Josh Gampel Talks SEO at SMX East

Episode #12 Transcript

PUBLISHED ON OCTOBER 7, 2010

Welcome to Onward Search Career Cast, the podcast that brings you the latest insight and career advice from experts within the Internet marketing and creative space. Onward Search is a leading nationwide provider of web-based talent and offers a full range of recruitment and staffing solutions. If you’re looking for a career and search engine optimization, interactive design, or emerging technologies, you should apply online at onwardsearch.com or call 1-800-829-0072 and speak with an experienced recruiter, today!

Peter Clayton: Welcome to an all new episode of the Onward Search Career Cast. This is episode 14 recorded at SMX East at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. This is Peter Clayton and I'm happy to welcome back to the show Josh Gampel the Vice President at Onward Search and it's been a very busy day and very noisy day here at the show at SMX.

Josh, give us some of your impressions of the show this year.

Josh Gampel: Thanks Peter. As far as this year, it is a lot busier than the past few years that I've seen. The buzz is up, the economy is definitely coming back because you could see the energy with the people all around. I was talking to a few people that work to show, and they said attendance is up 40% over last year and you could tell with the buzz around the expo hall.

Peter Clayton:And you just did a presentation here and in your presentation, you mentioned that it is no longer a buyer's market out there for SEO professionals, especially for the six-figure, the highly experienced SEO professionals, they're getting three or four job offers now.

Josh Gampel: If you're an experienced SEO professional, especially if you have management experience directly overseeing a P&L, when you're going out into the market right now, you're sometimes getting three or four offers at the same time and they put you in a position to evaluate what the right step is.

I spoke specifically on six-figure SEO jobs, how to find a job and how to hire the talent. In looking over some data and preparation of speaking - interesting, the economy for search engine and interactive marketing is growing. It's expected to double over the next five years, which is just astounding considering the amount of growth it's had over the past five years alone and it's exciting. If you're an SEO professional earning six figures, one of the great stats I found is you're going to continue to earn six figures once you get to that plateau. So one of the things we focused on is how to get to that plateau and what type of things you need to do in your career.

Peter Clayton: Something that we have spoken about in previous Career Casts that I'd like you to address again because the economy is so different now, for the aspiring SEO professionals attending events like SMX for the very first time, what do you recommend they focus on the most to get the greatest value from their time at events like SMX?

Josh Gampel: Great question. A lot of the search marketing conferences are geared towards to the exactly aspiring SEO. So when you look at the track, look at the basic beginner 101 tracks. There's SEO 101, Social Media 101, all that talk about the basic fundamentals of how to get into this industry and what to do. Some of the more advanced tracks you probably want to go to next year as you learn but getting into seeing a good speaker that works for a good brand that you think is going to be engaging or the type of work you want to do, go watch them speak and then go up to them afterwards and ask them questions because all of them are very welcome to questions. It's a great way to really learn and after the conference is over, go up, talk to people, go to the network events, get to know them that way and you'll really get some good tips.

Peter Clayton: Events like SMX, I mean they're really a valuable networking experience, especially for people who are new into the market, just be able to go to one place and meet a lot of industry leaders all in a period of a couple of days.

Josh Gampel: If you look at the talk tracks, there's some serious industry leaders. There's people from MySpace and Google, Bing, Facebook - they come from all over. Whether you want to talk to the engines, whether you want to talk to some major brands, there are a lot of people here, you walk by, you see everybody looking down at everybody's nametag trying to find out who they work for and you get to meet a lot of great people.

Peter Clayton: You were speaking about the demand out there for experienced SEO professionals, how about entry level, are you seeing an increased demand for the entry level SEO people just getting into the field?

Josh Gampel: It's a good question. There is an increased demand, I would say entry level for social media and SEO has grown. Everyone is looking for somebody, especially in social media, to do a lot of the engagement with the customers and a lot of times that is a way to get into the industry. Senior level though, if you're 7 to 10 years experienced, driving revenue with proven experience, if you went to the job market, you're going to get a job, you're going to get an offer because companies need your services.

Peter Clayton: A couple of the sessions here at SMX this year, which I think reflect kind of what's going on in the marketplace, I mean, there's all kinds of things now about YouTube and Twitter, and YouTube really is the second largest search engine out there and then, of course, mobile.

Josh Gampel: The industry has definitely changed over the past two to three years I would say... probably about the past two years as I go to these conferences social media, Twitter, mobile that has been the hot topic across every spectrum. You go to some of them and they have a live feed of what people are saying on Twitter right now about it.

Facebook is the next craze.The movie is out. Everybody is talking about Facebook, how do they get to 500 million people and engaging your customer via Facebook or Twitter or all the channels that are out there is one of the number one things that companies are looking to do right now.

Peter Clayton: Josh, as you know we always end our career cast with some of the hot jobs, the hot opportunities that exist out there. At Onward Search, what's really hot? What are you guys looking to fill?

Josh Gampel: We're as busy as I've ever been in my career, so to name a few would be tough but right now we're working on a director of SEO for one of the top 20 sites in the US from a traffic perspective, that's out on the West Coast. We have senior strategist roles in New York City, pretty much from an SEO search marketing perspective, every single major metro we have a lot of open orders right now that we're trying to fill from senior manager of SEO to VP of analytics even is becoming the next big thing. It was here, it kind of disappeared and we have a lot of digital analytics roles where people are getting the traffic and now they're trying to analyze the data.

Definitely check us out at onwardsearch.com, our jobs feed @SEOjobs, @PPCjobs and @onwardsearch on Twitter and you can find out all about what's going on with us.

Peter Clayton: Josh, thanks again for taking time this week us today on Onward Search Career Cast.

Josh Gampel: Thank you.

Thank you for tuning in to Onward Search Career Cast. For more information on the career opportunities available through Onward Search, you should visit us online at onwardsearch.com or call 1-800-829-0072 and speak with an experienced recruiter. You should also follow Onward Search on Twitter at twitter.com/onwardsearch