An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 4)

Sramana: All together, how many people did you have working on the project? You had an outsource engineering and support team, an SEO expert, you, and your wife. What was the headcount?

Curt Keller: When we first started it was just me, a support guy in India and three programmers. A few years later we had eight programmers and seven people in support. Our team in the U.S. consisted of me, my wife, my SEO guy and two salespeople. We grew to a team of about 15.

Sramana: Where were you in terms of revenue?

Curt Keller: We were close to a million dollars. That was in 2008 and 2009 . From 2006 to 2009, we coasted a bit. I was not spending as much money as I should have been to develop the product. Our sales started to plateau a bit, which did not make sense in a growth industry. Part of my reason for doing that was that it had been very hard and taxing in the early days, and I wanted to take some money out to live a bit. I used that period to catch my breath.

When I came back, I had a ton of energy and we revamped the product. At the same time, I took my programming group and I made them partners. They became vested stakeholders in the business. That picked up the level and quality of the coding even more. The product really started to grow, and last year we did just over $5 million and this year we will do just over $7 million in sales. We are still growing organically. We are still fine-tuning our PPC so that we know the cost of getting a client. We have to be able to sell more services. It cost a lot more to get a client today, and our industry is starting to consolidate.

Sramana: It is a very crowded industry. From an organic search optimization point of view, this is not an easy portfolio of search terms to optimize. There is tremendous competition here. It seems that you have been successful in this space. How did you position yourself?

Curt Keller: It stems from the fact that most companies look at SEO as they do PPC. They think if they spend x amount of dollars on SEO, they should expect x amount of return. We took a different approach. We made it a part of the core structure of the company. We never outsourced it. We developed systems and training for our staff. We were able to implement a system that was extremely effective, all in-house.

Sramana: What does the system consist of?

Curt Keller: I can tell you have a rigorous training process. When we have a new person join the company, he or she watches videos for a week. There are a lot of variables to getting pages and articles indexed by Google. Our SEO manager is in tune with what Google does on a weekly basis. The return on investment that we get is really good.

Maybe six months ago, we were not ranking for the phrase “free email marketing.” Our SEO team set strategies, such as guest posting and buying backlinks, to get us ranked there, and they told me it would take a while. They knew what they needed to do and now we have a good ranking for that phrase. Our process is proprietary, and I think we do it better than most of our competitors.

This segment is part 4 in the series : An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller
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