5th Annual Motif Charity Walk -2007

Motif in the Community

Not too long ago, many CEOs were grappling with the question of whether to outsource part of their business processes to countries like India. Fast forward a few years, and the key decision morphed: Businesses pondered whether to keep the outsourcing operation in-house as a captive center or allow a third party provider to handle it.

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The global finance and accounting outsourcing (FAO) market is predicted to grow in excess of 30% in 2007 as the global infrastructure matures to enable F&A solutions that take advantage of low-cost offshore talent and robust supplier process offerings underpinned by F&A technology, according to a report by the Everest Research Institute.

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In 1997 the residential mortgage market reached a milestone that many brokers, correspondents, and originators never thought would be exceeded. These residential mortgages jumped to nearly $4 trillion in unpaid valuation. In 2006 this same market, depending upon the research organization selected, approached $10 trillion in outstanding loans with projections in another 10 to 12 years reaching $20 trillion.

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In the changing face of today’s Internet landscape, the rules for success have evolved rapidly, and continue to do so. Contrary to popular thought, just about every business nowadays should be making the most of Internet Marketing Strategies, or risk being left behind from a very large slice of valuable opportunities or ‘leads’.

Most companies that realize this, tend to outsource activities such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to their neighborhood web designers, since they designed their website in the first place. It helps to stay aware of the associated pitfalls while outsourcing such functions. Here’s a quick checklist of the challenges in doing so.

1. Does your SEO/SEM vendor understand your business to an extent sufficient to create an effective Web Marketing Strategy that will fit your needs?
2. Has your company asked the vendor for, or created your own detailed Web Marketing Plan, with a clear rationale for each action item?
3. Will your vendor take the easy way out, and advertise and optimize for keywords and search strings that are less competitive, to get you a good SEP (Search Engine Position) in order to justify their expertise at SEO and SEM?
4. Does your vendor have enough expertise with Google’s ranking criteria and with Google Ad-Words, if for no other reason than the fact that Google controls between 60 to 95% of all Internet searches (varies by country and industry type)?
5. On the other hand, is your vendor a ‘Google Ad-Words Shop’ for Search Engine Marketing, who will fail at effectively spreading your Internet Marketing budget across other industry-specific advertising real estate offered through IndustryBrain, Overture and MIVA (formerly FindWhat)?
6. Does your vendor provide you with a contingency plan of what to do when your competitors note you are ranked higher than them, and start outranking you on your favorite keywords?
7. Do you use sophisticated (not necessarily expensive) Web Traffic Analysis software that helps you benchmark traffic growth pre and post your vendor’s SEO/SEM campaign?
8. Does your vendor use Black Hat SEO techniques such as doorway pages, hidden text, and keyword spamming or ‘bombing’ that can potentially get your domain blacklisted by leading Search Engines?
9. Has your vendor been around long enough to realize that ‘get rich quick’ type multiple submission softwares and websites usually fail miserably?
10. Last but not the least, is the firm closely informed of those niche keywords and search phrases which will actually work for you? This can be easier said than done. For instance, you could be the ‘leading car rental service in Miami’, but someone might be looking for ‘Porsche inexpensive rentals Miami’. In all cases, keyword ‘suggestion’ tools will tell you what’s out there being searched for, but not what keywords are out there leading to revenues over the Internet.