Finding the Best Search Engine Marketing Agency
Joshua Lee |
2 November, 2023 |
9 minute read |
Blog, Digital Marketing, PPC, Search Engine Marketing, SEO
Your business deserves the best SEM (search engine marketing agency) guaranteed to provide actionable insights and real conversions based on data-driven decisions.
But of all the agencies who’ve approached, how do you know which agency is the best for you? Stick around if you want to find out.
Understanding Search Engine Marketing
By now, you’ll no doubt understand that search engine marketing refers to a form of a digital marketing campaign that promotes a website’s visibility on search engines like Google or Bing.
Search engine marketing is primarily achieved through optimising and utilising paid and organic search channels.
Paid Search
When we say paid search, this refers to paid advertisements on search results, so the listings often have ‘sponsored’ or ‘ad’ over the top of their title. They’re most commonly located as the top and bottom results on a search engine results page.
Businesses have to pay a search engine to show these results to internet users, and once you stop or pause your campaign, they will no longer appear, so they’re temporary listings but highly rewarding in the short term.
Organic Search
On the other hand, there’s organic search; these are much harder earned but also ‘free’ compared to paid. You will have to spend time and resources on getting your website to a point where it’s optimised and healthy enough to receive organic listings.
When done correctly and maintained consistently, these listings could stay at a high search position for a long time, creating an evergreen source of good website traffic.
Working in tandem, organic and paid search is a fountain of untapped potential for many businesses. It allows them to target users at nearly all stages of their sales funnel, supplying constant awareness, lead generation and sales growth.
Why You Need A SEM Agency
While some businesses may attempt to manage their SEM with their in-house team, the intricacies of both organic and paid channels often warrant more dedication in the form of a specialist SEM agency.
Search engine marketing companies bring years of experience, diverse skill sets and a deeper understanding of the rapidly evolving world of search marketing. An in-house team could be spread across multiple channels, managing a much wider workload.
An agency is not intended to replace an in-house team but to work in tandem with them, bringing together industry specialists and bought-in advocates who know your business like the backs of their hands.
If you’re interested in learning more about why you need an SEM agency, check out our guide, ‘Why Hire A SEM Agency’, for a more comprehensive answer, and it’s free!
Identifying the Green Flags and Finding the Best Search Engine Marketing Agency
Assuming you’ve narrowed your search to a few agencies and you’re waiting to get in touch with them. We’ve found that a great place to start is knowing what the green flags are.
We will, of course, touch on the red flags, too but let’s start on a more positive note. Getting the ball rolling with these five green flags, you could use a few questions when making your choice.
Expertise and Experience
Any reputable agency will boast an appropriate, proven track record backed up with relevant facts and figures. Just check out some of our digital marketing case studies as one example of what you should be looking for.
Specialists and Unique
Most agencies offer specialist SEM services, covering all aspects of search marketing, most commonly in the form of SEO and PPC.
The agencies you want to watch for have unique offerings, whether techniques, strategy, or technology; unique offerings show absolute specialism and dedication to their craft.
Take our DIY SEO Platform, for example, or our SEO Bomb®, both unique offerings that help ROAR stand out from our competition and show industry specialism.
‘Relationship Material’
Jokes aside, you need to know that your chosen agency will be suitable enough to forge relationships. We’re not talking about monthly calls and random customised reports we mean effective, long-lasting relationships so your agency becomes a part of your business.
In our experience, long-term relationships provide the most bountiful results.
Transparency
The key to success for anything in marketing is transparency. We’ve often had clients come to us with absolutely no idea what their previous agency has done with their search marketing. They don’t have access to certain platforms or tools, wrong user permissions, and no reporting or feedback.
All of this is from a promising and open conversation at the beginning. Then, further down the line, there’s a lack of transparency with how they work, what they’re doing and the results they’re getting for your business – if they’re even getting any.
It’s hard to know which agency will be transparent from first contact, but consider asking them the following questions:
- How does your agency rank online?
- What analysis do you provide?
- Do you value transparency as an agency?
Communication
Effective communication is key in any business and the key to success in most cases. If you can’t get a hold of your agency, then it’s time to consider looking elsewhere.
The agency is in partnership with your business; they work for you and, depending on how you’ve worked it out with them, are expected to answer any questions you have.
Any decent agency should be prompt, open and available to you and your team within agreed times and channels.
Identifying the Red Flags
Now, let’s focus on the red flags; again, this might be helpful for you to narrow down your list of agencies. Keep these in your back pocket when engaging some of your chosen agencies.
Very ‘Affordable’ or Very Expensive
Pricing can vary from agency to agency, depending on many factors. Location, offerings, size, competitiveness and ability are just a few considerations.
But, when an agency is priced close to what you could be paying a freelancer, they don’t value themselves, or they either don’t know their own worth, hiding behind a small retainer when it comes to looking at what results they’ve actually provided.
We’re also not saying look or choose the overly expensive agencies because it goes both ways. Overly priced agencies can often get away with not performing because they roll out the red carpet at the beginning, but after, you fall in with the other hundreds of clients they have.
Promising Specific Results
You want results; that’s a given and expected of an agency. You need to be careful of an agency that promises specific results immediately. They might say ‘page one on Google in a few weeks’ or ‘x amount of conversions in the first month’.
Without actually auditing your SEO and PPC, they can’t give accurate, guaranteed results until the scope and size of your project are properly known.
We’ve seen it before when those claiming to be the best search engine marketing agency claim they can achieve ‘page one on Google in a few weeks’. Yeah, they might rank you on page one in the first few weeks, but for completely irrelevant search terms and targeting useless keywords that have nothing to do with your business or your target audience, serving zero purpose.
Or when they promise ‘x amount of conversions in the first month’, they often create shoddy conversions that count when a user plays a video or visits the targeted landing page; or in other words, conversions that trigger every time someone clicks through from the paid ad onto your website. A great conversion rate perhaps, but these conversions provide zero value and represent zero monetary value to your business.
Non-Data Driven
It will be harder to narrow down and find a clear answer, but any decent SEM agency worth its salt will use data to inform performance-related decisions. Generally, this will be evident from their approach to your project.
It might also be a good question to ask something like ‘If our performance drops, what’s your usual procedure to recover or improve?’
If they say something like We review the data and make suggestions, that’s cool but a standard response. Look for actual examples and press them on how they’ve made previous decisions to improve or repair campaigns.
Me, Me, Me
If you can’t shut them up and all they talk about is how they are the best search engine marketing agency, how many results they’ve driven for their other clients or how good they are compared to their competitors, then run for the hills.
We’re not doubting their performance, but any decent agency should talk about you and be interested and genuinely curious about your business. They’re going to be responsible for marketing your business, after all!
By all means, let them introduce themselves and learn about the agency, but if they can’t stop talking about themselves, it’s probably best to move on. This agency might not be ‘relationship material’.
Practice What You Preach
Have a look at their site, maybe even ask them what they currently do to market their own business and if they use the same channels that they provide their services for. An agency that loves what they do experiments, explores, and tests new things all the time, often on itself.
Making Your Choice
The most important piece of advice we can give you for finding the best search engine marketing agency is to ensure that they align with your business goals and focus on your success. Over time, they’ll become a close and trusted partner; they’re supposed to know your objectives and goals by heart; if they work with you to develop goals because you have none, even better.
Let’s talk about the elephant on the web page: ROAR is a specialist SEM agency. We’ve been making data-driven decisions using search engine marketing services to significantly increase the online presence and sales growth of our clients for years now.
We’re proud to be obsessed with all things search and take great pleasure in taking SEM strategies like yours to the next level.
Whether you’re looking for PPC services or unique SEO services, get in touch with one of our specialists today to book a free exploratory call.
We’re looking forward to hearing from you.
