Online Marketing Blog

Search Marketing is well documented as one of the most effective marketing strategies a business can employ regardless of the economic environment. Now more then ever companies recognize search as an essential element to their businesses bottom line and are seeking out the help of professional SEO firms.

Finding the right search marketing agency is no doubt a daunting task. But what happens once you’ve done your due diligence and chosen an SEO firm that best suits your style and philosophy?

Below are 5 ways to ensure you’re getting the best return on your search marketing dollars from your SEO invrestment:

Communication is key in business relationships as much as it is in personal relationships. Most of the disappointments that often happen in client/agency relationships have to do with faults in communication. Not being able to empathize with another’s perspective can make things troublesome pretty quickly.

Below are some real and some tongue in cheek considerations for why SEO firm and client relationships can get shaky:

Top 5 Ways SEO Agencies Piss Off Their Clients:

1. Agency over promises and under delivers
2. Agency uses tricks and gets client site penalized by search engines

The good advice over at ISEDB from Scott Buresh regarding how ways clients sabotage the search engine optimization performed on their site has motivated me to write a few of my own along with comments on some of Scott’s suggestions:

• Chase after the “latest SEO tactic” - The fundamentals of good SEO have not changed that much and chasing after the latest trend can compromise months or years of solid SEO work. An example is changing a site’s dynamic urls to keyword-rich urls solely for SEO benefit. Search engines are smarter than ever at crawling urls with variables. Just because a url is database generated does NOT mean it is bad for SEO. Making a sitewide url structure change without considering the effect on current rankings, redirection strategy, site map, 404 handing etc is also problematic.