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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

SEO Companies Ride Trend Toward Internet Marketing C

When Bernard May started National Positions in 2004 from the garage of his Calabasas home, most people had no idea what SEO was. Six years later Search Engine Optimization has become a popular term as more businesses want to be easily found on search engines such as Google Yahoo and Bing. His company, like many in the industry, is seeing fast growth as advertising dollars continue to shift towards the web. In 2009 National Positions increased revenue from $1.67 million in 2007 to $6.9 million – a boost of 313.17 percent. That growth earned the company the No. 2 spot in this year’s list of Fast- Growing Private Companies. “The overall ad spend in the U.S. has remained the same or shrunk over the last few years but there’s a huge trend with people moving their ad spend from conventional to online,” said May. Today, National Positions has 1,500 clients, up from 800 a year ago, including law firms, plastic surgeons, dental practices and a myriad of e-commerce businesses in all sorts of industries, who are all actively increasing their online footprint. The firm specializes in making businesses’ sites pop up in the top ten spots in the first page of search results in engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing; it helps drive traffic to websites through social media marketing and works to convert traffic that comes to a website into sales, among other things. The trend towards online has especially boosted Internet marketing firms in the down economy as businesses looking to find the best return on their advertising spend are lured by a metric based system that makes it easy to track results and determine what works and what doesn’t, said May. Among those firms that are seeing significant growth is also Encino-based Ebridge, a company that provides online marketing and lead generation services for small business owners. Ebridge saw 63.99 percent annual revenue growth from $16.69 million in 2007 to $27.37 million in 2009 and is projecting 2010 revenues at $35 million. Need seen “There is a crying need for a service like ours today,” said Ebridge CEO Mark Cave. “More and more small businesses are recognizing more of their advertising needs to be online.” Companies like Ebridge help the small business owner navigate the complex online marketing environment. “The days of the yellow pages were very simple for the small business customer, these days there are hundreds of different search engines that maybe you could be or maybe you should be advertising on. We guide the small business customer through the process and find the particular type of campaign that works best for them and gets them the best return on investment,” Cave said. Companies that help businesses sell their products online have also grown during the downturn. USI Technologies in Westlake Village grew revenues by 81.82 percent from $3.30 million in 2007 to $6 million in 2009. “Businesses are trying to increase sales, which is what we do, and are also trying to save on labor,” said Tom Kogler, president and CEO of USI Technologies. Founded in 2005, USI uses artificial intelligence technology to develop automated chats on customers’ websites, which provide customer service assistance and also help increase sales by engaging visitors at the time they are about to exit from an online shopping cart. Their automated chat technology, which can distinguish the nuances of conversation and portray a human persona, and also allows live agents to jump in and out of conversations when needed, is becoming more and more popular, said Kogler. Demand for their services has grown and their automated chat solutions are now on more than 700 websites up from 500 a year ago. “We’re a bootstrapped company, self funded, we were profitable six months after we launched and we’ve grown every year since,” Kogler said. “There are thousands of applications for our product.” Also growing is Volusion in Simi Valley, a company that provides shopping cart software for online businesses. Volusion grew revenues by 20.8 percent in 2009 from $18.61 million in 2007 to $22.48. As consumers spend more time online and businesses spend more money trying to reach these consumers on the web, companies that provide online services are facing an increasingly competitive field. “It’s a very competitive market, and the reason it’s so competitive is because there’s lots of money to be made,” said May. Staying ahead Online marketing and services firms have to constantly stay ahead of the curve to remain relevant. In an effort to remain cutting edge, National Positions is now expanding into video optimization and advertising on mobile devices. “People don’t want to spend a lot of time reading anymore, they want to just watch stuff and they want to see something that’s really exciting and entertaining, so we see video as a huge area of growth for us,” said May. “Video is becoming part of the new way of doing marketing and the growth rate is phenomenal. That and mobile marketing are all going to have huge increases.” Ebridge, whose focus is on businesses with less than 40 employees, is working towards the goal of becoming the world’s largest interactive agency for small businesses and is capturing new customers at an accelerated rate, according to Cave. In the last 12 months the company enrolled 239,000 small businesses in its services – that is one out of every 20 businesses the company engaged in conversation, he said.

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