Get to know Mike Rosenberg, CEO at Veracity

I am CEO at Veracity, a PR and digital marketing firm based in Portland, OR. We work across diverse industries like real estate & construction, professional services & hospitality and nutrition & nonprofits.

I began my marketing career in the world of sports marketing before taking the plunge into digital in 2007 where I honed my skills within the Search Engine Marketing world at EngineWorks (which was acquired by ethology) and began an 8 year stint on the SEMpdx (Search Engine Marketing Association of Portland) Board of Directors, eventually serving as President and currently sitting on the Advisory Board.

Interestingly, a lot has changed, but a lot has stayed the same as well. A well-built site still makes a difference in the search engines. Good title tags and effective meta descriptions are still needed and links are vitally important. I think what SEOs have to spend their time on has changed significantly, especially for smaller businesses. Instead of fighting with developers on building “SEO-friendly” websites, they have platforms that pretty much come ready to perform.

We continue to see the things that Google has been telling us to do for years paying off, such as providing good content and understanding our users’ intent in what keywords to focus on. It is amazing how many sub-industries, like penalty removal tools and local listing management companies, have developed over the decade.

We also didn’t have to worry about optimizing for voice search or position zero, which is crucial now. There is a lot more competition for regular old organic results now that those links are often below the fold under ads, answer boxes and local results.

I was working in the sports marketing world and at that time it wasn’t very progressive. I got frustrated with the answers I received when asking why we are doing something a certain way (because that’s how we’ve always done it) or how about we try something new (nope, we’ve always done it this way, we don’t want to change).

As my frustration was setting in, a friend of mine (Kent Schnepp of Odysys) took me to lunch and pitched me on joining the search engine marketing firm he had started.

Veracity is a PR firm first and foremost. To some that doesn’t scream SEO. However, Google is one of the main ways companies relate with their publics (the essence of Public Relations). Links are a huge part of SEO and some of the best links a company can get are from media sites. Other marketing channels businesses interact with the public through are their website, social media, and email. Our core services include public relations, community relations, media relations, social media, search engine marketing (SEM/PPC, Local SEO), creative, media buying and email marketing.

Google will continue to get better and better at cracking down on nefarious activities. So, good sites with good content will provide a return. Focus on quality over quantity in your content and social media. Optimizing based on perceived user intent will become more important and video will continue to grow. Oh, and site speed and mobile. You have to get those right!

Network. Find the local meetups and search marketing associations and get involved. They tend to be very welcoming and inclusive groups. Search is still a specialist industry and people that do it well are in high demand. But, agencies and in-house managers have to know about you to hire you.