Search Laboratory Founder Ian Harris on Ethical Marketing and the Joy of Letting Go

This is a far cry from the current state of agencies. The 150-plus staff are mostly based in Leeds headquarters (a brutal slab called The BlokHaus), but also in New York and Austin. Harris last year.

“Good job for the money”

With a background in mathematics, Harris’ introduction to the internet culminated in a master’s degree in “virtual environments” in the 90’s before working in web development and eventually at translation company TheBigWord. During the SEO boom of the 2000s, he left the company to launch Search Lab.

These are boom times in the world of SEO, he says, and a wild west of risky practices has emerged. “Search marketing companies were making big bucks and getting kickbacks from Google.

Drawing on his experience at a translation agency, Harris founded Search Laboratory, a multilingual pay-per-click (PPC) service. The brilliance of his SEO efforts in the agency’s early days, he says, was that the data-driven method itself distanced itself from the hacksterism that was prevalent elsewhere in the PPC industry. His team developed a statistically based bidding system for keywords in multiple languages. This he later became known as BidLab. “We called it ‘ethical digital marketing’ for a time, but that sounds redundant. Like fair trade bananas – why on earth would you sell bananas that aren’t fair trade? But it resonated in the industry. Mathematics doesn’t lie. ”

From there, the “no magic, no snake oil” digital marketing business card grew into PPC in English, then SEO, analytics, and display advertising. Harris’ principles are consistently consistent, he says. “At the time, the rate people were charging seemed to be £10,000 a month for him, but I don’t know what they were doing. No one knew what they were doing. .”

Ethics remain important to Harris and his agency. Recently announcing B Corp certification, Harris smiled when asked about his proudest achievement: The Sunday Times’ “100 Best Places to Work.”

“Global from the start”

Harris never hired a large team of translators or opened offices outside of the UK or the US, but his business was “global from the start.” Other Marketing While his business is discovering a newly borderless world in 2020 and beyond, Search’s multilingual approach to laboratories has always enabled him to work well beyond his hometown of Yorkshire. Helped find. “Our first client was New York because the first thing we did was set up his own PPC campaign globally and multilingually.”

He says the agency works well for coming across this global approach. “Instead of going to multiple agencies, like Spain, France, Germany, people come to us and use the same statistics across the board to give them a dashboard to the world. It’s a compelling message.”

“Letting go is a wonderful process”

Harris hired CEO Chris Attwell in 2018, long before the agency was sold, and has since made a lengthy transition to the executive chair role. Although he struggles with the process of passing, he touts a “wonderful process” of transitioning and recruiting new talent to take the business in new directions. Wise owners start that transition early, he says. “Your first handover should be to get someone who is really, really good at sales. No. That was the first transition.”

Next was the Operations Director. “The more it goes on, the more things I have to let go. It hasn’t been my baby for quite some time. Everyone’s fine. They’re all good at what they do. If I don’t have to, I walk away.” There is nothing wrong with that.”