Back to News
Mark Mills Host of Market Wrap Interviews Backbone President About Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing
BOSTON MA - Mark Mills, the host of "Market Wrap", interviewed Stephen Turcotte, President of Backbone Media, for the @Internet Speed segment on WBIX, Business 1060am. The segment, which is produced in conjunction with the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX), aired live during "drive time" at 4:55 p.m. on Tuesday, November 9th, 2004. You can also listen to an audio clip of the interview:
Listen now with Windows Media.
Transcript
of Mark Mills, Market Wrap Interview
Mark: We are @Internet Speed on our Tuesday edition of Market Wrap with Mark Mills on WBIX. Joining us today is Stephen Turcotte. He is President and Founder of Backbone Media, whose company is a member of MITX.
Stephen, welcome to the program.
Steve: Nice to be here Mark.
Mark: Backbone Media in Waltham. Tell us about the company.
Steve: We were founded in 1996 and we originally started out as a search engine marketing firm even back then. I noticed that there were a lot of people building websites and putting a lot of energy into the build and not much energy into the promotion and indexing of the website. I noticed that they way I searched back then and the way I found sites was through a search engine. So I decided to really focus in on the search engine business. Backbone Media today is an integrated search engine marketing strategy and website design solutions company.
Mark: When you talk about a search engine marketing strategy, give us a little bit more about what that means for a company and for the users?
Steve: It starts with understanding the audience’s language and the company’s business objectives. You want to make sure that if you own a business that you understand what your audience is putting into the search engines like Google. So then you can optimize your website to really emphasize those phrases and pop up in the top results in the search engines. We do a lot of keyword research to understand what the audience is looking for and then we make sure that the site actually has good relevant content within it and we provide the client with some technological solutions to help them maintain their website with a search engine friendly content management system.
Mark: Stephen, when you like at a website and you come up on the homepage, what kind of catches your eye as something that’s pleasing and looks user-friendly, and you look at it and go “You know for starters this looks like a pretty good site.” What are you looking at?
Steve: I’m looking at a clear call to action. I don’t want to see 5,000 calls to action. I’d like to see “Contact Us” if that’s what they’re trying to do or “Sign up for a Newsletter” or “Register” for a lot of our B2B clients – that’s really all they’re interested in. They’re not interested in making a purchase or a sale right then and there. I look for a clean design – one that I believe a search engine would find as search-engine friendly, meaning that search engines could spider it and find good text and content telling you what the site is all about. If you have to sift through a lot of flash to get down to the content, I think that’s not a user-friendly design and I think it doesn’t do the service for the B2B.
Mark: Looking at your website, and again we’re speaking about Backbone Media out of Waltham with Stephen Turcotte, who’s President and Founder. I see you’ve got something about Schwartz Communications here. It looks like they’re a major client of yours. What have you done with them?
Steve: They’re a good example of our integrated approach to search engine marketing and website design. You have a lot of firms out there that specialize in search engine marketing and you have a lot of firms out there that build great designs. We actually combine those two things into one holistic service. We’re able to provide the client with a really good solution for marketing and also for creating a good user experience. The big thing that we do there is a lot of times companies that build websites, they really think about search engine marketing as an afterthought, where it really needs to be part of the development process. In the case of Schwartz, we are a finalist for the award for Best Online Marketing Strategy and I think it’s because of the way we integrated the search strategy or getting good qualified visitors to their website with a really bold and attractive design.
Mark: You said you started out in 1996. That was kind of early in the Internet revolution that ramped up very quickly over the late nineties. Then you have the bursting of the bubble and in years since we’re trying to recover and regain our footage in a sense. Give us a little bit of a feeling as an entrepreneur what you went through in that stretch.
Steve: Actually it was pretty good for us because we never really grew too big that we had to burst. We didn’t really have far to go. We started out in 1996, and it was just me back then. I grew very slowly, taking one client at a time and making sure I got results for them. Really for us, we never really moved backwards. We’ve grown at a pretty good pace every year - it happened this year, we actually grew by 100%. Which I think is a really good year. I guess the trend I’ve seen is that initially in the late nineties more of the emphasis of companies back then was spending lots of money on banner display ads and we saw that the click through rates really dropped on those. So when the economy started heading downward a lot of companies started thinking more about better ways to spend their money online and search has really filled in that void and companies are really getting good results with it.
Mark: Stephen Turcotte, President and Founder of Backbone Media. We thank you for going @Internet Speed with us.
Steve: Thank you.
Research Data, Resources and Search Engine Marketing Tools
Search Engine Marketing Guide: Our guide to all the search engine marketing basics
How B-to-B Buyers Use Search Google Surprise, Plus 28 Tables & Charts (Source: Enquiro and Marketing Sherpa)
Linking 101 (Source: SearchEngineWatch Forums)
Delorie Lynx Viewer Check your website to see what search engines see
Use Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool or WordTracker for keyword research.
About Backbone Media
Backbone Media specializes in search engine marketing strategy, website design and development. Backbone Media’s mission is to help companies reach their active prospects and buyers online and profit from their online investment. Since 1996 Backbone Media, Inc. has been helping companies integrate high impact website design with innovative and effective search engine marketing strategies. Backbone Media, Inc. is headquartered in Waltham, MA.