Time to hire an SEM agency or consultant. Ask for referrals, search online, check the yellow pages, regardless of how you find them, please make sure that they know what they are doing. Far too often SEM consultants and agencies make the same mistakes that they are being paid to help you avoid. Check their work before engaging. The easiest place to do this, their own marketing website. Here is a list of things to be mindful of before engaging in a relationship with your vendor of choice:
1. Broken URL from PPC ad. It’s probably the worst kind of error an agency can make. Obviously, if an agency can’t manage clicks it’s buying for itself, chances are it will mismanage those its clients are going to pay for.
2. No custom landing pages. Big agencies with search divisions take note: if people are clicking on a text ad with “SEM Agency” in the title or description, they’re not going to want to know about your great print, broadcast, or outdoor stuff. Just give them a short pitch why your agency is the best in SEM: don’t make them hunt for it.
3. Out-of-date blog post entries. Hosting a blog whose last entry is from September of 2008 tells clients that you’re not serious about taking care of the annoying, time-consuming, resource-intensive production tasks that are a big part of running search campaigns. If your blog runs out of steam, don’t let it die a slow death: kill it quickly and mercifully.
4. Links to clients who have gone out of business. It’s truly bad form when prospects click on your client link and are greeted by an “Apache Server Port 80″ error message.
5. Out-of-date copyright stamp. Look folks, 2009 has been with us for two and a half miserable months already.
6. Links to press releases that aren’t there. Lots of agencies link to externally hosted press releases, and while this is easier than copying the file locally, doing so will bite you in a soft place because these hosted releases go away after a month or so.
7. Basic grammar errors. Big agency sites almost never make egregious copy errors, but small agency sites seem to be full of them. Most of these errors are simple and avoidable.
8. Tiny type.
9. Ridiculously pompous titles on your “About” page. Use standard titles; leave the ego-inflating hyperbole to the heads of religious cults.
10. Adsense running on your pages. I know these are hard times and we all want to make a few extra bucks — but running advertising on your site makes you look desperate.
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This advice is really going to help, thanks.