With the advent of search engine technologies and the rate of internet penetration marketers are finding search engine marketing as a new tool to market their product and services. Generally you find many claimant of the new technology know-how and this makes it difficult for marketers to identify right partner for outsourcing of such technology activity.

To help you in search engine marketing outsourcing partner selection, have a look below at a list of general questions that one should look before going to outsource.

General Questions

• How long have you been online?
• How long have you been doing SEM/SEO for your online strategy?
• How are you promoting your online services to the online market today?
• How are you presenting your internet products/services to your offline market?
• Do you have informational content online about your products/services?
• Do you have any current alliances or partnerships online?
• Please explain your current online efforts outside of SEM in a general form (ie. banners with x,y,z, email newsletter, etc.)
• What quality assurance process do you have in place to verify customer’s satisfaction levels during its web presence and online purchase (ie. feedback forms, questionnaires, etc.)?
• Is your only focus the consumer or are you targeting any B2B customers of the market vertical via the web?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Is you website search engine optimized at all? If so, who did this for you? How long ago?
• Are you currently using any “black hat” or “risky” ways of SEO? If not today, in the past?
• Are any of your sites penalized or banned by any of the search engines?
• What percentage of your pages on all websites would you guess is indexed by the search engines (general ball park figure)?
• Are all your copywriting materials optimized for the search engines (eg. page copy for website, press releases, etc.) or only the standard SEO parameters (title, meta tags, keywords, etc.)?

Search Engine Marketing

• Are you doing Pay Per Click (PPC)?
• How many keywords are your running on PPC campaigns?
• How are you handling your PPC management (manual or software)? If software, which one?
• Do you perform any testing of your PPC campaigns with regards to different landing pages?
• What metrics reporting tool are you using to track traffic and conversions?
• Are your SEO and PPC campaigns only in the USA?
• Are they only for the General Market or are you also targeting the Hispanic or other non-anglo markets?
• Are you doing any Paid Inclusion? If so, with whom?
• How much do you know about your competitors SEO rankings & PPC campaigns?
• Do you have an online affiliate program? If so, are your affiliates doing any PPC arbitrage to your keywords? Are they violating your trademarks?
• Are you tracking for Click Fraud?
• Do you have all your SEM efforts and Web Development architecture documented?
• On your perspective, what are the differences between search engine marketing for the general market vs. the Hispanic market or any other multi-lingual search markets and non-U.S. search engines?

Other Related SEM

• How about Contextual Advertising (ie. Google Adsense)?
• Have you established a direct relationship with the Search Engines?
• Don’t forget to talk about what you are doing, what you are looking to do, your objectives, timing, what you seek in terms of results, etc.

If you feel there are other questions that should help prepare a company that is seeking outsourcing SEM, please add them in comment.

Original source: http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=2359