So, do you have any advice for the aspiring entrepreneurs in our community?
My advice for the aspiring entrepreneurs in our community… [laughter]. Don’t do it. No. This is one I struggle with because I feel like I’m learning so much. I need people to give me advice. I guess my advice would be that if you have the right team that you can be successful. If not, it makes growing a business extremely difficult. I’ve learned the importance of hiring the right people. If you are going into a partnership, then you need to trust them. Sometimes you won’t know until you get into business with them, and even then only when you have a hard time or disagreement will you see what that person is like. You want to hire people you get along with and those you enjoy working with. Of course, you want to hire people who are competent and excellent in whatever they do. You have to hire people who have the same values and the same high-level goals and aspirations as you do. You will spend a lot of time with them obviously, but you will need people who are going after the same thing. These are things that are valuable to me. Business is important to me and the success of my business is important to me not only for my family but also for the families of my employees.
Business, to me, is not the most important thing. It’s a means to the end. I have to always remind myself that I’m doing this to support my family so I can provide for them. That’s why my employees are doing this. I want people who work hard and give it their all, but at the same time they care about providing for their families and doing the right thing. Sometimes that means losing out on business because we take a stand against something that we don’t believe in. We’ve had people who’ve come with this gambling site. Will you promote this site? There are some websites that we don’t touch at all. Some we don’t touch, but others are border line. We had a bingo site come to us from the UK. I guess it’s legal in the UK, but I personally don’t want to do any gambling sites. You could justify it as something like soft gambling [laughter], but it’s still gambling. That was one where they came to us and there was miscommunication. Our sales guys actually sold it. They wired us the funds. I said, what is this site? We had to send the money back. I’m not perfect. I don’t claim to be. I have standards and values that I stick by. Part of it too is that most of my employees are LDS and they have similar standards. I just feel like it’s not worth $80,000 a year to compromise our values. I don’t have to make those decisions every day, but this is what we stand for and what we will or won’t do. I guess this is another piece of advice. Stand up for what you believe in. Don’t compromise your values and your standards for money, or for what you perceive to be important. Even if it means losing business, I respect myself more. In that case, I don’t know. They probably thought we were nuts because they already paid and it was a weird situation. But, there have been other times where I’ve had to take a stand against a certain client and site, and they respected us for it. And, you respect yourself for it. Number one then is to hire well; they don’t have to have the same exact belief system, but characteristics of integrity, honesty and overall goodness are important. And the second would be stand up for what is right even when it sometimes doesn’t make business sense.
