Search to Be Seen

Dennis Pushkin and Andrew Wetzler help clients like Sprint optimize their Web sites.

Web search engine marketer MoreVisibility is tapping the Hispanic market and adding Web development services in a bid to grow.

Dennis Pushkin wasn't searching for new career when he bumped into consultant Andrew Wetzler, whose ideas on utilizing the Internet for marketing were prophetic in late 1999.

The crux of the two men's plan involved optimizing corporate Web sites so that search engines, such as Yahoo and Google, would catalog and list them more prominently. They solicited business from companies by sharing with them which key words produced the best results from search engines. Sounds like a simple task today - but at the time it was revolutionary, and eventually it became very lucrative.

"We put an email list out there and saw that this was a growing field - something that we could really take advantage of," says Pushkin, now CEO of Boca Raton-based MoreVisibility.com Inc., which he launched together with Wetzler.

The company is keeping up with the demands of customers, as well as staying competitive in its technology, by adding a host of new services and increasing its work internationally and for companies that do business abroad.

The closely held private company's revenue was in the mid- to high-seven figures in 2006, and is on track to hit eight figures this year, says MoreVisibility president Wetzler, who declined to give specific dollar amounts. The company's rapid growth during the last four years landed MoreVisibility back-to-back spots on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies. Revenues soared 327 percent from 2002 to 2005, and 315 percent from 2001 to 2004.

Wetzler claims the company has been profitable during the last seven years, and that a large percentage of those profits is being reinvested to keep up the pace of growth. In particular, MoreVisibility is stepping up its Web development services: Instead of just recommending changes to clients, it can now actually make those changes directly to client Web sites to make them more search-engine friendly.

"We're doing the full circle if you will," Wetzler says.

"Driving traffic is key, but once the traffic arrives, good things still need to happen," he adds. "That was an element that had largely been out of our control because we weren't involved in implementing the coding changes that we were recommending, nor any of the user experience or design elements."

That will change once the company expands its employee ranks, and its office - from the current 4,000 square feet to 6,000.

Tapping into Web design to make sites more attractive and effective for users is just one way Wetzler and Pushkin plan to maintain annual growth of about 20 percent a year.

As Spanish-language and Hispanic search engines have become increasingly important to marketers, MoreVisibility has added resources to tap US companies which want to grow internationally, as well as companies whose business is primarily overseas.

Emarketer, a Web site providing e-business research, statistics, demographics and Internet usage data for online marketers, reports there were 15.7 million Hispanic Internet users in 2005. That number was expected to rise to 16.7 million in 2006 and to 21 million by 2010.

"We have had some relatively new projects in Latin America that have come on board over the last couple of months," Wetzler says. "A proactive push toward the Hispanic community - national or international - is relatively new for us but it's something that we have identified for 2007 as an important growth area."

Wetzler points out that MoreVisibility's Hispanic efforts today represent less than 5 percent of the company's total business.

Web development consultant Kevin Krason, president of Oak Park, Mich.-based Biznet Internet Solutions, says search engine marketing and search engine optimization, or SEO, can have a global effect on a company's sales.

"Many companies are building multi-lingual Web sites; they are optimizing in many languages," Krason says. "There is probably a better opportunity to optimize your Web site in another language than there is in English today just because of the competition."

MoreVisibility's Wetzler and Pushkin say their company's focus is helping their clients drive profits by understanding the behavior of Web site users and enhancing their online experience. The company hires Google-certified strategists responsible for keeping clients on the cutting edge of technology.

MoreVisibility's target client is a business with a Web site that needs to grow its online presence. "Not a one-man shop operating out of a garage," Wetzler explains, but an established business that has a marketing budget and needs help establishing, growing and strategizing for an online presence.

New clients, of which 10 to 20 percent are international companies looking to work with US vendors, derive from the company's internal marketing efforts including newsletter sponsorships, referrals and paid Internet advertising.

A typical yearlong contract involves an initial consulting fee for optimization-related work, ranging from $7,500 to $25,000. On the small side, clients spend $3,000 to $5,000 per month. "Other clients are spending $50,000 to $100,000 a month on campaigns that we are managing," Wetzler claims.

Not that Wetzler and his colleagues see many of their clients, who are scattered nationwide and around the world. "We do not as a rule see clients in person because it's just not efficient, it's not the best use of anyone's time," he says, adding that he does not see this as a barrier.

"More and more companies are comfortable doing things long distance than ever before," he says. "Just from a time aspect on their part to recognizing that travel is much more challenging today than it has ever been."

To date, MoreVisibility serves 450 companies, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Sprint Nextel Corp., based in Reston, Va.

"For a Web site to be successful it has to have two things: visitors, and it has to convert them. It has to give them some value," Krason says. "Simply building a Web site and optimizing it and not providing your customer value - it has no point. Most Web marketers are finding that a really solid mix of both SEO and paper clip marketing is very effective."

Vince Thompson, a former executive for AOL and the principal at Middleshift, a California-based consulting company focused on creating revenue for Internet businesses, says the industry has a bright future. "Companies that can help filter information, in a world of so much information, are going to be very helpful and their expertise is going to be highly valued," he says.

It's definitely a growing business, Krason adds.

"Up until recently, only the really large companies were taking advantage of search engine marketing É people realized that the Internet was truly a powerful marketing tool" only during the last three or four years, he says.

MoreVisibility's rapid growth is proof of such demand. Depending on the company's performance during the next five years, it may open offices in New York, Los Angeles or "perhaps internationally," Pushkin says. - Yeleny Suarez