Making the Most of Your Search Agency

So you went the agency route. A wise choice – though pretty much any way you go when you decide search is important enough to commit resources to, you’ve made a smart choice. So now, you’re investing a fair amount into paid and/or natural search, and relying on forces outside of your own to return on it. If you’ve chosen a good agency, half of your work is done – the experts will do what they do best, and you’ll look smart.

But even marquee running backs need the right game tapes, motivation and feedback to produce on Sunday. So how do you make sure that you’re getting the most from your newest free agents?

Pass On Information
Constantly update your agency on where your company stands, your new developments and plans, your goals and expectations – the official and unofficial alike. This is especially important for your SEO team, who needs to know of any site updates from the moment of conception, but important for your paid team as well so that they can help you make the most of new budget opportunities, make up for shortfalls and be prepared for changes.This includes changes to your site’s URLs or structure, new products or locations, hot sellers (or poor ones), sales, and macro changes like shifts in consumer taste, changing budgets and priorities and new competitors.

Chances are that only 25% of anything that actually happens will make it to an outside agency, which leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.

Demand Information
Of course, an agency worth its salt is going to do the same in return. Not the internal stuff as much but new, fresh information about your industry, your competitors and new online opportunities. You’re paying for their expertise, so drain that tub dry. Not only do good agency SEMsswim in this stuff every day, they’re constantly getting updates, opinions and new tactics about search and the online world as a whole. Some have entire departments dedcated to this task alone.

Most agency types work on more than one account and, while they can’t share specifics about their clients, asking if other clients (especially those in a similar field) are seeing particular trends or if they’ve had success with certain tactics is totally fair game.

Oh, and of course, information your results as well. Yes, it might sound ridiculous to have to say it, but you should get reporting from your agency. Not just an email at the beginning of the week telling you how last week went. Solid reporting. Something that trends you week by week, month by month and year over year (the latter of which should be much easier for SEO, whereas you might not have or be able to share for ad campaigns like PPC). Something with a quick gauge of how things are going, but also on an engine-by-engine basis. And if you have your own internal reporting formatting that’s used, it should not be a great difficulty for them to either use it or match it to save you time rebuilding it unnecessarily.

Have a weekly call with your agency team at a bare minimum to make sure that information is going both ways, and keep in touch throughout the week.

Skip the useless stuff
All reporting is not good reporting. Too much detail, or the wrong detail, can wind up being filler that distracts you from the really important wins – or losses – that are outlined in your report. If there’s a section of your reports that ou find yourself not ever using, let your agency know so that they can save their time (and yours) compiling unneeded stats and keep to the business of making you money. This tends to happen mostly at the keyword level; if there’s a set of keywords that you’d like trending on, or would be good to monitor over time, great. Keeping an eye on your top branded and non-branded terms is a good tactic, so that if a lot of traffic disappears suddenly you can go right to typical biggest sources to use as a weather vane.

But when you or your agency starts to focus on the exact traffic and conversion rate on an individual term – especially minor players in your campaign – they simply cause a distraction for everyone. The same goes for rank reports on the natural side. Monitoring rankings on terms that are important to your company and industry is a way to gauge how your efforts are working on the most competitive terms and a good diagnostic tool for sudden changes. There’s no need, however, for a bloated list that’s thousands of terms long. Most companies – even the biggest ones – can get away with a trim list that’s 200-300 keywords max. Some might prefer to have a bigger list for closer observation, or sell such a wide range of products (like travel-based companies) that more is needed. But the second you hit four digits, it’s probably time to take a look at whether you use that much information and if it’s worth having your agency work on checking those ranks rather than spending that time making your site awesome.

Yes, sometimes the CEO desperately wants to know why you’re not buying ‘random term A’ at a higher rank, or where you ranked on ‘random term b’ in Google six months ago, and everyone has to go through the fire drill. A good agency will know and understand that - but will also help you prioritize it against everything else going on at that moment.

Harder, faster, stronger
Be very clear about your goals – both official (‘Department needs a 3:1 ROI’) and unofficial (…’but I’m not going to get a bonus unless I can make it 4:1′) – but push for performance and give them an impetus to spend more time maxing out your account. For example, ask about your ads on the paid side: How many keywords and pieces of creative do you run per adgroup, what kind of strategies are you employing on your ads, are there ways to make them more targeted and specific? They may be able to tell you that they’ve got things streamlined and targeted in a scary efficient way – but being asked about it can make them go back and see if there’s any way to push it even further.

Don’t whip them like galley slaves or you may find yourself being asked for a re-negotiated rate to compensate for a lot of extra time to go into your account, or become the client no one wants to talk to about anything but the numbers. But don’t be afraid to ask how they’re doing things and about ways that they can be doing things even better. You may even learn something.

Mom says there are no posts that are like me. I am unique.

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