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Finding The Right Search Engine Marketing Company: Part Two
February 07, 2008
Questions You Should Ask About The SEM Company's Services
Need help sorting through the scores of Search Engine Marketing companies?
In Part One of Finding The Right Search Engine Marketing Company, I shared my thoughts on questions you should ask SEM companies about their company. Now let's look at some good questions to ask the SEM company about their service offerings:
- What do you consider the main goals of the campaign?
- How does keyword research fit into your SEO process?
- Will you conduct a full site analysis of our site prior to the campaign to evaluate how search-engine-friendly our site is?
- Do you offer guaranteed search engine rankings?
- Changes To Our Site: Will your company be writing all necessary code and content recommendations and who will manage the implementation on our site pages? What happens to the code and content should our company stop using your services? How flexible will you need us to be to make changes to our site to help improve its performance at search engines and increase traffic?
- When should we expect to see the first results from the campaign?
- Link Building: Do you have a web site linking methodology for both internal site links and external, third-party links? What is your approach to building links and what are your thoughts on quantity versus quality? Will you submit my site to top tier paid directories? Will the links you gain for my site be one-way or reciprocal links? What happens to the links in the event our companies stop working together? Do you include advanced link building strategies including XML sitemap generation?
- What are your opinions in regards to “Best Practices” for SEO? Do you utilize “Black Hat” SEO techniques for your clients?
- Reporting: What type of performance reports will you provide us and how often? Do you report on search engine placements, search traffic, conversions, revenue, etc.? Web site analytics reporting will you provide to us? Will you provide consulting to explain what the data means and how it affects our marketing objectives?
- Based on the goals of my site, along with SEO, what other SEM services would you recommend?
All posts by Doug Ausbury
posted by Doug Ausbury at February 7, 2008 09:47 AM
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Comments
Although I think that some of the questions (in part 1 and Part 2) are valid, I'm sure you realize that it's tough for someone seeking search services to take advice form someone offering search services. That's like asking a car dealer what questions to ask a car dealer. Although there is merit in some of the questions, there's always that hazy level of "Is this the truth, or are you just trying to sell me something?" floating in the air.
All in all, a good starting point though.
Posted by: Dan Perry at February 8, 2008 12:05 PM