Barry Lloyd Interview

Barry Lloyd, well know to most in the SEM community as MakeMeTop, is a high-profile search marketer based in Ireland. In this interview, Barry talks about his background, his marketing driven approach to SEM, and where he thinks the industry is heading.

Thanks for asking me, Peter. Like all people who evolved into search engine marketers I got here by a tortuous route! More years ago than I care to remember - but it was in the mid-70s - I was a computer programmer working on old ICL mainframes and then DEC mini-computers. In about 1976 I decided, along with a couple of kindred spirits, that these new-fangled desktop computers might have a future (this was way before the IBM PC) and we should start a software company writing applications in the UK for personal computers. These included the Commodore PET, the very first Apple and a plethora of S100 bus based Zilog CPU machines. Well, it became rather obvious that someone would have to go out and sell our software, none of the others wanted to (or really could) so it fell to me! I was rather good at it and so became the sales arm of the company.

Within a couple of years, the company was bought by a larger computer manufacturer and I became their dealer manager for Europe selling their mini-computer platform to software houses across the continent. I also was responsible for large government and corporate contracts and landed several big deals. By 1980 I accounted for 41% of their world-wide sales.

After going through several iterations of senior technical sales positions for a number of well known technology companies, the early 1990s saw me working in the US assisting US and Far Eastern companies set up distribution and manufacturing facilities in Europe. I became something of a globe-trotter traveling regularly around the world and living in hotels and airports more than at home! In 1997, I decided it might be an idea to put our services on-line With a web site and paid a design company to produce a web presence which Cost a lot, existing clients liked - but didn't appear on any of the breed Of search engines then starting to make their mark. After much argument About why this was and because of my programming background, I decided to investigate why this was. The answer was pretty simple - suitably placed title tags, a description tag, an undoubtedly spammed-out keyword tag and (get this) some copy on the page that actually described what we did including the words we wanted to come up for - seemed to do the trick.

I was amazed at how simple it was, clients were impressed and asked if I could do the same for them (they had the same frustration with their Web designers) - then some suppliers asked the same thing and it seemed Silly not to turn this into a money making venture. In 1998 I took on a project to develop a PC manufacturing facility in the Republic of Ireland. When this project finished in 1999 my wife and I had already decided that we wanted to return to Europe and I wanted out of the jet-setting life I had been leading. I suggested turning my part-time pocket money earning SEO jobs into a full-time business and the idea of MakeMeTop as a service was born with Microchannel Technologies Ltd being formed that year. My wife was born in Northern Ireland - so we settled there, just over the Border with the Republic. It seemed to make sense to start the Business in pleasant surroundings where the cost of living was also comparatively Low in comparison to the rest of the UK.

I also decided we would only Market online and do no cold-calling, offline advertising or e-mail marketing - after all if we couldn't market ourselves via search engines - how could we state that is what we could do for others! Within a few months we were all over the search engines for every imaginable website promotion phrase (including that one). We were far too broad in our targeting and decided to focus on the UK market. Within about 3 months of starting, we got our first order (and cheque) from someone who had found us on the internet. It may have only been an order for $500 – but we broke open the "bubbly"!

Today we have 8 staff in our head office, 2 in the mainland GB office, sub-contract programming to 5 staff in Russia and have a partnership with an American company who are trading as MakeMeTop in the US. We have just under 200 clients and promote around 300 web sites worldwide. We've moved from being a traditional SEO company into being providers of qualified traffic usually via resellers and agencies rather than direct. Typically an agency will come to us with a client who provides services or products in a particular field. We get the demographics of who they want to target and where, design a campaign which may (or may not) include sponsored listings, organic listings, trusted feeds, AdWord campaigns and other suitable directory or paid inclusion methods. We then charge the agency a fixed CPC rate based on the volume of traffic we believe we can generate, the competitive nature of the market and other demographics.

Clients are then charged an appropriate amount by the agency (usually a vast mark-up) for each referral but are only charged for traffic that they want. We automatically filter out all "no referrers", put in place abuse filters, remove self-referrers which can be sites that the client may have campaigns running on for which we shouldn't charge. We also allow the client/agency to remove any phrases or words they don't want at any time - so the client only gets charged for traffic they have identified as being worthwhile. All of this is done through a real-time logging and analysis system we have developed. At the back-end this interfaces to our own PPC bid management tool, ROI tracking and Trusted Feed management interfaces. It is our attempt to Bring complete accountability and transparency to buying and selling SEM services. Of course, if we can't deliver any suitable traffic we don't get paid - but we haven't gone broke yet!

A lot more work is going on to make the technology even better, we've obviously signed contracts with people like Overture on the PPC side and are trying to make the integration for feed management smoother than it is now. Obviously, if a client sees a referral from a feed which is not suitable they can remove it from their billable traffic - but we still have to pay the search engine while the feed is updated - we need to speed this up - but still believe that our philosophy of not involving the client in the difficulties we may have with the search engines is the right one.

That, I guess, is about where we are now.

The search marketing arena certainly needs more transparency. Do you find more clients are looking for a higher level of accountability these days? That search marketing must deliver the traditional marketing metrics in order to be taken more seriously as a channel?

I think you have hit the nail on the head! Why should search engine
marketing appear so confusing to the client? Every SEM company says
pretty much the same thing. Most ask for a pile of money with no guarantee of
anything really. A few can do a good job - many do a mediocre job - and
some do barely anything! How is a potential client meant to tell the
difference between a hot-shot and a waffler?

To me, Overture got the SEM sales pitch right. Only pay for clicks to
your site from search engines that you want. No ifs or buts - you, the
client,should define the traffic you want and pay the going rate. If the SEM
industry is to gain credibility, IMO, clients should be in the position
to pay for what they want, which is targeted traffic, not for possibilities,
hopes or best endeavors!

Now, it requires a sea-change in the way that most people approach the
market - but I see it as inevitable that clients will want the
accountability, traceability and transparency from search engine
marketing campaigns in the same way they can (if they know what they are doing) from PPC and AdWord campaigns.

Why should a company who has chosen to do a Trusted Feed be billed for irrelevant traffic because it happens to come up in search results
because of the search engine algo - not because that phrase was targeted? They shouldn't! However, most companies will try and bill the client, it winds up in an argument, the client thinks they are being robbed (why should they pay for traffic they don't want) and we all finish up looking like charlatans (at worse) and vaguely dodgy (at best). This should be an argument between the SEM vendor and the search engine.

The client should just be billed for the traffic they want and why should they care or want to know about the internal mechanics of what goes on behind the scenes. If we want to be treated as professionals who know our business, we should, IMO, be prepared to take the rough with the smooth and make sure these things don't happen - not drag the client into the internal mechanics.

Similarly, why should a client be billed on the basis that the SEM has
achieved xxx top 10 results. They may look good on paper but do they
actually result in any traffic or (heaven-forbid) actual sales?

Accountability to me means offering ROI tools as part of the SEM mix so
clients can see which terms and campaigns work, it is also allowing
clients to say that none of the traffic you are sending them is worth 1 cent if that is the case - because if the client is happy with the quality of referrals, they will (in my experience) pay for it year after year after
year and beg for more of the same!

We should be offering rounded campaigns whereby the client is
relatively unaware of the machinations and changes that go on behind the scenes.

For an example, MSN dropped paid inclusion at the beginning of July and some of my client referrals from MSN plummeted. We immediately kicked in a pre-prepared Overture campaign and traffic levels remained the same. The client noticed nothing, it cost us a slight reduction in margin but no decrease in billings. We replaced our CPC costs on paid inclusion with PPC costs which (on average) worked out only slightly more per month. Did we have any clients calling up asking where their listings went? No. When we notified them that there may be a problem on some MSN listings - the answer was "what problem - we've noticed nothing"! They were totally focused on traffic and conversions - not rankings.

This is our attempt at offering professional services. Even if we had
done nothing, the client realises that if we aren't sending them traffic
that is accountable, we can't charge for it. They may not like a drop in
traffic, but the fact that we suffer as well as them gives them the confidence to feel we are doing our best to recover from a search engine tweak.

But enough of my hobby-horse! The fact is that SEM activities must be
both easily accountable and totally transparent before it becomes a truly
mainstream marketing activity. Paying an SEM to just get free listings
in search engines may be a nice idea, but to me, it strikes me as a
business model based on an unrealistic Utopian ideal.

As the market matures and the value of qualified traffic is appreciated, clients will expect to pay for results - and not pay for unsatisfactory performance.

© Peter Da Vanzo 2002-2004 All Rights Reserved