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Choosing an appropriate SEO agency is essential for every business organization. It helps the company to increase sales, revenues, attract organic traffic and improve its online presence and brand recognition. However, with the competitive market nature and Google’s ever-updating algorithms, SEO services have become much more diverse and complicated.

These services primarily include On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and Technical SEO. However certain companies provide more specific services like eCommerce SEO, YouTube SEO, Local SEO, etc, that help to improve your company’s performance. Therefore, before choosing an appropriate SEO provider, you should keep the following things in mind- 

Determining business goals

Before contacting an outsourcing team for managing your online presence, you should determine your ideal business goal. The SEO team will base its findings on your goal, conduct extensive website analysis, determine the strengths and weaknesses of the business, and therefore devise an ideal SEO plan.

Fixing budget

Comprehensive SEO agencies can charge high prices for their services. Therefore, you need to fix the budget of your SEO investment, which will help you to choose the appropriate agency and maximize returns on your investment. 

Research on company’s expertise

Different agencies offer different kinds of SEO services and have discrete experiences in the field. Before choosing a seo company for your company, it is important to conduct research on the specified aspects and services provided by the agency and verify their results with other customers and from autonomous websites that post their reviews.

An effective SEO provider will have the following characteristics- 

• SEO strategies :
  After an in-depth analysis and evaluation of the industry and target audience, a knowledgeable and experienced provider of SEO solutions will deduce ideas from your site audit and develop a customized plan for your business website. This would include formulating lead-generating comprehensive seed word lists, higher SERP strategies and even improving the brand’s reputation.
• SEO tools :
  An effective SEO company uses ideal SEO tools and reporting dashboards to monitor the SEO metrics accurately. Tools like SEMRush, Majestic are primarily centered around SEO whereas tools like HubSpot, Google Analytics help in marketing automation and reporting respectively.
• Proper implementation :
  The most important function of an SEO provider is technical implementation. After addressing technical issues, the agency can focus on on-site and off-site SEO strategies like creating relevant links, building authority on the sites, etc to help improve your overall control over the website and the sales.
• Transparent and progressive :
  A competent SEO company should be transparent about its strategies and provide you with a clear idea about your investments. As Google constantly updates its algorithms, the agency should have progressive marketing strategies like further keyword search, article SEO service, link acquisition campaign, etc. to keep your site competitive and improve visibility at all times.

SEO is a pivotal part of every business organization. Therefore, it is beneficial to choose agencies that offer all-over services of digital and traditional marketing, internal marketing, etc. Choose such an agency that carefully replicates your business goals and gives great returns in the future.

Request for Proposal abbreviated as RFP is a vital aspect of a standard business postulate. Most business in modern days invite suppliers and service providers to join a bidding process to purchase specific service(s) or product(s). The days of writing traditional letters to request for prices of products and service are long gone – giving way to the RFP. With more creative ideas and time-based experience the system has been improved a lot to make it more transcendental.

So what’s in it for you … you as the purchaser have often wondered and felt that it is a plaything that vendors bother about, if you ask … the answer is Everything. A good RFP can help you identify the right vendor for you, determine the strengths and skills and ideas of the service provider and most certainly can help in determining and fixing down your budgetary expectations and time of completion. However, if that is the advantages and merits, it should also be said that it does have some disadvantages like any other. Creating a good RFP is not necessarily child’s play, and can incur a good cost. For a larger project spanning over 2-3 months and more, it could be worthwhile to dedicate a full time person to identify the requirements, ideas, pros and cons. So Why Do We Need to Do It? Here is a easy reason – not doing it can lead up to spending more than you initially wanted to , get tangled in messy emails and phone interactions with your provider, jumping around multiple vendors for doing multiple tasks, end up dedicating more time to a smaller job and the list can go on and on !!

Here in comes the advantage of reading though this blog entry ? We have given the topic of Creation of a good RFP some thought for our customers and partners and also done some amount of research work on Google and Yahoo. This led us to finalize some basic points which are a must for any good Request for Proposals (RFP) and they are:

• Project Summary
• Objectives and Goals
• Scope of Work with earmarked functionalities
• Service Provider Information ( Contact Numbers, Emails, References )
• Budget ( Design and Development , Expenses , Promotions)
• Schedule ( Connected to goals , maintenance , expedition )
• Evaluation Criteria ( If Any)

Do you have a social media presence for your business? You are greatly lagging behind!

Setting up a business is quite straightforward have enough capital, manpower and you can start your own company. But there is a vast and tricky road that can lead the business to successful heights. Needless to say, if you own a business, you have to have some kind of social presence, or otherwise you won’t get the required exposure.

To simply put, if people are not even aware of your business, then how do you expect to grow sales and company reputation. It’s a fact that there are quite a number of great organizations out there but due to the lack of any promotions, there are never in the limelight.

To get you through the full gist of things, some of the most important benefits of having a social media presence for your company are:-

• Reach wider and unique audience: When your company is actively involved in several social media platforms, chances are that it will reach out to a wide number of people; more than what you had intended. Moreover, there is also the possibility to evoke the interest of people who are far diverse to your business.
• Far better promotions: Whether it’s for increasing sales or creating a buzz, social media is a great outlet for it. If you sell some products or services, providing valuable deals and discounts is a great way to promote your brand.
• Better customer service: For customers, social networks are a great way to reach out to companies. Incidentally, companies also prefer this method to provide efficient customer service.

For better or worse, the importance of social media is most likely to escalate in the future which is why you should immediate steps to set up and maintain it if you don’t have it yet.

For instance, you could spend an unlimited amount of advertising dollars to brand your business on programmatic advertising solutions or social media advertising; however, there are only so many converting keywords and searches in a market which caps your potential spend. Depending on the size of your business this may or may not be a big deal. In addition, to get the return on investment (ROI) you want, you also must take into consideration your search placement. Data-driven SEM Agencies, are positioned the best to maximize your SEM budget based on the highest converting factors such as keywords, geo-targeting, and more because they are leveraging the data.

Setting Your SEM Budget
Any SEM Agency should be able to help you set an ideal budget by using the Google Keyword Planner and/or Bing Keyword Planner. If your target budget comes in much higher than you’re expecting, you should ask for details like, How are they arriving at the budget? What keywords are they are using? What are their Cost Per Click (CPC) expectations? Most importantly, what is their management fee and what do they do with the budget if they don’t spend it?

The reason you should ask these questions is due to the concept of diminishing returns and potentially fraud. Let me clarify. Certain keywords will convert and provide value at a higher percentage than others. In fact, some keywords that seem ideal don’t convert at all. If you have some of this data beforehand, take out the junk keywords upfront. Or maybe you can eliminate products and/or services to better target your most profitable products/services.

SEM Management Fees
Clarify your SEM partner’s management fee and budget policies. You’d hate to see a 50% management fee when you can easily find someone who might perform equally or better for around 15%-25%. Actuate Media is a little different, we do a flat fee, which is typically even less. Also, you should be skeptical if they promise higher returns for the higher management fee. Professionally speaking, our team typically outperforms just about any media company. We have less overhead, so we don’t need to charge as much. Finally, you should also ask if they keep the remaining budget if the campaign underspends? If so, what is their incentive to spend your budget and maximize your ROI? They could simply be telling you to spend more than necessary to keep it.

SEM Keyword Strategy
Are they using Broad Match, Broad Match Modifiers, Phrase Match, or Exact Match? Why is this important? Certain strategies require more attention to optimize or may result in keywords that are too broad. Let’s look at the keyword “plumber,” if they are using a broad strategy then your ads will show for: plumber videos, plumber tools, plumber supply, plumber putty, etc. What a waste right? This means you might be spending some serious budget on terms that will not convert. We are not saying don’t use broad match, but if you do add the obvious negative keywords in before the campaign begins or at least understand if/when your vendor will do this and for a report.

SEM Conversion Optimizations
First, you need to make sure you’re measuring everything you want to analyze like form fills, phone calls, e-commerce transactions, and more. Once this is complete, you need to make sure the conversions are imported or set in Google AdWords. Then your SEM partner should be able to quickly locate which cities, keywords, and/or ad groups are performing within the first month or so. If you’re spending a bunch of money on clicks that are not converting something needs to change like the landing page or the text ads. If that still doesn’t improve results, then pause keywords/ad groups and stop wasting money. If necessary, the budget might be better appropriated to higher converting campaigns. In the end, how your partner sets up your account is important for data analysis, something we can discuss in another blog post.

If you have any questions about SEM, setting budgets, or data analysis, we encourage you to ask below or contact us directly.