There is nothing new in American and European companies outsourcing their search engine optimization activities. But now, more and more are turning to India to get the work done.

India has become one of the leading information technology nations of the world.

Although the country in may ways continue to be a third world nation, significant portions of the economy is “first world”, with many highly educated and competent experts and companies in a wide variety of high tech areas.

Needless to say, the Indians have for a long time been part of the search engine marketing arena. We can, for instance, remember discussing search engine optimization with Sumantra Roy at the first Pub Conference in London in 2001.

Nowadays, there are several Indian companies that combine American and European offices with teams of search engine marketing experts in India.

Pandia’s new sponsor, eBrandz, is one of them.

The eBrandz search engine optimization company has its headquarters in New York, but has research and delivery centers in India. It has some 250 employees world wide.

Cost advantages

CEO Milind Mody tells us that through this cross-continental collaboration eBrandz is able to offer significant cost advantages to its clients:

“Whereas other popular and reputed SEO companies in United States charge anywhere from $ 50 to $ 500 per hour, eBrandz is able to bring down the cost to about $ 11 to $15 per hour,” he says.

The main reason is the fact that salaries (as well as living costs) are lower in India than in the US.

Culture and communication

So far, so good, but how does he cope with cultural differences and language? In short, how does the Indian team communicate with American, European and South East Asian customers?

“Our Chief Marketing Officer, Mr Sameer Sama, is based in New York. Hence its not difficult for him to communicate with ‘fellow’ Americans,” Milind Mody says.

“Yes, there are cultural and language differences. The biggest challenge is the accents. But since we are working with American clients for over four years now, our team is comfortable working with clients with different accents.

“As far as communication with client is concerned, we use email, chats and telephone calls to provide support.

“While there are no problems with email and chat, if we face problems during telephone calls we resolve them by having someone from our American team present on the call to co ordinate between the client and our support staff. Same goes for clients from UK.

“As far as South Asian countries like Singapore, Thailand, India, China or Sri Lanka we restrict ourselves to English language SEO/SEM.”

No black hat SEO

Selecting a search engine marketing company is much a matter of trust. We have heard too many stories about enterprises hiring search engine optimization companies using unsavory “black hat” techniques, getting their clients excluded from Google in the process.

We asked Mody about eBrandz stance on black hat SEO.

“We do not use black hat SEO techniques,” he says. “It’s not that we do not approve, but the fact is that most of our clients want long term results. Black hat SEO works (unless someone complaints about your site and you are banned) mostly for a short term.

“Yes, some of our clients ask us to use white text on white background or show different text to users and search engine spiders. In most such instances, the client might have read an article and is not aware of the repercussions of getting caught. So we explain to the client how black hat techniques give short term results and how it’s better to focus on long term results.

“We have worked with some Fortune 500 companies like Manpower Inc. We simply cannot afford to use any black hat techniques on such clients.”

The learning arena

The interaction between a search engine marketing company and a client is in many ways a mutual learning process. The clients learn about SEO through interacting with the search engine marketing experts, and will therefore (hopefully) be able to avoid costly copy-writing and web site design mistakes in the future.

But how does an SEO company generate such a process, if the client is on another continent?

Mody replies:

“Nothing works like face to face meetings. But lets be honest. How many SEO consultants provide on site consultation? If they do, what are the charges?

“We work with both one man shops and big clients. In case of one man shops, our project manager explain the process by sending a process document through email. The client goes through it. If he has any questions, he most probably asks the project manager to explain what he is doing. The project manager then responds through email or chat. When the discussion is bigger, the project manager calls up the client and they interact (in US time zone).

“In case the client is a big corporation, we have to work with their in-house design team, development team or with external vendors. Again, we send process document to the concerned people and interact with them. The key thing is that if needed, our people are available in US time zones to talk to clients.”

Milind Mody and his staff is also providing search engine marketing services for marketing agencies and other SEO companies who rebrand the SEO service and sell it to local clients in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Diego in the United States.

Affiliate marketing

But that is not all. Milind Mody and eBrandz also run an affiliate marketing service . We asked him what that is all about, and if he believes he can compete with giants like Commission Junction and the like.

“We used Commission Junction like everyone else to manage our clients’ affiliate programs,” he says. “For smaller advertisers who could not afford the monthly minimum of Commission Junction, we would use Share A Sale.

“However, most of the popular merchant categories in both these networks were full and there was a very long waiting time. For one client we even got a response from Commission Junction that they no longer accepted merchants for this category. Our clients were upset by this and asked us whether we could do anything about it.

“For a few of them we ran an independent affiliate program, but not many affiliates trust individual affiliate programs. So we decided to start an affiliate network. eBrandz has a good reputation in the industry and by its backing we though eAffiliatez would also get good standing in the affiliate network industry. Also, I personally knew a lot of top performing affiliates whom I asked to join eAffiliatez. In the last year we have had 100 live merchants and about 1000 affiliates signups.”

It seems the global economy is here to stay.

SEPTEMBER 13 UPDATE

This article has led Mr. SEO to attack both Pandia and Indian SEO. You can read more about that in our article: Indian SEO companies, crooks or saviours?