What makes a 'good' optimisation company?
Just a few years ago, a 'good' search engine marketing company would have been a master of the latest optimisation innovations. It would get its clients' sites into high positions, delivering thousands of visitors every day. The fact that the positions were earned through stealth techniques like cloaking and spamdexing, that the clients were often in the adult or gambling sectors and that the traffic was more notable for its quantity than its quality was, naturally, of lesser importance.
Today, a good optimisation company will still be a search engine expert and will still get its clients to the top of the listings - but there the resemblance ends. Once described as a 'black art', search engine marketing has come out of the twilight zone to be a respected, effective and essential part of Internet marketing strategy. Search engine marketing today is more about helping web sites harness the power of the search engines and less about misleading the search engines into giving those sites higher rankings than they would otherwise merit.
A good optimisation company, for example, wouldn't dream of using cloaking or spamdexing. It might not matter to a faceless porn site if its pages get banned or blacklisted because it will have a new domain ready and waiting and can reinvent itself in moments. But a big brand that has invested millions in its online business and values its net integrity can't take that risk.
Likewise, a good optimization company has in-depth and up-to-date knowledge of each search engine's ranking algorithms and submission processes. But it uses that knowledge to help its clients abide by the search engine's rules rather than stay one step ahead of the spiders.
That's why search engine marketing is still alive and well despite the advent of paid-for positioning. As part of an integrated SEM campaign, there's a place for pay-per-click. It's a complement, rather than an alternative to traditional techniques such as meta tag optimisation or Weboptimiser's pioneering concept; micro-sites.
There are several ways in which an optimisation company can help clients enjoy a better return on their pay-per-click investment. It can provide a complete, managed service with a level of expertise and resources that few clients would wish to support in-house. The best SEMs have a dedicated Bid Manager to ensure that clients aren't paying a penny-per-click more than they need and a back-end development specialist who can optimise a database-driven site's entire content for search engines. A good SEM will also be able to conduct research, using data directly from the search engines themselves, to discover the key phrases which will still provide a good level of traffic at a fraction of the cost of the most popular terms.
Furthermore, a good SEM can enable access to optimisation services that clients couldn't get on their own, such as Trusted Feed, which demonstrates the intermediary role between sites and search engines that the top SEMs now play and the search engine's own recognition that SEMs can be partners as well as customers. In short, while SEM used to be about being search engine-savvy, today it's about being search engine-friendly.
What to look for in an optimisation company
If you're looking for an optimisation company you'll certainly be spoilt for choice - and your options will range from individual SEM consultants or freelancers to large interactive agencies. They all have their merits and size isn't everything but whatever happens, make sure you ask for:
- in-house capabilities and resources
- search engine partnerships/licenses
- proof of results and customer retention
- recent customer references
- ethical techniques
- innovation and leadership
- visitor science beyond log file analysis
- an optimised site of their own
- hand-tuned, not automated, services
By the same token, you should never trust a company that:
- guarantees specific search engine positions on the free listings
- won't show the licenses for its search engine partnerships
- offers exclusive rights to a particular keyword
- carries out automated page creation or submission
- puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
- doesn't distinguish between search results and ads
- can't provide detailed position/visitor statistics
- insists on hosting your site
In fact, you can start asking questions if:
- any of your pages are banned or blacklisted
- search engine positions don't last long
- you find the SEM's name in your site code
- you're not getting regular progress updates
- your cost-per-acquisition is unprofitable
- your site is down for long periods
- visitor session times are very short
- your sales don't increase
- you're not getting return on investment
Thanks to search engines, Internet users have access to millions of sites they would never have found otherwise. Thanks to search engine marketing, web sites are not only easier to find, but can be faster to load and more intuitive to use. And thanks to SEM companies, the search engines can monetise their services while dealing with a professional, ethical customer base. Everybody benefits from search engine marketing today.
