In our Digital Marketing Leaders series I am spending time speaking with Gillan Muessig. Gillian is the president of SEOmoz and a leader in the area of Search Marketing. I asked her the following questions:

Q: How did you become involved in the search industry?
I founded a marketing consultancy in 1981. In 1993, I became involved with companies building the first corporate sites on the web. Soon after Rand joined the company and we offered corporate websites to our clients. When the dot-com crash hit, clients had no capital expenditure budgets, but they still had operating capital. So I created a rev-share agreement and worked with companies who showed potential, were doing poorly online and built high-converting websites. We subbed out the SEO work to four companies without success. That’s when Rand turned his attention to search and learned it himself. In a short time, our clients were ranking well and they - and we - were making money. Rand started the SEOmoz.org blog as a way to share information and learn from others in 2004. In 2005, it was evident that our future lay in search, rather than marketing or web development. We re-branded and opened SEOmoz in Nov 2005. The rest is history.

Q: How can you use search to benefit smaller clients?
All of our earliest clients were small and midsized firms. Focusing on local/regional search, utilizing the long tail, and taking advantage of emerging technologies with relatively inexpensive ad opportunities such as social media and mobile ads can stretch a small budget for optimal success.

Q: Do you think it’s more difficult to keep up with industry trends in search marketing than it was a year ago? Why or why not?
It’s not more difficult to keep up, but it is more time consuming to get on the track now. Many of the top folks in search began their work/practice several years ago. Things were relatively simple (and spammy then. However, there is an ever-increasing volume of work on the subject of SEO. If you’re just starting now, it will take some time to ‘catch up’. I expect universities will soon offer degrees with a specialty in search marketing.

Q: Tell us about a successful search marketing campaign that you’ve run…what made it work? What made it fun? How did it benefit the client?
Early on, I worked more closely with the SEOs in SEOmoz. Later, I focused more on running the business. So my story is an old one.

We put a lot of effort into optimizing a hard money bridge lender. We made some mistakes, cleaned up the mess, and moved on. While the mistakes weren’t any fun (they stalled profitability at a time when we really needed them), we did learn a lot.

Finally, the site began ranking very well for some very competitive key terms. But our client still wasn’t closing deals. By calling into the client’s office myself, I discovered that the marketing and sales process inside the client’s office wasn’t functioning well.

The client was  willing to work with me and allowed me to run the phone number on the website through my office. I answered the phones as their receptionist for about three months. By perfecting the phone and response process, I demonstrated to the client that the website was generating solid, effective leads and that they could close a lot more attractive deals if they improved their in-house processes. Turning around a tough project and unequivocally demonstrating how to be successful to the client was fun, as well as very profitable for all concerned.

Q: How important is it to be “visible” in the industry these days?
That depends on the role you wish to have. Public speaking or even ‘visibility’ isn’t for everyone. I would say however, if you want to run your own SEO/SEM consultancy or agency, you’d do well to have someone in your company be a consistent and positive public face. Speaking, teaching, answering questions for news media, putting business related videos online, doing pro-bono work for larger organizations in the public eye can all increase the trust factor with a potential client. If you are targeting a specific market, say residential builders, you can provide a search marketing column for their newsletters if public speaking isn’t your thing. The more places you can point a client to in which you are seen as the expert in the field, the better. These are just a few of many ways to get the word out about your skills.

Q: How does link building fit into social media? Does PPC fit in at all with what you do?
I don’t think of social media marketing as strictly a way to garner links as they are generally no-followed or of low value these days. Social media marketing is very useful for direct target marketing to groups of people who are likely to be interested in your specific website/offer. SEOmoz doesn’t focus on PPC work, but in his keynote speech at SMX Singapore, social media expert Harrison Gevirtz pointed out that social media ads are still relatively inexpensive and an excellent way to tightly target and stretch an ad budget.

Q: Have you used any “questionable” techniques in search marketing?
These days, SEOmoz is focused on providing the best possible tools to search marketers. But we do serve some clients as we always want to keep our hand in the game in order to provide current, relevant information to our has a well-earned reputation for being strictly white-hat. It’s not so much a matter of whether a tactic is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Rather, the pragmatic question is asked, “Will this jeopardize the client’s current rankings or ability to rank better in the future?”. We serve clients who need to be in the SERPs for the next 100+ years. Therefore, we don’t have the leisure to play loose with whatever rules the private search companies want to impose on those who wish to be listed in their indexes.

Q: What industry trend leaves you cold and why?
Fear. I know it’s not exclusive to the search industry. But the wringing of hands and fear of shrinking budgets, etc. leaves me cold. You and I have spoken about this a few times in the past weeks already and we have both commented on a thread on the same subject. So, at the risk of being repetitiously redundant (sorry I couldn’t resist): This is a great time to be in search! Companies are slashing their ad and marketing budgets. Rather than simply hacking bodies, ad and marketing departments are pulling money from expensive print, TV, radio, direct mail, etc. and putting it online. The first boon goes to PPC. As soon as the number of bidders and bid prices increases, the next boon will be seen in SEO. Things move fast and marketing department heads aren’t stupid. We are seeing this money flowing into SEO/SEM right now. And I predict that when this is all over, that money will stay online where it is more targeted and the tracking metrics are so precise.

Q: What is the best part of your workday and why?
Opening the SEOmoz blog to see what’s new. I start there and go on to other sites, but it is always a thrill for me to see the new blog post at SEOmoz. I guess I still haven’t lost the excitement of seeing a goal accomplished. It was a lot of hard work to make SEOmoz a strong company on whom so many people depend for reliable, valuable tools, knowledge, industry information, marketplace and more. Just seeing the activity on the site and the constant updating of the blog, improvement of the tools, additions of partner offerings in the resources’ discount store, etc. makes all the hard years worthwhile. Like gazing at a beautiful child of one’s own, seeing SEOmoz active and in use daily is still the best part of my day.

Q: What advice would you give to young women trying to make a name for themselves in Search Marketing right now?
SEOmoz recently held an Advanced Tactics in SEO seminar. After a lunch break, I passed the men’s washroom which had a line outside the door. The women’s washroom had one other person in it. We laughed. Where else would you find the women’s room empty while the men’s room had a line out the door but at a Search event?

While there are relatively few women in the field of Search, be it marketing, analytics, tool dev, or otherwise, there is also relatively little gender bias. If you know your stuff and are willing to put in the hard hours, there is an exciting career to be had either as an independent marketer (ask Jill Whalen, Kim Krause Berg, Motoko Hunt, et al) or as an corporate specialist (see: Vanessa Fox, Natala Menezes, et al) .

The time is right! Jump in with both feet.

Thanks Gillian for your time.

Tags: Interview, SEOmoz