How to choose your Search Engine Marketing Firm?
Choosing a provider for Search Engine Marketing ( SEO or PPC advertising management) can be a very important decision for your business. Get it right and the ROI effects could be business-transforming, although we hasten to add that results vary greatly between industries. Get it wrong and you might as well have gambled your search marketing budget at the casino.
For business consumers, search marketing is a highly-specialised and complicated field so it can be difficult sorting through the various sales pitches. So here is a little help with the basics:
- Shop on return on investment (ROI). If you opt for the cheapest possible quote, then you will probably get what you pay for. Achieving good search results in competitive fields requires a lot of work by the SEO firm and costs are reflected in quotes. You should assess the cost of the service against the potential long-term ROI for your business. A cheap service that delivers little or no ROI is a poor marketing investment.
- Measure the results over the long term. Search marketing – and SEO especially – should be a medium to long-term investment. That means a minimum timeframe of 12 months to see good rankings for new websites and possibly less for established ones. Be aware that good organic rankings may be hard to achieve in competitive industries. But good search rankings frequently remain for years after they have been first achieved. In other words, your return on SEO is being earned over years not weeks or months. Other advertising forms are one hit wonders – once you stop advertising, there is no ongoing ROI. Natural search traffic is tends to be ongoing, with a little maintenance required depending upon the rate of change and competition.
- Don’t expect ranking “guarantees”. No honest SEO company can possibly guarantee you #1 in Google rankings for a given keyword. The only company capable of guaranteeing you a #1 organic ranking is Google themselves. Their search positions are not for sale. Google’s website says it plainly: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google”. If you’re speaking to a firm that does offer a SEO guarantee, ask a lot of questions about that guarantee or simply walk away. That does not mean that you cannot expect moderately reliable forecasts of average positions across a cluster of keywords at 6 month and twelve month review stages of a given investment plan. Speak to firms that mention words like key performance indicators (KPIs), Visibility Percentages (VPs), benchmarks and themes.
Why Use Us?
WCR helps businesses grow market share, increasing sales conversion 2 to 4 times with greater effectiveness per marketing spend and delivers analytics to management for timely decisions.
To provide real value to each particular business client an Internet marketer, or any marketer for that matter, cannot afford to become religious or fixated on any one form of online marketing.
While it is true that one form of marketing may be the most cost-effective form of marketing for the majority of businesses it does not necessarily follow that the client’s business is well suited, or is suited at this particular point in time in that or only that form of marketing. Moreover, a blended approach often provides certain synergies and, at least for a time, one may provide valuable market feedback to the other.
While natural search and SEO services, may turn out to be a single best approach, when doing a preliminary assessment, WCR consultant’s are trained to have an open mind about online strategies and solutions. While some form of search engine marketing is likely to be part of any online strategy – natural and/or paid search – we often discuss the possibilities of email marketing, social networking and the synergy of multiply marketing channels.
We teach our staff that every business is unique in some way and they deserve to be heard and proposed to on the facts of each case.
Each client is assigned a specific account manager who is trained to continuously review a client’s progress to objectives and assess whether there are any new ways to meet them. Each monthly report is custom written to ensure reports are relevant. If a client needs paid search services, the account manager must have at least a Google AdWords qualification.
Partners
We partner ourselves with other leading firms, including Microsoft, Google, leading web-design firms and several others such that we can recommend a flexible basket of solutions for our clients without loosing our specialist consultant role.