The Right Answers: What to Expect From Your SEO Partner

In my last column, Searching for SEO: How to Find the Right Partner, I discussed what questions you should ask any potential search vendor.

The best responses aren’t black and white, because the right SEO agency for one company might not be the best fit for the next. You need to develop a clear understanding of your SEO goals to identify the best partner. That said, any reputable SEO partner should meet some basic standards.

What is your SEO methodology? How do you approach SEO?
After posing this question, a CMO should primarily make sure vendors don’t react with blank stares. The idea here is that a methodical process had better exist. Ideally, you should expect a process that includes steps to:

1. Ensure all content is visible to search engines, including multimedia;
2. Conduct extensive keyword research to refine goals that lead to desired traffic, relevance and conversions;
3. Build internal and external links to help search engines properly gauge the importance of content;
4. Address the important task of content distribution and optimization.

Through each step, any reputable SEO vendor should be able to provide detailed explanations of how they approach the tasks and provide examples of successful past efforts.

How experienced is the SEO team?
Years of experience matter, but other factors are also important. Typically, CMOs want experts that have worked in many different situations to set the strategy for their campaigns. Still, these top tier strategic thinkers generally won’t run the campaign on a day-to-day basis. When asking about experience, CMOs should instead try to determine how well the team knows a particular industry, whether or not the various team members receive regular training on industry best practices, and what type of brands the team has worked with in the past and the success of those efforts.

Increasingly, CMOs want one firm to handle both paid search and SEO programs. In this light, the best SEO teams should be able to demonstrate how they have reduced overall search media budgets by increasing natural search rankings and traffic. They will do more than simply manage paid and natural search campaigns independently. The idea is to make them work together, make each complement the other and get more done with less.

Who will manage my account on a daily basis? What tools will they use? How often will they report?
Paid and natural strategies should be developed in their own right, but both efforts should be coordinated to feed on and create efficiencies for the other. As far as tools go, no search firm in existence can claim to have all the intelligence they need in their own home grown applications.

Some top partners lean on their own campaign management applications to coordinate natural and paid search campaigns; others will use an industry solution such as DART Search or Atlas Search. But this alone is not enough for large scale search programs. Make sure any prospective partner has the capabilities to build out extensions to their campaign management platform to meet the specific needs of your program. Link checkers, keyword mining tools and applications that identify potential synergies across channels are among the most common management platform extensions.

Do you follow generally accepted search engine guidelines? Have your clients been penalized?
CMOs should accept nothing less than emphatic responses to these questions. Never choose a partner that likes to try to out maneuver or outwit the search engines; this is risky business for any brand. Only partners with impeccable track records should be selected, and CMOs should do more than take the partner’s word for this. Make sure to speak to references and do some research to ensure no blatant examples of non-compliance exist.

What’s expected from us to implement the program? Can you manage with limited IT resources from us?
For CMOs with ample IT resources and plenty of cooperation, this can be less of an issue, but implementation can be a big problem for many CMOs. When IT resources present a challenge, CMOs should insist that any prospective SEO partner provide specific examples of how they have managed these issues for clients in the past and the client references to back up the claims. Ensure that any required tools are Web-based so constant site updates won’t be required. Asking to see implementation spec documents from past projects also proves helpful; these can provide an early indicator for IT staff as to how smoothly the implementation is likely to go.

Stuart Larkins is senior vice president of search operations at DoubleClick Performics and is a monthly contributor to Chief Marketer.