I updated my Linkedin profile last week to include my time at BMM. I don’t think the tongue in cheek job description I wrote went down well – my profile has been view by several “people who work at BMI” since then…

What amuses me is how the link building program currently works. Write an article and send it to as many directories/submission sites as possible. Christ know’s what they charge clients for that kind of shite.

The tech guys were always the only ones with any SEO experience really – account management is more of a customer service role to be fair, although I think BMM like to promote AM’s as specialists, etc. Although it was the experienced tech team that managed to get their site banned from Google back in 2006 lol!

And £700 per article…lol…slight increase from when I was there, but not much.

The company may fail in many areas, but give them credit where it’s due – they are great at one thing – selling!

Experienced Staff:

While there may have been some experienced staff when you worked there, these days there is barely any. Bigmouth take on graduates straight out of university and within a few weeks they’re on phonecalls, giving out seo advice to clients. Most of them start off as an account shadow initially but it isn’t long before they take on their own accounts. The majority of people (both newbies and old timers) don’t have a blog/website of their own, have never done any seo before and have no experience of handling clients. That doesn’t matter too much however as all clients are given an seo plan and series of recommendations that is completely templated. You simply use find and replace ##clientname## and voila you have an seo strategy that you can bill your clients several grand for.

This is a template that hasn’t really changed much in several years. It sorts out basic things like title tags, meta descriptions, and a few crawling issues but doesn’t go into much depth. Some recommendations are in there purely for an upsell e.g. “your site hasn’t been social bookmarked much which is a poor quality signal”. Oh yeah we sell social bookmarking, you should buy 20 hours of that at £120 per hour.

For bigger technical issues, the tech might get involved and add a few bullet points. In fairness to the technical seo team, they’re generally reasonably the most knowledgeable people within the company, although the benchmark account managers set is pretty horrific. Any other ‘seo insight’ a client might get would be regurgitated from other seo blogs – there’s no innovation, testing or anything like that. If it isn’t already covered a million times on seo blogs then you’re not going to hear about it.

Hiring grads on starter salaries and giving them all a templated seo plan for their clients was one way bigmouth managed to keep costs down. Another way was to simply give each account manager as many clients as possible. So now not only do you have an account manager who doesn’t really know what he’s doing handling your account but he or she also doesn’t have the time to do anything worthwhile. He can simply make the standard recommendations (hey you should get a blog or news service because then you’ll have loads of fresh content which search engines love. Oh yeah we sell a news service. You should buy up a few months of that at £80 per page. ) or you need some linkbuilding. We could submit some articles to article directories at £700 per article or a PR for close to a grand. We’ve only ever had these PRs get picked up by a journalist a handful of times but you’ll get lots of ‘great’ links that will really help with your site’s rankings. Despite the farmer update, bigmouth are still selling all of this as fast as they can although clients are quickly cottoning on and jumping ship.

Middle Management

In bigmouth you don’t get promoted for knowing anything about seo. You get promoted for the more shit you can sell, regardless of whether or not that’s of benefit to your client. Unfortunately while this system is very profitable you end up with a lot of people close to the top who are good at upselling the bigmouth products but have no real knowledge of seo. These people then go on to lead and ‘mentor’ the teams of new recruits and so the vicious circle continues. You also end up with a lot of client churn, but then marketing and sales is there game. They can always get new clients, but can rarely keep them.

I don’t think a lot has changed at bigmouth. We have cooler offices now and are obviously an Lbi company as well. Yes it was a legally a buyout but referred to as a merger for marketing and financial reasons one of them being that you mightn’t think bigmouth is as big as they want to come across if they were simply another Lbi buyout.