BC Guru Interview - Mike Belasco from SeOverflow

Brent: Hi, this is Brent from BC Gurus and HotPress Web. I'm here with Mike Belasco from seOverflow. Mike recently wrote an article for BC Gurus about nine ways to improve your Business Catalyst agency website. I thought we could get to know a little bit more about Mike and his firm, seOverflow. So, Mike, if you just want to tell us a little bit about who seOverflow is?

Mike: Sure, well, thanks for having me Brent. seOverflow, we are an SEO outsourcing company, which means that we help web designers, web developers, marketing agencies offer SEO to their clients. We're based here in Denver, Colorado. We're ten people right now, but we're growing fast. We actually were ranked as one of Denver's fastest growing companies last year according to the Denver Business Journal.

Brent: Very nice, very nice. For the BC Partner community, I think, and even for my business having a partner where you can just of kind of hand over SEO and be confident that it's going to be executed well and that you guys have products set up for that kind thing, I think it just works out really well for this kind of market in particular.

Mike: Yeah, SEO is really an art and a science. It's quite different from web development and web design. You certainly could expand your agency and hire someone in-house to do those sorts of services, but then even within SEO, you've got on page optimization, you've got link building, or the things that happen off of the website. So, it's very difficult to keep up with all that and be able to even figure out how to run it as a business, as an offering for your clients.

Brent: Sure, interesting, I actually had a question recently by a partner, and he was wanting to make sure if we referred seOverflow that you guys weren't going to do, like, take over the web design portion.

Mike: No. No, we don't do any web design or web development. We always tell people we're not programmers. We don't do e-mail marketing. We don't do social media marketing. The only other thing that we do besides organic search engine optimization is paid search marketing or pay-per-click.

Brent: Okay, interesting. I think a lot of our viewers at BC Gurus are very interested about what is your process for SEO? I know you guys have a few different ways of approaching it. If you're a partner out there and their client has requested SEO services, what is their next step in order to get you guys involved?

Mike: Sure. We ask all of our partners to kind of go through an initial conversation with us just so we can get them up to speed on what our offerings are, how our pricing is like, and generally what exactly is the process for getting our service. But it's pretty easy once you get started, we have an online form where we just ask the bare minimum of details that we need in order to put together an estimate. We give that estimate to our partners. They have a number of different ways that that can be provided to their clients.

We can do just a referral where we actually do offer a referral commission for any projects that you refer over to us. We can do white label where the client doesn't even know seOverflow exists, and it all happens behind the scenes. Or we have something that's sort of a hybrid between the two called open white label, where you're still managing the relationship. The partner still has the contracts with the clients, but the client knows that seOverflow exists. That works out quite well because then they can take advantage of our reputation in the industry. We have several employees that speak all around the world really at SEO conferences, like Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, Online Marketing Summit. Really, the list kind of goes on and on. Clients really like to have that trust that they're really hiring people who know what they're doing in order to handle their SEO.

Brent: I know from selling a lot of websites myself, to go in and try to act like this giant full-service agency that's a jack of all trades, I think there are certain clients that do buy into that. But I think most people, when you're open and transparent about your relationship with other industry experts, probably it builds value.

Mike: It does because, I mean, you're really building that trust. It's like, oh, they know they're not experts. They're smart enough to understand that, and they're bringing in people that are. So I do think that it adds a lot of value and a lot of trust to that relationship.

Brent: Okay. You know, getting into some technical stuff with Business Catalyst. I think I've gotten this question. Business Catalyst, there's decent knowledge of it in the industry, but there are the big titles like WordPress and Drupal just because of their open source nature have gotten a lot more traction. Can you touch on the core pieces of a content management system that you guys, from an SEO perspective, just need to be able to have? Maybe that can help partners sell SEO better.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Number one, we've got to be able to edit the title tags, the meta tags, the title tags by far. I mean that is the most important place that we need be able to go in and add those sorts of things. Part of it, quite honestly, comes down to site design. In the architecture, which any content management system could handle, most content management systems out there have the basics these days to be search engine friendly, but it's kind of how you apply your design and development.

For example, we like to see H1 tags for the headlines not wrapped around the logo or something like that. H2, H3 is available for use. Of course, Business Catalyst has that fantastic push button create an XML site map feature which definitely saves a few headaches in the process. That's really awesome. WordPress is a great management content system, but you can't get that functionality unless you have a third party add- on.

Brent: Interesting.

Mike: Of course, you're going to have to worry about how that interacts with your other add-ons and with the core system itself. Having that stuff built in, tested, and kind of guaranteed by Adobe, backing it up, really eliminates a little bit of the risk and the potential issues that might come up as a part of that.

Brent: Nice. Very cool.

Mike: Yeah, those are the main things. I mean, there's plenty of other things. I think I have a presentation out there somewhere on the interwebs about the nine characteristics of a SEO friendly CMS, and I'm sure there's plenty more I'm not thinking of right now.

Brent: Okay. Well, we'll have to be able to get that and reference it. Every once in a while I get a client or a prospect that just says, "Oh, well, Google loves WordPress." I'm like, "Well, I think they love certain characteristics about the site that's published, not necessarily like the WordPress brand in particular."

Mike: Yeah, there's certainly nothing about WordPress in particular that Google loves. Again, I think it has more to do with the people that use WordPress and how they tend to code their websites. I know that's a big push from BC Gurus is actually educating people not only on how to grow their businesses but also how to use Business Catalyst to the best of the their abilities and in their clients' best interests as well. Of course, if you're adhering to those best practices, Google is going to like you just as much as WordPress.

Brent: Okay. Well, that's good to hear. Well definitely, Mike, thank you for spending some time with us today. I hope you'll be contributing to BC Gurus in the coming weeks and months. I know we've got some stuff planned and in store. We definitely appreciate your time today.

Mike: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, and we love to work with all the BC partners out there. Please feel free to give us a call or look us up online at seOverflow.com.

Brent: Yeah, for sure, and I'll include a link on the post to Mike's website. Thanks again for watching BC Gurus, and stay tuned for more.