Good search engine rankings, especially in Google are critical to the success of an online marketing campaign. But how do you choose a search engine marketing (SEM) company and what should you expect from them?
There are two main types of SEM - search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click advertisng (PPC).
A good SEO company will not make outlandish promises of Number 1 in Google within 3 months or your money back - if they do, they're probably talking about number one in Google for a search term that nobody uses. Their initial approach should be to analyse your business objectives, your website's role in achieving them, your site and its current search status, the market for your keywords and your broader marketing plans so that it can integrate any SEO recommendations within your offline and social media campaigns, assuming you have any.
Having formulated an SEO plan, they should work on your site to ensure that Google can index the right pages against the right keywords - in other words, carry out the work that builds your site's identity for your target keywords. This might involve addressing structural issues, coding problems, content, meta data and internal linking.
After completing this work they should report on your site's indexing status in Google a few weeks later and start work on developing links into your site from trusted, relevant web pages. Each month they should report on how your site's rankings and overall 'visibility' in Google are changing. You should allow at least 6 months for this process to work and provided you see positive results, you should expect it to continue.
Pay-per-click planning is different in so far as PPC is generally used to generate sales or enquiries - it's a continuous battle to get the highest number of visitors to your site at the lowest possible cost and to convert as many of those visitors to buyers.
A professional PPC company is likely to be Google Adwords accredited or at least to have a Google Adwords Qualified Individual on its staff. Such experts are regularly tested on their skills and knowledge so that they keep pace with the ever-changing systems and tools.
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