(Source) Custom SEO guarantees should not be drafted without the SEO practitioner understanding your business, industry, and marketing goals. I cannot stress this point enough. A lack of information is equivalent to a surgeon operating with a blindfold. A SEO firm should ask pertinent questions and actually listen, record, and analyze your answers. What was your corporate revenue last year? What percentage of your revenue was driven from the website? What are your revenue goals for the next year? How much profit do you typically record per order or transaction? What percentage of your clientele are repeat customers? How do you rate your firm compared to your industry competitors? Where do you see your industry headed within the next few years? Where do you place your own firm within that industry? Why are you choosing to hire an SEO company? Are phone orders more important to you than web based orders? These questions are a sample set of the meat in which every SEO practitioner should get at before preparing a custom SEO guarantee - the questions might seem a bit intrusive at first glance, but they aren’t if you desire a solid working relationship.

In the old days, before Internet marketing, traditional marketing firms would ask all sorts of questions about their clients’ businesses and really get to know them from the inside out. The more they understood about their customers’ businesses the better able they were to meet their marketing goals. But is that really necessary with search engine optimisation companies?

First, no SEO company can guarantee you a No. 1 listing on Google or any other search engine. When it comes to SEO guarantees, a specific ranking is out of the question. That’s because there are too many factors involved, many of which are out of your control, and out of the control of your SEO company. That’s not to say that you can’t, or won’t, get a good ranking for your important keywords.

Still, why does your SEO company need to know your revenues? Perhaps that question is important for a total marketing campaign, but if all your SEO company is going to do is tweak your web pages for optimisation purposes, that’s not a relevant question. I really just want to know what your important keywords are, who your competition is, what your online business goals are, etc. Last year’s financial statements might be interesting to look at, but it won’t help me help you get better rankings. For SEO purposes, here’s the information your SEO company should be interested in:

• A list of your keywords, prioritised for importance
• Your top five competitors’ website addresses
• What kind of Internet marketing campaigns are you currently involved in?
• What Internet marketing strategies will you be using in the future?
• Have you submitted your website to any directories? Which ones?
• Do you know your link popularity?
• How many pages does your website have?
• Do you have a blog? Is it on your website or have its own dedicated URL?
• What strategic partners are important to your business and do they have websites?
• Do most of your customers order through your website or by phone?
• What important industry developments will affect how you do business?
• What are your expectations of SEO?

These are just a few of the questions your SEO company should be asking you. There may be others and they could vary depending on your business or industry. If I were to plan a complete Internet marketing package for your company then I might be interested in your company’s financials, but I don’t need hat for SEO work. All I really need to know to perform effective search engine optimisation is information that will help me do better SEO. Nothing more.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 2:38 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.