The List

The list of keywords is a list of common UK ecommerce sites, like ebay and Amazon, as well as common price comparison and review sites.

amazon

amazon co uk

amazon com

amazon uk

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

ciao

ciao.co.uk

ebay

ebay com

ebay.com

kelcoo

kelcoo uk

kelkoo co uk

kelkoo.co.uk

price grabber

price grabber uk

pricegrabber

pricegrabber uk

pricegrabber.co.uk

shopzilla

shopzilla uk

shopzilla.co.uk

What to do with them

Add these keywords as negative phrase-match keywords into any campaign where you run general or product ecommerce keywords.  This will stop your ads from appearing for searches like “Buy Snom 300 Phone on Amazon;” sales which you’re unlikely to get unless you’re, well, Amazon.

Why its important

When we run search query reports for ecommerce clients, we consistently see this list of phrase-match keywords across many verticals.  They seldom convert, if ever.  It’s easy to see why.  If someone types in “Canon EOS rebel SLR Amazon,” we know exactly what they’re looking for – a canon SLR camera.  We also know where they want to buy: amazon.

While it may be possible to intercept a sale when someone is searching for Amazon or ebay and your product, it takes a specialised advert to do so with any degree of success.

If you run general or product based campaigns, adding these keywords is a quick, easy way to cut some wasted spend.

Shawn Livengood over at PPCWithoutPity recently wrote a great blog post called The #1 Reason PPC accounts Fail.  It’s scarily accurate, and certainly worth a read.  Livengood argues that PPC accounts fail for a simple reason: the products they’re advertising are bad.  (His language is a bit more blunt.)

I certainly can’t argue with that. If your product is too expensive, not right for your market, poorly designed on a bad website, or just plain old rubbish, your conversion rate will never be strong enough to overcome the cost-drag on your account and move you into a positive return.

PPC is not a panacea and customers aren’t stupid.  This simple bit of maths is a big reason why we’re picky about which clients we take on board.  PPC can’t cure a bad business model.  We’re lucky to be in a position where we don’t have to take on campaigns, even when we know they’re doomed.

Building on Livengood’s post, there are two other reasons why PPC accounts fail. In my experience, they’re at least even with “the product is bad.”

Over-optimising a campaign

Over-optimising a campaign is a serious problem that can doom an account to fail. It happens when advertisers try to make decisions with too little data to justify them.

During account reviews, and even when managing accounts, I’ve seen this phenomenon time and time again.  Keywords in a brand new campaign are promoted and bid on hard based on one conversion in 10 clicks, only to run up spend and never convert again.   Sure, that keyword had a 10% conversion rate – but 10 clicks wasn’t nearly enough to make a decision.

“Promote East London! We had 10 calls from there today!”  Great, but what about tomorrow? How about the day before?  How can you decide if that was just a fluke? How can you separate the signal from the noise?

Worse still, training and experience is no protection.  Even experienced account managers sometimes fall prey to the temptation to make “just this one little tweak.”

How do you get around this?  Don’t make decisions without statistically relevant data.  You want to look at data trends over the course of weeks and months; thousands and tens-of-thousands of clicks – not hundreds.  Done right, PPC is a long-game.  Rushing decisions is a recipe for failure.  Take a deep breath and wait for the data.  Over time, data doesn’t lie and the signal becomes apparent in the noise.

Budget: Not taking your own business seriously

This is perhaps more of an underlying problem for businesses, especially small ones. That being said, businesses that don’t take themselves seriously have one symptom that comes out in PPC: budget.

Some industries and niches are lucky enough to still have absurdly cheap click costs. Indeed, seeking those out are a big part of what a good PPC account manager does.  However, it’s a good bet that if your industry is highly-competitive, (and whose isn’t these days?) and has the potential to be profitable, there is going to be a barrier to entry into the PPC battle: click costs.

I get it, I really do. Everybody is looking for the best possible deal for their business.  Everybody is tightening their belts.  But, if you’ve identified PPC as a core marketing channel for your business,  you need to treat it as such if you want it to give you a return.

If you want PPC to work seriously, you need to get serious about it. That means spending.  If clicks in your industry are likely to cost £1.25, you can’t get away with a £2 per day budget. You need data to scale up. You need clicks to get data. You need to spend money to get clicks.  It’s that simple.

Helping businesses get this math right is what agencies do, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a barrier to entry.  Doing PPC right costs money.  It’s not free. It’s not even necessarily cheap.  What it is, however, is scalable.

If you’re passionate and serious about your business , then that seriousness needs to be reflected when you delve into PPC.  PPC isn’t something “to take a punt on”. It’s something to be planned for and budgeted for in a realistic way.

Acting any other way does a disservice to your business and dooms your account to failure.

Stay on the lookout

It’s tough to beat these problems sometimes, especially when there are a million companies, agencies and individuals that will tell you exactly what you want to hear.  “Your website is fine, no problems.” “Yeah, £3 per day is a totally realistic budget.” “We turned off all your other ads because ‘blue widgets 55cm by 10cm’ had a 33% conversion rate and 10 clicks.”  Those tell you what you want to hear, take your money, and then work hard to avoid the blame for the inevitable failure of your account.

Avoiding those scenarios is a big reason why we’re picky about clients (especially for our Pay on Results PPC service).  We haven’t always been so good at being choosy, so we’ve learned some of these lessons the hard way at Maple Forest.

Avoiding these two issues, over-optimisation and lack of seriousness in budget will go a long way to helping you be a success in PPC. Be wary of anyone who downplays their dangers.

E-commerce clients tend to have highly complex campaigns, but tracking is comparatively easy.  After all, it’s simple to measure a sale and register a conversion from PPC campaigns with any number of analytics and tracking tools – including AdWords’ own.

Service providers are a different story.  We define service provider clients as clients who are looking for their PPC channel to generate leads for their business, rather than direct sales.  Part of running a lead generation means, usually, that the main call to action on a client’s website is a phone call.  Put simply, service providers usually want prospects to pick up the phone and call them.

This has traditionally presented a problem for PPC management – how can you attribute a phone call to an AdWords or Bing campaign?

In the UK, we’re lucky to have an answer.  Maple Forest uses a combination of leading UK call tracking technology to measure calls and attribute them back to the keyword, ad, ad group and campaign that generated it.

In practice, the system is quite simple.  A small piece of javascript is installed on each page, similar to Google Analytics.  Each instance of the phone number on a client’s site is wrapped with a bit of custom html which will swap out the phone number for each visitor, displaying a special, individually tracked number for each and every user session.

The effect of tracking calls is profound – inefficiencies in campaigns get laid bare. It becomes possible to see where every penny of spend goes and how many calls have been generated.  Most importantly, it allows us to track – to the penny – exactly what the cost of each lead is, regardless of its source.

The savvy marketers among you should be salivating at this point. We sure were when we started testing several months ago.  The PPC call tracking suite has become a highly important part of our Risk Free PPC billing system.

Three things you can do to get your site ready for accurate call tracking:

• Ensure that your phone number is displayed as text, rather than as an image
• Make your phone number clear – very clear – at the top of your pages and elsewhere in your navigation, footers and content as appropriate
• Implement multiple conversion channels, including online contact forms, live chat and call-me-back buttons for customers who might not be able to call right away

That’s a question that a surprising number of people who sell online don’t know the answer to.  At its most blunt, a cost per acquisition is just the cost of your online advertising budget, divided by your number of sales.  (Whether or not that number turns a profit for you is another question.)

Even scarier, many merchants view their CPA as just a big piece of their overall marketing costs, as just another line item that builds cost, resentment, and is ripe for the chopping block.

If you think you might fall into one of these categories, this post is for you.

What is an acquisition anyways?

An acquisition is any form of customer contact that has value your business.

For an ecommerce business, this is as simple as making a sale.  For a service business like a plumber or solicitor, an acquisition is likely to be a phone call or a prospective client filling out an online form.  For other businesses, an acquisition can be as abstract as the download of a whitepaper, report or sales presentation.

An acquisition is whatever your business is measuring from an online marketing campaign.  It is the goal that your marketing team or agency is working towards and that you turn into sales.

How to view CPA and marketing costs

We encourage our clients to view their CPA as more than just a line item.  An AdWords budget, usually the biggest online advertising cost a merchant faces, should be seen as an integral part of the sales channel – just as important as the wholesale cost of the product, a phone line, or a website.  It is integral – without the online marketing spend, there’s no sale.

With that marketing philosophy in mind, we work with our clients to establish a realistic target cost per acquisition (CPA).  A realistic cost per aqusition is the maximum amount that you’re willing to pay for each goal – be it a phone call, online lead, or sale.

For online marketing to be effective, this needs to be a quantifiable number and not a statement like “as low as possible” or “whatever doesn’t hurt my margins”.

Your realistic target CPA is a number, that:

• Is high enough to give your marketing team or agency room to scale up and grow your campaign as far as the available search traffic allows, and;
• Leaves you with a tidy, predictable, scalable profit.

Here is how to calculate a realistic target CPA

You’ll need to know the following numbers to get started.

Your average order value

• This is the amount you make every time you make a sale.
  • For service businesses, this is usually relatively static.  For ecommerce businesses, this may vary greatly and may need to be calculated per product category.
• It is also important to take the lifetime value of a customer into account.
  • If your customers regularly return to you to make a second purchase, this will increase your average order value.

Your gross profit margin on that value

• This is your gross profit per sale, after fixed expenses per unit.
  • For ecommerce, this is easy to calculate, especially if you sell just one kind of product. For service businesses, this can a bit more difficult to calculate with factors like rent, staff costs and even fuel.  However, it should be possible to arrive at a basic number.

If you’re a service provider, your lead-to-sale conversion rate

• This is your success rate in turning your leads, be it phone calls, online leads or even just emails, into actual sales.

Marketing as a fixed unit cost

In our experience as an agency, we’ve found that most businesses are happy to spend about 25% of their gross profit margin on actually acquiring the sale, and towards acquiring new business.

This number may be different for your business, and can be higher if that’s what necessary to scale.  However, 25% is a good benchmark that leavs a healthy profit on each sale.

Once you know all these values, you can calculate a realistic cost per acquisition.

Your target cost per acquisition should be:

• For service businesses: (Gross Profit per Sale X 25%) X your lead-to-sale conversion rate
• For ecommerce: (Gross Profit per Sale x 25%)

Example by the Numbers:

In this example, we have a plumber who advertises via AdWords and takes calls from clients over the phone.  He has a success rate of just over 50% at converting these leads to sales.

• Average value of each sale: £220
• Gross profit per order: £150
• Phonecall to sale Conversion rate: 52%

(£150 x 25%) is £37.50

(£37.50 x 52%) is £19.50

Leaving a realistic CPA of £19.50 for this client. This is the maximum they are willing to pay to generate a phone call lead.

What to do with your realistic CPA

Your marketing team or agency should know your target CPA.  It should practically be tattooed on their foreheads.  It’s the goal that they’re working towards!

Knowing this number allows you to calculate if a marketing channel like AdWords is likely to work for your business.  In some cases, it may be impossible to deliver leads at that CPA, and your agency will need to seek other methods, like Bing or Yahoo, to deliver at a cost that works for your business.

Keeping your CPA in mind also allows you and your agency to focus on the metrics that matter.  Getting bogged down in numbers like Cost per Click, Quality Score, Impression Share and Click Through Rate is no way to manage an effective campaign.  CPC, CTR and all the million other metrics provided in online marketing are just tools to do one thing: deliver leads and sales within the target CPA.

As long as you or your agency is focused on CPA, you’re in the right frame of mind to scale up your business.

If you’re interested in running a CPA model campaign for your business, give us a call 0n 0207 993 8886 now – there’s no risk, and you’ll only be billed when you make a sale.

We define Social Media as anywhere online that people have conversations which are:

• Publicly visible
• Easily sharable
• Easily searchable – by Google and others

This means recognizing that Social Media is more than just Twitter, Facebook, or whatever the flavour-du-jour is in three years time.  Under our definition, “Social Media” also includes community weblogs (like Metafilter), blogs with an active commenting community (like BoingBoing), link sharing communities (like Reddit) review websites (like Review Centre), and good old-fashioned web forums (like UK Business Forums).

What do all of these things have in common?  They’re all places where users form a loose community and have conversations with each other.  Those conversations are visible to the public, easily shared with other members of the community, and easily found by Google.

We’ve found that this working defition of “Social Media” gets the businesses we talk to in the right frame of mind to be successful – whichever social network or website they use.

Beyond Facebook and Twitter

When businesses ask us for help with their Social Media presence, what they usually mean is “can you give us a Facebook page and broadcast our twitter feed?”  Well, sure – but we think that’s the wrong way of thinking about Social Media.

Social Media is just another way for you to speak to your customers and potential customers; and fast becoming as indispensable as a phone line or email address.  The only difference is, as above, it’s all hanging out for the world to see.

If you treat a customer poorly, they can share their experience quickly. If you strike the wrong tone, you can alienate an entire online community.  This stuff can make or break a business, and it’s only getting more important.

Our Social Media Consulting service, and related services like social lead generation and reputation, are designed to get businesses thinking about social media as a set of processes.  It doesn’t matter if your main community is on Facebook, Twitter, or some niche forum – it’s a clear and coherent process that matters.

In a competitive market place it is important to protect the identity of your business. An effective online brand protection strategy secures the value in your brand. This value consists of the inherent visual or aural impact of the brand as well as the customer recognition and goodwill that attaches to the brand as you advertise, promote and establish your business. One of the most effective ways of protecting your brand is the use of registered trademarks. The online world is no different.

An effective online brand protection strategy has numerous benefits to your business in that it:

• prevents counterfeiting or other abuse of your brand;
• opens up new business avenues for you; and
• adds value to the business

Abuse of Your Brand

The use of a brand that is the same or similar to yours by a third party can affect your business. Use in this way can cause confusion in the market place, lead to a loss of sales and damage the distinctiveness of your brand as well as customer goodwill that you have built up.

The use of a similar brand by a third party may be intentional, but is actually most commonly the result of the third party failing to search for the names of competitors and selecting the similar name without malicious intentions. Nevertheless, if they have invested substantial sums in their branding and advertising, people will not be easily persuaded to change their brand. Strong legal protections for your brand will make any dispute that arises much easier to handle.

Protection of brands is particularly important for  online business. With the propensity to search for company, business, and product names through search engines such as Google, preventing others from using your name without your permission is important to ensure that Internet traffic finds its way to your business. Commonly a customer may have no personal or “real world” interaction with the business. With no individual or address on the high street to go back to, an online customer is more likely to be confused by a business using a similar name or brand.

Here are some examples of uses of brands on the Internet that can cause damage:

Cybersquatting

A third party may register a brand name as a domain name in the hope that either they will direct all traffic intended for the brand owners’ site or even as a way of extorting money from the brand owner who is forced to purchase the domain name in order to regain control of his brand. This is perhaps the most famous type of branding abuse on the Internet and it does cause considerable damage to business.

Having a similar registered domain name or limited company name is not sufficient to give you a right to prevent others using a similar domain name. It is possible to take action based on proven reputation, but a registered trade mark normally allows for a much easier, quicker and cheaper resolution of the issues.

Brand Bidding via PPC, such as  Google AdWords

By and large, brand bidding is allowed by search engine providers and allows advertisers to pay a fee or “bid” to have their adverts displayed whenever a particular keyword is entered into the search engine. Some businesses may bid on competitors brands, so that when a user searches for the branded product or service, adverts for alternative products are displayed.

At the moment this kind of brand advertising is permitted in some circumstances and not in others. For more information, see our blog post on Brand Bidding on Google AdWords.

Opening up New Business Avenues

Brand protection is effective on a territory by territory and product field by product field basis. If you have ownership of a brand in the UK, that does not mean that someone else cannot select the same brand to trade in the US. If you own a brand in connection with clothing, that does not mean that someone else cannot select the same brand in connection with furniture.

Except for registered trademarks you will only have protection over your brand if you can demonstrate by evidence that you have a current reputation in the particular field and territory.

Registered trademarks allow you to obtain protection in territories and in product fields in advance of you beginning to trade. If you have plans to expand into new countries or launch a range of new products you would therefore be very sensible to file a trade mark application before investing in preparation for the expansion.

A registered trade mark can also be licensed to third parties. This can be an effective and quick way of creating extra income and increasing awareness of your brand. Many licensees will require a registered mark, especially if they operate in a different country or product area. Even if the licensee doesn’t require a registration it can be important to file an application or else the licensee may claim that they own the goodwill that is built up in your brand in the new country or product area.

Adding Value to the Business

For a creative business its customer base is one of its most valuable assets. Many investors or purchasers of a business will want to be sure that the goodwill of this customer base is protected. The goodwill is inextricably linked to the brand name and therefore one of the key tools for securing the goodwill is a registered trade mark.

It is common for investors or purchasers of a business to apply a substantial discount to the value of a business if the important elements of the brand are not protected by registered trademarks.

Sometimes a trade mark carries a value all of its own and can be sold off separately from any of the assets of the business.

An Effective Brand Protection Policy

Once you have chosen the brand, the most effective way of protecting your name, logo or graphic is to register it as a trade mark in the countries where the mark is to be used. In order to register a trademark there must be no other existing marks that are either the same or are confusingly similar. For this reason it is recommended that effective searching for the availability of marks and brands is undertaken at the outset.

A successfully registered trade mark can be used as an effective tool to prevent third parties from using the same or similar marks as a brand for their goods and services. It is the simplest and most cost-effective way of protecting your brand online.

Protection for brands is available on a territorial basis. That means that a registered trade mark in the UK gives protection in the UK only. If you are intending to use the brand outside the UK then registration must be sought in those countries and of course searching of these countries must be undertaken to unsure that there are no potential conflicts.

Another aspect of brand protection strategy is an online reputation monitoring service.  By watching for mentions of your core brand online, you can track when, where, how and who is using your brand online.

With these key defenses in place: research, establishing identity, trademarking, and monitoring; your brand will be entrenched and ready to grow online.

If you have questions about building or defending your brand online, feel free to give us a call on 0207 993 8886.

Google’s own introduction to the +1 feature is available as a video:

How to opt in

In order to see and use the new +1 social layer, you’ll need to be signed into a Google account and to opt into the new +1 beta.

Once signed in, you’ll need to visit the Google Experimental Labs page and opt in.

According to Google, you can have the option of either sharing your +1’s tab with everyone, or keep it private.

What’s the impact

The web is abuzz with conjecture about how the +1 button will impact SEO, PPC and what Google’s motivation is.  However, that’s all it is at the moment – conjecture.

The most likely explanation is that Google is looking for a way to use social signals to indicate the quality of a website, in a way that is very hard to manipulate on any kind of mass scale.  If the experiment is successful (and that’s a big if) Google may use the number of +1s that a site has in order to determine where it will rank for other searchers.  Given Google’s recent moves to de-emphasise low quality content farms form it’s search results, this seems the most likely explanation.

It is highly likely that +1s will have an effect on organic and AdWords CTRs, at least for people logged into a Google account and opted into the experiment.  Indeed, there is already some evidence that AdWords ads featuring +1 see a CTR boost when run against their competition.

Some further info

Interestingly, it appears that the +1s given to organic search results are shared with the +1s given to PPC adverts, and with those given directly on a website.  That means that if you add a +1 to an organic search result, it will also appear on the website’s +1 button (if they have one installed) and on their PPC adverts, if they’re running them.

It will be interesting to see the rate of adoption of the new feature.  In order to take full advantage, a searcher must have a Google Account, be logged in whilst searching, and be opted into the +1 feature.  At present, it’s unclear exactly what the uptake will be, and it it will be of high enough volume to provide useful data to Google – and be free of manipulation by marketers.

How to get a +1 Button for your website

At the moment, it isn’t possible for a website owner to install a Google +1 button for their website.  However, if you’re interested in getting one, you can sign up to be alerted when +1 buttons become available at Google’s +1 your website page.

Sign up here to be alerted

(Anecdotally, I suspect that it is worth singing up with an email address tied to an active Google Account, and using your main flagship URL as your website.  This may mean you access the feature before others.)

We’ll keep abreast of any changes and likely impacts and share our findings as always.

When testing for a client of ours, I noticed something new. (At least I hope it’s new!)

AdWords, and the Google organic algorithm, appear to matching London postcodes with their locations.  The strange thing is, it’s a bit inconsistent.

Keywords have been changed in this example below from our client’s, but the phenomenon is the same.

You can see that a Google Search for plumber in SW18 (a postcode in Southwest London) trigger bolding for some of the locations within the SW18 area: Wandsworth, and in a few cases, triggering the bolding on Earlsfield as well.  (Weirdly, it’s not consistent even on the same results page: some instances of Earlsfield are bolded, some are not.

(Click the image examples for a larger version)

Trying to replicate this in other postcodes was an exercise in frustration.

Plumbers in E14 – a docklands/Canary Wharf postcode, only provided bolding on the exact text “E14,” not any of the related locations like Millwall or Canary Wharf.

Even moving just one postcode down from the first successful example, to plumber in SW19 doesn’t trigger any bolding on “Wimbledon”.

Could this be some kind of test?  Perhaps the sites with location bolding have their Google Places accounts set up in a unique way?

More testing is needed!  If you’ve had experience with this or can replicate it with different postcodes, please share in the comments.

We played a bit of cat and mouse for the answer.  The conversation went something like this.

Is it some kind of bid management software?

We do use it, but it’s not our number one tool.

Is it a custom bit of CRM software in your client area?

We use it all the time, but it’s not our number one tool.

How about Google Analytics?

Indispensable, but not our most used.

Microsoft Excel? Maybe Visio for doing campaign diagrams?

I use them every day, but it’s still not the most valuable.

I’ve got it! It must be AdWords Editor! I bet you spend hours a day using it.

True, but it’s still not our number one most-used most-valuable tool.

I give up, what is it?

It’s Google Calendar.

A little love for the Calendar

Our calendars are the number-one-most-valuable-most-used-totally-dependent-on-it tools that we have in our arsenal at Maple Forest. Calendars are indispensable for managing a PPC campaign.

When running a PPC campaign, relentless organisation, process development and strict testing are the keys to success.  Managing PPC Campaigns without a sophsitcated calendar would be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

We use calendars for:

• Setting reminders to follow up on an ad split test
• Tracking the date that we implement a strategic change on an account
• Reminding us to make a change to an advert at the start or end of a sale
• Creating campaign start/pause reminders for clients who turn their campaigns on and off
• …and about a zillion other things – our calendars become part of our to do list system.

We use Google Apps for Business at Maple Forest.  It keeps our Email and Calendars accessible and easy to search.  It also syncs across the various email, iPhone, iPad and Andriod devices that we have laying around at any given time.  It makes it impossible to miss a task!  (Those reminder beeps aren’t so polite).

Every other tool we have in our arsenal for account management is a time saver, research tool, or a convenience. Google Calendar is the only one that is totally, entirely indispensable.

That doesn’t mean that running a Search Engine Optimisation campaign doesn’t take time, effort and money.  It absolutely does.

But, it does mean that if your SEO agency or campaign is working properly, it should yield a positive return on your investment over the long term.

Here’s the nitty gritty.

If the cost of your SEO campaign is more than the resulting increase in sales, something has gone badly wrong.   It should be possible for your SEO agency to tell you exactly where sales are coming from, the dates that your rankings and traffic changed, and correlate those with their SEO efforts.

If you check out Maple Forest’s SEO methodology, you’ll see that SEO is really not rocket science.

Here is an example of the kind of work we do on client accounts:

• Keyword Research
  • Takes account manager time and access to research tools
• Work to make your website relevant
  • Takes time from account managers, copy writers, designers and IT team
• Build quality links
  • Takes time from account managers, copy writers, and access to research tools
• Reporting
  • Takes time from account managers and access to reporting tools

The word you see cropping up over and over again is “time”.  Running an SEO campaign is basically online grunt work.  It takes project management, research and plenty of writing to do it well.  All of those things take time and experience/expertise from an SEO account manager.

We call this adding long-term value to your website.  Adding value to anything, from a house to a website, isn’t free at the point of use.  However, when it comes time to cash in on that value – by selling a house or increasing the sales from a website – the costs become money well spent.

What do monthly costs look like?

Generally, SEO costs from an agency like Maple Forest are in the area of £1000 per month for a campaign with regular, recurring tasks.  That’s about 20 hours per month of account manager and copywriter time – which works out to £50 per hour.

However, costs can vary up or down depending on the needs of the campaign and the client.

It’s worth being wary of companies that charge a flat rate for an SEO campaign without assessing the needs of the client first.  SEO may be grunt work, but it isn’t a commodity – the needs of each client are different and different pieces of an agency’s SEO methodology are needed for each one.

Questions to ask about your SEO strategy or agency:

• Is my SEO campaign adding long term value to my website?
• Is my SEO campaign accountable, can I track its return on investment at all?
• How much work could my agency be doing for the price I pay them?
• Is my SEO agency demonstrating the work that they’re doing?
• Can I point to long term sustainable results?
• Is my return on investment positive?

If you can answer these questions, it’s a good bet that your SEO costs are being more than paid for by increases in business – meaning it’s essentially free!

If these questions can’t be answered, it’s time to re-evaluate your SEO strategy to turn it from a cost to an asset.