Advice needed on choosing a SEO/SEM services provider for a small software company

I'm working for Movavi Ltd., a small video processing software company (www.movavi.com) and we are currently looking for SEO/SEM services provider.

Recently, we've decided to engage in search engine marketing to increase our product sales and brand visibility. This is why we're currently looking for a SEO/SEM consultant to help us boost targeted website traffic and conversion rate through a variety of SEM activities. We have a lot of plans and hope to find a consultant for a long-term relationship.

We have never worked with any other SEM firms previously. However we have already tried to carry out some of the SEM activities.

We have a keyword list of more than 120 items compiled. We'll need our consultant to correct and elaborate this list. We also tried to optimize our website content and meta content to include those keywords, however there's still a lot oа work to do. Some of our products were designed particularly to assist SEO implementation: Movavi Tools are simple mono-functional video processing tools which represnt different modules of our flagship product Movavi Video Converter. Each of these tools can be optimized for 2-3 highly specific and targeted keywords. We're already running PPC, and we'd like to leave that in-house, however, we are ready to provide a consultant with all the required information on our PPC activities and also align our PPC activities with the SEM strategy developed by the consultant. We also practiced link building for some period of time, but now we would like to outsource all of our SEM activities, except for PPC.

As we're in a really competitive market of computer software for video conversion, we realize doing SEO for us is not going to be an easy task.

We will need our SEO/SEM consultant to both perform traditional SEO activities such as:
- website content optimization (though we already did some of it)
- targeted link acquisition
- sitemap building anв submission

and also utilize some of the new approaches to increasing web presence such as:
- article submission
- blogging;
- social search;
- guides/white papers;
- news releases
- podcasts;
- video search, etc.
(though we're not sure whether we really need and can afford all of it)

We will also want our consultant to establish a SEO/SEM monitoring system that would allow us to monitor the key metrics of our SEM campaign, analyze our progress and correct our SEM strategy on a regular basis.

Although we're based in Russia, our main markets are the US and Europe and that's where we're going to target our SEM efforts first. We're thinking of Google.com and Yahoo.com as of our target search engines.

We realize that our yearly SEM budget is relatively small - about $25000. So we would like to know if this is a realistic budget and what we can afford based on that.

We're also planning to carry out more localized optimization in UK and some other European countries, if we're successful with global search optimization after the first year. SEM in Russia is not required.

As I outlined above, we're looking for a long-term partnership with s SEO-firm. However we would like to start with a small project - optimization for just one of our products - Movavi Flash Converter. That is why the initial keyword list consists of only 20 items (which are the most popular queries for Flash Converter). This approach, as apposed to signing a 12-month contract right away would let us get to evaluate the consultant and make our final decision whether we want to procceed or not. However, I'm not sure if it's really possible to rank well for just one product as a result of optimizing only a limited amount of website pages, and not the whole site.


A few words about our business:

Founded in 2004, Movavi is dedicated to the development of software in video area. The company's flagship products Movavi VideoSuite and Movavi Video Converter have been well received on video consumer market and are attracting a large growing audience among digital camcorder owners and amateur digital movie makers. Our global customers are located in more than 90 countries worldwide.

While Movavi’s range of products applies to many fields in video area, our current focus areas include: video converting (coding/encoding), video editing software. Additionally, Movavi service areas include: online video applications, customizable video SDKs for professional use.

At the moment, our team is made up of 14 people - developers, designers and marketing specialists.
Movavi also works with an extensive range of independent specialists who bring an added depth
and breadth to the products and services we offer.

I have interviewed more than 10 SEO specialists already, both big and small firms, and also some freelancers. Still, I don't have a clear picture of what my SEO consultaте should look like. I would welcome any advice or personal experience (and especially references) that might be helpful in choosing a SEO consultant for a small firm with SEO needs like ours.

 

1) track record, is important when looking at SEO/SEM firms.
2) do they publish a blog, what is the level of their research they perform and publish

btw. why are you bidding on your keyword when you are #1 on the search already ?