Have you met the search marketing employee cutting into your website?
The hospital’s website rocks, but who the heck will be holding the scalpel over your anesthetized body? Likewise, a search marketing firm can sport a fantastic website, employ great sales people, be led by a luminary (who used to do the actual work), but success for your website depends entirely on the person or people actually doing the work for you.
In search marketing, there’s no upper limit to the expression of genius. An SEO or PPC Einstein would blow away the best of us every day. Like law or medicine, the professionals working directly on your case make all the difference. But in law or medicine, usually the goal is either accomplished or not: a surgeon doesn’t remove 80% of a tumor, and you’re either in jail or you’re not. In search marketing, each step in the sequence of work – a sequence which itself is a product of many brilliant choices about tools and processes – the search marketing pro (or his pre-conscious mind) will make key decisions almost every minute.
For example, in SEO, selecting key phrases to lace into your website is helped by software that ranks hundreds or thousands of synonymous phrases, and the final choice of phrases depends on an intuitive grasp of how much your inbound linkscape and subsequent PageRank will enable you to win for the shorter, more competitive and searched phrases vs. long-tail phrases for which page one positions are more likely. When writing the selected phrases into your text, the choice of repetition and close variants should factor, quickly and intuitively, the amount of conceptually related words and phrases already in that page’s copywriting. In theory, one could make such choices using more software and statistics, but that could take hours for every word choice. The SEO Einstein’s preconscious genius would make most of those choices with lightning speed and staggering acumen.
In PPC, rigorous and standardized optimization procedures that any bright employee could follow would accomplish a lot of success for you. However, the PPC Einstein would rapidly intuit the optimum blend of ad copy, landing page content, bid amount, and exact, phrase, or broad match with negative keywords – all prior to testing, so that from day one of the campaign weekly optimization is several months ahead of your competition.
Of course employee training, experience, and permission to research on company time are as vital as innate aptitude. A good search marketing firm will have procedures for efficiently transmitting to both new and seasoned employees the knowledge and wisdom in the firm’s and SEM industry’s leading minds. Still, some employees will never achieve that grace in search marketing which emerges from a rare blend of linguistic and statistical perspicacity.
So what does this all mean for your prioritization of web marketing investments? More than I can say in one blog post, but the salient advice for the marketing manager seeking a search marketing firm is to
- Ask how the firm trains new and old employees;
- Interview the people who will actually work on your account.
If you are considering hiring an in-house search marketer, stay tuned for my blog post next week.
