Ben Cook (@BenjaminCook) the Senior Organic Search Specialist at Perficient Digital is also someone I've known in the industry for a long time - back in his Skitzzo days. He invited me to his office in St. Louis, as a way to vacation from my family vacation.
He has a rich career, first working at a publishing company, then in a technology company - he then spent two-and-a-half years at Network Solutions as an SEO manager, then did his own agency for six years and then joined Perficient Digital about three years ago. So he has been in the SEO game for a while, wearing many different styles and colors of hats.
We then reminisced about the early days of SEO where it was the wild wild west. You could do whatever you wanted and rank for the most competitor keywords. Then monetize those pages through affiliate links or whatever.
Perficient Digital company is mostly made up of acquisitions of different SEM firms, like Stone Temple Consulting (see vlog 22 and 21), to form this agency. He explained how he went over to this company and how he was surprised that the company acquired Stone Temple Consulting and it was a pleasant surprise.
Site migrations is a heavy task within Perficient; including redesigns, platform moves or domain consolidations. He says often you just need to check the most basic things and then recheck those basics again, because you never know. Often the bigger challenges with working with enterprise level sites is the size and scope of the site. In addition, getting the development team on the same path as the SEO team - that is a big challenge. Getting buy-in across the departments is a must he said. He then shared some site migration nightmares.
It was great catching up with Ben and I hope you enjoyed the interview.
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