Your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategy should be approached with an understanding of your target audience, your current position in the marketplace, how well your competition is playing the SEO game and your keyword rankings with the Search Engines.

Our SEO program provides many of the analytics needed for this process but the 'questions' below will help you develop an online marketing approach and to set expectations.

Your Online Marketing Goals

• What do you hope to accomplish with your website?
• Do you sell products and services?
• Do you generate leads for your sales force?
• Do you generate leads for distributors?
• What type of "conversions" are available on your site?
  • eCommerce transactions?
  • Requests for information?
  • Online demos?
  • Free newsletter?
  • White papers?
• Do you want to increase website traffic?
• Do you want to increase conversions?
• Do you want to increase your conversion rate? By how much?

Needs & Obstacles Driven by Your Goals

• Do you currently know how much traffic your site is getting?
• Do you know how many of each of your conversions you are generating?
• Do you know your conversion rate?
• Do you currently have a means by which to measure the results of any search engine marketing efforts you undertake?
• Are you prepared to completely overhaul your website and start from scratch?
• Or are you prepared only to make minor adjustments to your current site?
• Do you have internal staff with the time and expertise to make changes to your website?
• Do you offer a lot of seasonal products or services?
• Do you update your offering often?
• Do your products, services and information remain unchanged over long periods of time?

Identify Services From Your Needs & Obstacles

• Do you need Web analytics in order to measure current and future performance?
• Do you need outside support of your in-house staff to make changes to your website?
• Do you need website design expertise to re-launch your entire website?
• Do you need natural search engine optimization for long-term search engine visibility?
• Do you need pay per click advertising management or paid inclusion management to advertise your rapidly-changing or frequently changing products or services?
• Or do you need these services to supplement or replace natural search engine optimization?

SEM Firms Mapped From Your Required Services

• Does the SEM firm actually make the changes to your site, or simply advise you on what changes to make?
• Do they offer copywriting services?
• Do they offer design services?
• Do they perform natural search engine optimization?
• Do they provide management of pay per click advertising campaigns?
• Do they provide management of paid inclusion campaigns?
• Do they offer any sort of website analytics package?
• Do they provide a service to increase your site's conversion rate?

Though you may need to add requirements specific to your products, services, competition and audience, you can see that the answers provided to the questions in each step drive the questions to be asked in the next step - ultimately leading you to identify what services and capabilities are needed to meet your needs and marketing goals.