Fred Schebesta

You’ve always been into that online space. Are there any big differences starting a company this time around than last time around?

I think the work pool or the pool of staff which you can hire from is a lot bigger. There’s a lot more people with a lot more skills and a lot more people who are open to learning new skills in this space because it’s sort of been proven that it’s a good ground.

I think another thing is that I can sort of come back and turn around and come from a client side with staff. I can teach staff basically all the things they would learn at an agency, and I can teach them all the other things they can learn on the client side at the same time.

And I think the other key is obviously there are definite ways to extend this business. For example, in the legal space if there’s a job ad there is at least 500 to 700 applications go in. There are so many lawyers out there looking for work and from our perspective that’s fantastic because we can develop services which require legal services and sell them online. It might be small and that’s something that we’re looking and they all add up. We’ve built all this traffic and it’s all about monetising it really.

So that pool of workers is giving you some other ideas of other businesses?

I’m learning a lot about the financial services space and I think I’ve had a huge crash course in the science of services. I’m also learning legal, law is very close to financial services. Those guys are debt, debt recovery and credit repair and all those kind of things, I didn’t realise how all the things are connected. And I think what I’ve found is I’ve been able to combine skills and resources and suppliers that I used to have with these new ones which has never been done before and suddenly you’ve got a killer product out there. Which as I said is something we’re experimenting with and it’s bizarrely working. I actually love this business James, I’ve got to be honest with you. It’s a weird thing to say but it’s a great company.

It sounds like the growth might have been a little bit better than expected. Any problems handling that from an infrastructure point of view?

Not really, because they’re all online and they’re so scalable. I suppose we’ve got a little bit of a hosting challenge but you can just throw a couple of dollars at it and it just fixes it. I suppose there’s a lot of competition. It’s unbelievably competitive as you could imagine, people enter all the time. But with that, I’m used to it. I was used to that in the agency world where there was just always competition. And I’d walk into a pitch and they would say “I’m already talking to four other companies” and I’d say, “how are we going to deal with that?” But as I said, it’s kind of like I found the pure business inside the other business. It was always there but I never had the guts to fully invest in that.

Well you’re known throughout the SmartCompany community as an online traffic guru, but of course by sharing all your secrets you’ve taught everybody else to be mini online traffic gurus. Is that an issue that everybody else knows all about SEO and they’re working hard at it? Is there still room to do traffic building better than other people?

James it’s fantastic you asked that question, it’s something obviously from my past, I’ve got that legacy, and it’s something which I’ve had to figure out how to place myself. I mean, what do I do because I’m used to helping people with their businesses?

I don’t work with anyone else now and that’s just goes with the territory. But what I’ve found is I guess, when I started doing all the stuff for myself, I obviously created a bit of a chemistry lab in myself and I’ve come up with some new potions and these potions are pretty strong stuff. I took my strategies and I sort of invested in them.

People who go on the site will notice a few of your favourite strategies, particularly around calculators, and there’s a lot of content on the site, including news and guides. You probably don’t want to give away too many SEO secrets but is the content really becoming important?

Content is very important, but it’s not the answer. I think if I was a small business wanting to invest in these kind of things, you go to Google and have a look at some of the other people who are competing in your niche and see what they were doing, because if you were to roll out a strategy which we apply, you’d overcook it and you’d get banned by Google. What you need to do is you need to benchmark yourself first against your competitors. What actually Google wants to see is what does everyone else in the niche look like? You need to have the same spots and the same stripes in the same places but just be a slightly faster or a slightly better site. Because if you suddenly stand out, if everyone’s driving along and they’ve got Hondas and you bring in a Ferrari and Google will go “no, this is not right”. And they have automatic algorithms which basically trip and they’ll give you a negative 150 or negative 100 penalty. And that is the art of entering a new niche.

Obviously I’ve just entered the home loans space and that’s a very competitive market and I can’t do certain things that I’ve done before because it would be very unnatural. If I did unnatural things, I’d be sitting in a penalty box waiting for Google to unlock me.

And when you say unnatural you mean really aggressive link building strategies and that sort of thing?

Too much aggressive link building, too much content, too much stuffing of keywords. Basically doing too much. Imagine Google plots a graph and it plots a graph where everyone sits with a number of links that they build on a yearly basis. And if you’re building 10 times more than anyone else, either you’ve discovered the cure for cancer and everyone’s linking to your website or you’re a spammer. If people were to look at my strategy, it would actually be worse for them in some of the niches that they would be in. If you were competing in corporate window cleaning and employed the tactics which I use in such an aggressive way, in two months you’d be doing pretty well but in three or four months you’d be doing pretty badly.

So get the strategy right for your niche.

That’s crucial, that’s a key lesson to learn.

Is that a bit of a change though from a few years ago, when everybody was trying to go out as aggressively as possible? Obviously Google’s really recognised.

I know of a couple of sites which have done similar things and they’ve overcooked it. It would take them at least three, four, five months and it probably wasn’t even worth the investment in the first place. Because some of the companies out there, some of the agencies out there are charging huge prices for buying links and for a small business or any business it’s very expensive – I don’t think small business realise the huge mark ups which agencies put on links. I used to be in one of those agencies and I used to put the mark ups on, but I don’t think they realise what’s going on.

The business ends up in the penalty box, but the search engine agency is going to say “you signed the document”. That’s a bit rough, but I just think there are a lot of corporate businesses and a lot of small businesses should be really careful because there are a lot of underhanded practices going on, especially in the buying links space because Google is just going to crack down on that, because the link graphs look all the same. It looks the same every single time because agencies are lazy, they’ve just got some guy at a computer who just writes the same email, writes the same code and just sends it out all day, they don’t care.

You said you have the SEO chemistry lab going there, is testing new things an important part of what you’re doing?

Very important. I’m obviously on a performance basis with my clients; I need to know what’s going to work. Our chemistry lab, we do try some pretty varied stuff actually, but you’ve got to be careful to isolate those kinds of things as well. And there are some competitors in our space doing similar stuff.

But we might be on the outer frontier of the internet and internet marketing doing pretty out there stuff in Australia, but in America they do way crazier stuff than us, because they’ve got bigger budgets and bigger markets.

But in the Australian market it’s a different beast, Google’s a different beast in Australia, we’ve got different people doing different things. We run with a four-year old version of Google, that’s what most people don’t realise, so whatever Google was in America four years ago, that’s what we’re running.