Search engine promotion services are a very complicated topic. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about what kind of services you need, what kind of services you can trust, and how much you should reasonably spend. The information is all over the place! We put this blog together to help people who are interested in sourcing a partner to promote their websites make sense of their options.

And on top of that, we’re constantly optimizing, both within departments and also across channels, holding each other accountable, taking service-specific insights and amplifying them wherever and whenever they make sense.

But doesn’t every agency say that? Yep, a lot of them do (trust us, we checked). But our process is unique because it provides every channel, service, tactic and team member with the strategic direction and unifying insights needed to keep everyone (and everything) on track. There’s no question about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how we expect to do it, when it needs to get done or who’s involved.

So many companies promise “integrated marketing,” but we actually deliver.

Hello and welcome to our video today on search engine promotion services. I’m Chad Hill, and I have Adam Stetzer here with me as well.

Yeah. Good afternoon, Chad. When you’re trying to find a partner to help promote your website or hire them to do a search engine promotion service, it’s a tremendously complex topic, as you and I know. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. And it’s really hard to judge what kind of services you can trust, you should trust, how much you should spend. It’s all over the place.

Chad, I was just watching a video from Matt Cutts earlier today, from Google, and the question was, how do you know if your SEO’s good? A very complex question related to our discussion today. And he gave a very soft, political answer. He said, you could be 100% white hat and just adjust your title tag and do something so we can crawl it and make your server really fast.

And then you could be way over on the black hat end of spectrum where you’re cloaking and stuffing and doing our redirects. But he left such room in the middle. It was so broad. It was so wide.

I want to open this conversation for our viewers today. How do you find a good vendor when you want to promote your website? You’ve done enough to know that “build it and they will come” just doesn’t work. So where do you go from there? And how do you establish trust with someone you might be seeking to outsource your search engine promotion services to?

That is a tough place to be. One of the things that I think people should look at is what your search engine promotions service provider is doing? Is it really creating real end user value? You really want to focus these days not only are just tuning and trying to figure out what’s that one little title tag adjustment that Google is going to find that’s going to put you on the top the rankings. You don’t want to be thinking about that because that sort of the third thing that, as we go through our methodology, that you want to be thinking about.

The first thing you want to look for in your search engine promotion service is really creating real end user value in the content that you create, that you put on your website, that you look for places to syndicate back because that’s the stuff that’s going to earn you links and ultimately is going to help. Those links are to help build a domain authority of your website, which is going to allow it to rank in the search engines.

Right. So, Chad, when someone’s out there looking for search engine promotional services, they’ve probably gotten to that point. So like, OK, now I need a link builder. Right? And so they’re out shopping for people to help promote them through backlink building.

A couple years ago, maybe that was OK. But today, if you shop that way, you still have the wrong orientation, right? Maybe that’s why you’re emphasizing end user value so much. You shouldn’t look for a firm the says they’re a link builder. But the ironic part about that is, yes, what they should do should result in backlinks. Help our folks understand that because that’s confusing.

Yeah, great question. Well, let’s think about it this way. Really, a vote, a backlink to a website, and when Google originally built its algorithm, was all about that sort of being a way to filter out a good website for a bad website. The idea being that if the content and information on that website was good enough for someone to take the time to build a link to that website, then that should help move it up in the rankings. That’s a better website than one that doesn’t have link.

The trick is that it’s very easy, or was easy for a long time, just to go out and say, well, I’m building links for the sake of building links. Google’s smart. They’ve caught up with sort of figuring out what are the signals that look like just links that don’t matter compared against links that do matter.

Links that do matter are ones that tend to be around compelling information, that Google’s able to filter out to determine which piece of content might be relevant, more relevant than another piece of content. And then, more importantly, are on good websites and aren’t filled with a bunch of other links. So if we submit to a directory with hundreds of other links on a page, that’s not as valuable as a well-written article that has one link back to your client’s website. That’s some of the stuff you want to look at when you’re thinking about a search engine promotion service.

Right. If you put two and two together, you don’t want to hire a firm whose orientation is link building because they’ve already got the wrong mindset and maybe they haven’t had trouble with Google up to this point. Although, Google has been very aggressive in 2013 to ferret out and devalue bad links and content that doesn’t have user value. But they certainly will have problems in the future if they maintain that mindset.

So I think the search engine promotional service you’re looking for is one that’s real SEO which, in our mind, is real marketing. And that all– again, we’re going to beat it like a dead horse here– comes back to end user value. If you’re promoting bad stuff, you’re really just building links for links’ sake.

If you’re promoting things that people really want and really answers questions and engages in discussion, it makes the internet genuinely a better place. Yes, you should and will earn backlinks from that and need to to promote your website and increase your rankings. But you got to– you know, horse in front of the cart– you’ve got to create great content. Or, in this case, find a vendor who’s going to do that for you by working with you, refining messages, and then using every medium at their disposal to really broadcast it out visually, in written word, social media. And earn that social spread, those likes, those backlinks that will ultimately promote your website in the search engines.