The 6 Main Questions You Should Ask An SEO Agency Before Hiring Them

Posted on January 23, 2016 by Bob Sanderson

Search engine optimisation agencies are hired by you to provide SEO services, but how can you be sure they will deliver?

There have been many complaints by companies in the past of SEO agencies ‘over promising and not being able to deliver’.

It is on some occasions not the agency’s fault as search algorithms may change and successful tactics may no longer works, but you need to be able to trust them to overcome these issues and communicate everything so you aren’t left in the dark and out of pocket.

Here are the six main questions that will help you make the decision of whether an SEO agency is right for your company or not:

1. Can I speak to one of your current customers, in a similarly competitive sector, who has been with you for two or more years?

Many companies will have case studies and recommendations on their website, but you will find speaking with one of their customers directly will give you a better rounded and honest perspective of the agency you want to work with.

If an agency is not excited by this or doesn’t seem able to find someone willing to speak to you then I would take this to be a bad sign and start to look around at other agencies.

2. Can we meet with the entire team who will be working on our account?

Many SEO companies will outsource certain elements of the SEO work, such as link building and content writing, which can lead to a lack of quality control, especially if the content outsources overseas.

It is important to arrange an appointment with the team who would be working on your account, including those working on off page SEO such as content creating and link building, as you want to meet face to face the people responsible for your company’s online reputation.

3. Why do we have to sign up for 12 or 24 months, with no break out clause in the contract?

Because SEO can take time to implement and take effect, and SEO agency may as your to sign a long contract to ensure they have enough time to deliver the promised results.

But realistically you should see some form of positive impact, albeit maybe not the full promised results, within the first 6 months of working with the agency.

If this is not the case then their strategies are not working for you and you would most likely want out of the contract. For this reason, a good agency should have no issues in offering a mutual get out clause in the contract, knowing that they have sound strategies and are confident they can deliver.

4. Who is the biggest SEO client you have lost in the past 12 months and why?

All SEO agencies will lose clients occasionally, but as a potential new client you want to understand what the circumstances were regarding any clients that have been lost. If the agency is honest and open with their answer, it is a good gauge of their honesty and transparency when working with clients and their confidence in their work to be able to tell you this information.

5. Can you guarantee our SEO performance?

If an SEO agency are willing to guarantee their performance, then they are likely to over promise and under deliver. A good agency knows there are many variables that are not in the control of the client or themselves, therefore nothing is written in stone where SEO is concerned and any guarantees would not stand up.

6. What do we actually get for our monthly fee?

This question links back to meeting the team. You want to know who is doing what physical work to determine exactly where your monthly fee will be going. If you are happy that the projected outcomes of the work and the amount of work done by the agency are in line with the monthly fee, then all is well.

Ethical Issues Faced By Internet Marketing Companies

Posted on January 23, 2016 by Bob Sanderson

In today’s digital based business environment, ethics are important in establishing the reputation of the company. And for an internet marketing company working in an area that is often criticised for its lack of ethics, it is ever more important to get right when working on behalf of clients.

With immoral and illegitimate Internet marketing schemes operating and deceitful tactics being used, marketers must take extra caution when promoting their clients and their products and services on the World Wide Web and ensure they can prove themselves as an agency to be legit among an industry riddled with scams. Here are some of the main ethical issues faced by internet marketers:

Who Can Be Trusted?

Because internet marketing is full of scams and people out to gain sensitive information, it is important that you have clear guidelines and form an agreement with the client to ensure you are both comfortable and trust in each other.

You will after all be in charge of the brand’s online reputation, a big task to be reliant on for. You will then need to ensure you uphold your end of the agreement and carefully gauge any content you put out there on behalf of your client.

A Little Matter of Morals

If you are handling organic and paid internet marketing for a client, as well as maintaining and updating content on the client’s website, you need to consider the privacy and legal implications that go with it.

What you publish for the client reflects on how they are viewed by the rest of the world, and although you do the posting, if they were to be found to have anything illegal or immoral on their website, such as copyrighted images that they do not have permission to use, then it would be the client who it reflects badly on and who would suffer the consequences.

This goes back to the ethical issue of trust, as they are trusting you to uphold the law and make wise moral decisions on their behalf.

Professionalism and Reputation

Because the internet and tools within it such as social media and blogs are used for both personal and online marketing purposes, the two can very easily overlap.

An internet marketing company must consider the implications of everything they write and post online, ensuring all client information is kept separate from other clients and personal aspects of the internet to ensure the client’s reputation and your own reputation is upheld.

Once Published It Remains Forever

When you hit send on that controversial blog post or Tweet, it cannot be undone. Even if you delete the post itself, it remains in cached page archives forever and can easily be pulled up by search engines or websites that specialise in recalling old pages.

Additionally, video and movies, audio and images, any kind of multimedia in various formats will remain and be viewable, which brings about the issue of consent, privacy and safety.

Complete knowledge of search marketing

Posted on October 31, 2015 by Bob Sanderson

The search marketing alludes to build a website, which is visible to targeted visitors or traffic to sites that could become good prospects.

Therefore, it is important for your website to be advanced of its competitions in terms of how it feels and looks and what it offers in the world where different people are continuously searching the information online.

It’s a broad term, which covers, search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, search engine advertisement and direct navigation.

Its basic objective is to obtain the highest search engine results and it targets sites of huge volume traffic and online communities. Search marketing consists of two broad categories paid, search marketing and organic search marketing.

Organic search marketing

With the help of organic search marketing, you can build a business website, which is relevant to what different search engines need to get top rankings, whenever the prospective customers searching for the services or goods you sell. The methods that are used to reach higher score sites are recognised as SEO (Search engine optimisation).

Paid search marketing

It’s also known as pay-per-click. Clients or advertisers place ads, which appear on search engine results pages. This type of search marketing works on different principles that you place.

When anyone clicks the ads, he/she is taken to your services or sales page. This is cost-effective for small and large business.

You need to know some useful tips for search marketing.

Useful tips for successful search marketing

In the competitive website marketing business, getting listed in directories and promoting services and products on portals are thought as the more practical methods of promoting your sites therefore, they are proven useful sources of getting a solid return on investment (ROI).

The following tips raise you up for search results through the big search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and MSN:

• Anyone interested in SE marketing knows that website popularity lies in intensive keywords research & analysis. So, while performing keywords research & analysis you should select the relevant keywords.

• For giving you website content more power, you may create link anchored to them.

• You use only quality content for your website. That will affect your website popularity positively.

• Submit your sites to different directories; you will see huge targeted traffic visiting to your website.

• You may select any search marketing agency for better results.

Search marketing agency

Since, search marketing agency knows well, how to rank well your website, on any search engine. It builds strategies for optimising your business site for the search engine.

It not only prepares strategies for high ranking on different search engines, but it also helps to generate valuable traffic to your website. You should always try to select the search marketing agency that has a good reputation.

Conclusion

The traditional marketing, swiftly being replaced by search marketing. That refers to online marketing, digital marketing or Internet marketing. It promotes your website by increasing its visibility in different search engine result pages.

Get comprehensive knowledge about PPC an effective marketing tool

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Bob Sanderson

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model that reduces your business marketing budget and increases its effectiveness. PPC are ads that you see on websites they are shown as text or visual ads. PPC Company matches the most recognised keywords in PPC campaign and spread throughout the Internet for advertising.

Procedure of PPC

Business deal among marketer search engine and publishers

When your ads appear on a page they are called impressions. Earlier, these impressions were shown at a flat rate, but in the PPC method, they are shown free, you pay when any user clicks on the ad.

The website that subscribes PPC advertising would show the ads when a search word or keyword matches the advertisers’ keyword lists. Now, you as a marketer will enter a business deal with search engine and Internet publishers. You will agree to any price that you pay for clicks. It is called CPC (cost per click).

PPC advertising cost: Determines visibility of company ads

PPC advertising cost varies, on the basis of size and plan of any company budget. The PPC company matches the marketing budget of any company with the proper cost-per-click. If a company has a large budget definitely, it will choose a high PPC cost and a company with low budget will prefer low PPC cost. PPC cost determines the visibility of company ads on the Internet. If the cost is higher your company ads will emerge on the enormous traffic website.

Why PPC used by advertisers

PPC is used by the more advertisers because it is very easy online advertising method. All the advertisers have better control on ads plans with it. Advertisers also get feedback about their business performance, in an effective and better way.

Which sites host PPC?

It depends on the nature of your advertisement and business. Your business will determine for itself which ones to make the investment. However, you should consider the more popular ones like, social networking sites.

PPC marketing via search engines usually gets more traffic than via websites. However, search engines cannot precisely place your ads on their home pages or on each search result page. When online ads pop up is determined by keywords that are entered the search engines.

Use tracking software

It is right, PPC campaign results are fast, but you may lose a big amount rapidly, if you do not pay proper attention. You should utilise the tracking software, which is provided by PPC ad provider companies. Otherwise you will burn your cash quickly.

Conclusion

Though, it is easy to set up a PPC ad campaign, but in my opinion, you should take assistance of those professionals who have an extensive understanding and knowledge of PPC, because without special training, you might face financial disaster.

Effective Search Engine Marketing Promotes Websites and Makes it More Profitable

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Bob Sanderson

Search Engine Marketing term is used for website marketing; it might include SEO (Search engine Optimisation. It is a kind of Internet marketing maneuver, which aims to promote the website by raising its visibility in SERP (search engine result pages) by contextual ad placement and paid user-based inclusion.

When you do, search engine marketing, consistently and correctly, it promotes your business and website, in a result, you get quick and huge, long term traffic to website. However, you also need to create, an efficient marketing strategy and its implementation. How can you do search engine marketing?

You can do SEM by free and paid methods:

Free Method: a Very Popular Method

Search engine optimisation, which includes on & off page optimisation. It also includes many link building methods and social media marketing methods. This is a very popular method. However, it is a very time-consuming method that provides slow results, in a result, your site gets loads of traffic for free if you have optimised the right search terms as I have mentioned in my previous post on how to choose the right search terms for your website optimisation needs.

If you show patience and struggle persistently, you will definitely have some results that will make you able, to create some marketing budget. When you have some money, you can then also spend on paid ads, such as ppc, this method will become a primary marketing method for you.

Paid Advertisements Method: Automates Marketing Efforts

This method includes contextual ad placement, pay per impression, pay per click as well as other kind of media buys. It automates the whole marketing efforts and makes you free from doing manual tasks like, link building and content creation for promoting your site.

You would also get extremely high targeted traffic to your website. As a result, you will have more sales and of course, more money for re-investment to grow your business.

Search engine marketing provides you many benefits such as:

• It is cost-effective, because you will be charged when your ads get clicked and any user go to your website. Here, you do not pay, even a single penny. You have to pay only on a result or click on an ad.

• By SEM technique and method you can target traffic to a website.

• When you get many visitors to your website you have lots of opportunities to transfer your visitors to paying customers. Thus your sales get increased.

• It is used to create PPC advertising, mostly in industrial advertising and marketing communities.

• It is an easy way for looking products and information.

• It is an excellent way for advertisers to find and get potential customers.

Conclusion

You should not always try to get to the top position of search engine, rather than, you should provide readers important information, good advices and good copy. If you provide them these things they will be loyal to you forever, because they will realize that you’re not only trying to sell your service and product but you really want to share services with them.

Can Search Engine Marketing Be An Alternative To SEO?

Posted on September 26, 2015 by Bob Sanderson

If you have been desperately trying to get high rankings in Google and other search engines without much success there is always an option to tap on the power of internet through Search engine marketing. So what exactly is it and can it really be an alternative to good old fashioned SEO and its related tactics?

Well you have to admit the fact that maintaining page one search engine rankings is a tough ordeal and in most cases online marketers are spending decent amounts for SEO services. There are many cases where rankings are there in high level till the time you keep on spending good amounts. If spending is what has to be done then why not spend directly on paid search engine marketing and get your ads out there on the first page?

Will search engine marketing work?

Working possibilities of paid search engine marketing services are quite high since you are already there on the high ranks right from day one till the time you have the deal. However, there is no guarantee that traffic will be coming but if you look it in this way, there is no guarantee with Optimization services too. And seriously if you are not getting the sales and revenues even after being there on the top page, you better check out on the kind of website you are having. Problems with web design and other navigation aspects can seriously dent the possibilities of getting successful sales through any of the methods that you may be employing.

What’s the best solution?

It is better to go with an overall comprehensive outlook and take the services of professional search engine marketing companies that will mix both SEO and search marketing so as to get the best results. The best thing is that if there are any flaws regarding web designs and other technical aspects these will be easily removed. You cannot just think that search marketing will be everything that is needed and SEO has gone into the brink of extinction.

You never know which strategy works in best possible manner and it is essential to experiment with possibilities. But before you go all out for paid services, consider a retrospection of website content and make sure that you have a target audience to work upon. Work for people not search engines as this is an age of organic traffic and loyal customers.