The carpenter who built your house is not necessarily the right person to sell it. If you want to see real return on your webmaster’s creation, we recommend they not be the person involved in marketing the site.

Many online businesses are more than happy to leave the aspects of marketing their web site to the person who developed the site – their web master. While it’s true that developing and optimizing a website involves a fair amount of technical knowledge, a professional search engine marketer should be the person developing your search marketing strategy, not your webmaster.

The recent MarketingSherpa Search Marketing Metrics survey showed that sites which include organic search engine marketing experienced an average increase on conversions by 158%.

Clearly defined marketing that focuses on the features and benefits of your product/service, concentration on retaining and up selling customers and defining your unique selling proposition are aspects of marketing that most webmasters have little or no experience in.

If indeed your webmaster is calling the shots and making your SEM decisions, here are a few questions to ask them to address to rate their marketing savvy-ness:

1. How will you develop my site to specifically target my customers?

2. Will you help me define on my site why visitors should buy my products or services rather than from my competitors?

3. What strategies will you employ in developing my site to help me communicate my product or service features to my customers/target market?

4. How are you going to measure and report my online sales progress?

5. Will you review my competitors' online pricing compared with mine?

6. Will you evaluate the online marketing strategies and tactics my competitors are using and estimate their degree of success?

7. Will you determine the best ways to inform my online customers/target market about my products/services?

8. What will you do to increase my conversion rate?

9. What strategy is used so my company becomes the customer's first choice?

As the above questions illustrate, there’s a tremendous amount to consider when you decide to bring your business to the web beyond having a website developed. Eventually, the demands of marketing and development will become too much for one person.

Leaving your search marketing to your webmaster can actually be quite harmful to your online business as the following story shows:

We defined a marketing program for a company that sold Dollar Store Franchises. The webmaster reluctantly agreed to help implement the program.

90 days into the program we noticed great rankings on all search engines but Google. Further investigations revealed 12 alias domain names with mirror home pages. The alias domains were used for their Pay Per Click Campaigns. Alias or not Google saw them as mirror sites and penalized them.

The webmaster had inadvertently shot his company in the foot with a poor integration of organic search and pay per click. The cost of undoing the work was high and the company decided to for go organic Google rankings and continued with the current process. A costly choice.

You have many competitors out there on the World Wide Web. Partnering with your web master and an experienced search engine marketing team is more likely to help you realize positive ROI.

Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.

About the Authors:

Tansy OBryant and Mark Schurtman are Marketing Managers for WebSourced’s KeywordRanking, the global leader in professional search engine marketing.