Choosing A Good SEO
Congratulations on your decision to select an SEO vendor to optimize your corporate website for natural search. I applaud you for beginning a tremendously powerful revenue generating process. Now the fun begins. Before you is a incomprehensible process with intangible deliverables and imprecise timing. How can you successfully oversee and evaluate this process to maximize your websites results?
SEO must be a marketing priority. With the help of a good SEO you be able to stress the importance of SEO to your team. The director of marketing, the president, web designer, and IT support will participate in the process but may have different priorities. Getting everyone on side will speed the process.
When looking to optimize, try to get a good enough understanding of the process that you can ask intelligent questions. There are many articles covering SEO on the internet, including all parts of the process. Make sure that you’re familiar with the terminology and concepts behind SEO, and reach a level where you can understand the metrics provided to you.
After all that work, you might be tempted to micro-manage your SEO operatives and insist that they do things exactly as you say without any of their own input or judgement calls. But this would be a mistake, and as they say, pride goeth before a fall. It’s all too easy to learn enough to think you know everything, and then make disastrous marketing errors with what little knowledge you have. If you’ve done a good job choosing an SEO pro in the ifrst place, he’s a pro for a reason. Trust him, listen to his advice, and let him handle decisions sometimes. If you handle it right, he’ll appreciate that you’ve educated yourself on the profession, building up an amicable and efficiently cooperative relationship.
Because SEO marketing works so differently from regular marketing, it can often make those on the outside leery even when it’s functioning perfectly well. Figuring out exactly why backlinks or RSS feeds are crucial parts of online marketing techniques isn’t necessarily an easy thing. But then, that is, after all, why you rely on the experts with training and experience in the field to do their jobs right. However, you should keep in mind that you still need standards when hiring these people. As with any other profession, there are some bad apples in SEO marketing. If your SEO person is evasive or not forthright in offering information, if he gives you advice such as to use link farms or stealthy forms of text, or if he tries to encourage you to knowingly violate the guidelines of popular search engines, he’s a bad apple. Drop him for a fresh granny smith.
Even the bset SEO marketing can occasionally slow down or falter, too. Search engines do their best to thwart SEO, and in such efforts sometimes change the algorithms they use to rank sites. You just have to adapt to the changing environment as best you can; your SEO people couldn’t have foreseen it, so don’t be upset with them.
Above all, measure the results of the campaign. Just like with any other expensive venture, you want to know that the money is being well-spent. Since you’re spending thousands on your campaign, don’t do it the disservice of tracking the results through a cheap service that doesn’t give you all the information you need. Splurge to make sure that your campaign is really working. Your SEO vendor should be able to offer advanced web analytics as part of their service; be wary of using a company that doesn’t. Using advanced analytics will allow you to make solid decisions based on complete, clear information.
