Hiring an Internet marketing company can be a daunting task. You have heard that businesses need website marketing, but aren’t even entirely sure what SEO stands for and you certainly don’t have time to research and educate yourself in the industry. There are a few quick things that you can do to at least appear knowledgeable and know what to look for in a good, honest Internet marketing company. It all starts with asking the right questions. Here are some initial questions that you should ask when interviewing SEO and internet marketing companies:

A great way to tell if a website marketing company knows what they’re doing is by looking at its website. If the company is implementing a great website marketing campaign, then it’s pretty likely that it can do it for you too. Practice what you preach right? Here are 15 questions to ask when interviewing an Internet marketing company:

1. How long has your company been in business? What is your experience? Internet marketing is a new and growing industry, so don’t expect to hear 20 years of experience. But, a background in traditional marketing, other website and internet businesses and related fields serve as solid background of experience.
2. How do you determine the best services for a particular company and website? Website marketing shouldn’t have a one size fits all approach. Each business needs a customized campaign, unique to its business goals and industry.
3. What kinds of SEO techniques do you use? Just like with any industry, there are companies that operate unethically. Watch out for companies that will launch you to the top of the search results by purchasing you thousands of links. The search engines will penalize a site that is using unethical, black-hat techniques.
4. What’s your link building process? Links continue to prevail as one of the most important factors in search engine rankings. An Internet marketing company should have a variety of link building techniques, such as press release marketing, blog posts or social media. This SEO Infographic for Link Data Visualization describes the various link building techniques as well as their value.
   
5. How many employees does the company have and what is their background/website experience? An Internet marketing company should have knowledgeable staff that knows its way around a website. Look for a company that has at least a few employees that have backgrounds in building websites on the various platforms.
6. Do you offer both on-site and off-site search engine optimization? It all starts with good optimization of your website. Look for a company that can advise you on good on-site optimization.
7. Can you guarantee the 1^st spot on Google? If the company says yes, then run! This can never be guaranteed.
8. How long will it take to get search engine results? Again, if the company claims it can guarantee you results within a week, or even a month, run! It typically takes three to six months.
9. What is your reporting process? A company should provide you with reports on a regular basis, showing you the progress and results of your campaign. If the company says it doesn’t provide reports or at least communicate the results in some form and you haven’t already run away, definitely run this time.
10. How can I expect to communicate with you? Make sure that the company communicates in a way that you are comfortable with and is willing to be flexible. If you would like a monthly phone call or email report, that is a reasonable request on your part.
11. Will you provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them? A company shouldn’t just hand you a contract full of services without an explanation. Be sure to look it over and have a conversation about why these services are best for your site and for your company.
12. Who owns the copyright? Internet marketing often involves web content development and the creation of social profiles. You, the client, should always be the sole owner of the work that the company completes for you.
13. What primary tactics do you use to increase a website’s rankings? Look for a company that uses a variety of tactics that are in line with the current trends of the industry. Internet marketing is constantly changing and evolving, and companies should adapt to those changes.
14. Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories? In most cases, companies will have non-disclosure agreements with its clients, so it’s reasonable for the company to not be able to share information such as the company name and website. However often times the company should have happy clients that are willing to give recommendations and testimonials.
15. What is your involvement in the Internet marketing/SEO community? There are conferences, associations and groups all throughout the country for SEOs and Internet marketers to share ideas and keep up with the latest trends. Look for a company that plays an active role in that community.

Just as you would, when hiring any vendor for your company, check references and reviews. Unfortunately, in the Internet marketing industry there is a lot of fraud and many unethical companies out there. But, there are also companies that are truly passionate about Internet marketing and SEO, one of those being Vertical Measures of course!

Sarah Moraes

Sarah Moraes, Marketing Manager, heads the tactical planning and implementation of cross-platform marketing activities for Vertical Measures including; blogging, social media marketing, webinars, content marketing, email marketing and promotions. In addition, she published the Local Search Marketing for Business How-To-Guide, a part of the Vertical Measures How-To-Guide Series.

+Sarah Moraes

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If your business is pursuing any form of online marketing, then it is likely that you have tried to work out your return on investment; the amount of sales that you can directly attribute to certain activities versus their costs. Whilst this kind of activity isn’t simple, it is possible to get an approximate figure and justify your online advertisement spend as you move from offline advertising to online, where people are spending an increasing amount of their leisure time.

Like with almost any kind of advertising, the results cannot be wholly measured. In the same way that it is hard to measure the effectiveness of a TV spot or newspaper print advertisement, it can be hard to completely measure the impact of online advertising. For example, web users may see your brand in a number of locations, building up an idea of your business and visiting an offline location as a result.

However, online marketing is more quantifiable than the ‘traditional media’ methods of advertising. With Google Analytics, businesses are able to track visitors from other websites and search engines to get an idea of the amount of traffic and sales that can be attributed to online marketing, depending on the type of internet marketing service being performed.

Before we get into the specifics, first note that to get the best results either e-commerce or goals should be set up correctly in your Analytics program. Even if your site isn’t e-commerce in nature, it should still have clearly defined goals and have a dollar value attached for each conversion. If the goal, or purpose, of your website is to have people sign up for a newsletter, and you know that 1 in every 50 subscribers will purchase a $50 service offline, then you can value each new newsletter subscriber at $1. Without having a dollar value attached, your analytics program can only calculate the number of customers gained, not their value.

Pay Per Click

PPC or Adwords campaigns are the most quantifiable form of advertising and can be easily tracked by linking your Adwords and Google Analytics accounts. This then produces a new report within the ‘Traffic Sources’ section aptly called ‘Adwords’ to review the traffic sent from paid Google listings. By clicking on the ‘Clicks’ tab of any of these reports users can get a complete breakdown of revenue, costs and ROI;

However, even this information isn’t entirely accurate and needs to be understood in context. What if searchers see your listing and go to your site directly or remember your brand name, for subsequent visits, without clicking on the advert? What about visitors who click the listing, but don’t purchase until several days later on a different computer or having cleared their cookies?

The information is by no means 100% accurate, but it is certainly a good starting point.

Organic SEO

Of course at Vertical Measures we’re more interested in the results of organic listings in search engines (we don’t offer PPC services here), which is trickier if only for the fact that Analytics doesn’t know how much you are spending on your efforts to rank for different keywords. However, if you keep track of how much you are spending on your organic SEO campaign, you can use this data in conjunction with the information in Analytics to get similar data of PPC.

So that you can be sure you’re only looking at organic search traffic, you need to select the ‘Non-paid Search Traffic’ from the Advanced Segments in the top right corner of your screen. This will update every report you look at to include only this information, so be sure to change it back to ‘All Visits’ when you are done.

Now that you are looking at only this information, find the value of this traffic by going to your E-Commerce or Goal Value reports to see the number and value of visits attributable to your organic effort.

You can then get even more granular by looking at individual keywords in the Keyword Report within ‘Traffic Sources’ in the left hand navigation. This report should look very similar to the reports you have for AdWords – only without your costs. Using this data you can see the value of each visit, the number of visits you received and how well they converted. You can then combine this with your separate SEO spending figures to see your cost per click and ROI for each keyword.

However, where it gets difficult is in the long tail, or terms you are not directly targeting. Having great content is likely to bring in traffic from a variety of keywords; don’t neglect to include this in your calculations! If you have been targeting just the keyword ‘desks’ and ‘mahogany desks’ is bringing in traffic, don’t exclude this from your ROI calculations.

In exchange for the slightly less measurable results of organic search results compared to PPC, it does have one huge advantage in that it is a long term strategy that will continue to pay dividends. As we like to say here, PPC is renting the house, SEO is owning the home. Whilst you may spend a lot one month on SEO and not see traffic increase accordingly, being ranked highly in SERPs will last for the foreseeable future and continue to send traffic to your site. You will then continue to receive traffic even if you don’t invest in SEO one month, whereas with PPC once you’ve spent your budget the traffic comes to a grinding halt.

Social Media

Another area of Internet Marketing that many businesses would like to see a measurable return on investment is in their social media efforts. As with PPC and SEO, It is  possible to get a rough idea of how your efforts in this area are performing via Google Analytics. Make sure you are looking at ‘All Visits’ in the Advanced Segments, and then go to the Referring Sites report in Traffic Sources. Next click on the Goal or E-commerce tab for the following information;

This report again shows the number of visits, the conversion rate and per visit value, helping you to identify where the best traffic is coming from and understand the return on your investment for your efforts in these areas. When you scan this list of websites look out for not only websites like ‘twitter.com’ but also any URL shorteners or twitter clients such as ‘hootsuite.com’, ‘ht.ly’, and ‘ow.ly’ in the screenshot above.

Again, the area where this kind of quantitative return on investment calculation falls down is that sometimes the rewards of social media aren’t always obvious. Much like TV advertising, the goal in having a strong following on social media is primarily to build brand awareness that may then result in customers knowing your brand to help you to stand out from your competition. Judging your efforts by direct goal conversions alone can be dangerous and lead you to cut back in areas that are meeting their goals.

Conclusion

To conclude, measuring ROI for your internet marketing is possible, but it isn’t an exact science. Like with TV and print advertising of the past, the full rewards are not directly attributable, such as brand awareness and recognition. You also need to fully understand how Google Analytics (or your analytics program) treats campaign conversion attribution (Click here and watch Slide 10).

However, despite these few restrictions, by digging into your analytics you are able to directly attribute revenue to your internet marketing. With information on clicks and sales from PPC, organic search, and social media, you can allocate spending to only the beneficial areas to get the most impact on your bottom line, gaining a competitive advantage over your competitors.

If you would like to see greater ROI on your internet marketing efforts, you could contact us or look at our website marketing services to identify the areas where your online business can be improved.

James Constable

James is a Campaign Manager at Vertical Measures, looking at client’s Internet Marketing from a strategic viewpoint to get them the best possible results for their business needs and budget. His blog posts revolve around strategy, analytics and keyword selection.

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If you run a small business, the odds are already against you. You can’t afford to make any mistakes that will further jeopardize your potential for success.

About the Author:
Gerald Weber is a blogger, social media enthusiast and founder of a Houston SEO firm.  

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Well we can hardly believe it.  WE PULLED IT OFF!  If this is your first time to our blog you may be asking did what?  For the last month we have documented the process of moving our web site to a new hosting company, redesigning and updating it and integrating our blog Link Building Best Practices in to our new web site blog location you are looking at now.  It was all done at the same time and you are now looking at the new site that went live effective December 7th 2008.

In our last post we shared some of the planning and specific action items we identified to make it happen.  One of our biggest concerns was making sure we don’t lose any of our excellent search engine position and it seems we achieved that goal as well as transferred our page rank.  

I think the best way to wrap up this series is to tell you about what DID go "wrong".   Although we felt like we planned it out carefully and we followed our plan there were things that happened that we just could not have anticipated and maybe sharing this information with you might help your next project as well.

What went wrong

Last Friday night we finished all the "Pre" items and the final step before taking the new site live was to use the excellent built in "export" feature WordPress has.  It exports all your posts, post categories and Authors.  The plan was to export that data and then import it to the new blog (you are on now) so everything is current.  I had already done this once before a few weeks ago just to populate the development version of the blog with some data etc. and I was very impressed with how easy and smooth it went so I wasn’t expecting what happened next.  Before I get in to that though here is where I made my first mistake…I hopped over to GoDaddy and updated the name servers for the site and blog to begin propagation.  Then here is where things got ugly.  I exported all the data just fine, then jumped in the admin panel for the new site and started the import.  It seemed like it was taking a long time but finally it finished.  The first thing I noticed was the post count was twice what it should be (oh oh) so I opened the site and took a look.  The entire site was all out of whack!  Things were not where they should be at all and the main navigation had extra items. HUH?

The next thing that went wrong was where it got REALLY ugly.  The entire site went down!  When I tried to view the site all I saw was "A CONNECTION CAN NOT BE MADE TO THE DATABASE" in big black letters.  YIKES!  This didn’t make sense because the site was just up and no changes were made that would impact the database connection.  I logged in to the database via PHP MyAdmin and everything seemed fine. By this time it was 2:30 am and after poking around a while I decided the best thing to do was change the name servers back to the old sites, get some rest and pick it up again in the "morning" when I was fresh.

All hail WordPress the self healing blogging platform!

At 5:30 am (yeah 3 hours later) I woke up and started thinking about the problem, came up with a few ideas and headed in to the office to attack it again.  Guess what, the site was up! (at the dev address of course) but still out of whack.  After inspecting the main navigation I noticed there were actually just a couple extra items I realized were the PAGES (not posts) from the old blog site.  (Well no kidding because pages are stored in the posts table so those were imported as well) Ok, fine I’ll just log in and delete them because we don’t need them any more.  I logged in and right away noticed the post count was back to normal!  NICE! I have no idea how…so I proceeded to delete the few extra pages.  I went back to the site and just like that the world was a happy place again!  The site looked perfect and the blog was completely populated.  All hail WordPress the self healing blogging platform!  Since everything looked ok I switched the name servers again to make the new site live and since I had no idea how long propagation was going to take I went back to bed for a while.

Oops, another big problem

I woke up checked my email and had a few from Arnie with the most glaring being all the images on the blog were dead!  Obviously I didn’t know  that before I retired for the evening.  All the paths to the images were wrong!  Normally this might seem like an easy problem to solve right?  Just add a copy of all the images to a directory found at the correct path and moving forward all images will be in a new correct location.  Nope, that isn’t going to happen.  The problem is that since we had a 301 redirect in place for linkbuildingbestpractices.com to verticalmeasures.com/blog there was no real physical path that could be used.  We decided the best thing to do (rather than manually change the path on all the images on the entire blog) was was to use mod_rewrite on the .htaccess file to point all the image paths to the correct location. This little beauty did the trick: RewriteRule [^/]+(/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/.+) $1 [R=301,L] It 301 redirects all the image paths to the standard directory in WordPress where all images reside.  Problem solved!

While we are on the topic of mod_rewrite there was another problem we needed to resolve and mod_rewrite came through once again.  On our old site we had a series of website marketing and link building articles and press releases that used an unusual query string path.  (They were dynamically generated from a content system developed)  We needed to make sure they redirected to the matching page on the new site to pass link juice and authority.  Here is an example of the mod_rewrite we used:

Articles:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} articles?Outsource-Link-Building-The-Right-Company-Is-Vital.html
RewriteRule articles http://www.verticalmeasures.com/outsource-link-building-the-right-company-is-vital/ [R=301,L

Press Releases:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Link-Building-Company-Earns-TOP-SEO-Award.html
RewriteRule press http://www.verticalmeasures.com/link-building-company-earns-top-seo-award/? [R=301,L]

Unfortunately we had to write one for each article and press release but it had to be done.  Also for extra fun we had to change the case of the new path on each to lower case as well (since PHP is case sensitive)  and a "http://UrlLikeThis" is not the same as a "http://urllikethis".  They would be considered different pages and duplicate content!  Ouch…

Our video didn’t work either

There was one other small problem that required some fast thinking and innovation.  If you were familiar with our old site you may recall we had a video built using Camtasia studio explaining the importance of natural search ranking.  The video worked great (on the old site) but for some reason on the new site it would stop about 15 seconds in.  Well it was time for an upgrade so we just uploaded the .flv file to the Vertical Measures YouTube account and it worked perfectly there.  Thanks to YouTube we were able to embed it on a new page and the result is a more visually appealing and professional wrapper for the video.  If you haven’t seen it before you should take a few minutes and watch our very informative higher search rankings video.

So that wraps it up!  There were a few other little kinks along the way but we wont bore you with all the details.  We hope you found this post and the others informative and a little entertaining.  Please be sure to take a moment and tell us what you think about the new site. We would value and appreciate your feedback. 

 ArnieK.gooruze.com

Vertical Measures

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