Search Lab looks to the States to extend its marketing reach

Ian Harris, the founder and chief executive of Search Laboratory, is planning to open an office in New York to tap into demand for multilingual search engine optimisation.

His company helped drive online fashion giant ASOS up the Google rankings and launched a global PR campaign after the First Lady was spotted wearing a red ASOS dress costing £55.

Search Laboratory specialises in helping businesses to achieve more prominent positions in online search results and offers its services in more than 35 languages.

The company works with ASOS and helps it to reach shoppers in key European markets.

“We do multilingual search for ASOS. They are number one for ‘dresses’ in this country. We do that.

“They are number one for ‘kleider’ in Germany. I think they are number one for ‘robes’ in France. Dresses is the biggest term in the fashion industry.”

Mr Harris said being at the top of Google is very powerful position to be in.

ASOS was in 12th place, the second page of results, when it hired The Search Laboratory in 2010, he added.

Mr Harris made sure that the ASOS site was optimised, could be crawled easily by search engine algorithms and said the right things in the right places.

He also increased the number of in-bound links from other websites by putting good content on the retailer’s site.

“Michelle Obama wore some ASOS clothing. We made sure the right people saw that article and linked to it,” he said.

This was basic PR – the company alerted international fashion writers to the ASOS connection and the story caught light.

But Search Laboratory also uses some very complex mathematics to help businesses reach the right customers at the right time.

It employs maths graduates alongside language experts and now has a workforce of more than 150 across three offices – two in Leeds and one in London.

They could soon by joined by an office on the East Coast.

Mr Harris studied competitors in the US market and found that American SEO agencies are “inward-looking” in their approach to multi-lingual search.

He said: “We speak the language and provide a bridge to Europe that (US businesses) struggle to get. We have looked at local companies and what they do and very often they partner with translation companies to deliver what we do.

“That is precisely the wrong approach.”

He said translation companies employ a linear approach to language by looking for the best alternative to a word or expression, while his company likes to “expand ideas and think of nuances of different ways of saying things that people might search for”.

He said businesses that want to sell into overseas markets approach translation companies to convert their websites.

“Once they have had them translated, most of them completely waste the opportunity because that site doesn’t index well on Google and they don’t get any inquiries from it.

“We help them with that next step of making the business work in other places.”

Turnover last year was £6.5m and is expected to grow to around £8m this year.

Mr Harris, a maths graduate, said Search Laboratory has continued to grow throughout the downturn.

The 45-year-old said: “The people we deal with are the people that are online, went online or going big online.

“We have been in a world where people have been growing.

“If we look at the clients like ASOS, Panone, the Manchester law firm, and Tiger Sheds, the Leeds shed retailer, they have all been growing.

“I can’t wait for us to start pulling out of the recession just so we do not feel so guilty.

“If we are coming out of recession and people do start spending more and freeing up budgets what are we going to do then? Are we going to grow even more?”

n Watch the video interview at www.yorkshirepost.co.uk