The online marketing world is a wonderfully vibrant and innovative space. Ideas and innovations bubble up constantly and are accepted or rejected as companies’ online marketing needs — particularly search and SEO — evolve.
Change is necessary for any business to survive and thrive in search marketing.
Change can also breed fear among marketers — fear that the companies they work with to solve their online marketing solutions may not have the scale, capabilities or wherewithal to help them tackle their increasingly complex online marketing and SEO challenges.
Our industry is becoming more fragmented. Every new algorithm adjustment by Google, and every new agency that opens or closes its doors, creates more confusion and unease among the very clients whose business we depend on.
A consensus is emerging that for the search marketing industry to continue to thrive, something needs to change. A million different providers all offering essentially the same thing isn’t good for the industry’s long-term strength.
Our Solution: MediaWhiz SEO
It’s with these great upheavals in mind that today we are announcing a significant change to TLA: we’re rebranding it MediaWhiz SEO and incorporating it within MediaWhiz’s full suite of performance marketing and SEO services.
The change in branding reflects its evolution as a provider of products and services that encompass the full spectrum of SEO, not just link building.
The brand transition also reflects our solution to the search marketing industry’s continual changes.
We at MediaWhiz believe that clients — especially top-tier advertisers and publishers — want to work with one agency that can provide a full spectrum of online marketing, SEO and customer acquisition solutions. Having multiple points of contact across multiple agencies or divisions isn’t efficient. This is especially true in an age in which a brand’s online marketing and SEO challenges are greater than ever.
The rebrand of TLA is part of a larger brand consolidation project currently underway at MediaWhiz. Our affiliate network and email product have also been rebranded and integrated within the full suite of MediaWhiz’s performance marketing and SEO services.
In Good Company
The rebrand of TLA to MediaWhiz SEO is part of a wave of similar corporate transformations taking place in online marketing. SEOMoz has been rebranded Moz. Its shortened name reflects its expanded level of services beyond its bread-and-butter of SEO analytics tools. Similarly, in the performance marketing world, Rakuten LinkShare recently announced a brand expansion to Rakuten Marketing as it develops an “umbrella” global brand that is growing into a wider online marketing agency offering clients a “more holistic approach” to their digital marketing strategy.
Alongside these two stalwarts in SEO and performance marketing, we’re confident that the changes and enhancements we’re making to TLA brand are the right strategy to best serve our clients.
Why We’re Retiring TLA
TLA (née Text Link Ads) was founded in 2001 and flourished early on by placing static HTML links on high-quality, high-traffic websites. This model worked throughout the relatively infant years of SEO. Around the latter part of the last decade, though, after TLA was acquired by MediaWhiz in 2006, we started offering more than the traditional static HTML link. Doing so enabled us to become a better-rounded link building and SEO company. We evolved, both with our clients’ SEO needs and with the search engines.
Over the last three years we have developed a number of content-based products, including those for content marketing, content creation, infographics creation and distribution and social seeding. Following our parent company’s acquisition in January 2013 by Matomy Media Group, a global performance marketing company, we were combined with MediaWhiz’s consultative SEO service to form a comprehensive SEO team.
It’s around that time we realized that continuing to call the company “TLA” or “Text Link Ads” was holding us back. We decided that as part of a comprehensive brand consolidation project at MediaWhiz, TLA would become MediaWhiz SEO.
More specifically, we changed the name of TLA to reflect the great evolution that has taken place both in the marketplace and within our own company.
- First, we’re aiming to provide advertisers and publishers a desired level of consistency in the SEO and content marketing solutions they use. As Google’s Penguin and other search engine algorithm modifications continue to cause upheaval in how publishers monetize their site traffic and brands improve their on- and off-page search results, we believe it’s beneficial to provide a single comprehensive SEO resource advertisers can turn to.
- Second, calling ourselves “TLA” is no longer transparent and authentic. We have evolved our business to include a complete suite of SEO products and services. Everything from content marketing to infographics to organic search to online reputation management and social media marketing; we’re doing it all. Our name needs to reflect that expansion and evolution.
Just like change is necessary for the evolution and continued growth of search marketing, change is also necessary for any agency or vendor operating in this space. By expanding TLA into a more comprehensive provider of SEO and content marketing products and services, and rebranding it MediaWhiz SEO, we’re confident that we’re adapting to the industry’s continual change in a proactive and strategic manner.
It’s a change we believe reflects the future of search marketing and SEO.
