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Questions To Ask Your Article Marketing Provider

Sunita Biddu

June 10, 2009

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There's no single way to do article marketing, and it's likely that your provider does it at least slightly differently from any other provider out there on the market. They all describe their services with similar phrases like 'quality SEO services' and 'effective techniques,' but they rarely say anything specific. Here are a few questions to help you get all the facts straight from your provider.

What previous projects have you done?

One of the most important questions you could possibly ask, the provider's answer could show you exactly how they do it. It's like inquiring about a doctor's previous patients or a lawyer's past cases: you get a clearer picture about how they work and what they can do.

Take a look at how well the client is currently placed in the search engine results. They might not be at #1 and their current position might not be 100% because of the article marketing work of the provider, but a good rank is always a result of quality SEO. Services from an experienced professional SEO company will always show up as an increase in rankings, no matter what kind of service you buy.

Which directories do you use?

Article marketing is most effective when you use it in combination with other SEO strategies like contextual link building. That particular technique, however, needs your articles to get posted on high-ranking and well-established article directories.

Your provider's choice of article directories is a crucial factor in the kind of results that you get from the services you buy. The 'more means merrier' rule doesn't apply, at least not to the article directories that your marketing company uses. In this case, you'll want your provider to go with quality over quantity.

The provider should be able to give you a list of anywhere from 10 to 30 directories to which it posts the articles for you. Remember that each article directory's rank with Google determines how much it can do for your own ranking. Unless your provider gives you a list of high-ranking directories, you're not getting the most out of your purchase.

Where do you get your material?

SEO copywriting services rely on excellent human writers to generate all that content. Even then, though, the quality (and consequently the value) of the content can vary widely depending on where the service provider gets all the material.

Low-quality content comes from articles that are merely rewritten from existing articles. While these usually work to improve your rankings on Google, they don't do much to increase conversion because the stale old content isn't human-friendly. Your customers aren't going to get attracted to articles that they've seen a dozen times on other sites.

Original articles made entirely from scratch are always the best for article marketing purposes. Not only will they serve as a good base for building up contextual links, but you'll also better convince customers that your products are a good purchase. In the end, it's converting those visitors into buyers that matters for your profits.

In most cases, just asking questions of your service provider isn't enough. There's a good chance that you'll have to ask for a bit of sample work to see how they actually do things. What the provider says and does can be two different things altogether.

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