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Now, I’m not saying you can’t find a company to design a search marketing plan for you for a reasonable amount, but there is some truth to the old adage, “You get what you pay for.” You value the products and services you sell; your customers value the products and services they buy from you. You should be cautious of a company that is selling search marketing solutions for less that its value. Your results will reflect your expenditure. If you spend $10 a month on a search marketing program, you’ll only get $10 worth of results.

True search marketing involves several layers of knowledge and labor to achieve real results. And to even begin the practice, a real SEO practitioner will ask good questions, provide significant value and not just provide cheap rates and make vague promises.

So what should a real SEO provider do for you?

He will start by asking pointed questions about your goals. Search marketing is about customer generation and conversions; information collected and acted upon through the SEO program should represent how to achieve that – not how to achieve high rankings on Google for search terms that your customers may not even be using.

The SEO provider should review your current website with you and explain its strength and weaknesses – often the best SEO results require some site redesign with SEO functionality in mind. If you are considering a new site and care about performance, SEO consideration needs to be included from the very beginning; this will save a lot of time and cost and will result in a website that performs for you!

Search marketers also realize that reports are useless without analyzing the results and reacting to them. Great SEO guys will spend A LOT of time reviewing data to determine how best to manipulate content, site structure, and other website features to make use of the collected data (analytics).

Proper SEO will pay for itself many times over, so the investment is well worth it!

Before signing on the dotted line, ask the SEO provider what results he has achieved for his own company or for his customers in the past. The proof is in results. Why spend $50 a month on nothing more than a report, when what you need is a detailed action plan that could increase your company’s revenue significantly?

A real search marketer wants to help your business grow through quality management of your website’s search engine optimization program. A good search marketer will work with you to understand what you can expect from a strong SEO program. And a great search marketer will partner with you to keep delivering results and providing you with a measurable ROI. Keep these points in mind the next time a company randomly calls you on the phone offering you inexpensive SEO services.