Your organization has decided that it wants to outsource all or part of search marketing to an outside firm or agency. There isn't one search engine marketing company that is right for all organizations. Finding the right search marketing vendor depends on your needs, your preferences, your site, and your budget.

This article provides the basic questions to ask when evaluating search marketing companies. Our hope is that these sample questions provide you with the right perspective to help you select the right agency for your needs.

The following 20 questions provide a core RFP. If you are soliciting information on more than one subspecialty, you will want to repeat questions 4 through 20 for each subspecialty.

1. Company name, Web site and physical address

Review the agency's Web site. Does it manifest best practices? Is the site regularly updated or is it stale? Does it contain typos? Is it well designed and easy on the eyes? These seemingly small details provide a sense of a prospective agency's approach to marketing.

You might also consider the agency's location(s). Payroll and rent—the agency's largest expenses—depend on the agency's geographic location. An agency located in the heart of a downtown district may face significant cost disadvantages, which could be reflected in its pricing. Location plays a large role in employee hiring. Ask a prospective agency how they attract, train, and retain qualified professional staff. Finally, make sure an agency has locations and/or hours that satisfy your needs.

2. Contact name, phone and email address

Pay attention to how the prospective firm handles your incoming inquiries. Excessive delays in responding to your messages could indicate problems with responsiveness. There's an old maxim that how a person treats the restaurant wait staff while on a first date predicts how he or she will treat a spouse after one year of marriage. Along those lines, the attitude of the sales staff may provide clues to the culture of the agency.

3. Which search marketing services do you provide?

Given the significant differences among paid search, natural search, and feeds, you should ask an agency to respond to each of the following questions for each subspecialty, as appropriate.

4. How many years have you been providing this service to clients?

The search marketing field is young and rapidly evolving. Some of the leading search marketing management firms are less than five years old. Google turned nine in September 2007. Given the newness of this channel, a reputable firm with a solid track record of three or more years and positive references is considered credible.

5. How many active paying clients currently use the service?

When evaluating the size of an agency, be sure it reports current, active paying clients.

6. Describe in specific detail what you would do for us

As with any professional services firm, you are paying a search marketing agency for its expertise, labor, and results. The agency should be able to provide a clear accounting of the specific tasks that it will perform on your behalf. Be wary of a firm that will not disclose a project plan. Specific tasks discussed in the RFP process can be included in the subsequent contract, ensuring both sides have clear expectations of the scope of the work to be performed.

7. Describe in detail any work you would require us to do

A search marketing agency may require you to make changes to your Web site, provide certain data or data feeds, or provide results from previous campaigns. If you cannot provide these in a timely manner, you will hinder the agency's success.

Request a clear list of actions and data you will have to provide. It is helpful to distinguish required from nice-to-have data and actions. The prospective agency should provide a timeline of what must be provided to avoid project delays. Many agencies place clauses in the contract requiring you to provide data in a timely manner, since they know they will fail otherwise. Such contractual clauses, if written fairly, are a good sign. They indicate that the agency has experience getting work done and understands the importance of solid partnerships with clients.

Before signing with an agency and, in particular, before signing a contract requiring you to provide certain data or site changes on a specific timetable, make sure that your key stakeholders are able to meet your side of the arrangement. Talk to your IT, marketing and Web-site stakeholders to ensure that you can provide the agency with what it needs in the time requested.

8. Describe the ideal client for this service and why

Not every agency is right for every client and not every client is right for every agency. An agency that tries to be all things to all clients will perform poorly across the board.

Realistically, agencies specialize in certain types of clients. An agency may focus on a specific industry, on a specific client size, or on business-to-business (B2B) versus business-to-consumer (B2C) clients.

This question can help you get a sense of the agency's personality and see whether its corporate culture fits well with yours.

9. What circumstances or conditions would cause your service to perform poorly?

Look for honesty on the part of an agency when describing the limitations or constraints that could cause poor performance. For example, if you are a retailer and your pricing is significantly above industry norms, all agencies will face a tough time increasing your site conversion. Similarly, if your site is built on an e-commerce platform that doesn't allow easy changes, recommendations that require significant modifications to your Web site would have difficulty succeeding.

10. What specific results can we expect to get from using your service?

Is it fair to ask an agency what specific types of results you can expect from its service?

It is unreasonable to ask an agency to provide specific numerical goals, such as an exact percentage sales lift, marketing-efficiency improvement, or the number of page-one results in search results listings.

It is also unreasonable for a client to ask prospective agencies to provide detailed 12-month financial projections. As an outsider, a prospective agency lacks context for this type of forecasting. The search landscape is evolving too quickly and too many elements are out of the agency's control, such as the client's pricing, merchandising, site performance, and competition, to accurately predict the future. Agencies know that even when presented as back-of-the-envelope, or ballpark, figures, such projections can become concrete expectations.

It is reasonable to ask a prospective agency how it handles quarterly or annual forecasting, as well as how much time it would need to accumulate sufficient data and experience with your account to provide projections for your budgeting process.

If you ask a prospective agency for financial projections, be prepared to provide comparable background data for prior years. You will want to execute a strong nondisclosure agreement to protect your information.

When evaluating the agency's projections, focus as much on the methodology and the logic behind the numbers as on the numbers themselves. An agency that projects modest sales based on a logical model and fair assumptions may be a stronger candidate than an agency that offers spectacular forecasts based on little more than optimism and hope.

11. Describe the account management staff involved in providing this service: who they are, what they do, how organized they are, and how they interact with your clients

Search marketing agencies are service companies. Your day-to-day experience and the results you obtain depend on the agency's staff. Ask an agency for an organization chart showing how its client services team is structured. After using the written RFP process to select a few finalists, ask to speak to multiple members of the account-management staff, preferably the people who would be working on your account. Find out the average tenure of the account staff, what their educational backgrounds are, what prior industries they have worked in, and what training they have received.

Make sure you understand how the account staff will interact with your staff. Ask about the expected frequency of phone calls, emails, reports, and face-to-face visits. Ask what happens when your primary agency contact is on vacation or out of the office. If multiple individuals at the agency handle different aspects of your account, ask how the key players are coordinated and if you are to provide direction through one central person or deal with each person directly.

12. Describe the technologies you use to provide that service

Paid-search and feed-based search depend on technology. This is less true for natural search. It is important to determine whether the agency is running proprietary in-house technology or licensed third-party technology.

If it's in-house technology, ask detailed questions about the stability and robustness of the platform. How does the technology perform? Ask for quantitative evidence. Can the agency provide before-and-after case studies showing the benefit of its tools? Ask about the credentials of the team that developed the tool. Ask about the theoretical underpinnings of the technology—are the ideas beneath the technology a loose collection of ad hoc heuristics, or does the technology rest on a solid foundation of statistics and optimization?

If it's third-party technology, the agency should disclose exactly whose technology it uses. You should then conduct due diligence on the tool it uses. You should ask about the tool's solidity and availability. You should also ask how much and what sort of training the agency staff has received on that tool, how long the staff has been using it, and what the staff's impressions are of the tool's strengths and weaknesses.

13. Describe the tracking, metrics, and reporting you provide

A prospective agency should describe the tracking and reporting tools it uses to measure results. These could be internally developed tools or third-party tools. Make sure that the prospective agency staff has a strong technical grasp of the tracking systems it uses. No tracking system is perfect. Look for an agency that can discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of its tracking—and the corresponding implications for your marketing activities.

14. Describe your pricing model in detail

A prospective agency should spell out its pricing in detail. A good pricing model should compensate the agency fairly for the work done and the results produced. Ask the agency why it selected its pricing model and how it aligns its and your interests in a mutually fair manner.

15. Provide a sample standard contact

Look for contracts with relatively fast no-cause out clauses. If you're dissatisfied with the service or results, you should have the ability to end the relationship with relative speed and ease.

16. Provide a typical timeline indicating how the project would progress following a signed contract

It is important that both the prospective agency and the client have clear expectations of how work will progress. What can be expected in the first few weeks? The first few months? How long before the campaigns reach a relatively optimized state? Once the campaigns have been built, what additional work occurs? Why and when?

17. Provide sample reports

The best search marketing reports are clear and well organized. They should be reasonably understandable to people who are not intimately familiar with the campaigns. In the case of paid search and feeds, reports should clearly present what you paid for (advertising) and the sales that the advertising generated.

Look for reports that present the same results at different levels of aggregation: overall for a specific time period and then broken out by engine, then by engine and campaign, and then by keyword. Check the arithmetic: The different disaggregations should add up to the same totals as the less-detailed reports.

18. Provide three current client references with full contact information

Client references are the most important aspect of an RFP. Speak to at least three different client references. Spend time with them on the phone, speaking to the individuals who work with the prospective agency day to day. If possible, speak to the manager to whom the day-to-day contact reports. What services does the agency provide for the client? Is the agency reliable? Is the agency producing results? Is the reference anticipating renewing his or her company's contract at the end of its term? Does the agency provide good service? What are the agency's greatest strengths and weaknesses? What other similar agencies has the reference worked with, while at his or her current employer or at others, and how does this agency compare with those others?

19. For the three clients who most recently stopped working with you, please describe why those clients are no longer using your firm's services

Clients and agencies part ways for many reasons. An agency should be able to speak frankly about former clients and provide contact names for you to confirm its story with the former client.

20. What is the single, most-important reason we should choose your firm for this service?

An agency will generally provide pages of written materials in the RFP process. You will also have extensive phone or face-to-face meetings to supplement the written material. An agency should be able to present clearly its core value proposition in a single succinct sentence.

Forcing an agency to name its one greatest strength provides critical insight into how it positions itself. Don't allow this single most-important reason to creep into the top-three reasons. Demand that the agency answers the question you asked.

* * *

Using the above framework, here is a sample search marketing RFP that you could use:

Thank you for participating in the [company name] search marketing RFP process. Please answer the following questions by [Close of business time] on [RFP due date]. Submit your answers in Microsoft Word format to [contact person] via email: [contact email address].

Please attach a copy of your standard contract and sample reports.

If we would need to make changes to our site for your tracking purposes, please attach a copy of your technical implementation documentation.

If you have any questions about this RFP, you may call [contact person] at [contact phone number].

[Company name] is seeking [one agency] [one or more agencies] to assist with our [paid search], [natural search] and [search feed] programs. Please answer the following questions for each program:

1. Please provide the company's name, Web site, and physical address.
2. Please provide the name, phone number, and email address of the individual.
3. Who will serve as the contact?
4. Which search marketing services do you provide? For each service, ask the following:
5. How many years have you been providing this service to clients?
6. How many active paying clients currently use this service?
7. Describe in specific detail what you would do for us.
8. Describe in detail any work you would require us to do.
9. Describe the ideal client for this service and why.
10. What circumstances or conditions would cause your service to perform poorly?
11. What specific results can we expect to get from using your service?
12. Describe the account management staff involved in providing this service: who they are, what they do, how organized they are, and how they interact with clients.
13. Describe the technologies you use to provide this service.
14. Describe the tracking, metrics, and reporting you provide.
15. Describe your pricing model in detail.
16. Provide a sample standard contract.
17. Provide a typical timeline indicating how the project would progress following a signed contract.
18. Provide sample reports.
19. Provide three current client references with full contact information.
20. For the three clients who most recently stopped working with you, please describe why those clients are no longer using your firm's services.
21. What is the single most important reason we should choose your firm for this service?