CEO SPOTLIGHT

Adam Heitzman

Company: HigherVisibility

Adam Heitzman is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at HigherVisibility, an internet marketing agency located in Memphis, TN. Heitzman founded HigherVisibility in 2008 after he came to the conclusion that the Mid-South was lacking true internet marketing firms. After achieving success locally, HigherVisibility quickly expanded to service clients across the country.

Prior to starting HigherVisibility, Heitzman worked for several internet companies as a Chief Marketing Officer and Marketing Manager where he learned the many facets of the internet marketing world and the strategies it takes to succeed. Over the years he has consulted and worked with Fortune 500 companies to small businesses on how best to utilize the internet to achieve quantifiable results.

Heitzman is a graduate of Christian Brothers University, where he earned his B.A in business management with a minor in psychology, and currently resides in Memphis, Tennessee.

What are your main services?

In just 3 years, HigherVisibility has grown from a small SEO company serving the local Memphis, TN community to a full service nationwide internet marketing agency. HigherVisibility offers a wide range of online marketing services ranging from Search Engine Optimization, Pay per Click Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Website Design, Affiliate Marketing Management, and much more.

What makes HigherVisibility different from other companies competing in your industry?

We take a practical approach to internet marketing. There are firms especially on the SEO side of the business that will do a little bit of on-page optimization and be done, or they will just build a bunch of links and hope for the best. We focus on the fundamentals that have been tested to produce results through hard work and proven methodologies. We won’t do anything for our clients that we wouldn’t do for our own company.

Tell us more about your firm’s success story.

We started this firm after we took a good look at the market in Memphis, TN and realized the lack of true internet marketing companies. There were some web design firms and traditional marketing agencies that dabbled in this space, but none that were dedicated solely to online and that did it well. My partners and I had spent our whole careers in the internet marketing space at various companies, so we decided to go out on our own and fill that void in Memphis. After achieving success locally, we used our formula to branch out nationally and now our national client base is much larger than our local Memphis presence.

According to you, what are the most important questions a potential customer should ask a company before choosing a vendor like you?

•    Can you show me some examples of your success stories?
•    What is your client load?
•    What is your experience and qualifications?
•    How is success measured?

What are some of the myths in your field?

If you were to go ask several people who have at least some SEO knowledge, what they think are the key strategies, you are likely to get a variety of answers. SEO as a whole is one of the most debated technology topics on the Internet. It takes someone who is constantly on top of the ever-changing landscape to research, test, and understand the best practices to know what it will take to achieve high rankings. Here are a few of the myths we hear most often:

•    Meta tag keywords help in Search engine rankings – It has been confirmed by Google themselves that they no longer use this as a ranking factor.
•    I need lots of links - While having links does help it is more about the quality and relevance of links than shear volume.
•    It’s all about PageRank -Anyone who performs SEO wishes this were the case because if it were it would make our lives much easier. You can look at practically any niche in Google and perform a search and see low PageRank URL’s outrank high ones all the time.
•    Once my site is optimized and I’m ranking, I am done - Not hardly. SEO is an ongoing process. Competitors are constantly battling for search engine rankings. If you don’t make it part of your ongoing marketing strategy, someone else will.

How do you develop your skills in this continuously changing environment?

Our skills are continuously being developed and tested through actual experiences while optimizing our and our clients’ websites. In addition, we stay on top of the latest news and trends by following our industry contacts, blogs, and forums and also by attending annual trade shows.

What do you see as the future of the industry? What will be the challenges? Do you anticipate any drastic changes?

Social media will be playing a greater role, but search will remain king. From an industry perspective it would be too hard to replace the targeting and user intent that search provides. From a consumer perspective using search engines to find products or information is much easier. Social media will probably make its greatest impact not on directing consumers to products, but influencing the results that search engines deliver. The more a product, service, or even company is mentioned through social channels, the greater the impact will be made on the search results. The search engines have been playing close attention to social media and have been integrating “social signals” into their algorithms for a while now. I think that will continue to be a big factor moving forward.

Where do you see your firm in the next 5 years? What about you personally?

We plan on being a larger version of who we are today as long as it doesn’t interfere with the quality of the service we provide. We feel we have the right formula to grow and we plan on continuing that growth while delivering the same quality service that we provide today. If things don’t feel right, we won’t do it. We don’t want to lose who we are.

For me personally, I hope I will be doing the exact same thing as I am today; I love what I do and the team I work with, so I can’t see it any other way.