Interview Transcript

Hi I'm Nikki St. Martin and I'm the Director of Marketing and Communication at The Jacobson Group. The Jacobson Group is the nation's leading provider of professional human capital services. We work with a variety of clients within the insurance arena: from agencies to brokerages, to large insurance companies, as well as where the industry laps over into the financial services and the healthcare industry. By professional human capital services I mean; professional recruiting, executive search, local temporary talent, project solutions, as well as subject matter experts and consulting. We're recently named one of the Staffing Industry Analysts, Fastest Growing Private Staffing Company. We're the only insurance focused firm on the list.

Our website, Jacobsononline.com, it serves as a portal of information for both candidates and clients. We have to make sure that it is meeting the needs of two different target audiences because we need to, obviously, we want to give information to the insurance companies and our various perspective clients but we also have to give information to our candidates. We can't fill positions with out our candidates. Our old websites was starting to be out of date; it wasn't inline with our current marketing collateral anymore, some of the verbiage was out of date and it was very difficult for people from the home page to figure out where they needed to go. We have five divisions and it's very confusing sometimes and our old website did a poor job of directing people, leading them to where they needed to go. As well as for candidates there was information on our website but it was a long list of job descriptions. They'd have to scroll down, scroll down, they couldn't search it all.

We also had realized we weren't coming up at all on the searching engines anymore when we were typing in our keywords. Obviously with today's internet age, it is very important that we were showing up, so that we didn't lose potential business and we didn't lose candidates whom are also job searching. Job searching on the internet is the number one way that people look for jobs now. We didn't want to lose them either. And when they did get to our site, we wanted to make sure they had the information they needed. We decided to undergo on a search engine optimization initiative as well as go hand in hand with the face lift for our website and to incorporate some functionality so that people could search for their jobs by typing in keywords, or setting parameters kind of like a mini version of Career Builder or Monster.

Our search engine optimization initiative, obviously we needed to start off by find someone we can partner with and that we can trust that was going to be around for a while. Obviously since the bases of the project was a search engine optimization project, we needed to interview firms that excelled in that area, not necessarily for firms that just excelled in web redesign and kind of did search engine optimization. So we decided to go ahead and start by searching on Google for search engine optimization vendors in the Chicago area because we are based in Chicago. We thought it would be easier it would be easier to have someone else that was also based here. We went ahead and typed 'Chicago search engine optimization vendors or firm' into Google, and desme was obviously one of the first results. We went ahead, and I filled out the contact form on their website. And within a couple of hours of hours desme called me right away and sent over the information that I needed; the power points what not, so I can get a better of the firm and some of the types of projects they had already worked on.

From there I had narrowed it down to about four firms and Enam Noor, with desme, came in to our Chicago office and presented to me about their services and their process, and things like dat. I was extremely impressed, not only did they bring in their marketing information; they had also already analyzed our website, given us some hints and tips on why things maybe weren't working the way that they should be working. For example, one of our old websites was still showing, old old website, was still showing up in some search engine results. That obviously wasn't a good thing. As well as they had done an analysis of our competitors to show where we had compared, or how we compared on some of our keywords. It was like a fifty page document and I was extremely impressed because I thought; hey desme took the time to actually analyze the situation, tell me how they can help me specifically with the problems they had already addressed before even further research. And I thought if they can do this for me before I hire them, then what are they going to do for me when I do hire them? I had no concerns about the quality of their work or that they'd be in depth, make sure that they'd cover all the angles. After we decided we were going to go with desme, I went ahead and ask for references and all of them were glowing. I had no concerns going ahead to move forward.

Even though we decided to have a Chicago based firm work on our initiative, I actually work our Indianapolis office so I am not here in Chicago to meet face to face. We're a national company obviously desme is international, so it worked very well. It meshed together very well because I obviously, we were doing the project remotely, satellite based, they put together a portal for us so that we when ever we had comments or concerns or changes to the project they would all get documented. I could go back and see what had been done, maybe things that I had requested already and what the progress was with them. We were also able to upload any of our copy to there, so there was one place to go for to find out the status of the project, and I thought that was great. Another thing that was great about having a firm that was international was, at the end of the day if I had gotten together all of our information that they had asked me to send over, my changes, or my suggestions to the site, I could post them all on the portal and then tomorrow morning, in the next morning when I get in the office the changes would have already been made because one of their offices overseas would be making them. And I thought this was great because that helped us work on the project, make the project go along faster because we worked on it 24 hours a day.

When we started the project there's obviously a couple different phases and it was great because desme set it up that way, so that we weren't doing five different things at one time. Which things weren't getting confusing or anything like that, we first started of with the design of the website, we choose one, and made our changes. Then from there we went on to the content and the different links and things like that. And then from there, they focused on the search engine optimization aspect; coming up with our list of keywords, the things that were the most important to us, least important, the things that people were most searching for, not searching for, that maybe we thought they'd be searching for. From there we kind of worked together to create a list of things that were most important to us and they incorporated things for those keywords into the website, throughout the website. And after the search optimization portion it is very important for our company because we have a job database on our website to be able to access the website on our own and make changes as appropriate, also to change, like press release, thought leadership articles, things like that. Desme actually created a content management system for us online so we can log in and we can make the changes to our website without messing any of the search engine optimization, things they did behind the scenes, and not having to worry about messing with the design or anything like that. It was very easy, most like Microsoft word. Obviously the project doesn't end with day one. As soon as the site's launch it's not all over, especially after you log on to the site, sometimes you'll see changes that you'll want to make later on that maybe didn't realize during the development phase. And desme was always great about going ahead making changes and we'd update, upload our changes onto the portal, and they'd be changed the next morning.

Very quick response time which was wonderful because sometimes I'd have people asking or one of our executive managers asking me to make sure the change was made and it was great to know that when I ask that it be made, it would be made and I didn't have to follow up on it. Since this was a search engine optimization project as well, obviously when we launched our site, we're not number two on every keyword we want on day one. We've been working with desme, we've actually retain them, to consult with us every month and to watch our search engine rankings and to make suggestions for how we can improve, make changes to our site possibly to improve, or other things we can add to our site to help us get to where we want to be. The way that the process ended up working out with desme; the satellite offices, and the way that they kind of made all the steps clear from one segment to another, it worked out great and it was a wonderful experience.