Paul Bongers

Paul Bongers is a B2B sales leader known for his energetic public speaking with passionate appeals for data-driven marketing and sales strategies based on search data. He heads up the New York office at Searchmetrics, the global leader in Search and Content Optimization software.

Speaker Interview
Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Paul Bongers, I work at Searchmetrics and I work mostly in SEO, in strategic alliances and in strategic partnerships. So, I’m from software company and I work with large agencies and large media groups such as WPP and Publicis.

What have you been doing at UnGagged?

I’m speaking today, and tomorrow as well, mostly about tying SEO into a wider business. I’m very much a part of the new generation everyone’s been talking about where SEO is becoming more integrated into the corporate world and I work very closely with people who try to communicate the technical part of SEO into the business as a whole.

What do you enjoy most about UnGagged?

What I enjoy most about UnGagged; I think is it’s thought leadership. Especially the old school leadership, the people who have been in the industry for a long time, who have built the industry from scratch pretty much and the combination with the young, new generation looking at what do we have right now and how do we move forward. It’s a big thought leadership thing in UnGagged.

What’s been your best conversation here?

My conversation actually just happened, we had a two-hour chat about, exactly what we were just talking about; how do we move on from here? What are the demands of the industry? What are the opportunities of the industry? It’s no longer necessarily that we can sit in a corner and do a lot of technical stuff on our computer and hopefully get a gratification for that; we actually have to think about who is going to invest in our time and who do we explore opportunities to show and measure our impact in a business and how do we create a new industry from this?

You flew to UnGagged from the UK, what’s your experience from coming over from Europe to an American conference of this nature?

America is a very interesting market and compared to Europe, obviously a lot of this tech and search happens in the United States, as Google is based here. So it’s very much the front runner of most of the things that happen, interestingly most of the developments that happens in the US we use that as a projection of what would happen to the rest of the world. For example, is Google has a roll out, has a plan, they’d test it on the US market, if it works, it would probably come over to the UK and it rolls out into other markets. As a software company we’re very good at measuring and analysing how this rolls out, so it’s a very fascinating thing. It’s a very competitive market, I find the conversations here are more heated. I love the Brits, don’t get me wrong, they’re very polite, but I do like that Americans, from time to time, can basically say what it is, be direct and move on; so it’s a very driven culture.