Questions to Ask a Search Specialist (Part 1)

When selecting an Internet marketing agency, ask their search specialist these questions to understand their expertise.

1. What area of search is your specialty?

Search engine marketing has three core disciplines:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Pay Per Click Account Management
• Conversion Optimization.

Each disciplines requires lots of research & experience to master. Most SEM agencies are experts at 1 of the 3. This is fine as long as you know what you are getting.

If they say they’re a specialist at all three, be cautious and verify this. Dig into their experience in each area. Ask about their process for each.

Volcanic excels at all three but our specialty is conversion optimization. Testing lots of landing pages lets us garner more sales & ROI on pay per click advertising dollars without increasing your PPC Ad spend.

2. How will you improve my organic search ranking?

It’s usually self-evident to an experienced SEO specialist what needs to be done to increase a sites organic rankings, if the market is not hyper-competitive. (Hyper-competitive markets require deeper research to create an action plan.)

Beware of companies that mention tricking search engines in any way. These techniques will get your site BANNED from Google and other search engines. If you hear “doorway pages”, “cloaking”, “redirects”, etc… RUNNN!
When Volcanic takes on a search engine optimization project, we go through a list of 57 tasks. Here are 5 strategies we most commonly used:

• Do search-phrase research to find high quality, less competitive terms.
• Add search-phrases to the title & headline tags of a page.
• Find relevant sites and attract quality incoming links.
• Get pages indexed by improving linking structure of site and adding a good sitemap.
• Make it easier for search engines to digest the site by removing all the road-blocks that search spiders/crawlers face on your site (such as JavaScript, frames, nested tablesc, etc.)

PS: Volcanic Marketing is an internet marketing agency that only employs ethical, search-engine approved techniques that delivers results without the risk of getting banned forever. Got a project in mind? Call me (Melvin Ram) at 800-811-0186.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.