My recommendation to business owners and large company managers would be, do some homework and find someone who has already shown they are a successful Organic Search Engine Marketer. You are looking for current organic results in a highly competitive market. Many times a little less than number one results are what you are actually looking for since the capable search engine specialists in question aren't normally working with significant resources. The tough part of this is you need to be able to identify who is doing a lot with a little to understand who has what it takes.
Once you can do this, though, you simply need to find a way to incentivize the Search Engine Marketing Specialist and provide them the needed resources. These additional marketing resources should include things like a budget for PPC, links, press, and other SEO placements, a copywriter, and possibly a small amount of graphic design work.
Start-up Search Engine Marketing Solutions
If you are a startup and have the ability, you should strongly consider offering a skilled search engine marketing specialist equity. This should allow you to pay them a much smaller and more reasonable employee level salary compared to the huge fee's they will normally demand.
Or better yet, you might even be able to get by without paying them any salary at all, especially if the search engine specialist is truly as capable as they need to be. In these cases, the search engine specialist would be more interested in the budget set aside for the position, but from the perspective of how they can leverage those dollars as an additional optimization/marketing spend. This, along with the budget for the more standard marketing initiatives, would allow them to spearhead a much more significant and effective plan right from the start.
Enterprise Search Engine Marketing Solutions
If you happen to be a manager for a larger company, hopefully you still have options to 'bring them in' on the project, whether it is through equity, a revenue share, commissions, or some other type of corollary incentive.
The bottom line is, show the
Search Engine Optimization Specialist some upside based directly on their level of
Internet Marketing success, and your job will then simply be to provide the additional resources necessary. If you can accomplish this type of partnership with someone who truly has what it takes, you will not only take away their fears of never being rewarded for what they bring to the table, you will also give them the sole focus of making everyone involved a lot of money. I promise, if you can find a way to pull this off with the right search engine marketing specialist, everybody wins…and wins big.
