SearchFest 2016 Mini-Interview: Ian Lurie

Ian Lurie will speaking on SEO at SearchFest 2016, which is being held March 10th, 2016 at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I’m CEO of Portent. I have three real duties:

Set the organization’s direction and values as best I can, then over-communicate them. Watch how my team applies what I say and then adjust for better clarity. And so on.

Tell the leadership team what to do. Then stay out of their way while they ignore my terrible advice and do great stuff. More seriously: I set expectations and let everyone know what I’d like to see. Then I really do stay out of the way.

Teach and learn the shit out of everything. I write, speak, etc. But I spend even more time working with the Portent team on projects, showing them how I do things, and learning quite a bit from the stuff they do. I read like crazy and spend a lot of time staying up on developments in marketing and communications.

My background is so bizarre it’s best served up as a list: History degree. Law School. Marketing. Tabletop and pencil-and-paper gaming. Geekery. Cycling. Bi-coastal and tri-cultural (New Jersey, Los Angeles and Seattle)

2) While SEO isn’t dead, does the literal meaning of the term have much relevance any more? Or, has SEO evolved to Techno-Marketing-Content-Site-Development-Analysis-Architecture-Planning and Execution?

Has SEO ever not been Techno-Marketing-Content-Site-Development-Analysis-Architecture-Planning and Execution? SEO hasn’t changed. The tactics have: The way we do technical optimization has evolved. Content standards have risen (thank the gods). Links are important. Execution remains the single biggest problem. People still look for silver bullets and completely screw themselves in the process.

People equate “We can’t just spam links and spin content any more” with “SEO is dead” or “SEO has completely changed.” It isn’t, and it hasn’t.

In SEO, the best long-term rewards will always come from a focus on perfecting – perfecting the user experience (including content), perfecting infrastructure and eliminating errors.

3) How does a mid-sized agency like yours fit in a marketplace where there are some very large players and a lot of very visible soloists / small groups?

Our success comes from our work across disciplines. People assume that, because of our size, we’re an “SEO agency.” We’ve never been an SEO agency. We’re a digital marketing agency. The reason we’re so good at SEO is that we don’t just do SEO, and a company of 30 people can deliver great omnichannel work. That’s what we offer when an organization is looking to augment their individual specialist.

We also bring a ton of tactical expertise and the ability for big clients to work directly with the experts. That’s what we offer when an organization needs to augment their big agency.

Working with great freelancers, small groups and big agencies is great. We fit a perfect niche there, because we can connect tactics to strategy so well and still bring the expertise. We work with a huge market of non-Fortune-500 companies that are still really, really big and need great work. It’s worked well for us so far 🙂

I suspect I’m going to share too much here, but I’ve been told letting my frustrations out is good for me, so: Working with all the hacks who say they can do SEO/PPC/social media simply because they hired a person or said so in their statement of work drives me up the wall. I don’t tell clients we do PR, or print design, or radio, or TV, because we aren’t qualified and will do more harm than good. I expect the same integrity from other companies, and rarely see it.

I just alienated half the industry and annoyed the other half. But there you have it.