Interview with Gab Goldenberg, 21 Year Old SEO Consultant of SEO ROI

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Gab Goldenberg is a 21 year old law student who sells professional SEO services through his blog SEO ROI and is particularly interested in Social Media Analytics as well as finding out competitors keywords. I had the opportunity to interview Gab about his business in SEO and he offered some great insights. Read on for more.

Gyutae: You’ve come on strong over the past 6 months and developed yourself as a prominent SEO blogger in the industry. Can you share some more background information on yourself? How did you come across SEO and why does it interest you so much?

Gab: The honest truth is that prominence in SEO is highly transient. A year ago hardly anyone in search knew me, and vice versa. I still don’t consider myself a prominent SEO blogger, but I’ve made some friends at Sphinn and on StumbleUpon and that’s helped enormously. I’d say that some people like yourself - who were one of the first to comment on my blog - have come to know me and become friends with me as a result; this in turn gets me some attention. So the truth is that I have some prominent friends but could do more to build an audience myself. SU’s ridiculous move in banning SEO ads from search has put a dent in my promotional tactics though. Just wanted to clarify that point before addressing your questions ;).

As to myself, I’m a 20 year old McGill law student (21 June 4th :)) in Montreal, Canada. Some of my personal passions are soccer, business, my mother’s cooking, and reading. Sometimes I read when my time would be better spent working for clients or myself, but life needs to be enjoyed too, you know?

I came across SEO either at Problogger or Entrepreneur’s Journey - I can’t remember which. One probably pointed me to another. I was searching for keywords like “blog promotion” and “website promotion” (which suggests why spammy services often focus on those general keywords; they’re going after newbs) because I had a blog I wanted to make more influential.

The reason why SEO interests me so much is probably a mixture of the ability to influence others through it as well as the commercial potential inherent in search marketing. I love the fact that it’s mass permission marketing (though with all due respect to Seth Godin, I wouldn’t classify traditional firms using SEO as making Meatball Sundaes, which he implies in his book) . Another thing that I love is that the people in search are so friendly. Tamar Weinberg is so sweet and approachable it’s shocking, particularly for a social media superstar like her. Likewise Rebecca Kelley at SEOmoz. XMCP at Slightly Shady SEO is so helpful and patient with others who aren’t at his level of expertise that it’s quite surprising, especially for a blackhat. I could go on, but in short, have a look here for more of what I mean.

Gyutae: What are your favorite types of clients? Least favorite?

Gab: In an attempt to better qualify potential clients/leads, I made a page describing who my ideal clients are.
Unfortunately, I haven’t made it prominent enough and so I still get occasional leads from people whose budgets are too tight or who don’t appreciate that the value I’m creating for them is multiple times what they’re paying me. For example, an affiliate site of mine took 2 hours to create, and perhaps 3-4 to promote. That earned the merchant over $2,400 to date. And it should continue earning them nice sales. When you can create that kind of value for people and they don’t understand that they have to pay you accordingly, well, those are the worst clients.

For example, some guy named Alex called me up about a month back. He had read about SEO and got the impression that it was the “key to marketing online”. He went on to try and get me to work for free and get him ranking for “travel insurance” and such, thinking I’d be overjoyed to do some work since I’m so young and “need it” to build my portfolio. He didn’t know what SMX was, thought that paid links “wouldn’t be necessary” in that niche and wasted an hour of my time droning along on the phone. He was the human equivalent to one of those 10-screen/scroll-long clickbank get-rich-quick-ebook sales letters. Please don’t get in touch if that’s your mentality.

Gyutae: What has been your most effective method of attracting new clients for SEO services?

Gab: Word of mouth has attracted some nice leads, and my first serious client, this downtown Montreal boutique hotel and their youth hostel, the Auberge de Paris. I was chatting with the owner’s nephew, a friend, at a party one night about SEO. He referred his uncle to me later on.

SEO has been a mixed bag. On the one hand it got me working with The Business Card Creator and they really understand and appreciates search marketing’s value. It’s a pleasure and a joy working with them. On the other, my rankings for Montreal SEO, SEO (on Google.ca) and other terms have generated nothing, or else price-sensitive leads that wasted my time. It’s kind of ironic when you think about it. Rand answered my question the same way here.

Gyutae: You’re a 21 year old still in school and running a business at the same time. How do you manage all of this and what has been your biggest struggle?

Gab: Great question! In all honesty I did a horribly shabby job of it. SEO is just so much more fun than law school! I was waaay behind on my reading and outright stopped reading for one course when we changed the readings to history from cases (I like history, but I hadn’t noticed that there was a separate book we needed for those readings and decided not to buy it). That stressed me out incredibly. I crammed hard for my December exams though, and pulled off a B average (which is fine by me, since I’m not trying to work in law). I’m still waiting on grades for the winter/spring term.

At the same time though, I was working really hard on SEO and my search marketing business. Preparing my first SMX presentation, developing my social media relationships, and building my RSS subscriber base (now over 1,500) was all very time consuming, besides keeping up with client work.

On a related note, the “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin is a NECESSITY for building your RSS subscriber base. In one fell stroke, you mine the value of all your posts for gaining readers. If you want to get more advanced, I recommend click tracking on a post-level. That way you can tell what posts are most successful at attracting new readers. I use the free PHP Click Counter from PHP Junkyard, though I’ll be looking for a more robust script as my volume scales (that one has issues with its text database corrupting at ~10,000 clicks) .

Besides the trouble keeping up with school, my biggest challenge has been attracting new clients. For whatever reason, my lead-to-sale conversion rate is awful. I think I’m a poor salesman really, and I’ve been considering finding a salesman who’ll work on commission. It’s really frustrating. Anyone reading this who can help please get in touch! (Gab at my domain).

Gyutae: What do you study? Has it helped you at all as an SEO consultant? What do you plan on doing after graduation? Long term goals?

Gab: I’m studying law at McGill. It’s pretty funny to me in hindsight, because I worked extremely hard for years to get in, and now that I’m there I wish I had graduated already. Also, the bloody McGill management and computer science faculties make it nearly impossible to register for their courses if you’re not in their faculty… But I digress.

It’s helped me understand contracts, non-disclosure agreements, and Sarah Bird and Eric Goldman’s blogging. Michael Geist is also making more sense now. It’s also made me realize how generally nonsensical the adage “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” is. That saying’s based on the law being publicly available to read, yet unless you’ve studied law, it’s ridiculously difficult to understand, quite often. Heck, I’m registered for a course next year on “Statutory Interpretation.” What if you never had the chance to take that course?

After graduation, I figure I’ll still be running SEO ROI, though I hope to have grown it somewhat between now and then. I definitely see myself working in search marketing in the medium term. It’s so much fun! In the long term, I have plans for software and other online-oriented businesses.

At that point SEO ROI will probably become an in-house search team, or else I’ll hire AIM Clear, NetConcepts or Matt McGee if he’s running his own search company at that point in time. I’d probably also have the initial site designs done by Rustybrick, SEO Design Solutions or David Mihm. I note in passing that all of those folks caught my attention through Sphinn and/or their blogs, which is saying something about the long term/bigger picture value of social media.

Gyutae: You recently had the opportunity of speaking on a panel at SMX West. How was that experience and how has it helped your business? Were you nervous?

Gab: SMX West to me was like being an elephant in a peanut shop - a nonstop thrill. I met so many friends that I only know from the online world and made so many new ones too! I can’t name em all here, though I tried to name and link to as many of those that made a positive impression as possible here. Apologies to those that I forgot! One of the highlights for me was meeting the SEOmoz team and other mozzers - my favorite search community.

They were also really awesome, helpful and supportive at the airport when I realized I had forgotten my laptop at the conference center. Both them and Third Door Media were unbelievably awesome, and Third Door even sent me my laptop by courier for free - diagonally across North America! I’m telling you - the search community is awesome.

What I’m saying is that as far as helping my business, that was huge for networking. And from a strictly “ROI” perspective, I can’t tell you how many links that got me as a result.

Speaking itself was a little challenging. I think that my content was fresh and original, but I made a couple of jokes that fell flat. People came up to me afterwards saying that they enjoyed it though, so it couldn’t have been too shabby. For other speakers, I recommend you buy “Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln” by James C. Humes (eBay has it cheaper than Amazon). Since reading that, two speeches I’ve given went off exceedingly well to captive audiences. Hopefully I can repeat that at SMX Advanced, where I’m speaking on the Site Buying Panel :D.

As to being nervous, I’ve done lots of public speaking before and lead/coached the senior debating team in high school, so that’s not a problem.

Gyutae: Do you run any of your own sites for profit? If so, how are they doing? Why do you do consulting when you can just work for yourself doing SEO?

Gab: I mentioned earlier the affiliate site that did those sales for the merchant. I’m getting more and more into it and am currently link building for a second affiliate site, hoping to see results by late July. Much thanks go to XMCP at Slightly Shady SEO and Smaxor’s Oooff Internet/Affiliate Marketing Blog for getting me back into affiliate marketing after AzoogleAds turned me off it by paying me months late with a stupid excuse.

You can just work for yourself doing SEO, it’s true, but not being a thin affiliate is very difficult. And the top cats like Todd Malicoat, Michael Gray and Rae Hoffman are building communities and creating other barriers to entry, so the competition heats up daily. Which goes back to your point about getting started ASAP. In hindsight I wish I’d listened when Yaro Starak first counseled me to buy my own domain and do things the right way.

Another point is that no matter how great you get at marketing, you need to have capital to back you. That’s what client work is good for - a steady stream of money to reinvest. My best friend’s mom asked me what I’ve saved after two years doing this, a few months ago, and I told her that I only had a couple thousand in the bank (some of which was from previous lifeguarding work). That’s because I’ve reinvested. I bought a professional design, got custom plugins, advertised, and bought a boatload of domains (including a couple of French language generics) etc.

Finally, no matter how great you are at marketing, you don’t have a business. I could be the best SEO in the world, but if I had no hotel to promote, who would pay me (bad example given affiliate opportunities in travel, but you get my point..)? Besides which, affiliate marketing isn’t necessarily stable income. We independent webmasters, in discussing that question, tend to forget that most of the transactions in the economy are done offline…

Gyutae: Who are you top 5 SEO inspirations? Top 5 sites that you follow?

Gab: It’s ridiculously tough picking just 5 - I read 15-20 hours a week to keep my skills up to date. So there’s many more than those I’ll name here, because Sphinn is awesome in helping me find quality reading.

SEOmoz is like a home away from home. If there’s one blog I have to read, it’s the moz. For whatever reason, I rather return in my browser than read it in my reader. I think it’s more fun seeing it in full color or something, which brings me back. They completely deserve the best SEO blog award they’ve won a few years in a row now.

XMCP, like I said, is a big inspiration. One of my first original ideas, cloning expired sites, came from a discussion with him about expired domains still in the Yahoo directory.

He’s also one of the foremost experts on Facebook PPC to my mind, with Marty of AimClear. If you’re looking to advertise there, I’d hire one of those two depending on whether you like consultants or agencies better.

SEL is also huge, and frequently feature quality stuff. On the flip side, they also let search vets off with veeeery average and sometimes even mediocre posts. I won’t name names (can you spell career-suicide?) but it’s really, really lame when that happens. And even more pathetic when those posts go hot on Sphinn. I just saw two from SEL, as a matter of fact. Had they come from anywhere else, no one would have paid attention/sphunn the pieces.

The other two I’m a big fan of are Sphinn discoveries.

Search Engine People feature consistently high quality and original writing. Consider Ruud Hein’s series, How Search Really Works. He’s now doing something similar with The Algo is Human. Jeff, Dev, Tom and Jenn are also awesome bloggers and SEP is quickly becoming one of my first daily reading stops.

Finally, Chris Winfield, Danielle and the gang at 10e20 regularly publish premium content. Their post on linkbait graphics were a fresh look, and on and on like that. I’d like to take this moment to highlight that Chris has pulled off ANOTHER huge media mention.

Top 5 sites I follow (i.e. beyond search) are:

Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor is great on analytics. Come to think of it, I have some catching up to do there.

Mind Valley Labs are shockingly under-appreciated in the search community. They feature some of the best damn posts in the whole online marketing industry and it’s a crying shame that no one’s paying attention. Look at this post on Frank Kern’s copywriting, this item on generating big ideas and just about anything they write. I LOVE their blog. It’s also a huge opportunity to network with some of the best folks in marketing as they hardly get any comments on the blog.

Maki’s blog, naturally, is premium on all things internet marketing. I gave him top a CASE award.

Grok Dot Com and most things by Future Now are quality publications; I think they have something to do with Marketing Experiments as well, which I recommend.

Finally, Closed Loop Marketing publishes original material that’s more focused on ROI than just about anything else online. Which makes sense, considering its head honchos, Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus, wrote Web Design 4 ROI, which is THE book to buy on building sites properly. I can’t say enough good things about the book, which I’ve had my sister read and have now lent to my girlfriend’s mom, who owns a small jewelry site specializing in South American handcrafted silver jewelry.

Gyutae: Where do you think SEO will be in 5 years? How are you preparing for the coming shifts?

Gab: That depends largely on where the search engines will be in 5 years, and where information retrieval will be. Some possibilities:

Ranking according to friends’ recommendations. Friends often have similar taste (in clothes, if not necessarily in food) and are more trusted than the government, universities, the Fortune 500 or other standard ‘trusted authority sites’. This idea makes a lot of sense to me personally, since this is often how people find out about new things, like musicians, restaurants, vacation spots etc. This also means that the role of Influentials (read the book) is going to increase. You can check out my post on influence for more.

If MSN and Yahoo can stop being a bunch of clowns, maybe Google would have some competition in Western countries and we could all be that much less dependent. I was at Compete.com today and they showed Yahoo.com and Google.com as having equivalent amounts of traffic. Why in hell is Yahoo funneling so much of it towards their content? Google has proven that being the middleman rather than the destination is 100 times more profitable. Get people searching, Yahoo!

We’re going to see increasing regulation, particularly in terms of antitrust, intellectual property and freedom of speech. We have to.

Google has far too much power and becomes a little more like Big Brother every day. Take a seat for a second and consider how much data Google has on the typical webmaster. Now consider who creates the web. Scary, isn’t it, that Google should have so much information on such a uniquely powerful group? Here’s a fun exercise: Sit down and try and come up with 5 Google services you use. I’ll bet you that it takes no time at all.

As far as IP goes, the number of TM suits increases daily, to say nothing of the rampant scraping/republishing that goes on. Government should pursue policies similar to how online gambling was banned from the US - cut the banks out of the picture. Sure, the Russians will still do it, but right there you just eliminated AdSense as a revenue model and plenty of affiliate networks etc. This should get internationalized in treaties, afterwards, hopefully.

As to freedom of speech, hate speech shouldn’t be given the distribution it does in the name of the politically correct euphemism of alternate viewpoints. Watch Jew Tube, read this Jew FAQ and “Who Is a Jew”. For those of you scratching your heads, read this. Freedom of speech needs to have other limits too. Reputation management problems caused by unsavory competition (e.g. fake reviews), ex-es (e.g. ‘my ex-husband is a pedophile axe murderer’) and places like RipOff Report can’t be allowed to continue.

Gyutae: What are some tips you can give for aspiring SEO consultants?

Gab: Network your ass off.

Comment with your real name in the comments, and say something useful besides “I agree, great post, you taught me a lot here.” Maki wrote a great piece on proper commenting, which ironically led to a flood of these “thanks for the awesomeness” craptastic comments (it was awesome, but if you’re just commenting to say that, you’re annoying and discouraging those people who want to add value to the conversation because their comment will get pushed further down. (The flip side is that for popular bloggers who get these comments a lot, they should delete a lot of these comments if you want to foster a truly great community.)

Link out like there’s no tomorrow. And make an effort to constantly be developing new relationships. It’s cool to have some “online best friends” but it’s lame if you then only hang out with them. Lame for your career and future success, I mean.

Submit other people’s content to social media sites, then email to encourage them to vote (and thus indirectly highlight who submitted ). The email’s optional for people who pay attention to social media and their logs, but when you find a great source that doesn’t pay much attention to social media, such emails are more necessary. They’re usually welcome and often requested, anyways.

Gyutae: Thanks!

Gab: My pleasure

For more interviews of top Internet marketers, be sure to check out Winning the Web’s Winners’ Circle.