Bruce Clay, Inc.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Our company purchases life insurance policies from people who no longer need, want, or can afford them. Those people would typically lapse or surrender their life insurance policy, getting little to no value for it. Lighthouse Life can provide a market value option for that policy, generating significantly more value to the consumer.

Our typical demographic is senior citizens. We’re focused on providing benefits to and advocating for them.

What challenge were you trying to address with Bruce Clay, Inc.?

We needed to build out a robust direct-to-consumer strategy and an online presence. It was important to convey a position of authority in the marketplace to attract consumers looking to sell their life insurance policy.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Bruce Clay makes sure that we consistently show up when people search for information about life settlements. Their team ensures that we show up as a source that people can lean on to understand how the transaction works and how we can help them with life settlements.

We use their PPC, SEO, and content creation services. Their team’s working on content for our website. They're writing all of the first lines for all of the pages on the site with SEO in mind.

What is the team composition?

We work with an account manager, Katie (Program Manager), who coordinates the day to day operations. Albert (Senior PPC Analyst) works on our PPC efforts and on the SEO side, we work with Scott (Senior Search Analyst). Melanie (Senior Content Writer) writes content for us.

How did you come to work with Bruce Clay, Inc?

Before we went with Bruce Clay, we worked with another company but never launched our strategy with them. There was a mismatch in the relationship. We asked around for references and researched agencies on the internet. A colleague recommended Bruce Clay. We spoke with Bruce (President) who was flexible, giving us as much time as we wanted. We also spoke with a few of their customers who explained the value that Bruce Clay provided to their operations.

How much have you invested with them?

Between PPC, SEO, and our content strategy, our investment in their services probably falls between $50,000–$200,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been with them since the inception of our online presence. We launched with them in October 2019, which was our foray into the digital world.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

They’re one of the better partners that we’re working with right now. Their team has driven qualified leads to our site. Month over month, our lead quality has gone up, which means that our targeting is getting better. We’re becoming more efficient with our advertising.

How did Bruce Clay, Inc. perform from a project management standpoint?

We have weekly meetings, which isn’t typical for them. They accommodated our request for weekly meetings. In addition, their team sent weekly reports via e-mail. We communicate with them at least every other day about some task, so they’re constantly working. They’re some of the best project managers that I’ve come across. Their team doesn’t miss anything — nothing ever falls through the cracks. They’re incredibly efficient and flexible.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their methodology and professionalism stand out to us. This project is driven by formulas. They also execute their methodology well. I’ve always had confidence in their abilities to do their work well because they do such a good job managing the project.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, we haven’t had a problem.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be involved in the process and know what’s going on in the project. It’s important to understand the information that their team provides. Understand the numbers and use that information to help make decisions.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the head of corporate communications and handle marketing, advertising and sales support for an auction company. We specialize in reselling owners’ equipment, whether that be cars and trucks, or heavy equipment like backhoes. Our purpose is to help the owner find a secondary buyer for the equipment and fleet vehicles. We do this through live auctions held weekly, coast-to-coast, as well as through timed, online-only ones. We have 85-90 employees.

What challenge were you trying to address with Bruce Clay?

We wanted to update our website and had the initial approach of learning as much as we could about search engine optimization. We had not partnered with anyone for this task before.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The initial main focus was on how to properly structure the website’s UX and its content, in order to deliver the best we possibly could in terms of SEO rankings, and provide the best possible experience for people navigating through the site. We went through a design phase in which we identified the key words we wanted to rank for. Bruce Clay coached us on this, and began to develop the architecture for the site so that we could decide how to properly align products so that they would rank organically.

From that point forward, we began development of the website, with Bruce Clay’s team helping us refine and adjust the way in which it was formatted. After the launch, they were instrumental in evaluating and looking for enhancements, things which we may not have expected.

Bruce Clay provided the architecture for our site, in terms of which pages are linked to others, how the overall site was laid out from a technical standpoint. They built a linking theme which a search engine like Google could understand and attribute value to. We handled the graphics and color palette 

Keyword research has been important, first and foremost. Having a team that has repeatedly and consistently developed a process they understand and that works for identifying keywords and moving through the process of which page we want to rank, and how we’d make that happen. They provided understanding of Google best practices. In-house marketers and IT people are inundated all day long with many different projects and concerns, so having a team which is in touch constantly with what’s coming next, like the concept of mobile first, is important. It won’t be long until we’ll see an effect of Google changing to mobile first, so having someone looking down the road for us and anticipating those changes, helping us get ready for them, not only through the design of this project but in terms of an ongoing relationship, is really important. 

Bruce Clay has also provided technical expertise on how the website should work. We have continued to work on SEO, which is a full-time job. Bruce Clay will remain with us in some capacity, coaching and advising us.

As we moved through the SEO project, we realized that we needed help with our paid ads, particularly Google Ad Words. We were able to use Bruce Clay’s services for this. They have a solid team which is able to help companies like ours manage and operate these types of campaigns. We were quite pleased with them.

Bruce Clay has an excellent program for training marketers on how to understand and practice SEO. Our teams, from IT to marketing, have gone through that program more than once. We like to undergo both the basic and advanced SEO course every couple of years, just so that, at least during that period of time, we will be able to keep ourselves somewhat up-to-speed.

I am also looking forward to working with their content people, particularly from a social media standpoint, but it’s not something we’ve been able to do so far.

How did you come to work with Bruce Clay?

Our first contact with Bruce Clay was at SMX East in New York. We were researching everyone we could find in the SEO space at the time, but the one interaction we had with Bruce Clay was enough to convince us that they were absolutely the leaders in that market. Once we spent a bit of time with the team, we understood just where their value was. 

What is the status of this engagement?

I believe we started working with Bruce Clay around December 2014.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We have recently launched the new site, and it’s within its first 6 months of evolution, so it’s too early to provide any data on it. What we can say is that the rankings of our target keywords are going up, and it will be a process that occurs over time as we enhance content. 

Additionally, with respect to the Google pay-per-click campaign, Bruce Clay has been able to bring our cost-per-acquisition down from $150 per click, to the $30 to $50 range, depending on the keyword. This was a very good result for us, and it’s definitely something we wanted to maximize.

How did Bruce Clay perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re a very responsive company. If we ask for support, the team will take the question, review it across the group, and respond quickly. Bruce Clay always had a solution for us when we came to them with a question.

We’ve typically communicated via email, and also conducted monthly or weekly conference calls, depending on the stage of the project.

What did you find most impressive about Bruce Clay?

The most impressive thing about their team is the depth and breadth of knowledge, whether it’s content, the technical aspects of exactly how to build a website or the architectural aspects of exactly how that website should be laid out. For a firm to have the depth and breadth of knowledge for going across most industries, and helping clients move through the process of enhancing SEO, was staggering. Bruce Clay has a great well of knowledge, and they’re adding to it every day. It’s why we go back to them for training regularly.

Please describe your company.

Netpicks is an educational company that provides training and systems for individual active investors.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I am the founder and president.

What was your goal for working with Bruce Clay?

The goal was to improve our organic SEO [search engine optimization] and come up with a structured plan. We didn’t have a plan when we first started talking to Bruce Clay. The website had been out since 1996, so we had a lot of history. However, so many of the tactics and strategies had changed through the years that we just weren’t sure. What used to be white hat was probably now black hat, and it was time to be current, do things correctly, and fix our prior issues that we had gotten ourselves into.

Please describe the scope of their work.

Bruce Clay did primarily SEO strategy. We have two major sites that they work on, and we work with them on a regular basis. It's like a shared implementation of their strategy. They do some of the work; we do some of the work too because we're contracted for a certain number of hours. Sometimes, it makes sense for us to do some of the work on our side. The bulk of the work is to restructure both websites, reorganize them, and make them more logical for the search engines. We don’t want to impact the user experience, but we are much more presentable and well liked by Google and the other search engines.

What was your process for selecting Bruce Clay to work with?

Through the years, we hadn’t had good experiences working with other companies. Every time I tried to outsource pay-per-click or SEO, it never worked out. Most of the time, I felt like I knew more than they did, and that’s not a good thing. I should feel kind of dumb when I’m around them, and that was never really the case. Also, I never felt like anyone tried to understand our business and what was unique about it. Instead, we got a formula that they tried to force everybody into.

I ran into Bruce Clay about a decade or so ago. I had seen some of their writings. At the time, I wasn’t sure if they were looking for customers, but I contacted them directly. In the beginning, I heard from Bruce directly, which was nice. That was unusual, because you usually hear from a sales rep. I don’t deal with him now but, in the beginning, it's nice to have the frontline person be the person who hears about your business and comes up with the initial strategy, then turns it over from there.

Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

We spend about $5,000 a month. Right now, the work is open-ended and we don’t have any plans to stop. Like everything else, I need to measure it continually. I enjoy working with them. Like any business, I have to assess it and make sure that it makes sense and that I’m making money on the investment. We were under penalty from Google due to some things from 1998 that came back to haunt us. It's taken us some time to get off the penalty, and we had some setbacks along the way. It probably took longer than they expected. However, they got us off the penalty and we're all cleaned up.

Some of the initiatives that we thought we'd be on a few months ago were delayed. But, I see staying on with Bruce Clay for a while because we can get into the fun initiatives and make some more progress.

Do you have any stats or metrics to track improvement from the project?

It took a while because it can take up to six months to get some traction. We knew that, we were not impatient going into the project. I knew that they were already improving things logically, based on all the new content that we were putting on the new website. That has definitely improved. The organization of the website is definitely improved. Some of the cleanup work and getting fresh eyes has helped quite a bit and probably improved the user interface. It probably forced us to look at the site when we were in a bit of denial or ignoring it because we were so busy with everything else. That has been a measurable difference.

On the organic side, I would say that anywhere between 25 to 40 percent, now that we’ve gone off the penalty, is what I have seen kicked up on our organic search. There are quite a few terms that we used to rank for years ago that we dropped off, but now we're back in. Call it the top 20, top 30, and there are definitely some top 10s. We're making progress. Obviously, I need to see some of those go up to top 10 and top 15. They weren’t on the radar before, so I have seen some measurable improvement. A lot of that has come over the last few months. You have to be patient, but once you are, it pays off.

How is their general work performance?

I’m very satisfied with my team. They are extremely organized, which I appreciate. I never feel like I have to chase them down. We use Basecamp back and forth and get together for calls twice a month. They also spend as much time as we want to spend. We're probably rushing them more often than vice versa. With respect to action items that we come up with from each call, I feel very comfortable with the team. I appreciate how organized they are with the project. I know they’re busy with a lot of other clients, but I never feel like I’m an afterthought.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

Forcing me to go to training stood out. I can’t say it was the most exciting three days I ever spent, but I get it. I thought that was very interesting, that they force you to take some personal responsibility and make you understand the strategy. Even though I learned a lot of things in the class that I may have forgotten since, it was valuable. That stood out to me. I’ve never been asked to do that, but I appreciated it. I also appreciate the fact that the founder gets involved up front with our strategy.

I haven’t worked with an SEO firm that’s been this structured and organized. That was always a downfall for the others, which were sometimes haphazard.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

You always want quicker results. It's like having a house. Once you get into the walls, you find things that you didn’t know existed. We found some things that we didn’t know were there. It has taken a little bit longer in some cases, but I don’t put that on them. I think it's things that you don’t expect, you have to prepare for.

Could you give a brief description of your company and your role?

The Golf Warehouse, or TGW.com, is a group of four different brands. TGW is The Golf Warehouse, SoccerSavings.com, BaseballSavings.com, and SoftballSavings.com. We sell general sports merchandise. My role is senior manager of content development. I oversee SEO [search engine optimization] and content marketing for TGW.com.

What was your goal for the work with Bruce Clay?

Our goal was to improve our natural search rankings relative to our competition and to polish or to improve our online presence. We need to improve on our legacy site, which is a little bit older and to set ourselves up for a replatform to a new Web platform with WebSphere so that we would be optimized for natural search. The overall goal of the traffic is to increase sales conversions and revenue.

Please describe Bruce Clay’s work in more detail.

It was focused on those core things around online marketing. The work also included things like page load times and optimizing for page load speed. It depends on how narrowly you define SEO. I think Bruce Clay would define that as a pretty large umbrella as opposed to just returning good results for one keyword. It’s all about Web architecture, rather than performing for a particular term. They provide a full-service solution for online marketing.

What was your process for selecting Bruce Clay for the project?

We attended some trainings at conferences that Bruce Clay ran himself and certainly saw his name pop up as a thought leader. So, our sister and parent company, which is the Sportsman’s Guide, Inc., was the first to take on Bruce Clay in a consulting role. The results were favorable. It was easy, obviously, for us to join in that case.

When will the work be completed?

It’s ongoing. We engage them for a specific project and then we engage on expanded projects based on that completion of the first.

Do you have any plans to end the work in the future or is it all open-ended?

I know the contract has a specific end date that takes us through our replatform. Our particular contract now ends at that point. We will maintain our license to their SEO reporting software, SEO toolset to monitor that work. I’m sure there are possibilities for consultation engagements past that, but not on a retainer basis.

To give a sense of the size of the initiative, can you provide a general cost range for the projects?

The total, by the time we’re complete, will be in the range of $60,000 on the two projects together. 

What have the results of the work been so far? Do you have any statistics or metrics you could share?

I don’t yet. Most of it is probably going to be rolled out in the next couple of weeks. You asked for results. The implementation of some recommendations on our soccer site led to 40 percent increase in traffic: 40 percent in March and 50 percent increase in April of this year, which doubled the trend from the prior year.

Are you satisfied? Do you think their work was successful?

Yes. We initiated on one of our three sites a couple of months ago. Our natural search traffic picked up beyond prior years. It reversed a downward trend on the other sites. Absolutely.

What is unique or special about Bruce Clay and that stands out for you as different from other digital marketing companies?

Probably the grounding. For one, it’s the thought leadership. You see Bruce Clay [CEO] acknowledged in the industry. So that certainly helps validate some of the things he tells you to do. Their contract for us at least included training at Bruce Clay, Inc.’s general SEO training. Everything that they tell you to do is grounded in that general approach to SEO site-wide rather than one project’s Web architecture.

Looking back on the work so far, is there anything that you think they could improve upon or something you might do differently?

Actually, no.

Please describe your company.

The company’s name is American Micro Industries. We have two different divisions, and Bruce Clay has been working with us for our acoustics division. It is called Soundproof Cow. We sell any kind of soundproofing equipment and panels that you'd see in churches or restaurants. Our biggest item is custom-printed acoustic panels. As long as you own the image, we put it on a panel in a variety of sizes. We have car, boat, and marine soundproofing and sound deadening. We deal with architects, designers, schools, churches, apartment complexes, homes, and so on.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I am the corporate director of IT and marketing. I manage the entire IT and marketing of both divisions of the company from print ads to Google AdWords to social media marketing as well as the in-house IT work.

What was your goal for working with Bruce Clay?

We took a newly branded website and wanted to corner the soundproofing market. We saw a need in trying to drive traffic to the site and increase website sales and volume to our site. We also wanted to increase our call-in volume. Our goal was to increase traffic, revenue, and market share of the soundproofing business realm.

Please describe the scope of their work.

Bruce Clay does SEO [search engine optimization] and PPC [pay per click] for us. They also give us some pointers on social media. We do some YouTube and Facebook marketing as well. I do the majority of the social media work, but they give us advice on what we should do, such as connecting the blog to social media and vice versa. The work is ongoing.

What was your process for selecting Bruce Clay with which to work?

We met Bruce Clay at an SMX [search marketing expo] event in San Jose, California, in April of 2013. We’ve been working with them for the last year.

Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

Our contract is for 15 hours a month, so it's not overly expensive. We pay about $7,000 a month. We're a fairly small company, so we have to limit our advertising budget.

Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?

We definitely had  from 5 percent to 10 percent increase, up to 35 percent increases in revenue and traffic volume. We’ve had at least a 10 percent to 15 percent drop in bounce rate. Our cost of acquisition has decreased tremendously, almost $100 per click. That’s huge.

Are you satisfied with their performance?

We are definitely satisfied. We signed with them for another year. We understand that SEO and PPC does not give overnight results, especially when you take on a brand-new project. It was slow going at first, but now that we're really rolling, we've seen huge increases in keyword rank. We’ve had keywords that have gone from position 20 or 30 up to fifth, second, or first. Our keywords have tremendously increased in ranking, which we hope will expedite the rest of our results as well. We're definitely pleased with the results.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

I call Bruce Clay the mad scientist. He doesn’t just try to understand the organization and how to improve your results. He understands Google's algorithms and what works through A/B testing. It's much more of a mathematical, planned out, and tedious process than just generalizing keywords and doing research on your product. The way that Bruce Clay [founder] and all of their employees operate is extremely professional,  they are extremely knowledgeable and easy to work with. They’re on California time, and we're on Eastern time. It can be challenging to do it that way, but we’ve had no issues whatsoever.

They are always willing to help out with any additional things that aren’t in the scope of the project. They are willing to go the extra mile to give us reports that we need when we ask for them. They come up with additional suggestions that we never thought of, or didn’t talk about in our meetings. They are extremely professional and easy to work with.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

Sometimes, because they’re as knowledgeable as they are, it can be difficult to talk to someone if they are not fully trained. But, the nice thing is, when you sign on with Bruce Clay, they make it mandatory for each client to take a one-week class, so you're talking on the same wavelength. One week doesn’t do justice to the years of experience that they have.

Please describe your company.

We work for a nationwide tutoring franchise with centers all around the country. Each franchise offers individualized instruction in a variety of subjects.

What is your role and responsibilities?

Person 1: I am the senior director for digital marketing and platforms. My role is to lead all the digital marketing here and all of our Web digital properties and Web mobile properties for our consumers and for all of our digital initiatives.

Person 2: I am an online marketing manager. My primary function is to work on lead generating activities, so that takes the form of a lot of paid search and display. I also work on other elements of our digital mix, like SEO [search engine optimization] and landing page optimization.

Person 3: I am the digital marketing manager. I help a lot with the different marketing efforts as well as online marketing efforts to assist the franchisees. There is a particular focus within local search, managing their websites, helping with the SEO and overall management of the national website as well. I dabble with some of the social media initiatives.

What was your goal for working with Bruce Clay?

Person 3: We were in desperate need of a new website. We were working with another agency to help us build the site, but their focus and expertise was more in the design side. They weren’t SEO experts. Our team has solid knowledge of SEO, but we wanted to make sure that we were doing it right. We reached out to Bruce Clay and looked at a few different SEO agencies. We wanted to have the proper foundation of building our site from the ground up with SEO in mind.

We wanted to rank well for more general terms but, because we are a franchise structure, we also wanted to make sure we did well from a local search standpoint. We asked Bruce Clay to help us as we built our site to make sure our site map was correct, that we had the proper navigation and structure, and that we were doing everything right. We wanted them to liaison with our creative team and design team to ensure the direction we were headed was correct. We wanted to be sure we used search best practices.

Person 1: At a higher level, one of the things that we tried to achieve was to reduce our reliance on paid media. We know there is an interactive between paid media and SEO. We want to make sure we are maximizing our potential with SEO. We needed to create a new website, so we saw that as the entry to building a solid foundation to make sure that we have the SEO in place. Because we're a franchise with 800 locations across the U.S. and Canada, we needed to make sure that we didn’t have any issues with duplicate content, to make sure that our local center websites were not going to be competing against each other in some way. We wanted to be able to expand across the coverage on a local level.

The focus of Bruce Clay was to come in as the experts and help them review not just our strategy and our approach, but also to review the code base of SEO.

Person 2: I would say that, by and large, we are still the brand leader in our category. We have 94 percent brand recognition, which is fairly strong. We have noticed that in recent years, as the Internet has become bigger, we’ve seen other competitors such as WyzAnt or Tutor.com ranking more effectively in SEO. The number of people who feel the website is a barrier for them is low. That was one of the elements that spearheaded the SEO initiative.

Please describe the scope of their work.

Person 1: We know that Bruce Clay can support a lot, from consulting and review to tactical implementation. Because we have so much of it that is already being developed either internally or through a third-party development firm, we need to stay directed in our scope of work with Bruce Clay. The initial project consisted of a review of our current platforms, a strategy of recommendation on where we needed to go, and that was a collaboration based on where we were thinking we were going and what we were building. The code review was coupled with Bruce Clay's strategy for framework review. In the development phase, they came in and reviewed the actual code progress. They made recommendations on what should stay and what should go, from the simpler HTML tags to architecture setup.

What was your process for selecting Bruce Clay with which to work?

Person 1: We vetted a number of SEO experts and consultancies. We saw Bruce Clay at a conference and reached out to them as well as a lot of other people and vendors at that conference. They were the best match for us.

Person 3: We also thought that a lot of the other agencies that we RFP'd [request for proposaled] were trying to use SEO to get their foot in the door and win a bigger portion of the business. We were very happy that Bruce Clay was willing to step up to the plate in a more consultative role. That, and their expertise, was another reason that we went with Bruce Clay.

Person 1: Overall, we gave a resounding yes to Bruce Clay and the team. They are true experts in that field. We're not SEO experts, but we're experts in digital marketing. All three of us have solid backgrounds here and elsewhere. It was very clear from the beginning that everybody on the Bruce Clay team knows their stuff.

Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

Person 1: We enlisted them in June of 2013 for a six-month project. They went from strategy to development oversight. We re-engaged with them on a second project this year for a different Web development project. If the opportunity comes up, we will definitely work with Bruce Clay again. They have been one of the best vendors we’ve ever worked with.

Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?

Person 1: From the first project, we launched our new learning website. Within weeks, we were able to show up on first page ranks on 18 new strategic keywords. That is a big task, given how competitive our industry is.

How did Bruce Clay perform overall?

Person 3: We were very satisfied with the engagement.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

Person 3: The level and depth of expertise is unique. Bruce Clay himself was the expert, but the level of knowledge of his staff members was very high as well. If we asked something that they didn’t have an immediate answer for, they told us they would look into it and get back to us right away. Our reps were very good and knowledgeable.

Person 1: Their reps were also very succinct to the point of always being on time. They were very cautious about how much time they spent on each task, knowing the potential outcome of a question as well. If they knew that we were going to chase a rabbit that wasn’t going to result in anything, they would tell us that.

Person 3: They were very clear in setting expectations, which we were very satisfied with. As part of our engagement, they required that some of our staff members undergo a training session with Bruce Clay himself. We found that the training was very effective, and we got a lot out of it. We thought that it was very satisfactory. It allowed us to come back to the office, have a better understanding of SEO, and be able to talk about it intelligently and get SEO into the culture here.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or something that you might do differently?

Person 2: There were some slight structuring or realigning priorities as the project moved on. There were some things that we had to push back initially. We anticipated keeping our location pages in with the initial launch. We realized that because of space and time constraints, we weren’t able to do that. We had them spend on time on what that strategy would look like but, unfortunately, we had to change our plans because some of the work that they did wasn’t always usable. That is probably inevitable, but that was really a change on our side. We could have had better planning and alignment on where they would spend their time and efforts. That is something on our end I would like to change if I could.

Person 1: For me, Bruce Clay was on the entire time. There wasn’t anything I would change in their service, deliverables, or commitment to us. If anything, they overdelivered in almost everything. They were so flexible in working with various players: the internal tech team and outsourced tech teams. They actually communicated and delivered meeting notes with every detail, so we and our technical teams were clear on what to develop. It was amazing. I’ve worked with a lot of vendors, and I generally don’t provide a testimonial or recommendations for them. Hands down, for Bruce Clay, I would do that any day.