Bill Hunt (Global Strategies)

Bill Hunt gründete 2001 seine Firma Global Strategies, welche auf die SEO-Beratung von großen Unternehmen spezialisiert ist. 2007 verkaufte er das Unternehmen an die Ogilvy-Gruppe, leitet die Firma aber nach wie vor selbst. Im Rahmen der SES London 2009 verriet mir der Autor des SEO-Bestsellers „Search Engine Marketing, Inc: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site“ – nein, kein Affiliatelink – was ihn aktuell beschäftigt und was es in der Welt der internationalen Suchmaschinenoptimierung alles an neuen Entwicklungen gibt.

SEOnaldo:  Bill, you are often named a „search veteran“. And you have seen many things changing since the very beginning of SEO. Please tell us about these changes.

Bill Hunt: Well, many things changed, but a few things did not. My book is still the best selling SEO book . The SEO game got much more complex. Owning the first 30 results for a competitive term is not as easy as in the beginning. But on the other hand clients got more educated and SEO consultancy is – at least in the United States – not such a hard sell anymore. And these days with universal search / blended search it is like going back to the roots and being able to dominate a big percentage of the first result page. Just much more complex and much harder to achieve. “Shelf Space” might become the next buzzword in search. With all that images, videos and social sites in the SERP’s the question is how much of the first page does your client control? And for this type of question there will be very different kinds of ranking-reports needed in the future. But besides all this “Shelf Space hype” the main goal is to target traffic to your clients site and this has not changed over the years.

SEOnaldo: What did change for you personally when Global Strategies increased over the last years about more than 100 employees globally?

Bill Hunt: It is still the same motivation, just on another scale. I am always looking for curious, competitive staff. They must be curious because they must love to take a close look at the search engines and their algorithms, and they must be competitive enough to have the will to win for their (our) clients. Of course I do more administrative work now than a couple of years ago but I am still very close to the daily business of search engine optimization, just much more efficient with all our tools and ressources for research.

SEOnaldo: Tell us a little more about your company.

Bill Hunt: Global Strategies offers search strategy consulting and auditing. We are not deep into PPC ads and concentrate on the organic search business. Most of our clients like IBM, Cisco, Procter & Gamble, Adobe and Intel are multinational and very large organizations. That is why we have to offer our services in so many languages. Today, Global Strategies is running 3 offices in the USA and additional offices in 12 other countries like China, Brazil or Germany.

SEOnaldo: What are the main differences for a consulting agency in working with big clients compared to small and medium sized companies?

Bill Hunt: Small companies are much easier to work with. Especially, if they still are run by the founders. The owner understands the advantages of SEO, takes action and wants to win. In big companies there is often an understanding that there is a right to rank no. 1 with several keywords in Google because the company is the no. 1 player in the offline world in this market. And even if they understand that they have to work hard to get on top, there is often so much bureaucracy that it can be really frustrating. But if you finally get things done the results can be exponential. And several things such as linkbuilding are much easier with huge clients. We do not have to buy links for our clients to increase their page rank. They usually already have many inbound links and a high page rank. It is more a job of educating their pr-teams, distribution partners, resellers or channel partners how to link more efficiently.

SEOnaldo: Your company runs an office in Germany. From your perspective, what is the German SEO market like?

Bill Hunt: It is a very competitive market. There is only little traffic available due to the little population and many SEOs are fighting hard to get a piece of that pie. The big companies in Germany just seem to begin understanding what SEO is and why they will need it. So there will be a growing market. I admire about the German SEOs that they are so analytical and disciplined in testing the search engine’s algorithms. I guess it is not by accident that also many very successful search engine spammers are based in Germany. And compared to the United States there are many young, very passionate folks in the SEO game which is great but makes it hard for a lot of them to sell SEO as a service to companies, because the budgets are often still in the hands of older guys in companies like this. There are also many many good forums and blogs about search engine optimization and an existing SEO-community, which is also the case here [Anm. in UK] but not in many other European countries.
But it looks like SEO Agencies in Germany have bad feelings about giving too much know how away for free. Global Strategies has been very successful in educating potential clients for free by offering workshops and seminars. Once a company has understood why it needs SEO and is aware of its opportunities, it wants to embrace it. It will come to you again and pay for more consulting. And you have a happy client to grow with.

SEOnaldo: Is that the way Global Strategies grew? Or do you also have an additional sales-team?

Bill Hunt: We do not have a sales team. We generate business primarily by using the maturity search cycle. We grow through growing our clients. First they have only a rough idea of search engine optimization, then they understand its opportunities, they want more and SEO gets more and more important within the organization until it is finally identified by the company’s leader as ‘mission critical’. We are chasing new business by speaking at conferences (if possible, choosing topics our clients would like to listen to and not the guys from other agencies). And being part of Ogilvy Group has also helped a lot in the last two years.

SEOnaldo: What is Bill Hunt going to do in 10 years? Lying on a beach drinking coconut milk?

Bill Hunt: Lying on a beach sounds good. But with a laptop, of course.

SEOnaldo: Well, Bill, thank you very much for the interview!

Der Beitrag wurde am Freitag, den 6. März 2009 um 15:33 Uhr veröffentlicht und wurde unter Interviews abgelegt. Du kannst die Kommentare zu diesen Eintrag durch den RSS 2.0 Feed verfolgen. Du kannst einen Kommentar schreiben, oder einen Trackback auf deiner Seite einrichten.