Want To Know Where Your Extra $1M In Revenue Went?

SEO and SEM – both are of serious concern for any website owner including your clients. The problem many agencies have zero idea about the web, much less optimization techniques, which has provided wiggle room to a new crop of agencies. So, we decided to talk to one of these SEM/SEO shops and find out how this segment of the advertising business is snatching your cash.

Meet Roger Wehbe, President of Yooter InterActive. His clients include Primedia, Allscripts and the recent win of Empire Beauty Schools. The agency opened with $700 in 2005 and now, has revenues of just under $1M. Right. In just two years. We asked Wehbe why his agency is better equipped to handle SEO/SEM services; what agencies he works for, the future of the business and just how Yooter managed to get their hands on a million bucks that could of been yours.

1. What does Yooter do for their clients?

The best way to phrase it is that we work on any areas the search engines touch. For example, Google bought YouTube, now we are ranking clients in YouTube.

Search Engine Optimization is our core business, but it really touches everything from Social Media Marketing to getting agencies off their addiction to flash.

2. Why would a client come to you, a separate search engine marketing and optimization company, when their advertising agencies are offering them the same service?

We ask the same question, sort of. Why would anyone come to an ad Agency for SEO or any online marketing for that matter? Ad Agencies just have not been doing this long enough to understand it or it’s potential. There might be 10 firms out there that can get clients ranked for competitive words using proper, Google guideline approved methods. None of them are ad agencies.

The joke in our industry is that the words ‘ad agency’ and ‘SEO’ are mutually exclusive.

3. Why do you think it’s taken agencies a so long to catch onto SEM and SEO techniques?

This I don’t understand.

I myself have been doing SEO for about 12 years now, since Altavista was the largest engine and didn’t even own it’s own domain name. What I thought was normal internet marketing didn’t appear to be normal to ad agencies.

Ad agencies are all about look and feel. Our problem is that look and feel doesn’t rank. So the problem is how great is a site if no one finds it to say it’s great.

4. Do clients ever call you after dealing with an agency who they thought failed them? And what is the most common complaint you hear from those clients?

That the agency stiffed them. They claimed they could do SEO and they can’t. Or, they billed them enormous amounts of money for search marketing for keywords they could of ranked for themselves organically.

Go poke around one day on any agency designed site and try to find Metatags or try to find a sitemaps.org standard sitemap. Try to find keyword rich text… What I find most annoying is how they host things on proprietary software where the person that built it was clueless on SEO factors, and you don’t have the right to fix it because you don’t own the code.

5. What agencies are the worst at SEM and SEO techniques?

Virtually all of them. Like I said, the words ‘ad agency’ and ‘SEO’ are almost mutually exclusive.

The line of thoughts between the two industries are staggering simple. Ad agencies really only care about look and feel SEO firms only really care about rankings. Look and feel doesn’t generate rankings. At the end you need both to really do a positive ROI for a client.

SEO is a marketing discipline that the agencies really haven’t understood.

6. Do you ever work inconjunction with agencies to serve their clients?

All the time, that is the biggest part of our business.

7. Which agencies?

That’s NDA. That’s the only way they would work with me, but I can tell you this though – some of them are in your categories on Agency Spy.

8. What do you think is the future of SEM and SEO (i.e. will the business grow, morph, do you think agencies will ever catch on put you our of business)?

I doubt that they will put us out of business… maybe vice versa if current trends hold.

How long will firms keep paying a quarter million for a full page ad in US News and World report, print edition with the 20% agency cut?

Of course our industry will morph. We will look more and more like an ad agency just online. Already we spend a good part of our day ranking stuff in YouTube and Google Video. We spend huge parts of our day putting stuff on Digg to get popular to get the tons of backlinks to help increase our clients rankings. We spend time getting clients press release out on Google and Yahoo news (for a fraction of the cost that everyone else is paying).

We have years on them from a technology and innovation standpoint. These are the same firms that still build their sites without meta-tags. You have to remember, SEO firms as a whole, traditionally have had far less resources than traditional firms. This means that they had to be far more innovative with themselves and their clients to generate a positive ROI.

When I mean less resources, I mean really less resources. I started Yooter in the back of my house a few years ago with about $700. Now we have over a dozen employees and have been profitable almost since inception. With no seed money. No VC, though we get calls every week. We have been hiring at such a rapid rate that we just had a building fitted for us. We are looking to expand again.

9. Anything else you’d like to share?

SEO isn’t a complete marketing plan. You do need branding, though the argument could be made that ranking for tons of relevant keywords is branding. So there still is life in the traditional ad space. It’s just not what it used to be. The best plan would be to have an ad agency handle the offline marketing and logos, catch phrases, market research, etc. Things of that nature. We have no idea what colors to choose to make people buy, but we know how to rank the page to have people see the colors in the first place.