Search engine optimization is an ever growing industry, and increasing numbers of companies are hiring search engine optimization firms. SEO is a very specialized field and requires skill sets not employed by the typical “webmaster”.

The potential dramatic benefit to a company’s bottom line creates a scenario whereby they become susceptible to less than scrupulous offerings. Unfortunately, many of these companies become interested in search engine optimization for the wrong reasons, and many also have unrealistic expectations. The following is a breakdown of some of the issues to consider.

Are my customers searching for my products and/or services online?
The answer to this question is almost always YES (a study conducted by the Georgia Institute of Technology indicated that 85% of prospective web customers use search engines to find product solutions and vendors).

If there is a market out there for your products and services, you can be assured that people are searching for what you do. Of course, accurate and efficient choice of your targeted phrases will reveal the associated volumes of searches.

Are my competitors showing up for the terms I want to target?
You’re in a constant struggle with your competition to position yourself favorably against them. If a search is done for your Goods and Sevices, and they’re found and you’re not, which of you has engendered the most confidence from the potential customer?

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While this alone is not reason alone to hire a Search engine optimization firm, discovering that many of your competitors have undertaken search engine initiatives of their own may indicate that they have found it to be a good investment. An ethical SEO should offer a competitive analysis in its service offerings to help you analyze your competitions commitment to internet exposure.

What effect would an increase in targeted traffic to my website have on my business?
If your site receives steady “targeted” traffic but has never helped you to land a sale, an increase in traffic will not necessarily improve your results.

On the other hand, if your website currently helps you to generate sales every week, an increase in traffic should improve your website results in a more or less predictable fashion. An ethical SEO understands that the goal is not visibility, or even traffic for that matter. Your conversion of that traffic (however you define it), is the ultimate goal. To reach the goal, visibility and traffic are necessary steps along the way.

When you decide to employ Search Engine Optimization as a strategy for driving revenue.
Be sure that the SEO has a published code of ethics. The value of a reputable firm is simply too high to not do due diligence on their tactics, clients, and process.

Understand specifically what they will be doing for you, the time frame it should take, the associated costs, and what you can expect in the way of results. If you’re not committed to the process, it simply won’t work.

You will better understand the recommendations that your SEO firm makes.
A better understanding of the SEO process can help you to evaluate the recommendations that your search engine optimization firm makes. This can be useful when you are trying to balance the needs of your visitors against your need for increased traffic. This site has made efforts at helping you understand what differentiates good from bad, and costly from effective.

You need to be able to participate in the process.
While a good search engine optimization firm will take the time to understand your business as best they can, they do not know your business or your customers as well as you do. If you take some time to learn about SEO and involve yourself in the process, the coordinated effort will almost always yield better results than a search engine optimization firm working on its own. Your website has the potential to be your primary marketing tool, you should apply the time and effort that it deserves.

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Have Realistic Expectations.
While search engine optimization is one of the most effective marketing channels available to most organizations, it is important that the expectations that you set for your campaign are realistic. There is simply no magic involved. It takes a combination of time, effort, money and understanding to achieve the potential goals. It will not happen overnight, but once underway, you’re headed towards the most dynamic message delivery system ever available.

Don't expect to rank highly for ultra-competitive, general terms.
Statistics indicate that most people now search using multiple words, but many companies ask their search engine optimization firm to target a very general term. For example, if your company provides transportation services for large companies, you may be tempted to ask your SEO firm to target the phrase "transportation" or the phrase "logistics". The problem is that these phrases are very general (and probably very competitive) and only a fraction of the people typing either of them in a search engine will be looking for your specific product. It is generally much more productive to go for less competitive phrases that bring in a higher percentage of visitors looking for your specific product or service. Specificity is the key to high conversion rates.

Don't expect overnight results.
Unlike pay per click or other forms of advertising, organic search engine optimization takes time to implement and time to yield results. Be patient - the results should be worth the wait. Statistics have taught us that between 17-20% of Search engine users will click on what they identify as advertising as opposed to the answer to their question.

Be Prepared to Protect Your Investment
If you placed an ad in a national magazine and it brought your firm a steady stream of new customers, you’d not only continue it, you’d expand upon it. Companies that hire a search engine optimization firm should also understand that it is not a one-time effort. Hiring a SEO is only the beginning of a long process of improving conversion rates, monitoring results, and potentially expanding your campaign.

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Improving Conversion Rates
Be prepared to track the conversion rates on your site for individual keywords. There are numerous software’s that allow you to see which phrases from which engines bring you the visitors who are most likely to buy your products, fill out your online form, etc. Access to this data can help you to improve pages of your site that do not convert visitors. Your website is interactive, use the available knowledge to improve you websites productivity.

Track Ranking and Traffic Data
Your hosting company should supply you with traffic reports. Unfortunately, this is usually raw data. You should be prepared to track your traffic and ranking data on a regular basis, whether you outsource it or do it in house. Without access to this data, you will not be able to tell whether the overall value of your website is trending upward or downward.

Expand Your Key Words List
If the strategy works for you as it should, you will probably want to expand your key word list over time to drive more targeted visitors to your site and further increase the value of your website and consequently your company.

What is natural search?
For those who aren't quite clear what the term means, "natural" or "organic" search describes the results returned to you when you search for a word or phrase. These results are supposed to be non-biased. Essentially meaning that, the engine will not accept any amount of money to influence the rankings of any individual sites. This is quite different than the paid advertising that appears in "sponsored" or "featured" search engine results, in which higher positions are rewarded for to the companies willing to pay the most per visitor.

Why is natural search important?
Savvy searchers who understand the difference between paid and natural results are more likely to hold the natural search engine results in a higher regard, much like a person reading a magazine would probably be more positively influenced by an article about a particular company than by a paid advertisement from the company.

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It is highly likely that relevant search will become more important in the coming months/years. Yahoo's new Site Match program, which mixes some paid search engine results with natural results, is certain to get some close scrutiny from the FTC (even though the fees paid are not supposed to influence rankings). This type of public attention will no doubt educate some oblivious users as to what "sponsored results" actually are.

More importantly, other search engines are likely to use this as a means of differentiation from Yahoo. It is no coincidence that Ask Jeeves recently announced that it was getting rid of its similar program the day after Yahoo's new program was unveiled, claiming that it was impossible to produce unbiased results using this methodology. Microsoft also recently claimed that they were taking steps to further differentiate paid results from natural results. No matter what the end result, one probable outcome of this new attention to paid search engine advertising is that more average searchers will learn the differences between paid and natural search engine results, and many will instinctively favor the latter.

What advantages do huge corporations have?
Certainly, large companies do have some specific advantages when it comes to natural search.

a. Links- the primary advantage that large corporations have is their ability to obtain large amounts of inbound links, which can have a huge impact on search engine rankings. Often these links are given freely without the company asking (or being aware that it is happening). Many of the huge corporation's vendors, affiliates, partners, etc. are eager to show their association with the company and link to the corporate site readily and non-reciprocally. Large corporations can also facilitate huge increases in link popularity through a simple corporate policy requiring inbound links from any companies wishing to work with them. In addition, very large corporations may have several websites, which can sometimes be effectively linked together for additional link popularity.

b. Budget- although history shows that a large percentage of major corporations do not spend wisely in this arena, larger corporations typically have larger marketing budgets then their smaller competitors. However, this does not necessarily mean that they will readily allocate a portion of that budget for search engine optimization, as discussed below.

What advantages do smaller companies have?
While the advantages of huge corporations, particularly in the area of link popularity, can be difficult to overcome, it is often unnecessary to try. A large percentage of such companies consistently seem to shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to natural search engine optimization, a primary reason why small companies can often outperform them in search engine results. Specific advantages include:

a. A willingness to pursue the channel- Huge companies have the disadvantage of slow decision making process’s. It’s the old meeting to discuss a meeting philosophy. Smaller companies are typically more willing to devote resources and time to natural search than large corporations. Huge things have to happen for a major corporation to get involved in this "new" channel, a channel far removed from the traditional marketing methodologies used to build the giant. Few corporate underlings want to be the one to put their neck on the line and recommend something completely new and "unproven". Even when a large corporation looks into natural search engine optimization as a potential marketing tool, it can take many months, and sometimes years, for a final decision to be made.

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b. A willingness to change the company website- Huge corporations face similar problems when it comes to changing to the corporate website. Within such entities, a person can often not get so much as a comma removed from the text of a secondary page without holding several upper-level management meetings and, ultimately, making a board presentation. Smaller, leaner companies are able to approve necessary website changes more quickly, and are almost always more willing to quickly adapt to the needs of both visitors and search engines.

c. The willingness to outsource- Larger companies have more internal resources at their disposal, and are less likely to outsource this specialized service to someone with proven experience. Often, search engine optimization is treated as an afterthought and dumped on an IT person, who typically has too much to do already and will approach the problem solely from a technical standpoint. Natural search engine optimization is by necessity a combination of marketing and technology. Newcomers to the field (especially those who treat the discipline as strictly a technical issue) often make fundamental mistakes that at best do not get results and at worst put sites at risk of penalization.

d. A lack of technical hurdles- Huge corporations are more likely to have technical issues on their website that can prevent search engines from indexing all of their pages. Often the pages of corporate websites are generated "on the fly" from large databases, and such pages (without modification to the URLs) are sometimes never indexed. In addition, (although usability studies are making this happen less often), some huge corporations have their sites built entirely in flash or use other technologies that are virtually invisible to search engines.

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