SEO Guru Bruce Clay Teaches Masses

Clay When he wrote the book Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, Bruce Clay did not realize that one day, he’d be making a good living cleaning up the mess left by many people who did not read his 741-page tome all that carefully, though they probably should have. The search engine optimization (SEO) business has grown fairly sophisticated in recent years, and while Clay’s book can help some computer-literate people through the process, it’s clearly not for everyone. “The growth has been so rampant, many companies think they can hire a kid out of college who thinks he can read an online article and do the work,” Clay said. He’s an industry veteran who started Bruce Clay Inc., his SEO business, two years before the launch of Google in 1998. “There is a whole business to be had from cleaning up those disasters.” It’s one reason Clay’s Moorpark-based company grew 66.7 percent over the last three years to $5.7 million in sales last year. When companies realize that Google’s sophisticated algorithm will actually push them down in rankings and punish them for tricks like paying for links — which also happens to be a Federal Trade Commission violation — they tend to bring in the professionals. And Clay is one of the best-known. Google his name and you’ll get 2.8 million results. That’s because Clay is an institution in SEO circles. He started his business in the days of the first search engines, when it was Alta Vista and Infoseek, not Google, Bing and Yahoo. Back then, he said, it was just about calling his own shots and not doing things he didn’t enjoy, like signing checks three hours a day. Headquarters: Moorpark CeO: Bruce Clay growth rate: 66.7 percent REVENUE 2010: $4.5 million revenue 2009: $3.5 million Revenue 2008: $2.7 million “Companies have a tendency to make you do things that are not a lot of fun,” he said, recalling his decision to go into consulting in 1996. At first, he just wanted to help clients with their marketing and management challenges, which is why he hung up a shingle under his own name. But as search engines became better and faster, he discovered that as a math and computer science major, he had a knack for figuring out how to get his clients to move up in the rankings. In 2000, two years after Google’s launch, he posted a tool on his website, a search engine relationship chart. It was so popular that it was downloaded 300,000 times and made his name. Starting at his dining room table, Clay now has offices in Washington state and Montana as well as Tokyo, Sydney, Sao Paolo, Zurich and Delhi. Clients include small insurance companies in the Valley area to big brands like Victoria’s Secret, Caesars Palace, eBay, AT&T and Rosetta Stone. Clay says SEO is more important today than ever, as even the smallest mom and pop shops discover that it’s critical to have an online presence. And these days, much of his new business is from these smallest of companies. But while he still runs a monthly training course out in Simi Valley, he does not suggest these small businesses try to do SEO alone. “There are a lot of bad practices out there and it’s costing users money,” he said. If those users eventually find their way to him, though, he said he would be happy to set them straight.