It’s difficult to invest in things we don’t fully understand, and it’s even more difficult to appreciate the details in things foreign to us. How can you convince someone who knows next to nothing about what you do that your service is better than someone else’s? You can use graphs and charts of past campaigns, but ultimately it comes down to whether or not they like you, and probably cost. That makes the SEM and SEO world very difficult for experts.
Many companies don’t charge very much, build a bunch of bad links, and just don’t really care about a company’s strategy or how the increased traffic affects profitability. Whether it’s SEO or SEM, it’s important to know the value you’re getting from each visitor – and how that value is reflected in the traffic you’re choosing to attract. It’s much more obvious in the SEM space: you’re paying for visitors on a certain keyword, and if they aren’t converting, you shut it down fast.
SEO isn’t quite so obvious. People pay SEO professionals to drive very similar traffic to SEM, but there’s much less accountability. They say “look at how much your traffic increased” even though it didn’t affect sales very much. The charts still look pretty. So when it comes to hiring and SEM or SEO company, you’ve got to find someone interested in your goals (profit!) being the end game by which they are measured.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The most important part of SEO happens before a single link is built or a single webpage changed. It’s all about keyword research and competition analysis. During this process, the idea is to assign keyword relevancy values to keywords and how much value they may provide on your website. Based on keyword volume, relevancy values, and average CPC, we then take a look at the fist-page competition to see how feasible it would be to achieve first page volumes (really the only way you’ll get traffic).
After this keyword and competition analysis is finished, we develop a program based on your budget to maximize both short-term and long-term profits from SEO. If you’ve got a lot of money, we’ll go after more difficult keywords. If your budget is limited, we’ll find some niche keywords to target. Ultimately, it’s about maximizing the ROI based on your business goals and budget.
Search Engine Management (SEM)
Sem services follow a very similar theory, with one hitch: it’s much easier to do testing. Since you’re just paying per click, you can test the effectiveness of keywords over a couple days and get rid of them if you aren’t seeing great results. That right there is basic SEM, and something you can do yourself. But if that’s all your doing, you’re not doing a very good job.
Professionals help find profitable market segments and maximize your spending in those segments to increase ROI. They can target advanced segments, not just keywords. And with the number of options out there, it’s a good idea to have a professional handle it. From A/B testing advertisements and landing pages to segmenting paid search networks, locations, and times of the day, they can give you a lot more targeting options which will pay off for you in the long-run.
If you want to go a step further, hiring a web analytics consulting company is an often overlooked tactic which can greatly boost ROI across all your campaigns. When your site is converting better, all your marketing activities benefit.