August 03, 2007
Kurt’s 25 years of experience in marketing began with his first job in 1982 designing brochures for a marketing company that specialized in the hospitality industry. Kurt recalls, “In those days, we had to use a giant typesetting machine which would literally spit out one line of text at a time onto a small strip of paper. We would then have to use hot wax and a light table to line up each sentence before taking the layout into the darkroom.” Technology has come along way since then and through the years Noer continued to advance his career by working at a number of advertising agencies. Eventually he was asked to serve as a Marketing Director for a number of companies including a national magazine and an international fiber optic company. Kurt is well experienced with strategizing, designing, placing and monitoring the conventional forms of advertising such as print ads, direct mail, tradeshows, press releases and promotional material.
In the early years of the internet era, Kurt recalls when Yahoo was king, banner ads were still popular and Google had yet to be born. One of Kurt’s very first experiences with natural optimization efforts resulted in growing a small manufacturer’s website from less than 500 visitors per month to over 30,000 per month. Leads from the website grew from less than ten leads per month to over 400 leads per month and as the traffic grew, so did the sales. Over the following two years, the company experienced record-breaking sales and was actually able to reduce their overall spending toward other marketing efforts.
Kurt saw how these results could be easily repeated for other companies and in the late 1990’s, Kurt began building a business plan for Customer Magnetism. In the year of 2000, Kurt partnered with a 70-year old accounting firm called Goodman & Company. With over 400 employees, Goodman was and remains the largest accounting firm in the state of Virginia. Customer Magnetism quickly grew and became profitable in less than two years. In January of 2003, Kurt bought out Goodman’s share of the company and moved the business from Norfolk to Virginia Beach, Virginia where Customer Magnetism has remained ever since.
What are your main services?
Our forte at Customer Magnetism is definitely the rankings we generate within the natural, organic listings. However, we also provide affordable and effective pay-per-click management, as well as external link-building efforts, such as press release syndication, articles, blog reviews and relevant directory submissions.
What makes your firm different from other companies competing in your industry?
While other firms offer a wide variety of web design and other web related services, moving websites to the top of the search engines is primarily all we do. We have built an excellent reputation for generating results through the years and Customer Magnetism has been ranked as one of the top ten SEO firms in the country by marketing sources such as Website Magazine, Promotion World and TopSeos.com. The vast majority of our clients choose to renew and/or upgrade upon testing our services. We are proud of the fact that our very first clients are still with us to this day.
Tell us more about your firm’s success story
We have some of the best overall rankings for a majority of the search terms relating to our industry. If we can do this within our extremely competitive industry, we can do it for you as well.
According to you, what are the most important questions a potential customer should ask a vendor like you?
Ask to see a list of search terms that they personally rank for, as well as some of the rankings they have generated for their clients. Insist on proof that the search engine positioning firm knows what they are talking about. Ask for references and beware of misleading money back guarantees that include a list of 10 to 15 “major” search engines which allows these firms to easily meet their guarantee and leave you no where to be found in Google and Yahoo. And last, don’t shop for the lowest price, shop for a company that is interested in a long-term relationship and a positive return on your investment.
What are some of the myths in your field?
1) That it is ok to spend thousands of dollars per month on pay-per-click efforts, yet feel that organic optimization efforts would be a waste of time. 2) That hiring a full time employee to do in-house optimization would be a better investment than hiring a dedicated, experienced firm likes ours. 3) That there is still a need to continually submit websites to the major search engines.
How do you develop your skills in this continuously changing environment?
There is a lot of outdated advice floating around on the web that can actually hurt your rankings. Keeping up to date and adhering to Google and Yahoo guidelines is a priority. We also continually test and re-test various ideas using experimental websites that we own. We attend the Search Engine Strategies conferences and we keep up with the latest news on a handful of trusted blog sites such as searchengineland.com.
What do you see as the future of the industry? What will be the challenges: do you anticipate any drastic changes?
I believe that internet access on handheld devices will continue to improve in both performance and popularity (making search engine advertising all the more a priority). I believe that search engines will continue to improve their efforts on ideas like universal search and “local” results. Continual changes in this industry is a given. It only makes sense to work with experienced search engine ranking firms who keep up with the ever-changing algorithms, methods and rules.
Where do you see your firm in the next 5 years? What about you personally?
In spite of having stronger rankings than some of our “mega” competitors, we are still a very small company in comparison. We have experienced steady growth every year and God willing, in five years, I could see Customer Magnetism reaching annual revenues of at least $10 million per year. However, I care far more about staying focused on our clients and keeping our strong reputation, than I do about becoming the largest firm. Personally, I have no desire to resign at an early age. While family time and vacations are a must, I would go crazy if I just sat around every day. I love my job!
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