The flaw is to continue to see agencies as such. Don’t hire agencies for the sake of having arms and legs. You can outsource that and it would be less expensive. Your agency needs to be a partner. A true business partner.

Marketing agencies have a shelf life of X time. That leads me to two arguments. The first one, the agency model is broken and needs to be fixed. The second one, and contrary to the first one, the agency model is doing so well that it continues to be replicated time and time again.

For this post, however, I will only concentrate only in SEM agencies. By now, [if you are still reading], youknow you have a viable business model and proper marketing strategy and you have come to the conclusion that search marketing is core to your overall success. Hiring an SEM expert agency or consultant is not the issue anymore. The challenge is figuring out who and how to hire.

Hire folks that will implement your business vision based upon your business goals. SEM will become a core lead generation channel and you have to be sure you have the proper support.

Here are a few ways you can discern:

The agency only does SEO. If you don’t understand what SEO is then it is not a good idea to blindly turn over your website for optimization to a third party.

You should always be involved in the decision making process for the tactics to be used in the optimization.

The agency does not make an effort to understand your business from the get go. If they don’t take the time at the start, there will be no suitable time later.

Your SEM/SEO agency does not understand what information architecture is.

Your SEM/SEO agency is a black box. The black box approach for search is almost always a sign of suboptimal tactics.