So who is Simon Heseltine and how did he get to be the Director of Search Marketing for a Digital Marketing Agency inside the Washington D.C. beltway?
Back in 1992 I graduated with a BA (hons) degree in Business Administration (minors in Marketing and Programming) from the University of Humberside in Hull, England, along with a diploma from the Institute of Administrative Management in Orpington Kent. I then immediately moved to the US. After a few years of working in the IT / Marketing department of a millwork firm, I went back to school, taking programming courses at the Chubb Institute in Philadelphia.
After graduating top of the class I began working for SID designing bolt-on applications for SAP’s R/3 ERP system. Following SID, I went to work for a 46,000 person corporation in Harrisburg PA, designing and developing their Factory Systems Management system (emphasis on quality management).
After a year as a consultant, I settled down in the D.C. region, and began working for SynXis. 15 months into that relationship the company was spun off into 2 pieces, the arm I went with became Innovectra, and was involved with developing platforms for Yellow Pages publishers to get their books online. We grew from 8 employees at the start to over 100.
Early in 2005 we had many of the top YP publishers on the platform, but the traffic wasn’t getting to the site, so it was decided to form an in-house Search Marketing department. I was chosen to set up and run that department.
By early 2007 my team of 6 was running PPC campaigns for books for 11 local and regional publishers, as well as for over 800 small, local businesses. We had also architected and implemented SEO best practices to enable the sites to rank highly for certain key terms.
In mid-2007 I decided that it was time to take the knowledge I’d gained at Innovectra and apply it to other companies, Serengeti Communications offered me the position of Director of Search. After a year I’ve had the chance to apply my knowledge (and to learn along the way) to a sites in a variety of industries from online education, to financial services, to non-profits, to manufacturing and beyond.
