Choosing a Search Engine Marketing Company

You may have spent countless hours trying to get a good search engine ranking. Maybe you have been successful and maybe you haven't. In either case you may have considered outsourcing this part of your website promotion to a professional search engine marketing company. Here we will provide you a few tips on how to choose a good company.

1) Find a Company by Searching the Search Engines
What better way to find a company that practices what they preach? Look in all the major search engines to see which companies come up on top most of the time. You can do a search on keywords such as "search engine marketing company" or "search engine marketing London." If a company can get itself up in the top, then chances are they can get your website to the top as well. Narrow down your search to a few different companies and follow the rest of the steps below until you find one that you like.

2) Guarantees
Find out what kind of a guarantee they provide. No one can guarantee that 100% of your keywords will get a top 10 ranking in all the major search engines. However, most companies will give a minimum guarantee and a refund if the guarantee is not met. Some companies, such as us, provide a pay-per-performance type placement, where you may pay an initial set-up fee and nothing more until you see results in the top 10 or top 20. Note that most companies will only guarantee results after minimum of 2-3 months, because search engines do not index sites immediately.

3) Reputation
Hold a meeting with the company to see if you will be able to get on with them and ask them if you could talk to one of their clients. You may also ask to see some recent ranking reports for their existing clients.

4) Technique
Ask them what techniques they use for search engine marketing campaigns. Almost every SEO agency uses some sort of doorway page technique for search engine optimisation. Some may use controversial cloaking software and some may use other redirection techniques, where the visitor does not actually see the optimised page. Some do not use any redirection and the visitor may end up on an ugly entry page constructed only from a few sentences of text. Using cloaking software to increase your rankings is a very risky game to play with the search engines who frown upon these techniques. Cloaking requires a high level of maintenance to keep up with the IP number changes. If the search engine optimisation company does not update their IP addresses on a regular basis, then you’ll get spotted. Contrary to what you may be told, search engines can detect the use of cloaking techniques, and even if they don’t then your competitors may report you. The end result being that you may lose all your rankings and you may even get banned from their index.

Also, ask the search engine marketing company if they use other forms of SEM such as pay per click advertising or database feeds. A good SEM agency with adopt a consultative approach and recommend the best techniques for your own individual campaign. Some search engine marketing consultancies will only focus on one aspect of SEM so be sure to ask if they have skills in more than one area so that you know your campaign will be tailored to suit your budget, timelines and objectives.

5) Directory Submission
Since directory submissions are reviewed by actual humans. Make sure that the search engine marketing company knows what they are doing. Make sure that they will submit you to Yahoo, LookSmart and Open Directory (Dmoz.org).

6) Keyword Consultation
Most SEM companies will help you decide keywords for your site or can recommend better or similar keywords to use. There are tools that can determine what the most searched keywords are. A good SEM agency will have such tools and will help you decide keywords for your site.

7) Ranking Reports and other Extras
Make sure that the company offers you monthly ranking or visitor reports. Ranking reports could be a very time consuming process, unless you have your own software. Most search engine marketing companies will offer this in the deal. Also, ask what other extras or options can be provided. For example, with our plans we provide Yahoo and LookSmart Express fee based submissions and link popularity improvements. Link popularity is a very important ranking factor these days. Make sure that the company you choose offers a plan for improving your link popularity.

8) Fees and Plans
Some companies may charge a one-time flat fee and some may have monthly maintenance fees or some others may charge on a Cost-per-Click (CPC) Basis. All plans have pros and cons. On a flat fee or monthly fee based plan you have a fixed budget and most of the time you are guaranteed a certain number of top 10 or top 20 results. However, most companies will not give you a traffic guarantee. On the other hand with a CPC plan, you pay a fixed fee such as 20p or 20 cents a click, but there could be no limit on what the max fee is on a monthly basis. You only pay for traffic delivered to you. You will have to decide for yourself which plan is the best option for your needs.

There are only a handful of good SEM companies out there that do not charge an arm and a leg to do the work and offer everything above. Feel free to do your own research and compare them to our services. You can see more details about our search engine marketing services,by clicking on to About Site Visibility.

For more information on working with search engine marketing companies click on to our ‘Outsourcing search engine marketing’ section. If you would like to obtain a sample search engine marketing brief or request for proposal then email us and we’ll happily send one through to you.