We found this great blog post today over at Entrepreneur.com, Top 20 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Company. Here are the first 10:
- Do you guarantee top search engine rankings?
- Will my website need to change?
- What is your process for keyword research?
- What is your pricing, and when can I expect (ranking) results?
- How will I be able to gauge progress, and what level of communication should I expect?
- Are you visible in the industry? Where can I find you?
- Describe your firm’s general SEO experience and a few client references.
- How long will our agreement (contract) last?
- What should my SEO agreement include?
- Who are your competitors, and why are you better for us?
We do a little bit of SEO work at TPL. One of our current clients has his own in-house SEO campaign and dropped in on us in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, during one his frequent business trips to Asia. He sat down with managers and staff and provided a nearly 2-day training on SEO and how we could support his in-house SEO campaign.
It was a really great learning experience – it seems that this client really knew his SEO. His internet store is consistently ranked on the first page of Google results.
Of course, there are many tools and tricks to in order to achieve SEO – and there isn’t a clear-cut formula. That’s why online businesses outsource their SEO work – it’s a huge job and a lot of of it is quite repetitive. We’ll even bet that some of the SEO companies you’re outsourcing to are outsourcing to companies like us!
Today, the San Francisco Chronicle published this interview with Infosys CEO, S. Gopalakrishnan: Pioneer in the field of global outsourcing. Infosys is one of the world’s largest outsoucing companies, with more than 91,000 employees, 40 offices worldwide, and $4 billion dollars in revenue.
As a relatively young business process outsourcing (BPO) provider, we found this interview particularly interesting. In it, S. Gopalakrishnan traces the growth of Infosys from its early years:
I think of ‘81 through ‘91 as the surviving ascent company, surviving to establish a viable business. This is the period when the Indian economy was almost closed and it was a very different era. So we struggled a lot. We didn’t have much to show for all that struggle. We hardly grew. I think in 1991 we would probably have had about a million dollars in revenue, something like that.
In ‘91, the economy opened up. We did an initial public offering in ‘93 and invested that money into the business. That was the period of building the foundation of the company, of a stable organization – working systems, processes, lots of things we did to create a strong foundation for growth.
And then in ‘99 – helped by the Y2K boom, the telecom boom and the Internet boom – we began growing more than 100 percent year over year. That’s been our period of accelerated growth. It took us 23 years to get to the first billion, 23 months for the second billion, 12 months for the third billion and so on.
Looking forward, S. Gopalakrishnan notes continued opportunities for growth:
The reason why we continue to grow is that our market share is very, very low. We have only about 500 clients. There are a lot of companies that we don’t work with. So there is still opportunity for growth.
The outsourcing ”pie” is projected to offer growing oppportunities for offshore IT/BPO providers in other countries as well. You can imagine how exciting this prospect is for an emerging BPO such as ourselves. Infosys is a model of success that we certainly hope to emulate in the coming years.
Filed under: Advantages/Disadvantages of Outsourcing/BPO, Clients, Conferences & Exhibitions
We’re back in Vietnam after a great trip to Chicago for the IRCE trade show (see previous entry below). We spent a day exploring the city, a day setting up, and 3 days on the floor talking to IRCE attendees about our BPO solutions.
On the floor, we met representatives from all types of internet retailers: start-up to established, B2B to B2C, family-run to public corporations – selling a vast array of products, from nail salon supplies, sports equipment, glass tiles, shoes, military uniforms, and so much more!
The IRCE 2008 Exhibit Hall Floor
This being our first trade show, it was really interesting to see the diversity of businesses represented and their range in openness to BPO. Many of the attendees we talked to seemed thoroughly interested in what we offer: BPO solutions that save their businesses time and money and unload repetitive processes and management burden. Others were already outsourcing: mostly to India and a couple to Eastern Europe and South America.
Others weren’t so convinced: common objections included: “We’re too small” or “We prefer to do it all in-house.” Of course, we know that outsourcing can be a foreign concept to many (no pun intended!) and we’ve got firm rebuttals for all these objections which we’ll get into in another entry.
Overall, the show was a great success for us, bringing in over 100 new leads. Since last Thursday, we’ve been following up on our strongest leads and have already been given sample projects to work on for review by prospective clients. It’s exciting, indeed. More to come on these developments in the future.
Filed under: Clients
Hi everybody! Welcome to our company blog, TPL Inside Outsourcing. We’re pretty excited about this new endeavor and are looking forward to engaging current and potential customers through this format.
Chances are, you’ve already browsed through our website or are already familiar with our services, so we won’t go into those details in this welcome post. If you haven’t already, you can go to the About section of our website to find out who we are.
So, what’s this blog about and why have we created it?
Our first goal is to provide another channel for our current clients to access and communicate with us. We think our clients might be interested in hearing about new services, learn more about the people at TPL they’re working with, and in general, keep up to date with news that’s relevant to our partnerships.
Our second goal is to engage potential customers or others who may be interested/curious about business process outsourcing solutions, and, to the extent that we can, demystify the process and outsourcing in general.
In this blog we’ll be covering topics such as: 1) outsourcing solutions that work for our clients, 2) our thoughts on outsourcing trends or business developments in Vietnam (where we’re based), and last but not least 3) who we are, such as staff and training.
This is just a flavor of things to come – and we’re sure that this list of topics will grow. So, again… welcome!
