Friday Q&A: Lance Bachmann on Philly’s SEO community and being on a billboard

If you’ve driven up 95 lately, you’ve already met Lance Bachmann.
The founder of 1SEO has stood cross-armed on a billboard preaching the value of SEO for months over Philadelphia’s eastern arterial road. At first glance the billboard appears like a marketing campaign from a national company, but the Northeast Philadelphia native is helming a rapidly expanding business right here in the Philadelphia area, counting local companies such as Sweat Fitness, Center City restaurant Ladder15 and Holt’s Cigar among its clients.
Founded in 2010, the company has 15 employees in its Southhampton offices and 96 in India.
“We’re jammed in here like sardines right now,” says Bachmann adding that the company is planning on a big move this month.
We sat down with the guy on the billboard about what’s its like to, um, be on a billboard and why he’s inviting you to play arcade games in his company’s new office in Bristol. Bachmann also discusses Philadelphia’s SEO community and why he didn’t relocate to 4th and Bainbridge.

Explain what 1seo does like I’m a five-year-old.
If you have a product or service, we’ll find the best keyword that will get you the best conversion through a mix of pay-per-click and organic links… We don’t do any black hat tricks. We don’t hold people hostage, all of our agreements are month-to-month.

Tell us about the new space you’re moving to in Bristol.
We want it to be an open technology community where our clients and freelancers can come work from our place. We’ll put arcade games in there. We have big screens where people can Skype to our office in India. It’s going to be a totally different look and feel than anything Philadelphia has ever seen.
Did you say you have an office in India?
We have a full-blown 100-man office in India doing link-building, development jobs, stuff like that.
What’s it mean to link-build?
You can do reciprocal link building to switch links with another webmaster with the right tags and page rank. The other way is to do directory submissions or approach blogs that anchor the right keywords for your site.
We often get inundated with contact form and e-mail spam with people asking us to do a “link exchange,” I assume that’s what you’re talking about, but at a lower level.
The problem with that is that the sites that ask you probably have a low PageRank and aren’t in the same industry as you. Sometimes they ask you to put the link in such a way that it would make their site the “authority.” So you have to do a full analysis whether these things make sense for you.
What is it like to be on a billboard?
You don’t get as many girls as you think, it actually hurts you I think [laughs].
Does anyone ever approach you and say: “I know this is weird, but are you the guy on the billboard?”
Absolutely. I’m one of 14 kids from Northeast Philadelphia, so I know a lot of folks.
What would it take to move 1SEO into the city? Why Bristol?
I wanted to buy a building on South Street around 4th and Bainbridge. I brought in an accountant and it wasn’t an Opportunity Zone so I would have been destroyed in taxes. As an employer, I would have had to pay my employees the Philadelphia wage tax. They don’t want a four percent pay cut because of that.
What’s the SEO community in Philadelphia like?
There are only two real SEO companies here in Philadelphia. Us and SEER interactive. There are a lot of web designers in Philadelphia that say they can do it, but they can’t. Do me and Wil [Reynolds, founder of SEER Interactive] talk? We go to the same conferences and I say “hi,” but there’s not a big communication between SEO companies here or around the country. Everybody just kind of does their own thing.
For Philadelphia being such a large market, it’s odd that you and SEER are the only two companies. That’s a lot of pond and not a lot of fish.
And that’s why we are growing so rapidly.
Below, Lance Bachmann explains SEO.
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