You have probably heard multiple pitches from advertising agencies and SEM firms looking to take over the search engine marketing campaign for your company. When was the last time one of these firms offered to pay for all of the ads up-front and be paid only for the sales and leads generated? Not too often, I suspect.

Performance SEM agencies are out there building, managing and funding large scale search campaigns for companies that pay them a pre-negotiated rate for the sales and leads generated. Working with a performance SEM agency is a great way to take advantage of paid search while limiting your costs and risks.

In most cases, you’ll need to have a paid search campaign up and running before approaching a performance SEM agency about running or supplementing your campaign. Why?

Performance SEM firms live and die by the numbers and will want to estimate how much revenue they can expect to generate per click before agreeing to take you on as a client. Here are some important numbers you should know before pitching:

Commission rate. What is the highest commission rate you can offer the agency for the sales and leads generated? Performance SEM agencies do not typically bid on terms that lose money for very long. Since they are spending their own cash up front, they tend to track keyword performance very closely. Offering your highest commission rate up front will provide the agency with the best opportunity to be profitable while running the maximum number of keyword terms.

Site Conversion rate. What is your site’s conversion rate? Historically, what percentage of visitors to your site do you convert into a sale or lead? You should know what your conversion rate is and be ready to discuss the steps you are taking to optimize your site and improve conversion rates on an ongoing basis.

Average order value. If you are paying the agency a percentage of sales, as opposed to a fixed commission per lead, what is the average expected order value?

With these three numbers in hand, a performance SEM agency will be able to quickly calculate their estimated revenue per visitor (RPV). Take for example a company offering a commission rate of 5% with a site conversion rate of 2% and an average order value of $100:

Commission Rate (CR) = 5%
Site Conversion Rate (SCR) = 2%
Average order value (AOV) = $100
AOV x SCR x CR = RPV
$100 x 0.02 x 0.05 = $0.10

In this example, the performance SEM agency can expect to make an average of $0.10 per visitor. That is not a lot of room to bid on keywords. An experienced agency would probably pass on this opportunity because the risk of losing money would be too great.

It is important to understand that performance SEM firms often lose money on many of the campaigns they test. They quickly weed out the winners from the losers so they can focus their efforts on their most profitable opportunities.

Beyond knowing your numbers, you should be ready to talk about how to setup a measurable test for at least 90 days to determine if you can establish a win-win relationship. During this test period, you want the performance agency to prove to you that they can produce significant incremental results without driving up the costs of your internal search campaigns. You will want to prove to them that your commission rate and site conversion rate provides a significant profit opportunity for the agency so that they will be willing to invest their time, effort, and capital towards your campaign.

In these tough economic times, establishing a good working relationship with a top performance SEM agency can be a monumental win for your company. Not only can these agencies bring in a significant amount of new business, but smart companies are also leveraging their agency’s advertising budgets to bring in additional sales at a fixed cost of goods sold and to find areas where they can reduce their advertising expenses to meet increasing budget pressures.

No PPC agency is right for every advertiser.

Andrew Goodman’s recent SEL Post dividing the world of PPC practitioners into “Muddy Ones” and “Quants” was quite entertaining and accurately characterizes most firms in the space. We at RKG like to think of ourselves as “Muddy Quants” in Andrew’s vernacular. Alan has the PhD in Stats, and… well… I’m muddy.

We believe that for large, competitive, ROI driven accounts you must have both pieces. You need an advanced system to predicatively model data and execute bid changes automatically, because hand-bidding off of spreadsheets simply doesn’t compete in 2009. At the same time, we know enough about numbers to recognize the limitations of the data and data modeling, and the need for smart marketing analysts to control the process. The predictive model has no way of knowing that there’s a sale next week on Gibson Guitars or anticipating how that might impact performance; it has no way of knowing that you’re out of Merrill boots sizes 9-11; or that a retailer has just gotten some co-op advertising dollars from Kohler; or that customers of certain types of products are much more likely to pick up the phone and call or visit the local store than the average spillover rate for that client would suggest. Marketing is muddy, no matter how skilled one is at analysis.

But not every advertiser is both ROI driven and competing in a large, complex marketplace.

How does your company think about advertising/marketing? Is the primary goal of PPC advertising to:

1. Create positive awareness of your brand? or 2. Generate maximum revenue within some acceptable ROI?

Many will answer “both”, but in our experience only one of these dominates an advertiser’s thought process.

Agencies come with the same biases: either they’re fundamentally direct marketers and live and die by ROI calculations, or, they’re advertising agencies that focus on share of voice, brand awareness and creating positive experiences with your brand.

If the principal objective is branding, you don’t need the mathematicians/engineers, and likely you don’t want them. When you ask “What sort of ‘outside the box’ ideas do you have for creating brand awareness?” the quants will scratch their heads and send you a spreadsheet pointing out why the changes you suggest would damage conversion rates, lowering revenue per click forcing bids down the page. Not what you wanted to hear, and, frankly you’re asking number crunchers to paint a portrait.

If, like our clients, you enjoy talking about hold-out tests, the incrementality of a marketing program, lifts necessary for offers to pay-off, and the cannibalization that occurs between different marketing programs, you will be miserable if you hire the advertising agency style of PPC firm. They will talk about metrics that don’t matter to you like impression share, they will talk about buying cycles without supporting data, and most importantly the results will stink. At a gathering of agency heads I heard one say “(egads) Our clients are starting to ask us to separate brand from non-brand performance data, and (horror of horrors) some are even asking for keyword level performance data!?!” I almost fainted!

Agencies often claim expertise in both, but take a look at their “about us” page to see their roots. The roots will determine the type of tree. Those who aren’t direct marketers by training do not build the right analytical systems, the data warehouses, or the algorithms and don’t train their staff to eat, breathe and sleep ROI.

Advanced data modeling doesn’t help every company that seeks ROI.

Data modeling requires data. If an advertiser’s niche is too narrow in scope or geography, the best mathematicians in the world won’t be able to materially outperform the advertiser’s own staff. An agency of muddy-ones will do every bit as well as the muddy-quants like RKG, and probably better than the algo-only firms.

Finding the right PPC agency for your firm requires knowing yourself and whether your organization sees PPC as primarily an advertising vehicle, or primarily a direct marketing vehicle, and finding an agency that shares the same view.

Have you ever heard this before? “We like everything you have said so far, and your proposal looks great, but the only concern we have is your lack of direct experience working in our industry.”

Perhaps a better question would be, “Is direct industry experience really necessary to be an effective SEO?

Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, discusses this topic in his article, How to Hire a SEO Firm – According to Google:

What’s your experience in my industry? – Experience in a particular industry may be important on one level, but a company that specializes in a particular vertical warrants questions about conflict of interest. How can a company specialize in “real estate” for example, without working for competing firms? The biggest advantages that come industry specific experience is the ability to quickly ramp up on client key messaging and audience needs as well as connections made online for content promotion, online public relations and link building.

I agree completely with all of the above!

Overall though, I am a believer that a good SEO agency, or search professional, can be highly successful for a client without having prior experience in that client’s industry.

Here are some thoughts on both sides of the issue.

Why industry experience is not critical

Conflict of interest issues. An SEO agency should not work with more than one client in a given keyword space. If there were a way to ensure that a large agency would be able to keep its professionals from sharing information, perhaps this is feasible. If not, then how can you possibly decide which client you work harder for? Who gets the best, unique content? Who gets the coveted link placements? Would a client even be comfortable with such an arrangement?

Technical SEO is technical SEO. In many cases a large part of the opportunity for improvement in search engine results comes from technical issues related to URL structure, domain management, solid website architecture, pulling content out from behind a search function, dissemination of data feeds and so on. This requires absolutely no prior experience in a given industry.

Unbiased keyword research. On this side of the argument, I would say that it is the job of any good SEO professional to help a client uncover the most-valuable keywords through extensive research. In fact, lack of prior experience in an industry could have a positive effect by pushing the client to think about how they position their products & services as the agency moves up the learning curve and discovers for themselves how people search in that space.

The process in itself is often extremely eye-opening for the client. “Sure, that’s the CEO’s favorite search term. But, what we see in our research is that these 20 phrases have high search volumes, are much better qualifiers of buying intent, and this is how people in the trade are talking about what you offer.”

Not to mention that when you are digging deep into keyword research, you will use as many data sources as possible—keyword tools, trade publications, blog content, social media conversations, analysis of competitors’ websites (be careful here—they may not be as smart as you think!), internal site search data, any existing PPC data, web analytics data, review of materials written by the client (hopefully materials that are a bit more “organic” than marketing collateral, such as articles & opinion pieces), etc.

Content generation can be outsourced. I suspect that, in general, an SEO firm is not going to have staff members that have actually worked in the client’s industry (i.e. on the “client side”).

If you are lucky enough to find an SEO firm where someone there was in charge of marketing or product management at a competing firm, partner, vendor, etc., then you should strongly consider working with them (assuming that they also have strong technical skills and a track record).

If not, then producing great content typically takes the form of either using the client’s internal resources, finding an expert in the field to write content/consult on content generation, or working with a content writer that has successfully shown in the past that they can adapt to new industries quickly.

Link building is link building. As with keyword research, it is the job of an SEO professional to find high-quality link/promotional opportunities. And, just like keyword research, there are specific techniques for finding those opportunities:

• Find the right bloggers, trade publications, trade associations, niche social communities, etc.
• Leverage client relationships with partners, vendors, associations, educational institutions, etc.
• Check out competitors’ in-bound links (e.g. use of SEO tools, basic search commands such as link:www.domain.com, or using Yahoo! Site Explorer)
• Monitor broader social networks for opportunities (Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious, etc.)

Why industry experience is beneficial

Industry experience counts for something. If you have no conflict of interest issues with working in the same keyword space (not just direct competition), and it is a situation where prior industry experience comes from working in a related area (partner, vendor, etc.), then there isn’t much of an argument against working together. At least I can’t think of anything at the moment.

Knowledge-based keyword research. There probably is something to be said about the benefits of already knowing which keywords resonate with searchers and produce results. If someone were to deposit 12 months of PPC history on your doorstep, with conversion metrics, you’d probably take it (unless you knew that it was stolen, broke confidentiality agreements, etc.).

But there’s that old, prickly “conflict of interest” thing again. If you are looking for an SEO firm with prior experience in your industry, and they agree to work with you, let’s hope they are both willing and able to keep your information confidential.

Content expertise. Prior experience could absolutely help in the area of creating great content. If you happen to find that agency that has a staffer who used to work in/and around your industry, then there could be a great fit. Just hope that if you choose that firm that they are putting as much energy into creating unique, valuable content for you as they are for any other clients in your space. Or that they are not the type of firm that will break confidentiality agreements to leverage their experiences with content that worked for someone else in the past. You could be next.

Insider link building contacts. It would be ideal if you could find someone with a database of contacts that could be mined to quickly start disseminating your message. Instant link outreach. It’s quite possible that there is an argument in favor of finding a link specialist who has done this in your industry before.

I’m having a hard time finding the negative to this—unless that link specialist had to make decisions about “either/or.” Having a great network is likely one of the strongest selling points that experts such as Jim Boykin, Eric Ward and others have (but they are smart and creative as well).

Link building is one of those areas where you can make decisions about staying with your SEO partner for the overall optimization program, but then either supplementing link building with a 3rd party and/or having your SEO partner source the appropriate link acquisition talent (I am not talking about paid links in any way, shape, or form here).

What are your thoughts on whether or not prior industry experience is a must have for a successful SEO program? Please share your thoughts in the comments area below.

I always think of an armada of ships when I look at a franchised company. You’ve got a large battleship, directing the path of the smaller craft—yet the smaller craft must navigate on their own, especially when the instructions from the battleship don’t make sense. And oftentimes, because the franchisees are busy navigating their own murky waterways, they can fail to see the logic behind the battleship’s directions and forge their own paths, sometimes to disastrous effect.

Creating search engine marketing strategies for franchised companies is some of the most challenging work I’ve done in my career—and also some of the most rewarding. In this column, I’ll outline some lessons learned when working with franchisees and at the corporate level of the franchise itself.

Rule #1: A heavy hand at the beginning saves heartache down the road. The franchisees have already thought about search engine marketing. Most likely, some of them are already doing some form of search engine marketing with local firms or on their own. For some reason, franchisees seem to fall victim to the numerous “snake oil salesmen” in our industry more than the average business owner.

It is important at the beginning to set firm rules about what franchisees can and cannot do with their own sites in terms of search engine marketing. This is especially true if each individual franchise site resides on the main domain of the company. There is damage that can be done to everyone if one franchisee breaks the rules. A franchisee using disreputable SEO tactics can damage an entire domain, so it’s best to nip the problem before it starts.

In PPC, setting limitations on the types of keywords that can be bid upon by franchisees, or better yet creating a central PPC campaign that meets the needs of the franchisees. There are a number of ways a centeralized campaign can work, including co-op dollars from different regions, etc. Don’t be afraid to get creative to make this work, as it will save tons of time and frustration down the road.

Rule #2: You can’t please all the people all the time – pick a strategy and stick with it. In the course of planning a search engine marketing program for a franchised company, you will come across challenges from everywhere. Every franchisee is, for good reason, protecting their own turf. They want to make sure that the tactics employed will benefit them. Many times, it is a challenge to please everyone. And the simple fact is, if you do please everyone, you probably have a mediocre program that isn’t doing anyone any good.

Whether you plan to conduct a top-down program where all of the search marketing comes from corporate, or you plan on implementing a best practices program where each franchisee is given a set of guidelines and rules and sent off to implement the tactics by themselves, the result will be the same. Someone is going to be pissed off. Typical problems include geographic skirmishes (who gets the customers that are equal to two franchisees), problems with restrictive rules (why can’t I bid on the company name for just my store?), accusations of favoritism among franchisees and an overall disagreement with the SEM strategy (too aggressive vs. not aggressive enough).

The bottom line is that you need to create a comprehensive strategy and act upon it. I’ve worked with some franchised companies who are so scared of their franchisees that they fail to put a program in place at all – and that hurts everyone.

One best practice is to create a beta group of franchisees and test some programs there. Then, you have data to show the others when you launch systemwide. While this tactic can bring its own headaches, it seems to alleviate some problems others have, especially if the franchisees picked for the beta are some of the more successful in the program.

Rule #3: You have limited resources. Realize this and plan accordingly. No matter how many stores your franchise has, you have limited resources. Much of the search engine marketing for franchises takes place in the local search arena. Local search, by its nature, is more time consuming than traditional search. There are more moving parts in local search – just keeping up with the localities and all of the data collection points (IYPs, directories, aggregators, etc.) is a full time job. Doing that for 1000+ stores could require a full staff, which probably wouldn’t be profitable for anyone in the long run. The secret is to create processes whereby the stores can help themselves, but also control is maintained at the top. This is tricky, but not impossible. The secret is a well-thought out road map at the beginning of the project. Centralized campaigns can be a good thing, but if you don’t have the resources to run them, they quickly become nightmares that make everyone mad.

Creating a search engine marketing program for a franchise system is challenging, but the rewards can be great for everyone involved if done correctly.

Tony Wright, CEO and Founder of WrightIMC has spent his career helping businesses of all sizes be profitable on the Web. He serves as President of the Dallas/Ft. Worth Search Marketing Association. His blog is at www.shavingoccam.com. The Industrial Strength column appears Mondays at Search Engine Land.

When you outsource SEO, you don’t outsource responsibility and accountability for getting the job done and driving more traffic. Even though you may outsource SEO completely, you really should invest the time understand SEO basics to best manage your SEO firm, your strategy and provide greater value to your SEO program.

Relying entirely on an agency is not an adequate strategy, for a variety of reasons.

When it comes to SEO, each site is different. Certain optimization techniques that might be ideal for one site might be entirely inappropriate for another site. As the in-house point of contact with an agency, you need to have a working knowledge of SEO so that you can bring these points up during meetings. This knowledge will also be extremely valuable if you decide to change agencies.

Your SEO agency won’t be available in every meeting, and may not be there to answer the incidental questions that arise throughout the day. Having a working knowledge will let you answer some of the most basic questions that come up day-to-day (and will save your consulting fees for the more basic SEO questions).

There are some… “interesting,” and potentially risky tactics that SEO agencies have suggested to companies—even to some very big brands. You want to have a working knowledge to know when something sounds off base, when to probe and when to seek a second or third opinion.

You may need to translate SEO-ease to your company language. As a former in-house SEO, I can appreciate the value of having a working SEO knowledge that allowed me to chime in with a translation from an SEO consultant to the lingo that we used internally. This is extremely useful when you need something to resonate to foster change.

How do you quickly learn the basics when you’re busy with a million other things? You don’t need to spend months studying SEO; you just need a quick way to gain a very strong grasp of the basics. Here are some simple things you can do to get up to speed quickly.

Engage an SEO consultant for in-house training so that you can learn the fundamentals. This could be training conducted by your current, or you could reach out to someone new for a fresh perspective, new insights and to confirm that what your agency is telling you, is in sync with others in the search engine marketing industry. When working as an in-house SEO I used multiple consultants for these very reasons. This is the approach I recommend most because it allows you to learn the concept and get immediate answers and clarification. Time investment: 1-3 days all at once.

Purchase online training programs, such as the SEMPO Institute, where you can learn SEO basics at your convenience. The SEMPO institute has a quiz at the end to help you identify how much of the material you retained, and understood. You’ll probably finish each module of the training with questions, so reach out to an SEO expert for answers and clarification. Time Investment: 1-2 hours broken into several sessions.

Read books. There are now several good books on SEO that you can purchase at the local bookstore. They aren’t going to make you a superstar SEO, but they do have plenty of information to give you the basic understandings so that you can effectively manage your SEO program. A couple to check out include The SEO Bible and Search Engine Visibility. The biggest downside of books alone is that they address very simple sites and not the more complex issues of highly robust and very dynamic sites. With every chapter your list of questions will grow, so reach out to an experienced SEO for question-and-answer sessions. Time investment: 1-2 hours of reading in several sessions.

Join SEO learning communities run by well-known search industry leaders. These are likely to be less structured than some of the other recommendations, but they do offer a wealth of information. SEObook.com is a good example. Another up-and-coming learning portal is Market Motive, where members get video, conference calls and Q&A with a faculty of A-listers in each online marketing discipline—including SEO. Members get authoritative answers from leading experts rather than novice members. Time Investment: 1-2 hours broken into several sittings.

Conferences are also great for learning SEO basics and this is what I recommend least for a quick-learn approach to bring you up to speed. Remember, though, that conferences aren’t structured to walk you through the basics so that you have a solid and thorough foundation of the SEO basics when you leave.

Take the time to learn a bit about SEO and you’ll be able to manage your agency effectively, respond to basic SEO questions, and articulate your SEO strategy to others.

Jessica Bowman is a free agent SEO strategist available for SEO site audits, SEO trainingand helping in-house SEO programs become more successful. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Even with budgets getting tightened, your SEO program may be kicking, but the head count you requested to keep the program moving upward may not get approved. When this happens, it’s time to look at a Plan B for increasing throughput without adding staff.

Many people I talk to think a superstar in-house SEO team doesn’t need an agency, and there is some truth to this. However, when you see that more could be done, but not with your limited team that is already at capacity, it’s time to think about how you could spend a few thousand dollars a month to be more productive and move your numbers even further.

Let’s take Marsha, a current client at a Fortune 500 company. Marsha is an in-house SEO that realized she either spent most of her time on action items and not selling SEO as much as she knew was needed, or she spent most of her time selling SEO to the level that was needed, but it left no time for the action items that came out of that selling.

It’s tough to strike the balance of this double-edged sword—too much of one causes a need of too much of the other.

Over the past three months, Marsha has outsourced the creation of presentations, reviews of product release documents, wire frame reviews, and more. She’s finding that now she can do both the selling and crank out the action items, increasing her SEO throughput.

What are the things that are easiest to outsource for experienced in-house SEOs? Here’s a list to get started:

• Business case reviews for SEO

• Product release documents and tech spec reviews for SEO
• Keyword research
• Strategy development
• Site audits
• Presentations on SEO topics that you just don’t have time to devote or create. Example topics that have been outsourced to SEMinhouse.com:
  • SEO copywriting

  • Duplicate content issues
  • SEO 101 for the engineering team
  • Presentation for pitching how to incorporate SEO into the existing development process workflow

If you don’t have budget for an agency, look for things that you can outline with step-by-step instructions to get other people in the company to help out, with a “tour of duty” arrangement. When working as an in-house SEO, I was able to get non-SEOs to do keyword research, copywriting, and more, with highly detailed step-by-step instructions and rigid guidelines to follow. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than nothing, and because of the quantity of work that I was able to push through it gave a very nice lift to the SEO traffic. When time allowed, I went back and made corrections for the low hanging fruit that would create a high ROI.

Get creative and start thinking about how you could outsource the busy work to make your SEO program go even further, without adding the extra staff.

Jessica Bowman is a free agent SEO strategist available for in-house SEO training, SEO audits and helping in-house SEOs increase their throughput. The In-house column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

One of the first jobs I have to do as a consultant going into an SEO engagement is to debunk the myth that SEO is “free.” SEO has never been, nor will it ever be, free traffic. It takes work, and that comes at a cost. You need to hire staff or allocate internal resources to manage your SEO efforts. You need to enlist an SEO firm or consultant to help identify the opportunities and prioritize them, navigate the minefields, and up-skill your internal team. You need to outfit your in-house team with on the tools of the trade (SEOmoz Pro, Internet Marketing Ninjas, etc.), send them to the conferences (all the SMX conferences, of course!), provide them with training intensives (e.g., SEOClass, SEOTraining), and various other professional development and networking opportunities.

If you are paying an SEO firm or contractor, the cost is obvious. But the time you allocate your internal folks to SEO — and this includes the IT team, web designers, copywriters, project managers, as well as in-house SEO specialists — must be quantified and factored in, too. Then there are the “soft” costs that are harder to measure, including:

• The missed opportunity cost — Failing to optimize everything leads to lost sales. It’s hard to know how much, and which things accounted for what. John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half!”. According to an iProspect study, over 66 percent of SEO recommendations go unimplemented a year later. What if that 66 percent represented the good half that John Wanamaker alluded to!
• The time-to-market cost — They say all good things take time, but the inordinate amount of time it takes for large companies to implement SEO initiatives equates to a serious amount of lost traffic. A major online retailer of outdoor gear spent over 1000 hours of IT time implementing URL rewrites and they couldn’t even finish implementing them all! How would you know this in advance? It’s really tough. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could flip a switch and be optimized?
• The cost of competing priorities — By asking your IT team to dedicate time to extensive SEO initiatives, you change their focus. What if one of their other — now displaced — priorities was more mission critical to the business than you or they realized? Having them take their eye off the ball could lead to disastrous consequences.

This all sounds very fuzzy, doesn’t it? Hard to quantify, hard to prove in advance. This is SEO’s “Achilles heel,” and why paid search usually wins over natural search in the budget battles, receiving the lion’s share of the search marketing budget. This is a travesty, considering the searcher’s primary focus on the natural results and the fact that a searcher interprets a natural listing as an implied endorsement by the search engine.

The allure of paid search is strong in part because of its predictability, but I’m convinced that natural search trumps paid search in overall opportunity. And besides, with paid search, the moment you stop paying is the moment you stop receiving the traffic. Stop investing in SEO and the traffic drop-off will come too, but it won’t be as dramatic and sudden as for paid search.

With uncertainty comes risk, and your natural rankings are full of uncertainty, and therefore risk. There’s no guarantee that a dollar invested into SEO will net 10 or 20 dollars in return. So take heed, SEO firms: de-risk your SEO offering and you will have the secret to success. Granted, you can’t control the engines’ natural ranking algorithms; however, you can introduce more predictability and accountability into your SEO. But it’s going to cost you. And it may require a paradigm shift, to a pay-for-performance pricing model for SEO services. SEO firms are starting to embrace alternative payment models, as evidenced by the session on this topic coming to SMX Advanced in June. Indeed, we at Netconcepts have performance-based pricing for our GravityStream technology platform — natural search traffic on a cost-per-click basis.

After expending some serious effort and cash too, you may finally find yourself ranking for some highly competitive terms, receiving traffic that you aren’t “paying for” like you would be for paid search. However, getting there was not free, and guess what? — neither is staying there. Now that you have that top spot, you have to keep it — against others who are forever trying to outrank you. This is especially true if the words you are ranking for are competitive. You are still going to need someone to build links for you and keep up with the changing SEO landscape and search engine algorithm updates.

Wouldn’t it be great if natural search traffic were free and never ending? Like manna from Heaven… Yet, SEO requires continuing investment. Invest in SEO as an ongoing marketing channel and your natural rankings will surely rise over time. Treat SEO as a one-time project, or dedicate insufficient resources, and you court obsolescence.

Stephan Spencer is founder and president of Netconcepts, a 12-year-old web agency specializing in search engine optimized ecommerce. He writes for several publications and blogs at the Natural Search Blog. The 100% Organic column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Geary Interactive has announced acquiring Fathom Online, an SEO company.

Fathom was formed in 2002 and is based in San Francisco. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Geary is a full service digital marketing agency based in San Diego. Some of Fathom’s employees are now working out of the San Diego office.

Andreas Roell, president and CEO of Geary Interactive, said:

Search engine tactics are the most popular element of a digital marketing campaign. In order to effectively generate search demand and convert customers’ search clicks, the campaign must also include a strong integration with web development, paid and organic digital media planning and data analytics.

Last month I attended the SMX West session in Santa Clara entitled Is it Time for Search Marketing Standards? It was an interesting session, but I wasn’t really sure where I stood on the issue at the time. Now that I’ve had a few weeks to think about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that not only would it be impossible to come up with standards that most would be happy with, I strongly believe that we don’t need them at all.

I have long been a proponent of performing SEO in such a way that satisfies all stakeholders, i.e., the client, the search engines, and the internet as a whole. My feeling is that the better we make websites, the better it will be for everyone. Through the years I have developed SEO methods that not only meet that criteria, they also work wonderfully to increase targeted search engine traffic. In fact, the techniques I developed and refined over the years have been adopted by tens of thousands of others who share my belief that SEO is about making websites better, not about tricking the search engines.

So you’d think I’d be a big proponent of standards… but I’m not.

Here are the top 4 reasons why I believe we don’t need SEO standards:

1. There are too many ways of skinning the SEO cat. Let’s face it, some of us may use similar SEO methods, but there’s no one way of performing it, nor is there one special recipe for SEO success. You may add a few more keyword phrase instances into your copy than I might. Or I might be a strong proponent of pulling up secondary pages in a website’s architecture, while you’re not. Yet we are both successful in bringing targeted search engine traffic to our clients’ websites. I can’t imagine there ever being any sort of standard rules or recipes that SEOs are supposed to follow in order to be a member in good standing of the SEM industry.

2. We can’t even agree on the definition of search engine optimization. Some of the proponents of SEO standards claim that we need a specific set of definitions for the industry, but I don’t believe this is possible. Through the years, I’ve had my share of online arguments over semantics way too many times to think we could ever come up with set of definitions that everyone would agree with. For instance, my definition of search engine optimization is “helping sites to be the best they can be for the search engines and the site users.” No more, no less. I understand that this definition is very different than what most people believe. But to me it is absolutely the essence of what SEO is. Unless SEO changes dramatically at some point, I don’t see myself ever agreeing to another definition than that one (yeah, I’m stubborn). And I doubt the rest of the industry is going to suddenly start using mine. And that’s just one term. Create an entire set of terms people agree with? Good luck with that!

3. There are already laws to protect people from SEO scams. The one thing that most honest search marketers agree on is that you shouldn’t rip off your customers. Well, duh. That’s why there are laws regarding fraud, as well as laws about fulfilling the terms of signed contracts. If the search marketing industry needs a special standard that says we have to do what we say we will do, then we’re in a lot more trouble than I thought. One would think the threat of jail time or a court-ordered breach of contract settlement would be deterrent enough from committing crimes against clients.

4. There’s no such thing as “cheating” in SEO. I have to laugh when I hear some SEOs complaining that it’s not fair that sites that are beating them in the search results are cheating. Where’s the cheating? Using techniques that are against search engine guidelines? How’s it cheating if it works? It’s not up to us to police what our search marketing brethren are doing with their own or their clients’ websites. It’s up to the search engines to enforce their own guidelines—assuming they truly believe in them. If “shady” techniques didn’t work, people wouldn’t use them. Period. Instead of worrying about the cheaters, make your own site better. Doing things to websites that search engines have explicitly stated you shouldn’t be doing is not illegal, nor is it necessarily even wrong. It’s simply a risk that some people are more willing to take than others are. So be it. I agree that if you take risks with client websites, you should inform them of what the consequences are, but even if you don’t, there are existing laws that could be enforced if you play Russian Roulette with your clients’ websites. I imagine the legal consequences would be a lot worse than getting excommunicated from the search marketing industry.

So, yeah, I’m not a proponent of SEO standards. Every industry has their share of bad guys and good guys. Industry market forces and the search engines themselves will eventually dictate what best practices are and are not. I believe it has already happened, to a certain extent. Why do you think there are so many ex-black-hatters turned white-hatters out there? They have learned through trial and error that fixing what’s broken on their websites—rather than tricking the engines into thinking all is well—works much better for the long-term.

For those who just don’t get it, all the definitions and rules in the world won’t change them. Market forces will either require them to change their ways, or they’ll simply end up out of business.

Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings, a search marketing firm outside of Boston, and co-founder of SEMNE, a New England search marketing networking organization, has been performing SEO since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. The 100% Organic column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Over the years I’ve seen quite a few Requests for Proposal from companies seeking to buy SEO services. If your RFP is not written well, it hinders the SEO firm’s ability to understand and define your needs and to scope and price your project. This in turn leads to a disconnect in expectations for both parties. A lousy RFP can discourage a busy SEO firm from even responding—a very unfortunate outcome, since it takes the best firms out of the running.

Many companies intuitively “know” what they want but are challenged structurally to “ask” for it in a way that is clear, succinct, informative, and constructive. If written properly, an RFP will facilitate the sales process and ensure that everyone involved on both sides gets to a shared understanding of what the purpose, requirements, scope, and structure of the intended engagement are. By following a few, key steps in the beginning of the RFP process, you will be able to rest easy, knowing that you are going to get what your company wants in the way that is best for you.

Step One: Nominate a “point person” for the engagement

One of the most challenging concepts for any large company with multiple working parts is to determine what the “end goal” of the engagement is. Often, marketing departments may voice different wants and needs than an IT department; even though they may be asking for the same thing semantically, they are not using the right language to communicate what they are looking for. Every successful project needs a champion who is invested in that project’s success and can pull together the disparate groups who have a stake in the outcome or a role to play. Without that person at the helm, the project will struggle. By nominating that champion as the SEO firm’s “point person” even before you send out your RFP, you will ensure the steady flow of information throughout the process so that internal and external expectations are met.

Step Two: Define “needs” and “wants” using a decision matrix

RFP recipients will understand that you aren’t the SEO expert, and therefore you aren’t going to be able to adequately define the scope of your desired SEO engagement. As the saying goes: “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Just try to be reasonable when formulating your needs and wants and recognize that the RFP recipient may actually know what you need more than you do.

In addition to disclosing to the SEO firm the basics such as your objectives, your site’s “conversion” event (e.g., online purchase, newsletter subscription, whitepaper download, etc.), target audience, constraints, and so forth, in all fairness you will also need to clearly spell out the criteria for which you will evaluate the SEO firm’s suitability. This means you will need to define these criteria—in advance. None of this “going with your gut” nonsense!

SEO firms know the selection process is usually governed by gut feel, and so any RFP recipient without a preexisting relationship with you is automatically inclined not to respond because they know the deck is stacked against them. This is exacerbated the more SEO firms you send the RFP to. You can allay this concern by candidly sharing with the firm your biases and clearly defined criteria by which you will be evaluating them. This will be mapped out into in a decision matrix, which is simply a chart listing the attributes you are looking for in the SEO firm, a weighting factor for each attribute, a score from 0 to 10 for each, and the weighted score (e.g., the score multiplied by the weighting factor). The weighted scores are added together to arrive at a total score.

Judging criteria that are both quantitative and qualitative brings objectivity into a subjective process, which will aid you in managing expectations internally. And by sharing your list of criteria along with the weighting factors with the RFP recipients, you increase the likelihood—as well as caliber—of responses.

Step Three: Define your success metrics

Now that you’ve identified what you are looking for in an SEO firm, it’s important to let the SEO firms know how you will measure the success of the engagement. Some firms, like ours, can report on SEO health metrics well beyond just rankings (e.g., page yield, keyword yield), thus facilitating troubleshooting and reviews of program performance. Others will rely heavily on your own analytics package to track the program’s success. For example, you might pose the question internally, “What are our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?” SEO firms often use KPIs to prove the value of the services that they provide; online retailers often get caught up with conversion, a metric that isn’t really under the SEO firm’s control. If you aren’t sure which KPIs your company would like to use, I often recommend baking that request into the RFP, stating something like, “Do you offer monthly program performance reviews indicating the program’s growth? If so, please elaborate on the deliverables of such reviews.”

Step Four: Prepare to disclose all known influencing factors

An SEO firm can easily examine your existing website—the “on-page” factors (title tags, navigation, HTML)—to gauge project scope. But there are other factors that will influence your rankings during the engagement, some of which won’t be immediately obvious or known to the RFP recipient without prior disclosure. Does your company have other domain names, subdomains, or microsites? Is a massive redesign of your website in the works? Do you employ a third party for your site’s internal search, and if so, who is it? By disclosing as much information as possible, you spare the SEO firm the time and expense of discovering these things on their own.

Step Five: Provide an Estimated Timeline and Budget for Project Completion One of the biggest deterrents in any RFP is the confusion over when a project should be completed and how much it might cost. A company hiring an SEO firm may not know how much time it takes to complete something like an SEO audit, but they may have pressing, internal matters that require a specific deadline. Retail sites may want to schedule new launches around a particular theme or season; for example, if you want your site launched in time for back-to-school, be sure to write that into your proposal. Not only will an expected deadline save your company time looking for an appropriate firm, but it also serves as a professional courtesy to the SEO firms you are querying.

Budgets often coincide with a project deadline depending upon how your company conducts its business. Our firm recommends assessing a budget based on the “range” of services; i.e. instead of saying the project absolutely has to cost $X, you are willing to spend within a range from $X to $X. Budgets may or may not be included as part of the RFP, and there are benefits (and drawbacks) to both approaches. Even if you do not provide an SEO firm with your budget in the RFP, we recommend determining a budget beforehand regardless, because the money you are willing to spend will help you determine a target ROI.

A sample RFP document outline

Now that you’ve gathered the above information for your RFP, you’re ready to sit down and write it. There are several different ways that you can structure an RFP; here is a brief outline.

• Section One: Summary and overview. This section is where you will introduce the challenge you are having and provide your SEO firm with an overview of the rest of the RFP. I also recommend outlining “how” you would like SEO firms to respond to your RFP. Think of this section as an “Executive Summary” where you will provide the highlights of the RFP without the technical details.
• Section Two: Technical summary. Often, SEO firms need gritty details to determine how they can best help you. In the technical summary, this is where you will provide key pieces of information relevant to your project, like technical requirements, description of technical issues with the project, your site’s current platform, etc. The technical summary might originate from your IT department, as this section is often for an SEO firm’s programmers and delivery team.
• Section Three: Administration & management. By describing who will be involved in the project on your end and what the timeline is for completion, you are finalizing the framework of the project.
• Section Four: Project expectations & delivery. If you’ve done your homework, this should be the easiest section to write. From outlining your evaluation criteria to outlining what monthly deliverables or training you would like to receive to assessing your KPIs, this section helps an SEO firm determine their cost to complete your project, as well as their suitability.

RFPs can be pretty daunting to write, but if you really think about it there are several benefits to creating one. Not only will your company uncover and identify potential barriers to project success, you’ll also facilitate great internal communication, develop better budgets, and identify what types of SEO firms you’ll want to work with.

When you write an RFP, keep in mind that the purpose of an RFP is to hire an expert SEO firm that will propose what their recommended actions are for your company’s website(s) to achieve the greatest chance for success. Sometimes, an SEO firm’s feedback highlights other potential issues that you may not have considered, which may change the scope of your project entirely. If you really don’t know what the best solution is for your web properties and only have a vague idea, you can submit a Request for Information (RFI) that is typically not contractually binding but allows you to ask questions about an SEO firm’s products and services.

Stephan Spencer is founder and president of Netconcepts, a 12-year-old web agency specializing in search engine optimized ecommerce. He writes for several publications and blogs at Scatterings. The 100% Organic column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land.