Online Marketing Blog

How to Build Investment Interest in Your SEO/SEM with an introduction by Anne Kennedy and a presentation by Patricia Hall, Investment Banker, Hallmark Capital. If you own and/or are running a fast growing search marketing agency and want to gain more insight into making your firm more valuable for acquisition/investment, then this session is for you.

What Wall Street looks at.

• Client list is important. Keep in mind, if you have big name clients now, what will you need to do to keep them.

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:

A TopRank client that we do some online PR work for and that has been involved with the search marketing industry for quite a while is topseos.com. Our listing and also the ranking of TopRank as a search engine optimization agency on topseos.com has been a significant source of direct traffic for us.

Bill Peden of topseos.com recently gave the heads up that the site has been revamped offering new features for companies researching internet marketing services including a press releases area, a jobs area and knowledge base.

When KeywordRanking was still in business, our Minneapolis SEO agency used to get calls about once a month from disaffected clients asking how to get out of contracts and to see if they were getting value for the $2,000 being spent. Most of those situations were the result of overzealous sales people, cold calling businesses and making promises that were a bit ambitious.

In most cases though, the business owner had not allowed enough time for their SEO and link building to gain momentum. Even quality SEO firms can suffer if expectations are not set correctly.

Marketing Sherpa has released their 5th annual Buyer’s Guide to SEO and PPC agencies. The new report includes:

• In-depth profiles of 62 PPC agencies and 104 SEO firms include honest notes on which types of clients each works best with — and who should *not* hire them.
• Practical 80-page Shopping Overviews guide you through the budgeting, decision-making and RFP process.
• Easy Scan Charts let you compare-and-contrast dozens of search marketing firms at a glance. Includes factoids on pricing, staffing, and specialization. Great for creating your short-list.

Last Friday was the due date to get your survey completed for the 2006-2007 edition of the Marketing Sherpa Search Engine Optimization and PPC Firm Buyer’s Guide. There were 126 companies profiled in the SEO Guide last year.

The survey questions this year were pretty much the same as last year but also included questions such as: “What is your ideal client?”, “What is your nightmare client?” and “How many clients did you lose due to training them to do SEO in-house?”. The actual wording was different, but you get the idea.

Today I received emails from two different SEO firm ranking lists that have ranked my SEO firm, TopRank in the top 5. One from topseos.com where TopRank was ranked #4 and the other from PromotionWorld.com where we were ranked #4 again. Bruce Clay did quite well in both as well.

At first this seems pretty cool, but I am wondering how potential clients preceive it? I know it pisses some SEOs off, which most lists are prone to do. But I really don’t care what other SEO firms think. What comes to mind is how subjective such rankings are. Here are the editorial/review policies for both lists: